The Terror

 
           An Isreali blind near Beit Hanoun 3 July 2006

From Uri Avnery via Alternet:

 [O]lmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior of his government “we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted.”

According to Olmert, a “terrorist” is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot freely. “Terrorists” are also the women and children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: The children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up to be terrorists.)

Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the United States even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world — America, Europe, the Arab world — are accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.

  
Palestinian men gathered next to water stained with blood after Israeli tanks fired on homes in Beit Hanoun, Gaza.  [Getty photo/NYT]

The world did not pay much attention to the massacre, because it happened on U.S. election day. The results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.

A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.

But let’s not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people have accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the world — including us here in Israel — were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.

As for this last… well, we hope.  Leave it at that for the moment…

Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American Army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neoconservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.

We hope…

 

Via Electronic Intifada, Pinochet in Palestine

[T]he plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their utmost to provoke Hamas to start the war at which point Fateh, with the aid of the intelligence services of friendly Arab countries, as well as assistance from Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over. Indeed, the first unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli government kidnapped a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet ministers and parliament members, and placed them in Israeli jails. This was not sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of help that Fateh rendered the Israeli occupiers. …  Hamas however, is wisely adamant that it will respond by force only when Fateh launches an all-out war to bring about its planned coup, but not before.

Fateh’s planned coup is not only based on the popularity of Hamas and its electoral victory but also on Hamas’s increased ability to defend itself against Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs under Arafat’s leadership to crush the first Palestinian Intifada and any remaining resistance to the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas is almost as well- armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it. This is where the situation today differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s.

To offset this new balance of forces, the United States government, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been training Abbas’s Praetorian Guard in Jericho for over a month with American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors, and is providing arms to them in preparation for the confrontation with Hamas.

The Israeli cabinet in turn has recently approved the transfer of thousands of rifles from Egypt and Jordan to Abbas’s forces. The Israelis also approved a US request that Israel allow the Badr Brigade — part of the Palestine Liberation Army currently stationed in Jordan — to deploy in Gaza.  [snip]

The writer is clearly pro Hamas, I am not arguing for Hamas, being too far away to argue for anything… but merely say what matters:  that the people have a chance.

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What of poor Habeas?  Shall anyone elected, in any cycle, dare speak its name?

WASHINGTON – Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees. [...]

Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was arrested in 2001 while studying in the United States. He has been labeled an “enemy combatant,” a designation that, under a law signed last month, strips foreigners of the right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

That law is being used to argue the Guantanamo Bay cases, but Al-Marri represents the first detainee inside the United States to come under the new law. Aliens normally have the right to contest their imprisonment, such as when they are arrested on immigration violations or for other crimes.

“It’s pretty stunning that any alien living in the United States can be denied this right,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney for Al-Marri. “It means any non-citizen, and there are millions of them, can be whisked off at night and be put in detention.”  [snip]

 We all can sense that “enemy combatant” and “terrorist” are the active words… “citizen” is getting hazy.

We conjure up horrors and somehow in the conjuring we do not deal wtih our very real, very great problems…

Nightmares, boogeymen, who’s the invader [really], endless television promotion of sexual predators, “stranger abduction” – but no one will talk of familial violence and murder – not really… easy to get lost in the illusions… Better to fix on the immigrant, the masked, the bearded…

  

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The many Americas… certainly more than two, but mis-managed!  That great buga-boo of modern America, that carpet we sweep everything under:  management…

And note the corporations at issue, the same mis-management as Iraq!  Hardly news…

One thing I don’t want to see in a year or two, is some Gridiron or Washington Correspondents dinner with a Democrat poking around the edges of the carpeting in Congress searching for the missing, never showed up, never was to be OVERSIGHT.

   [O]ther corporations profiting off the devastation include Bechtel, Blackwater, CH2M Hill, Fluor, Halliburton subsidiary KBR and many others.

    There has been no real oversight of these misdeeds. The only criminal charges filed have been against individuals who ripped off programs for a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars.

