Rudy, most of the people here does recognize Israel a certain right to exist.. I don't, I don't even understand why people recogize an occupatiojn army would become a country. In Insight , I am to the opinion that we, Canadians should put on trial zionists for supporting terrorism against palestinians.. May be arabs are right, that 's what canada do best, supporting zionist terrorists and thiefs...

Your basic premise is that Israel does not have a right to exist. Thus, Jews are the only people who cannot have a homeland. This belief of yours pretty much makes you a bigot. Either that, or as I said to Mariam, every human on this earth should crawl by to Africa.

HE WAS FROM ARGENTINA.

First, much to your chagrins, Chomsky is far from creditable. His research is highly questionable not to mention he likes to cite himself as his own authority. Second, you obviously don't know the definition of the word "anti-semite." It came about in the late 1800s to specifically mean "anti-Jewish." That's a nice word game you attempted to play and it was played out years ago by the people before you who don't like that a Jewish state exists. Third, good job on "dispelling the myth" of the Jewish homeland. 5000 years of history apparently are wrong. Fourth, by your logic every human should crawl back to Africa because all land is "stolen." That should make for some interesting living arrangements. (Can I call myself an African American?? Fifth, your mentioning of the lack of oil in Israel shows an incredible lack of knowledge about the oil industry and when middle east exploration began. The difinitive book on the subject is Daniel Yergin's "The Prize." It won a Pulitzer, which is hopefully acceptable in "progressive" circles. Sixth, one of your cites simply reinforces that Arabs moved into present day Israel only AFTER it began to be settled and improved by Zionists. Good find, thanks.

BTW, WOULD MAKE ME ANTI-ALMOST-EVERY-ONE-IN-THE-MIDDLE-EAST,  I HAVE TO IGNORE ALL THE FACTS OF HISTORY THEN I WILL HAVE TO ACCEPT THE TITLE OF M, THE ANTI-SEMITE...

As all the research by historians and geographers of modern Palestine shows, the Arab population began to grow again in the middle of the nineteenth century. That growth resulted from a new factor: the demographic revolution. Until the 1850s there was no "natural" increase of the population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced and modern hospitals were established, both by the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab population growth. ... No one would doubt that some migrant workers came to Palestine from Syria and Trans-Jordan and remained there. But one has to add to this that there were migrations in the opposite direction as well. For example, a tradition developed in Hebron to go to study and work in Cairo, with the result that a permanent community of Hebronites had been living in Cairo since the fifteenth century. Trans-Jordan exported unskilled casual labor to Palestine; but before 1948 its civil service attracted a good many educated Palestinian Arabs who did not find work in Palestine itself. Demographically speaking, however, neither movement of population was significant in comparison to the decisive factor of natural increase. ^[69]

I just read that Hamas is considering recognizing Israel's right to exist. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070110/ts_nm/palestinians_meshaal_dc How charitable of them. The catch is Israel has to withdraw to the 1967 borders. The great thing about that is in 1967 there was no Palestinian state and certainly no hope of one. The land Hamas wants was Jordanian and Egyptian. So is Hamas asking to be under the control of Cairo and Amman? BTW, what do those two countries have to say for not giving the Palestinians territory? Betcha' Mariam doesn't know.

Ok, what's your point? You fail to mention that Arabs started moving to present day Israel in the 1920s as a result of economic opportunities created by the evil Zionists. Prior to that, there were less than 500,000 Arabs in the area. In other words, the area didn't have an "Arab" presense until Jews started moving there. You fail to mention that 5 armies simulatenously attacked Israel in 1948. You also fail to mention the 3 million Jews kicked out of Arab countries (Syria, Iran, etc.) in 1947. The bottom line is the Arab world doesn't believe Israel has a right to exist and in the West, "progressives" disguise their anti-semitism by criticizing Israel for defending themselves in a 100 year war. You're just as bad as the rest of 'em Mariam.

In Tel Aviv "on March 10, 1948, eleven men had a meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine.

No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were written about that fateful meeting.

A systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."-Dr. Ilan Pappe, who is Israeli born and a graduate of Hebrew University and Oxford and is currently teaching at Haifa University. He is a well known revisionist or "post-Zionist" Israeli historian who has been both acclaimed and demonized. His most recent work is A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples which documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing.


Dr. Ilan Pappe spoke in East Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 2006 at the Notre Dame Conference center to over 330 International ecumenical Christians during Sabeel's [www.sabeel.org] 6th International Conference: The Forgotten Faithful: AKA Palestinian Christians.

