Barack Obama reportedly said something very important and long overdue to a group of some 100 Cleveland Jewish leaders on Sunday — that being pro-Likud and being “pro-Israel” are two different things.
“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”
He said even more about the confined nature of the debate over Israel and its security in this country, according to the dispatch in the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA). Apparently in defense of his consultations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has been harshly critical of neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, Obama said:
“Frankly some of the commentary that I’ve seen which suggests guilt by association or the notion that unless we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel that is non military or non belligerent or doesn’t talk about just crushing the opposition that that somehow is being soft or anti-Israel, I think we’re going to have problems moving forward.”
And he contrasted those constraints on the debate here with the breadth and vigor of the discussion of those same issues in Israel itself.
“There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel. All of you, I’m sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I’m saying though is that actually ultimately should be our goal, to have that same clear-eyed view about how we approach these issues.”
The staunchly pro-Likud New York Sun is carrying a partial transcript of the meeting it obtained from the Obama campaign.
Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.
Very subtle, and no hat in hand. Quite the reverse, isn’t it? Would some of the less wild-eyed and bellicose of you cultural and religious Zionists like to cover your bets perhaps? My comptroller is accepting donations at the end of the banquet table.
I am interested by the following comment…Brezinski was harshly critical of Bush neocon policies…..? What?!
Brezinski is a trilateralist. He helped invent the neocons….oops! I’m sorry! Did I let the cat out of the bag?
You thought Mr.Obama was about change?
So are we saying that criticism of Israeli barbarity in their dealing with Palestinians isn’t “anti-Semitic?” Wow, now there’s a relief! One grows weary of that ‘you’re an anti-Semite’ tag.
Skulz: You speak of “Israeli barbarity” in dealing with the Palestinians. Can you be more specific?
Also, do you agree that Palestinian suicide bombers are equally barbaric? Do you find it barbarous when HAMAS shoots missiles over the Gaza border at Israeli civilians in Sderot? Are you outraged at the barbarity when, a few years ago, a Palestinian bomber walked into a large hotel on Passover night and blew up a bunch of innocent people who were minding their own business at a Passover Seder? Were you outraged when ( until Israel got some sense and built a wall that is actually working to keep terrorists out) Palestinians would come into Israel and get on public buses and blow up innocent kids time and time again?
Why are you so selective in your depictions of Israel as the barbarians. Meanwhile, you act as though the Palestinians are just victims.
Tim R:
Why do you write as if nothing happens in a vacume? Does not the hypocrisy of your thinking scream at you? Of course it is barbaric. But any eye for an eye can only escalate. I do this to you two three four then you do this to me two three four …. five.
#sigh#
Why do I bother?
Read the unfiltered history of occupation. Chicken and the egg, which came first?
Tim R:
Why is using the only tools at your disposal “barbaric”?
Would it be less “barbaric” if the indigenous people had Apache helicopter gunships and M1-Abrams tanks to try to reclaim their homes?
Was is “barbaric” when George Washington used any available tool to kill the occupying English army?
The Palestinian Resistance is no more a terrorist organization than the French Resistance was when fighting the Nazi occupation of their country.
Are you joking? The French resistance and George Washington’s army? That is the best you can come up with? They did not attack innocent civilians. They attacked other armed soldiers. The Palestinians PURPOSEFULLY target innocent civilians, including children and the elderly.
Sorry Tim, your lack of historical knowledge of is truly mindboggling.
In his latest book Violent Politics, William Polk details how during the war of independence “collections of colonists gathered themselves into a number of small groups…Not to mince words, they were terrorist organizations”. They worked outside the law and “all over colonial America, the insurgents engaged in violent actions to terrify, drive away, or kill the (pro-British) Loyalists”. Polk chronicles how the ‘insurgents’ attacked the ‘Tories’ or ‘Loyalists’ as those who sided with the British Crown were known. From tarring and feathering, lashings, lynchings by mobs, to hangings on orders of ad hoc ‘Committees of Safety’.