Most recently, the Department of Justice triumphantly announced to the press that they had issued an indictment for abuse of Katrina funds – of a man who illegally received Katrina unemployment benefits while still working! Meanwhile, hundreds of millions are being diverted without a peep from the government.

    The people of New Orleans and the Gulf coast are fighting against the robbing of the poor and the looting of hurricane relief funds, but the clock is ticking.

    Before long, there will be no money left. The generosity of those who contributed to help those harmed by Katrina will be snugly in the pockets of developers and corporations. Affordable housing will remain scarce. The working poor, the elderly and the disabled will remain displaced. The next disaster will occur, and this will happen again.

    Support the people and community organizations of the Gulf Coast in this fight. Raise righteous and holy hell! Join with Amnesty International USA in the human rights campaign to stop the demolition of affordable housing. Ask your federal elected officials for an immediate investigation into the looting of the Gulf Coast. We need your help, before all the money is gone. [snip]

War profiteers, disaster profiteers.  Ghoulish, is it not?

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MIS-management!  More of it…

Curmudgette is back around…

[W]hat is new, and I why I think America is dumbening is that no one seems to notice or care anymore that everything works like crap. What amazed me more than anything about my laborious conversations with Verizon was the seeming astonishment of the customer service reps that I was, how say, dissatisfied, at being forced to wait for 3 weeks for phone service through no fault of my own. Gone are the days when the customer was always right and sales people cared about your business. Today’s service industries are typified by a prevailing sense that they are entitled to your money and a customer’s unhappiness with either product or service is his problem.

It almost doesn’t surprise me that Verizon reps seemed shocked by my lack of complacency. Complacency has become the hallmark of  American culture. Now, I’m as thrilled as anyone that Dems have taken back both houses of Congress and it truly gives me hope, but look at just how bad things had to get for the tide to turn. Torture scandals, the loss of habeas corpus, unauthorized wiretaps, open cronyism, an illegal war; this litany of criminal offenses goes on. But what finally turned public opinion en masse? The lesson for today is that if you want to create massive political shift in this country, a President publicly shredding the Constitution is not enough. What you really need are some good sex scandals. Not just any sex scandals either. They have to be GAY sex scandals.  [snip]

Yes, when things look bad, keep an eye out for the wagging weenies…

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…then listen for the Echo – from Who is IOZ on Blahhger foot stamping…:

[I] ask myself: How well-attended will the next antiwar march on Washington be, what with the Dems happily jiggering the levers of power? Within the next few months, the Democratic party line will move along to smarter fighting, better occupation, more troops, timelines for those backwards Iraqis to get their shit in order. The firebreathing “antiwar” democratic blogs, meanwhile, will make like Echo and repeat the party line, since dissent might lead in two years to defeat. Like Echo, they’re cursed by their own idolatrous longings.

And who do you suppose that makes the Dems, you mythologists?

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UPDATE, 7:45 am on the Pacific Ocean…

I am listening to Shadegg on Wash Journal, he is running for Minority Whip… and happy to mention the Blue Dogs.  That an incoming member of the BD assured him more than few ”do not agree with their leadership”… and Shadegg goes on to how important it will be to work with the Blue Dogs.

Boll Weevils, I say again….

AND:

Digby [thanks to Madman] takes a look at the recent The Nation article on the Quiverfulls… crazed Christian Breeders… and he centers on the Phillip Longman/DLC/reach out aspect of the article.

Holy fuck, indeed. This kind of thinking has finally gone mainstream and is fully integrated into the debate among influential Democrats. Granted, Longman’s advice to the DLC was to embrace “family friendly” policy but as you can see from his comments, in order to truly embrace these undereducated “Quiverfull” nuts whom everyone thinks need to be part of the Big Tent (birthing and cleaning after everyone apparently)the agenda is going to have to expand significantly. We are already seeing the argument going beyond abortion and extending into the birth control realm.

I am laughing as Digby seems to get it, some tents are too big.  To say nothing of too too Drahmatic…

I had posted on the Phillip Longman, etc., at the tag end of this post…

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