His topic was the "Dynamics of Forgetting" and because of the "fierce urgency of now" [-Rev. MLK, Jr.] the world is beginning to remember that once there was a Red House, which birthed a most diabolical plan.

He stated, "The Red House in Tel Aviv is gone now. It was a typical building in Tel Aviv that had all the characteristics of Mediterranean homes but with the local Palestinian architecture of the '20's. Today a USA Sheraton Hotel stands in its place. The Red House was the home of the Hagganah; a Jewish underground organization but before 1948 it was the home of a socialist movement, from which it received its name."

AND IT WENT DOWNHILL FROM THERE.

---

There is a gross double standard applied to Israel not to mention and incredible distortion of history and facts by dectractors of the Jewish state. No apology is necessary.

Rudy, it's despicable beyond words that you would pollute this blog with charges of anti-Semitism because K. Yearwood dared to criticize the behavior of the state of Israel. If you criticize the behavior of the Cuban State, should you then be accused of being anti-Hispanic or a racist hater of Afro-Caribbeans and/other Latin Americans? And if I criticze the old South African state, then I suppose, by your perverted logic, I am a racist hater of all people of white Afrikanner background. It's just absurd. You owe Kelvin Yearwood and ZNet readership an apology. How you think our criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the ME (and elsewhere) is an embrace of Arab anti-Semitism is beyond me. As for Cuba, of course there's a big group that wants to make it to the richest and most powerful nation on earth. If you read my comments a bit more closely you'd know I'm not comfortable with incarceration of dissidents (though it's not hard to see why the Cuban state would be a little paranoid with a super-powerful long term eand monumentally murderous enemy 90 miles off its shore). But the really remarkable thing is how much the Cuban people stand by the revolution and there are real accomplishments that explain some of that to this day. Want to see the U.S.-imposed model, look at the DR and Haiti; Cuba broke off and did some truly remarkable things and not just within Cuba..and they're not done.

Kelvin, you really don't miss an opportunity to blame the Jooooos, and especially the universal Joooooo, Israel, for the world's ills, do you? 

Did you know that the communist AK-47 is the most widely used weapon in the world and is responsible for more third world deaths than any Joooooish produced weapon? Do you care? Probably not because your central tenant appears to be: If only Israel wasn't, then the world could be a peace.

Hey, I got a question for you: why don't you criticize Iran WHO IS a signatory of the anti-nuke treaties for pursuing nukes?  Israel isn't a signatory so it isn't violating the treaty, yet you bash it for violating the treaty?  Hmm, that seems like shaky logic. 

Here's another question, why don't you criticize the president of Iran for calling for the destruction of Israel? Why don't you criticize the mainstream Arab press in EVERY Arab country for doing the same and calling jews dogs and pigs? 

Answer: because you're a bigot who thinks the universal Joooo Israel is to blame for everything.  You really should go down to Hyde park and hang out with all the other bigots standing on their shakey soap boxes.

 

Hey Paul, if Cuba is such a great place, how come people are willing to swim, float, and sail through shark infested waters to leave?  And if they're unsuccessful, why are they put in prison?

You never fail to amuse me and educate me.

Kelvin - thanks for adding more strange and yet totally understandable and logical dreams. The ruling English-speaking states certainly have much to answer for. England and its spin off Frankenstein Uncle Sam share extreme levels of interrelated Empire and Inequality (as does Israel now, well down the path of domestically regressive militarism) I dreamt that the UN imposed economic sanctions and that leading world financial centers directed a divestment campaign on the U.S. as punishment for neglecting pressing and worsening social needs at home while pursuing an extravagant, mass-murderous imperialism, repelete with a global prison/torture state abroad; for harboring Central American terrorists (including National intelligence chief turned Condi Rice assistant John Negroponte); for making drmatically outsized contributions to the ecologocial destruction of the planet and to the impoverishment of billions; for saddling one in three black U.S. male adults with a prison history and maintining massive concentrations of black poverty in major U.S metropolitan areas; for subverting democratic political processes both at home and abroad; for dangerously handing half the nation's wealth to the nation's top 1 percent; for failing to pay miminally adequate reparations for the powefully living legacy of centuries of slavery, segregation and racial terrorism; and for....fill in the blank. The too-rarely noted South Africa-Israel alliance made perfect sense, reflecting shared projects (both racial-territorial and nuclear) and shared sponsors. So I have another Pilger book to read: he's up there on my list with a handful of others (e.g., Chomsky, Herman, Hobsbawm, Roy, Achcar, Ali,Zinn and now this interesting U.S. historian/sociologist James Loewen to name some) that are just must read when new stuff comes out from them.

to help the poor and sick, so thought the givers, but she never so much as gave an asprin to a sufferer. Quite the opposite, she collected suffering like some collect stamps.