Palestinians have a right to resist by any means necessary. If they are strapping bombs toi themselves to blow up their occupiers, it says a lot more about the occupation and the occupiers than it does the Palestinians.
Wow. Some of you guys are really sick, at your true hypocracy is showing. You say America is a terrorist and Israel is a terrorist when we bomb a military target and civilians inadvertantly get killed. But for the Palestinian terrorists that PURPOSEFULLY target civilians some of you are making excuses for that? Wow.
No. You’re terrorist when you use terror to extract assent from the population- as Israel does in Lebanon and Palestine. Targeting soldiers is an act of war, not an act of terror, and suicide bombings directed at military targets are therefore legitimate.
please stop playing game with the sheeple of America
the reason why these things happen are that you stole their land houses and farm actually you stole 82% their land now you are trying to give them95% of 18% and if they agree so you control their air and sea ports borders and their lives. please stop the BS get out of palestanian land obey international law like other honorable countries.
how many more Moslems have to be murdered so your thirst for blood stops ??????…….
Stole 82% of their land David? Is is not true that Sir Moses Maimonides and other wealth Jews actually PURCHASED a great deal of the land now in in question? Is is not also true that the United Nations voted for a two state solution in Novermber of 1947? Is it not true that at that time the Palestinians would have been given a state with MORE LAND than they will now get even if Israel goes back to pre-1967 borders? And yet they refused that partition plan and they attacked Israel in May of 1948. And now it seems they are crying over spilled milk.
You are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts.
Yes, property rights is an issue that is rarely addressed in the Middle East. For example, last week a report revealed that 1/3 of Israeli settlements were built on private land owned by (in most cases, purchased by) Palestinians.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/17/africa/ME-GEN-Israel-Settlements.php
Another fact: many of the Israeli settlers in Gaza who were evicted by the Israeli government two years ago had bought their land from Palestinians.
I am pretty sick of the collectivist arguments by Tim and many of his critics that property rights are directed by ethnicity and biblical passages. Taking the land of one person and “returning” it to someone else who happens to be of the same religion or ethnicity is equal.
The amount of land “owned by Palestinians” or “owned by Jews” is irrelevant. If I own a house, the fact that I am a Jew (which I am) should have no bearing on my property rights. Same for Palestinians, etc. My rights to control my life and property are inherent. They are not derived from US law, UN edict, or any other bunch of thugs who decide, by majority vote or not, to steal from me.
FYI, I am the founder of Antiwar.com. I have written to Tim several times and he doesn’t reply, but maybe he is using a false email address. I have granted him and others broad latitude when it comes to their collectivist rants, but it is really counterproductive.
I would appreciate it if you would cease your comments about “all Muslims” and “everyone on this site.” It is not at all helpful, and you are smart enough to know that you are being quite disengenous.
Tim, please write to me so we can get the rules clear and I can take you off moderated status.
Eric, I believe you wrote to me once and you are right I, I did not get back to you; my sincere apologies for that. As for “moderated status” that sure as heck sounds a little like censorship to me. I thought free speech was all about a free and fair exchange of ideas? In fact, I admire your website ( or at least I did)for being open to other points of view. Of course this is a private site and you can do whatever you want, but it seems a tad bit hypocritical to censor someone who simply disagrees with you.
As for my comments about “all Muslims” when did I ever say something like that? Muslims are, in my view, created in the image of God and have intrinsic dignity and value–just like all human beings. They should be judged as individuals, on their individual merits. On the other hand, yes, I firmly believe that in many ways Islam is not a very peaceful religion and that many ( though certainly not all) Muslims have a propensity for violence, sexism, racism, intolerence, and homophobia of the worst sort. That is my belief and if I am wrong, challenge my thesis with facts and evidence–not censorship! But I would be more than happy to talk with you. Please email me privately or provide me an email address to contact you.
