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Subject: I am amused. Author: Mark7 [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] Date Posted: 22:47:49 02/26/02 Tue In reply to: JeffF 's message, "You'd be amusing.." on 09:24:45 02/26/02 Tue Some 3 months ago, Fox News described of a 3 year old Palestinian baby killed in his father's arms (by an Apache US made missle) as a Palestinian "youth". While the Bush Administration is "shocked" by relevations that the Palestinian authority, by most accounts with the knowledge of Yassir Arrafat acquired weapons, anti-tank and anti-aircraft from Iran, we are GIVING 2 billion $ worth of US weapons EVERY year to Israel. These are the Apache Helicopters and the Missles that are fired daily into cities inhabited by an entire nation that lives in 2 large ghettos: Gaza and the West Bank. How is that helping the "peace" process? And mostly, what about Sabra and Shatilla and Sharon's involvement in the murder of over 2000 men, women and children, all civilians, of Palestinian origin? I bet that is not terrorism. Men in uniform are never terrorists, least not until they lose the war. Sorry Jeff, but Ariel Sharon belongs in the same cell with Slobodan Milosevich for the same crime. Ethnic Cleansing. But Sharon is cleansing with the blessing of the US government and when Arabs in any way complain, the US is placing it's huge fist in their mouth. That's good old peace. The US media's role in reporting this conflict is despicable, immoral and frankly nauseating. 3 year old murdered Palestinians are described as "youth", Palestinians fighting to prevent their homes from being demolished and confiscated for the benefit of immigrant Jews are always called "Palestinian gunmen", there is no mention of Sharon's involvement in Sabra and Shatilla, no mention of the demolition of Palestinian homes, no mention of the confiscation of Palestinian land, of the continuing construction of Jewish settlements in confiscated land, no mention of the thousands of Palestinians still living in exile in Lebanon in refugee camps. There is no mention of the ghetto like conditions created in the West Bank and Gaza, and no mention of the economic blockade, of the continuing economic strangulation of the Palestinian territories by Israel, with the intention of determining Palestinians to leave their land of birth. The US media is taking advantage of the lack of international policy knowledge of the American nation to present the victim as the aggressor. No man in his right mind will risk his life throwing stones at an A1 tank because Yasser Arafat told him to do so. However, a desperate 20 year old who grew watching his family killed in Sabra by Ariel Sharon's Lebanese troops, who's house is demolished by American made A1 tanks may do so. And CNN will never show the boy crying in Sabra for his murdered mother, only the young man burning the US flag. And like you said, the policy is failing. You don't fight terrorism with terror. When organized terrorism collapses in a radicalized population, that population becomes ungovernable. The only reason Arafat is alive is because Israel would not be able to control Gaza and the West Bank without Arafat and without building extermination camps (the sad thing is that most Israelis I know would welcome the extemination of Palestinians). After all, in the Old Testament, extermination of defeated tribes was the norm, and we are dealing with nations who believe in an eye for an eye. But why do we, the American people, take side in this conflict and supply the ammo for one side is beyond my understanding. I wish we would get the wisdom to tell our government to let them kill each others with stones and clubs if their morals so dictate, rather than US made Apache helicopters. We, the American people have no obligation and no benefit from the aliance with Israel. You said we have some obligation towards the Jews for not allowing them in the US during ww2. We have none. We didn't help the Armenians when they were massacred by the Turks, and the Turks are our best buddies. We didn't accept Tutsi's as refugees from Rowanda, and didn't fight their wars either. The consequence of our involvement is the alienation of 1 billion people, Muslims, suffering their anger (including terrorism). We dehumanize the suffering of Palestinians and describe them all as terrorists, while in the same time we become dehumanized by our own refusal to see their pain, and our media's decision to show us only their anger. We the American people, are allowing our government to do evil in the middle east. We shall pay the price for our weakness. Nations always pay dearly for their government's immoral conduct. Guaranteing the borders of Israel, as internationally recognized by the UN is a good thing, a right thing. Backing Sharon in the West Bank, Gaza or the Golan Heights is not the same. It is a bad thing, a wrong and immoral action to help a bad and immoral man, a criminal. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[> [> [> Subject: Sharon etc. Author: JeffF [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 10:06:07 02/27/02 Wed I'm no fan of Ariel Sharon by a long shot, but let's look at how he got elected. First of all, he deliberately went to the Temple Mount to provoke a confrontation and the Palestinians overeacted as he knew they would and there were the violent riots. Then people desperate for peace in their lives turned to Sharon. It was a cynical ploy to get himself elected and it worked. But that's not the main reason he got elected. Basically, the PA elected Sharon. Clinton tried to force a deal that neither side was happy with. Barak accepted it. Arafat turned it down. The basic problem is that he thinks any deal that doesn't get the Palestinians 100% of what they want is signing his death warrant. It may be at that, but those are chances real leaders take. It's curious that while the Palestinians have so many willing martyrs among them, the top leadership is afraid to make a deal and get the Palestinians their own land because they are afraid of their own death. Let them kill each other, you say? I disagree. Bush's problem is the opposite of Clinton. Bill tried to force a deal to get a legacy, but GW does nothing. We are too disengaged right now. Nothing will be solved as long as the sides are shooting each other without talking. I actually might have agreed with a lot of what you said if I hadn't come to that comment about victim and aggressor. Israel is still surrounded by hostile states on almost all sides, plus the hostility of the PA. Put aside that Israel has rarely started any of the wars or hostility, there is still the matter of this tiny country surrounded by all these hostile people. However, I do agree that the current policy is not working. Israelis are less safe after Sharon's election, not more safe and there are small steps they could take immediately to build some confidence with the Palestinians. The end to house demolitions, letting people reach their jobs and hospitals, the end to torture of suspects. These are concrete steps they can take to start to get negotiations back on track. Call the PA's bluff. Give them things like this that Israel should be doing anyway, and see if it lures the PA back to negotiations or not. I fear that we need a whole new generation of leadership on both sides before peace has a real chance and I stand by my comment that if Syria, Iran, etc. don't sign off on it, it doesn't have a chance any way. As for Turkey, we do have the same moral obligation to the Armenians that we have to the Jews. The fact that we are ignoring it, doesn't mean that we don't have it. Turkey is abusing the lives of Kurds and people on Cyprus too, but the Europeans may force some changes becuase Turkey wants to join the EU

[> [> [> [> Subject: Re: Sharon etc. Author: Mark7 [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 23:29:19 02/27/02 Wed Bush and the US administration are doing something. They are supplying Israel with 2 billion $ of weapons free, every year. These are the Apache helicopters that shoot misles into Gaza and the A1 tanks that demolish Palestinian houses. I wish we wouldn't do that. As far as I see it, it is not our war, so like Pilat from Pont, I wish whatever blood gets spilled to be on Sharon and Arafat's hands, where it belongs. As far as my morals are concerned, we the American people, are responsible for the death of the 3 year old "youth" killed by an Apache helicopter missle. We provided the missle and paid for it. The Palestinian "youth" was guilty of being born in Gaza, and get born Arab. As for Sharon's policy, it seems to me Bush is trying to emulate it at a much grander scale. In a nutshell, don't listen to any grivances, legit or not, just do a fast draw and shoot from the hip. So far, as far as I can see, the only one killed has been the piano player in Afganistan. Just like his dady lost the war with Saddam, baby lost the war with Osama, who is likely to be alive and doing just fine thank you. To call that a "victory" and for somebody to accept this as a "victory" is beyond my comprehension. The bearded idiots in the Taliban never flew any planes, and the camels they were riding never hit the twin towers in NY. The Saudis, who made up and funded these types of organizations are still there, full of money and continuing to fund the same organizations, while we bomb some illiterate peasants in Afganistan who couldn't point NY on a map if their lives depended on it. As for Sharon, as I said, he belongs in the same cell with Milosevich. How many Americans know that Sharon will never set foot in Bruxel because he is WANTED for MURDER? There are no "good" guys in the middle east Jeff. Only horrible guys, and people who place their beliefs and ethnicity before their morality and before their humanity. Why are we meddling into that place? As for the Turks, last I checked, the US government didn't give a damn about either the Kurds nor the Armenians, or the Tutsis for that matter. And I doubt they give a damn about Jews either except for the political and financial power of the American Jewish community. But is that influece so strong as to make us all murderers of women and children? I personally don't like it. I don't like being the ally of Ariel Sharon.