The $100,000,000? She set up a world wide order in her name....... to collect suffering, not to help.

She supposedly reckoned that the suffering of the poor was pleasing to ¨god¨.

Wouldn´t want to meet that fellow on a dark street.

Here is the billionaire's version of charity: The Gates Foundation was set up recently to give hundreds of millions of dollars to fight disease esp in Africa, a truly worthy cause and one which gained Bill and his wife much global praise - probably even get a Nobel Prize for this. The following Truthout article is probably worth reading - gives an indication of how that money is being spent: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807P.shtml An excerpt from the article:

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France - the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe. Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.

See next comment...somehow there was duplication so I'm just cutting this (which was the same).

To follow up and qualify...while I can't go with the Che cult and have some of the standard left-libertarian issues with centralist-statism, I am on the whole an admirer of the Cuban Revolution. I applaud its real accomplishments in reducing inequality, increasing health and literacy, inspiring revolutionaries throughout the world, fighting the apartheid state of South Africa, exporting doctors (imagine) to impoverished states and peoples victimized by Washington's capitalist imperialism. and more. The revolution's legacy is looking stronger today than many of would have imagined after the Berlin Wall came down; Guevera would have been rightly gratified to see the current impressive wave of resistance to Yankee neoliberalism in Latin America.

Two Dixie cups and a piece of string.

But we do have indoor loos.

So, there.

Two Dixie cups and a piece of string.

But we do have indoor loos.

So, there.

Amen to that, Mariam!

They have the internet in Cental America?

I suspect that had we been privy to the life and human foibles of the man called by us, Jesus, we would find much to be dismayed by. Try taking an unflinching look at Gandhi or Mother Teresa.......were they without fault or wrong thinking?

I think the appeal of Che in South America and here in Central America is his vision of a united and powerful Southern Continent, free from and on an equal footing with the monster to the north. The dream of Simon Bolivar........and it still could happen!

The point is, and as Paul's post inferes, Che is far from the leftist icon he is held out to be.  It is ironic that a champion of oppression and centralized government is  so revered today.  It is also strange that an upper class kid whose family would have benefited from the so-called U.S. Imperialism bit the hand that fed him.  I would think his back ground alone would draw skepticism, but alas, it doesn't. 

Next time you see some hip 20-somethingish kid wearing a Che shirt, ask him if he knows anything about Che's policies.  Dollars to donuts the answer will be "no."

che was probably just trying to be intimidating in front of younger crowds

People interested in Che should look at the brilliant biography by Jon Lee Anderson: Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life. The author is left (and so not coming from SGTR's perspective) and got some remarkable source access. He captures the genuinely heroic romanticism, incredible courage and occasional tactical brilliance  of Che. He also reveals some real problems with Guevera, including a taste for crackpot pseudo-Marxian economics, a dangerous authoritarianism,  unrealistic (and for him fatal) adventurism in Bolivia and a grisly lust of sorts for execution. So it's a mixed story - something that should not surprise adults.  One part that really chilled me is when Anderson reports Guevera's disgust with the Soviet Union's "cowardly" decision to stand down in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Apparently Che would have liked to see my fellow nursery school students and me -- I was a "fair-haired" Yankee imperialist toddler (a light-skinned Argentinian from a bourgeois-bohemian family in Buenos Aires, Guevera used to rip on Yankee gringos with "fair hair")  --- incinerated in a revolutionary nuclear exchange.  Nice. He was justifiably angry at U.S. imperialism (to say the least) but I'm kind of relieved he didn't get his way on that one.  

The Independent Institute whose directors are ceo´s of Algonquin Petroleum, Paypal, Bank of America, Liberty Fund, and whose authors include a very long list from all Northern Hemisphere Universities, Brookings and Cato Institutes, and this man, the lone South American, might be suspect. 

Here you go, read away.

 

http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=61

Exactly where did you read such a thing? Please give me references. Frankly, I don't believe you, but I'm willing to read it, especially if you are actually quoting him.