Islam is an indeterminate system. It is whatever its followers choose to make of it, much like Christianity and Judaism, but to claim that “Islam” possesses an immutable set of characteristics not directly related to its basic ontology is breathtakingly ahistorical. I do recall you making comments a few posts back that outlined an explicit refusal to make any distinction between terrorists and the remaining Muslims.
In fact, I admire your website ( or at least I did)for being open to other points of view. Of course this is a private site and you can do whatever you want, but it seems a tad bit hypocritical to censor someone who simply disagrees with you.
Tim, it’s not because you’ve disagreed- observe that the vast majority of your comments have not been censored- but because you’ve made inflammatory remarks, such as the one above, which even you doubtless realize aren’t true obviously calculated to offend. In other words, it’s because you add nothing to the conversation and subtract much.
Thank you, Eric, for letting us know that you are attempting to negotiate with the poster who names self Tim R. I would suspect that indeed such entity is using a false email address. I am so sorry about the disinformation artists that make it difficult for truth seekers here, and so appreciate this blog effort, Mr. Garris. May peace and love reign, someday.
You mean like shooting unarmed children and pregnanet women, firing rockets into crowded marketplaces, or torturing prisoners? Or perhaps you were referring to demolishing tens of thousands of Palestinian homes and uprooting their olive groves? You are aware that collective punishement was a Nazi trademark?
As far as terrorism as a military tactic, are you aware where the Arabs learned that from? The whole placing bombs in buses and large crowds bit was first brought to Palestine by the Zionists. In particular, by the infamous Jewish terrorists Irgun, a militant Zionist group, in late 1937.
“The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews.”
–Jewish historian and Zionist Benny Morris
Between 1944 and 1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist attacks against civilians to drive the British from Palestine, so I always chuckle when I hear Zionist idiots squealing about “terrorism.”
Did you know that, according to Israeli government records, more than 32% of the land that Israel holds for the purpose of building settlements is privately owned by Palestinians?
Have you ever pondered how the Jews went from owning 7% of Palestine at the founding of Israel in 1948 when they made up only 35% of the population to owning almost 93% of the land inside its borders by 1962. Here is one clue:
“There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family—we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included….There is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”
–David Ben-Gurion, writing in his diary on January 1, 1948
It was through ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. 531 Palestinian Arab villages were destroyed. Eleven urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants. Over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes through a number of massacres, assassinations, terrorist acts, rapes, beatings and other forms of intimidation.
You see Tim, the Zionist agenda has always been, even before the founding of Israel, to steal all the land of Palestine from its current inhabitants via force.
“After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”
–David Ben-Gurion to the Zionist Executive in the summer of 1937 regarding the Peel Commission’s partition plan
“Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.”
–David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos in 1937
“We want the Land of Israel in its entirety. That was the original intention.”
–David Ben-Gurion before a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive in the U.S. in 1937
“We shall organize a modern defense force…and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means.”
–David Ben-Gurion, writing to his son in Oct. 1937
As far as what Ben-Gurion meant by “other means”, he and the other Zionists knew all to well what it would entail:
“It is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”
–David Ben-Gurion writing in 1941
“If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us [], but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
–David Ben-Gurion to Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, in 1956
“The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.”
–Berl Katznelson, close ally of Ben-Gurion and a leading Zionist intellectual
Bread and Circuses:
I am not saying Israel does not have a share of the blame, they certainly do. For example, I agree with you that collective punishment by Israel is inexcusable and immoral. However, can you please back up some of your other allegations with specific sources that I can check? You say Israel “shoots unarmed children and pregnant women.” Where are your specific sources for that? Do you mean to say that do it purposefully? Please provide documentation.
Also, you mention destroyed crops and olive groves. That is inexcusable as well. However, are you aware of the wanton destruction to Jewish holy sites during the time Jordan was in control of the West Bank, prior to 1967? For instance, I personally viewed overturned graves that are still visible at the Mt. of Olives cemetary. And how about the burning and desecration of Joseph’t tomb just a few years ago. Don’t act like the Palestinians are so innocent.