[> [> [> [> [> Subject: Take a look at this Author: JeffF [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 10:51:53 03/07/02 Thu Here's a balanced article about why we can't wash our hands of the situation, Mark. There is little chance of peace without a US push for it. Who else is there? Israel doesn't trust the Saudi push for peace which is unbalanced and neither side totally trusts Mubarak, the only other person who is offering anything. This article isn't pro-Sharon, it's fairly balanced. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51904-2002Mar6.html

[> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: I did Author: Mark7 [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 00:00:11 03/08/02 Fri Here is the problem with the US involvement. 1 - We have never been, nor can we be an honest broker in the middle east. Why? Because we supply the guns that kill the 12 year old Palestinians, so I can't imagine giving ammunition to the guy who kills your child and be able to make peace in the same time. We are a declared ally of Israel, and a declared enemy of almost everything Muslim or Arab. Read the news. Watch the TV. Arab Muslims are always portraid as terrorists, bad guys. When was the last time you saw a movie where the Jew was the bad guy? When did they ever show the Mossad exercising their God given right to "preventive assassination" or to torture? I wish somebody would make a movie about this subject, but I doubt it could be viewed in the US. I gave up on reading any US news about the Middle East and Israel. I relly on European media, because what Fox News and CNN is showing us is intelectual garbage. 2 - Each time we attempted to mediate and in the Midle East we blundered. I believe the State Department and the CIA has nobody from the region to articulate the US policy and relly exclusivelly on Jewish and Israeli sources. I cannot believe the President of the US (a born too many times Christian) is telling of a "cruciade" unless he is an idiot, advised by idiots, or is indeed articulating the American policy against the Muslim world. 3 - You were the biggest critic of Clinton for his involvement in the area. We actually agree on this. Clinton did make a fool of his legacy by trying to mediate this conflict. 4 - This is a fight for survival. It transcends politics. The battle for Palestine or Israel, is primordial. They say Hyenas and Lions will always fight for territory, and never share it. The Jews from Russia cannot go back to Russia. They need the land confiscated, so the demolition of Palestinian homes will continue, specially in Gaza (the Mediteranean Coast is more attractive than the desert). The Palestinians have nowhere to go. They need to kill each other until one nation cleanses the other. Israel is wining for the moment, but aside from the Palestinians there are over 200 million Arabs, who's nationalism is only beginning to grow. Actually American involvement in the Middle East in the last 30 years has less to do with Oil, than to deal with this growing nationalism. Our invovement has always been dictated by Israel's policy and against our own interests. We have been stopping the nationalist tendencies and made it imposible for leaders of a Pan Arab world to emerge. I don't care about either Jews, or Palestinians. But I do care about Americans, and our involvement in the area, our idiotic policies and inept leadership in this area will cost the American people dearly. Even if it serves Israel. As for our "leadership" as a "superpower", we never exercised that leadership except when our government found it expedient for other purposes. We still have not officially pressed the Turkish government to accept responsibility for the Armenian HOlocaust, and have done nothing for Armenians. We have done nothing for the Tutsis when they were massacred, and Clinton has been criticized by you and everybody else for his saving of the Albanians and Bosnians in Yougoslavia. The only way the US can have a "leadership" role in preventing such tragic outcomes of policy is by formulating a foreign policy in agreement with human rights. But that would mean giving up the Trade with China, and both Democrats and Republicans need the trade with China, and the money from the Jewish lobbies to get elected. By the way, tell Ethan to take some pills to cool down, he's becoming more radical conservative and more bloodthirsty against anything not redneck than ever. Must be that old age getting to him. He sounds like a poster boy of American Conservatism - a cranky old man with no new ideas and a lot of hatred for everybody else.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Happy mediums Author: JeffF [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 10:21:47 03/11/02 Mon It's true that I criticized Clinton's trying to force a solution that nobody was satisfied with as a way of getting a legacy. Critical as I can be of the man, he did have some caccomplishments that could have stood on their own as his legacy(the Family and Medical Leave act for example and Milosevich's arrest). But if he went too far, Bush does nothing. You say you read the European press. If so, you know that most of the European countries are begging us to stop this hands off approach and at least get the parties back to the table. You say we can't be an honest broker. If that's true, the question is who can take our place? If Europe is more even handed, then perhaps they should take over and try an initiative of their own. Surely, you don't think Israel is going to trust the Saudi plan? One thing I agree with you about is that even if Israel is winning for the moment(which is debatable - just because more people on the other side are dying doesn't mean you're winning) they cannot win in the long run if the situation stays as it is. They are at a huge number disadvantage. Even though the PA forced most of the current situation, Sharon's policies in general are not in Israel's long term interest. The Israeli people certainly do not have more peace than they had before Sharon was elected.