News and Views
As the presidential campaign drifts into its most petty and superficial, here is a reminder of what is important, of what Washington is all about and is likely to continue being all about unless Americans wake up and understand what U.S. terrorism around the world really is:
I recently wrote more extensively about the U.S. drone war in Pakistan: Secrecy Obstructs Accountability: How the Drone War Will Help Get Obama Reelected.
The entire U.N. Security Council, representing 14 countries, voted to condemn Israeli settlement expansion as criminal only to have the resolution vetoed by the U.S.. Those 14 members united yesterday to criticize the U.S. position as one that prolongs the stagnated peace process and extends the subjugation of the Palestinian people. The press release at the U.N. described the status quo of the last month:
The past month witnessed a series of developments that are cause for “continued serious concern,” he said, noting the announcement of several new settlement constructions, the demolition of 57 Palestinian structures in the West Bank, an increase in settler violence, and over 300 Israeli military operations in the West Bank.
Gaza and southern Israel again witnessed “a dangerous deterioration” in the security situation, he added. During the reporting period, 45 projectiles were fired from Gaza into Israel, while the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) conducted nine incursions and 13 air strikes.
The condensed summation illustrates the obvious asymmetry of the conflict that has always been apparent. But according to some recent reports, it may become even more so. Bilal Y. Saab at the National Interest:
Jane’s, an internationally respected British security and defense risk-analysis firm, has recently reported that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, is on “the brink of renouncing armed resistance and moving to a policy of nonviolent resistance to Israel.” Jane’s, with which I have been a monthly writer to three of its publications since 2007, has several hard-to-ignore quotes in its report of Hamas leaders saying that the move was not “tactical” but “strategic.” Also interviewed are Palestinian Authority intelligence officers who said that Hamas’s strategy was “gradual and nuanced,” with one senior officer telling Jane’s that Hamas “intends to keep its military and security units to control the situation in Gaza, not necessarily to fight the Israelis.” The interviewees’ names were not mentioned for obvious security reasons.
The article goes on to explain that “the springboard for this new strategic approach by Hamas is the Arab uprising,” and that Egypt, Qatar and Turkey played a key role in convincing Hamas to reconcile with Fatah and replace armed resistance with nonviolent resistance. “Hamas leader Khaled Meshal,” Saab writes, “in a meeting on November 24 in Cairo with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, accepted ‘in writing with a signature’ the need to embrace peaceful activism.”
Hamas has not yet gone public with this new approach, but if it does (and that does remain an ‘if’) Saab says it would be “a major boost for the Palestinian cause.” I’m inclined to agree. If there were an explicitly nonviolent united Palestinian front it would put increased pressure on Israel’s American enablers to stop supporting the ruthless subjugation of Palestinians. Then again, the ability of the U.S.-Israeli establishment to inflate threats and indoctrinate people away from peace has discredited such optimism before.
Remember how the US contracted Ethiopia to “restore order” in Somalia? The East African dictatorship was to help install a UN-backed government of warlords and former communist apparatchiks in order to “free” Somalia. They ended up obliterating the delicate gains the impoverished society had made in the early 2000s.
Ethiopia, whose government purposely starved Its Own People to death in the 80s, such that Americans sang songs about them, was Washington’s light of freedom unto the Somalis. That turned out horrifyingly as we know — Ethiopia could poetically be said to have infected Somalia with famine; many other African despotisms have been roped in to somehow deliver democracy at missile-point, killing and displacing thousands in the process; an insurgency of war-scarred children runs wild.
But the point isn’t to mock yet again the utter, utter failure of US foreign policy with regard to Somalia, but to note that Ethiopia — DC’s go-to for regional freedom delivery — is run by terrible people who monitor and punish journalism they feel threaten them. Two Swedish journalists were just sentenced to 15 years in prison for “terrorism,” i.e., the crime of attempting to report in the Ogaden, an ethnic Somali region ruled brutally by Addis Ababa. Ethiopian journalists have been charged with terrorism as well. Many flee, shuttering their papers, in order to avoid what I imagine are quite inhospitable prisons — all for speaking their minds.
In the US, meanwhile, a sort of terror-fueled guerrilla law has taken hold, which will now soon be properly codified thanks to a few hawks and an ocean of cowards in Congress, plus a power-mad president. One could wonder if Ethiopia might be the model for the US government lately, whose leaders have seen fit to torture, imprison, and murder Americans for their own crimes of speech.
Progressive Cenk Ugyar, lefty blogger and sometime MSNBC host (purged for defecting from the Obama cult), has it right about Sean Hannity, Ron Paul, and Fox News.
Amid an avalanche of attacks on antiwar Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, the latest (as of midnight on Tuesday) is one in the comically-named “American Thinker,” a neocon web site for the intellectually challenged, which runs a piece by Adam Yoshida on “The Madness of Ron Paul.” The real irony here is that if anyone is an example of madness run amok it is Señor Yoshida, who wrote the following:
“Can any rational person deny that Michael Moore is a traitor? … Michael Moore should be made an example of. During the Revolutionary War, loyalists were tarred and feathered and sometimes killed. … In short, during virtually every major American war, subversion, sedition, and treason have been harshly dealt with and civil liberties have been curbed. This is the way things ought to be. This is the way that things must be.
“Vietnam was lost both because seditionists were allowed to run free and because the government failed to take proper action to curb them. Today Kent State is memorialized as a great tragedy because a few traitors (or those stupid enough to stand near them) were killed when, in fact, one of the great tragedies of the war was that there were obviously too few Kent States.”
This is what passes for “conservatism” these days: the Madness of Adam Yoshida.
“This is the way things ought to be. This is the way that things must be.” Spooky. Scary. And wacko. The man is off his meds — or maybe there aren’t meds powerful enough to counteract that kind of psychosis.
A Washington Post piece on Ron Paul’s rise in the polls comes with the usual “but he can’t win” caveat, and there’s also this nugget:
“Yet, while the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman is earning support for his tight-fisted fiscal positions, he’s so out of step with the GOP mainstream on foreign policy and some domestic issues that even his most loyal aides doubt he can use his momentum to win the Republican nomination.”
Just how “loyal” is an aide who snipes at Ron behind his back? It’s disturbing there appears to be a fifth column in the Paul campaign. Earth to Ron: get rid of them before they drive the knife deeper.
The reality of Paul’s poll numbers refutes these disloyalists: in fact, Paul’s opposition to perpetual war is a major plus in the demographics he is outpolling his opponents in: young people and independents.
These “loyal aides” — hopefully soon to be ex-aides — are playing footsie with the mainstream media which is out to get Paul and destroy his campaign: in effect, they are actively sabotaging the Paul campaign. While this won’t be the first case of alleged “libertarians” turning on the man who made libertarianism into a household word, Ron can — and should — make damn sure it is the last as far as his campaign is concerned.