Also, your quotations about David Ben Gurion; I am keen to know your source texts for that. Could you kindly give me a bibliography? Thanks.
You always conflate criticism with partisanship- it is apparently inconceivable to you that some of us might not feel beholden to any particular polity. No one here is excusing or downplaying the antics of Arab states- only you are attempting to lessen the gravity of one country’s offenses by reference to those of its neighbours.
Hamas shooting rockets at Sderot? You mean Islamic Jihad, but perhaps all Palestinians look alike?
Touche, indeed!
What a breath of fresh air! Nice to see a candidate who doesn’t kow-tow, bow and scrape before the pro-Israel/AIPAC types. The problem is Likudnik hate, hysteria and paranoia are so intermingled and closely tied to our defense industry. Pissing off the defense industry and/or the pro-Israel types is a good way to end up dead. I hope the neocons and likudniks don’t assassinate him and blame “racists”. Oh, and by the way, for the record, if despising the Likud and their neoconservative brethren makes me “anti-semitic”, then so be it.
antisemite
Chris:
Bulls*%t
Obama is a pretty smart individual, and you can bet your ass he knows exactly what The Likud Lobby has been up to. This man looks better all the time and it will be interesting to see whether he holds his ground and gets assasinated (like JFK) or folds his tent like Ronald Reagan.
Might depend on who he picks for Vice President. If you don’t want to get killed or impeached, picking an Agnew or a Cheney isn’t a bad idea. That way the opposition has to get rid of the successor first.
Kucinich or Gravel would certainly do the trick but might mobilize conservatives too much without pulling in a commensurate number of progressives. The best choice would be Ron Paul, if Obama is willing to take that kind of plunge once the nomination is secured. I think Paul scares the fascists, neocrazies and CIA even more than Kucinich would. No way does Obama get assassinated if Paul is VP.
A man with a Muslim background is running for the President of The United States— you are right… he knows whats going on but its not the information to help us as Americans.
Hes only out to help the Muslim nation.
I have one word for him…… ANTICHRIST !
So im sure if he makes it into office his run will be short..
or like JFK as you put it!
Subtle, I also agree, and beyond overdue…is it possible that Obama represents a different way of looking at foreign policy….I dare to hope.
If that is courage on behalf of Obama then American must ask themselves whats up here? Can they not even speak freely about foreign policy matters that have dealt so much damage to American image abroad? Must you hitch your boat at the interest of another country no matter what! Or does the world drop at your coastline and American don’t give a darn about the rest of us so called “aliens”! Then do not be surprised to see more 911’s and more mayhem.
Chose a president that speaks the truth even if that means upsetting folks who benefit from endless wars and build your economy on other than production of WMD for we all know that supply needs demand and the demand for WMD is creation of more invented wars.
Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb Iran, ., sang to the Beach Boys tune by McCain should make this old warhorse expunged in any modern democracy. But you guys are voting for him. Imagine if any Arab country chose for their president a man who says death to America! Its a crazy world. Please inject some sanity into it.
Be a force for peace and life. Not destruction and war.
Ahmed from Bharain where the 5th Fleet has been stationed for over a decade.
I agree
as much as it may be a break for him is it really all that big deal if one looks at the bigger picture ?
both likud and labor have been steady-fast in building settlements and confiscating land , treating palestinian as less than human being aka apartheid .
how does this ” fine ” distinction will take the israeli jackboot off palestinian neck escapes me . also escapes me how this ” distinction ” will put an end to colonialist / racialist policies of israel when it comes to occupied territory and palestinians .
it is more a sad reflection on how awful public discourse has been in this country that a little departure like this becomes a big news .
regards .