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: My feelings exactly Author: Mark7 [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 22:15:22 03/11/02 Mon http://www.fair.org/media-beat/020307.html Six Months Later, the Basic Tool is Language By Norman Solomon Cameras have recorded countless defining moments. And six months after Sept. 11, some nightmarish televised glimpses of that day's horrors still resonate deeply. Visual images are powerful. Yet there's no substitute for words that sum up what might otherwise seem too ambiguous, upsetting or baffling. Words attach meaning to events. Since last fall, the biggest media buzz-phrase has been "the war on terrorism." By now, journalists are in the habit of shortening it to "the war on terror" -- perhaps the most demagogic term in recent memory. Present-day reporting is locked into a zone that excludes unauthorized ironies. It simply accepts that the U.S. government can keep making war on "terror" by using high-tech weapons that inevitably terrorize large numbers of people. According to routine news accounts, just about any measures deemed appropriate by top officials in Washington fit snugly under the rubric of an ongoing war that may never end. Irony, while hardly dead, is mainly confined to solitary reflection. If insights run counter to the prevailing dogma, then access to mainstream media is fleeting or nonexistent. The need for independent thought has never been greater. At this point, facile phrases about war on "terrorism" or "terror" are written in invisible ink on a blank check for militarism. They can be roughly translated as "pay to the order of the president" -- to be cashed with a lot of human blood. The grand media outlets are so entangled in the current newspeak that they rarely seem capable of presenting any fundamental challenge to the White House. At the same time, a smattering of news outlets -- far from the centers of journalistic power -- refuse to dodge the task of raising key questions. A daily paper in Florida made a profound statement on March 2. "The nation's loyalty is turning into groupthink," the Daytona Beach News-Journal editorialized. "How else explain a president who, playing on the war's most visceral slogan, gets away with justifying an obscene corporate tax cut as 'economic security,' a build-up of defense industry stock as 'homeland security,' and an exploitative assault on the nation's most pristine lands as 'energy security'? How else explain his contempt for Congress, his Nixonian fixation on secrecy, his administration's junta-like demeanor in Washington since September?" The notably forthright editorial pointed out that "without robust dissent, democracy might as well pack up and head for the hills." And it accurately described the status quo of March 2002 in the USA: "This is not unity. It's not patriotism. It's stupor." At once foggy and focused, the media lexicon of self-justification rolls on. By implicit definition, Washington's actions against "terrorism" can only be righteous -- and a penumbra of virtue extends to Uncle Sam's allies. That helps to explain why, in the daily drumbeat of reporting from the Middle East, the Israelis who shoot are engaged in "security" operations while the Palestinians who shoot are "gunmen." Almost without exception, in U.S. news reports about the back-and-forth violence, exculpatory words like "retaliation" are reserved for deadly Israeli actions, not deadly Palestinian actions. It's a typical element of style for American journalism: Israelis "retaliate." Palestinians don't. The media spin is exceedingly kind to the occupiers. When Israeli onslaughts take civilian lives, that's not "terrorism." When Israel sends tanks and aircraft to attack Palestinian neighborhoods or refugee camps in the West Bank or Gaza, that's merely an "incursion." Meanwhile, American taxpayers are financing massive new Pentagon ventures, with troops and weaponry deploying overseas from Afghanistan to Georgia to the Philippines. To boast about waging war against "terror" by terrorizing is a no-brainer only in the sense that our brains must be on automatic pilot in order to nod approval. A little more than a year ago, at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano commented that our societies suffer from "fear of solitude ... fear of dying, fear of living." The dominant trends encourage passivity. "Quietism is based on fear." And: "The system presents itself as eternal. The power system tells us that tomorrow is another word for today." Currently, that's more true than ever. Promised a perpetual "war against terror," we face a parallel media war without end. It's a propaganda siege that must be resisted -- because truly open debate is essential to democracy. As Galeano observed: "There is no greater truth than search for truth." That search, positively endless and necessarily difficult, stumbles over manipulative language. Words are pivotal for keeping us in this mess. And words may be crucial for getting us out.

[> [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Don't know Author: Mark7 [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 21:48:35 03/11/02 Mon I'm not sure the Saudi plan is so great either. I believe any plan that doesn't include some reparation for the Palestinian refugees in 3rd countries (Lebanon is first to my mind) is likely to fail. I don't see how the displaced Palestinians in Lebanon would accept such a peace, just so Arafat can keep a nice home by the Mediterana. Any peace plan where there is some reparation and consideration to victims of the Arab Israeli wars would be unacceptable to Israel. MOstly, we live in an American world, where Israel backed by the US is winning militarily, so they have all the incentive to keep pushing for more land. Israel's security, sad to say, would be strenthened if they could achieve a larger Israel, with a new cleansing of Arab populations within it's mist. A 10 or even 15 million Israeli nation is perfectly posible, economically and militarily more secure than a 4 or 5 million Israeli nation. And no US administration would object to a few more massacres of the Sabra or Chatilla type. We didn't do much about the first, why bother the second time it would happen? After all, in the average American mind, all Arabs are terrorists, so a good Arab is a dead Arab, just as a good Indian used to be a dead and lanless one. And without American concern, no other nation today can, or will do anything. But times change. Few years may change the power positions and the policies of today are likely to be remembered for many generations in the Arab world. My prediction is that in the next year or 2 we shall have another big Israeli-Arab war, possibly with Siria and Lebanon, where Israel will get another chance to a landgrab. America will not raise an eyebrow to anything Israel will do. Let's see if it haepens or not.