Barack Hussein Obama wants to sit down and have a “dialogue” with our implacable, sworn enemies. At least Hillary has some back bone and will not just sit down with our enemies so they can use her for a photo op. If this were 1938 Obama would be right up there next to Neville Chamberlin kissing up to Hitler and talking about having achieved peace in our time. Obama is a good man with good intentions. Unfortunatly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Comment by Tim R. on 2008-02-25 22:02:18 Report abuse
Barack Hussein Obama wants to sit down and have a “dialogue” with our implacable, sworn enemies. At least Hillary has some back bone and will not just sit down with our enemies so they can use her for a photo op. If this were 1938 Obama would be right up there next to Neville Chamberlin kissing up to Hitler and talking about having achieved peace in our time. Obama is a good man with good intentions. Unfortunatly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Our enemies?…dont’ you mean Israel’s enemies…implacable sworn enemies indeed…..zionist have nothing but enemies…they make them faster then they can kill them.
That’s what Tim said. He said “our enemies” and he’s made it quite clear in previous posts that he identifies strongly with Israel and in particular Likud. From his point of view, “our” means “Israel’s” and perhaps even “Likud’s”.
“Barack Hussein Obama wants to sit down and have a “dialogue” with our implacable, sworn enemies.”
What can you ever hope to accomplish without a dialogue?
We’ve tried it the other way, you know.. bomb first and ask questions later.
Perhaps a dialogue is exactly what we need, and perhaps even more so with our enemies than with our friends?
It’s not as though opening a dialogue and acting as an honest broker eliminates the military option entirely. Why shouldn’t we try it?
The only reason I can think of: Israel doesn’t want that.
It’s their enemies we’re talking about here and THEY don’t wish to open a dialogue.
A little closer to the truth, isn’t it?
Tim R:
Please quit saying “our” enemies if you are an American citizen. But do keep up the Orwellian “newspeak”, it’s very entertaining. In this case, you are trying to equate Palestine with Nazi Germany. Does the comparison hold up?
Let’s see:
What group invaded neighboring countries and killed (10s thousands? 100s thousands?) of civilians?
What group pursued ethnic cleansing to rid themselves of “inferior” goys?
a) Germany
b) Stateless Palestinians
c) Israel
If you guessed a) and c) take two bulldozers out of petty cash.
TIm R.
YOU ARE THE ENEMY.
“Barack Hussein Obama wants to sit down and have a “dialogue” with our implacable, sworn enemies.”
Apparently, reasonable people only sit down to talk with “enemies” after they’ve both blown each other to smithereens. Color me unreasonable then: I’d much rather talk first. One of the most feared things for Tim and his Israel-firsters is that if we talk we might actually learn the humanity that exists in the other side and come to mutual agreements, and mutual agreements don’t lead to unilateral control.
It’s interesting that the Palestinian extremists are characterized as terrorists while the Israeli extremists are commended for their deep faith. The ethnic cleansing demanded by the Zionists is as ‘terrorist” as the Hamas not willing to recognize the right of Israel. The implicit support of the Zionist agenda by the US government has only aggravated the situation and will mean much more pain for Israel in the long haul. Its about time that Western countries mobilized and marched the Jewish occupation out of the Palestinian territory and allowed them some time for self-determination. Did you know that the annual handouts to Israel from the USA along with the Jewish associations around the world produce a GDP/capita that greater than that of 100 countries of the world. When will they begin to earn their livelihood?
Neither Hamas nor any Palestinian, individual or group, has any imperative to “recognize” Israel’s right to anything. Israel is a cancer on the Middle East, grafted onto the region by Western powers. The land that is “Israel” is Palestine and was previously inhabited by Arabs who were Muslims, Christians and Jews (in that proportional order). The modern day “Israelis” are mostly Jews of Western origin. Many of them, particularly the ones in the settlements, are Brooklyn Jews.
Of course there is a large Arab Israeli population in Israel. These are the true Israelites, as many of them could actually trace their heritage back to Biblical times.
@Tim R.
Sorry, I can’t stand that 1938 lie any more. Chamberlain did not kiss up to Hitler, he played for time, as the british empire was not at all ready for war in ‘38. This is documented well enough.
If you need a practical example of what Chamberlain was up to and up against, look up the journey of the battleship Bismarck - scoring a big success against pre-38 british naval armament first (Hood) and what happened to the Bismarck next, when she encountered state of the art british armament.
Anyway, lest you conveniently forget: the Nazis wanted and needed war to stay in power and they were judged and hanged in Nürnberg for causing the war.
While in no way wishing to support the insupportable - that there is some parallel to Munich in Obama’s reported willingness to engage in a more balanced Middle Eastern policy - there can be little truth either to your assertion that Chamberlain was playing for time in 1938 any more than Stalin similarly was playing for time with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. Both seemed to have been caught up in the events that Hitler was setting in motion. Chamberlain was honestly taken aback by the Czech invasion in 1939. Up until then he’d seen Hitler’s Sudeten aspirations as at least understandable as they involved ethnic Germans exclusively. No such interpretation could have been placed on the Czech matter. And if it were time that were being sought, how far back are we to go to see that kind of motivation. To the naval treaty?
Your point is well taken - that is why I mentioned Nürnberg in my last paragraph: while Chamberlain, for different reasons to avoid war, the Hitlerites needed war if only to stay in power a bit longer in germany - and war they got in the end, from none other than Chamberlain.
That Chamberlain recognised certain german demands as justified, is certainly true. To open up a discussion thread about the treatment of minorities (not just germans) in Poland or the CSR in order to assess Chamberlain’s (or Lord Keynes’) opinion on these matters would lead us far away from the original topic.
When I singled out the question of armament, that was because that the practical part of Chamberlain’s “appeasement” seems to be completely overlooked.
However, Chamberlain’s gaining time to prepare for war (if necessary) must under no circumstances be overlooked, and the fate of the british empire post war seems to be of no interest at all to those who try to show Chamberlain as naive. It should be.
To twice cite Churchill, who is most probably responsible for much of Chamberlain’s bad reputation (and whose admirers assidouusly avoid to see any connection between their hero and the end of the empire he tried to preserve):
Eventually, the Israeli leadership (at least those not in comas :) will meet the same fate if they live long enough.
If there is a God…
wiredispatch is a joke. I don’t why this site uses so many of it’s links.
Please don’t feed the trolls.
I’m glad others pointed out Tim R.’s loose rhetoric - and fatuous historical analogies for that matter. I’ve been wanting to use the word implacable for ages now too, it’s just a bugger to fit into a work or dinner conversation.
The Palestinians are not implacable, nor are the Lebanese, Iranians, or Syrians for that matter. All have shown that they have the capacity to negotiate and meet agreements. Negotiation requires all stakeholders to be involved of course, but that’s another story…
When three Israeli’s die for every Palestinian death, then you can talk Tim R. Until then, the opposite is true. Many of them Palestinian children. So be quiet. Or how about a couple of kidnapped Israeli soldiers vs 1000+ Lebanese deaths and vast destruction of their infrastructure? Pax, PhilthyRex
You can see the value of Palestinian life versus Israeli life when one kidnapped Israeli soldier may be swapped for 1000 Palestinian prisoners/detainees/whatever the Newspeak word for them is. I still can’t believe how the West Bank and Gaza can be in limbo/occupied for SO long without a resolution. Viva Falasteen!
I have a solution to the Hamas indiscriminate missile problem, lets send them some some satellite guided missiles and to replace the suiside bombers lets give them some smart bombs this way they will have no excuse if they hit any civillians.
hmmmm, they can always blame technical errors, may be equipping thses bombs and missles with videos and have them give a presentation after each bombing run with all electronic data collected will have them think twice about using this execuse.
Wait, that never stopped Isreal, no gurantee it will work for the Palastinians.
Only solution is for both to stop bombing, period. No he started crap, and for Isreal to give the Palastinians thier rights and stopped making excused for thier racist policies.
Few Palanstians with fire crackers against tanks and F-16’s does not warrant the labeling of all Palastinians as terrosrist who don’t deserve peace.
Well said
Just like a Kenedy the master of the speach breath of fresh air.
I hope his fate will not be the same as Kennedy.
Mossad & CIA must be in deep discussion (not verbally) to create a cenario of OSWALD type of arrangment.
This man is to nice to clewer and not white enoughf to be a American president.
Look at The Bush ?
The neocon bores who keep trotting out comparisons with Munich and glorifying Winston Churchill never say two things.
First, Hitler was thwarted at Munich, as he complained afterwards. He didn’t get what he wanted.
Chamberlain pulled off the first summit-conference coup, buying vital time for Britain to finish its program of air defenses and fighter squadrons which pre-empted the possibility of invasion in 1940. Between Munich and the Battle of Britain, England, pace JFK, did not sleep: it rearmed faster than Germany, and by early autumn 1940 could put over a million trained conscripts into the field– primarily to defend its own land and its interests, a priority the neocons would appreciate less than George Washington.
Secondly, Churchill was no blanet anti-fascist and champion of small countries. He was an imperialist at heart, an admirer of “might” and intervention.
He had blown hot and cold about the danger to the British Empire of Nazi Germany’s rise throughout the 1930s; he had praised Hitler’s and Mussolini’s domestic policies, accepted that the dictatrs might be a bulawark against Bolshevism, and was only concerned about saving the old balance of power on the Continent. Using inflated and wrong estimates of Germany’s air power and the capacity of its bombing fleets to wreak destruxction, Churchill urged preventive war on an overstretched, recession-recovering mother country: like McCain singing “bomb, bomb Iran”.
If Churchill had been premier in the late 1930s, Great Britain would have been equipped with ineffective, short-range bombers while lacking the radar, anti-aircraft defense, Hurricanes and Spitfires that enabled it to win the only decisive air battle in history. Churchill inherited Chamberlain’s legacy while displacing him as premier immediately after another unsuccessful pre-emptive strike, on Norway; it was like the one in the Dardanelles in the first war, which Churchill, the neocons’ inspirer of “cakewalk” masterstrokes, had also crafted.
Churchill lived to bankrupt his beloved empire, so there may be another parallel for America. John McCain idolizes Winston too.
Chamberlain pulled off the first summit-conference coup, buying vital time for Britain to finish its program of air defenses and fighter squadrons which pre-empted the possibility of invasion in 1940.
Britain might have gotten stronger as time passed, but so did Germany.
You’re omitting the facts that (1) Czechoslovakia had large armaments works that Germany won by its bloodless takeover there, and (2) the Czechs had a pretty good army, which was neutralized by Munich because natural defenses were handed over.
Not to mention what Munich said to Stalin—that the West was unwilling to stand up to Hitler.
This is a welcome turn of events. Maybe the pro-Israel crowd have reason to smear Obama after all.
Tim R is a classic war mongerer. There is no point in talking to him. Everybody who doesn’t accept American rule deserves death and destruction. Kind of funny that he keeps bringing up Hitler because he is “the good German”.
Zee, just the other day, I was mentioning that if Obama wins, AQ will lose moral support and can pack bags to go home from Oceania to Africa. Such is the admiration for Obama everywhere. Now with one loose talk he has put himself and the ‘hope’ he offered in jeopardy. Get ready for McCain and the next war folks, we are doomed to witness hundred years of war.
Indeed, indeed–McCain is looking tougher and tougher every day.
Reminds one a bit of Sonny Liston.
About time we hear some intellegent talk as regards Israel vs the Likuds.
Sonny Liston’s dead…
Wasn’t he played by Stu Irwin? Or was that Sylvester Stallone in On the Waterfront?
Oh I remember now–it was Rod Steiger playing Shelley Winters in Quentin Travoltino’s Pulp Fiction, right?