Che Forever?

You're not Cuban, are you? 

You realize that Che was in favor of concentration camps and capital punishment for kids that disobeyed their parents? 

Let's start with the premise that freedome is good, just because Che wanted "freedom," doesn't make him good.  He was a despot through and through. 

I have a feeling people like Che now a days because they are "against the man" and they view Che as being the same without knowing his politics. It's a shame and it is pure ignorance. 

 

Hi, congratulations for your site about the neccessary political change and specially i want to say "Che For Ever", last night i've discovered a cool Che site :

http://www.cafepress.com/the_che_guevara

The Herbert who wrote DUNE wrote about Chinese occupation of the U. S. I would have to re-read it to be able to tell you much about it.

Fire Fox will give me something to watch on tv if I can find it on cable here in San Jose.

Sorry Paul, ...I was all inclusive in combining the two songs of Hendrix...one of my favorite artists from way back when.  Left handed guitarists rule!

Purple Haze and All Along the Watchtower (the latter a Bob Dylan tune in fact) are two separate songs! On reposting all I can do is say I'm sorry; I explained what happened. Walter K nice job of responding to the post; looks pretty moronic to bring that comment here. I'll do a piece on charity later.

Victor, I read the article you mentioned in Asia Times.  It was not a US retired general.  It was a retired Filipino general as I recall.  This was an excellent article...so much so that I save it, printed it, and sent it off to many of my associates.  I was very impressed with this general's knowledge of "current" weaponry and what the Chinese, as well as the Iranians, would do to stymie American arrogance, if challenged.  I am sure, as arrogant so and so's (Lords of War) are challenged, regardless of what country they reside, more and more money is spent on more and more death toys.  Hegemonic imperial power is what the US is all about...and, by the way, we spend more money on these toys than the entire world combined.  Go figure.

The article by Victor N. Corpus

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HJ19Ad01.html

 

R

The only place I can really envision Dubya is in a bar shitfaced and out of harms way. As for the Chinese, don't mess with them. For one the Asian mentality is vastly different from our own - they truly hold grudges when wronged, they won't compromise their standards to give way to a Dubya, and they never ever forgive until justice is served. Secondly, there's BILLIONS of'em! I read a commentary on an Asian news site not too long ago written by a retired US general living over there (God, how many retired generals are there in the world???). He has talked with a lot of Chinese about US aggression (excuse me, "freedom fighting"). He notes that where the US tries to overwhelm the enemy with bombs and technical firepower, the Chinese simply "go for the knees". A few well placed EMP bombs would knock out all US electronics and communications, and a few cruise missiles flying low on the horizon could quickly wipe out their aircraft carriers. An interesting article... http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HJ19Ad01.html Perhaps not altogether true, but not altogether false either.

Paul, it is really strange that you should repost this.  In your original posting, I had created a reply that probably would have gotten me in trouble, and as I was just about ready to post it, I back-paged on my browser for some strange reason.  When I forwarded to the posting that I was about to deliver, I noticed it had been wiped out. I guess I felt relieved.

So now, you post it again.  Are you on the same wave length with me or what? Problem is, I can't really remember what I wrote in the original reply.  The feeling is there, the thoughts are gone.

I can say, having personally been involved in black op missions in the south east part of asia a few years back, that a wannabe like junior wouldn't have a chance in hell of co-opting with others on a any mission..let alone riding in a humvee with some soldiers in Ramadi.  It is a given: once a chickenshit, always a chickenshit (chicken hawk doesn't really cut it).  Given the importance of any mission where one's life is at stake (potentially), it is essential that all team members trust and approve of one another.  In your dream, junior may have gotten his legs turned into stumps, but the 18 year old wouldn't have lost his face if junior hadn't been along for the ride in the first place.  So, to jump in as Director of this scene, I would opt out all requests for a dubya presence....because, in the long run, too much of humanity is at stake.

Hell, he does bad enough as a civilian in his current position.  Who needs to dream about this guy as a faux soldier.    Remember, junior (whilst at Yale) was only good enough on the "team" to handle dirty towels, jock straps, and do an occasional cheer.  Hip, hip, hurray, georgie.

So much for the nightmare. 

Curious, too, is your dream of the Chinese as occupier of US mainland Amerika.  Have you seen the TV series Fire Fox (Serenity)?  Briefly, it is a show about wars, wars, and more mores and in the end, the chinese have won out. The symbolisms and sublties make for interesting thought of what may be in the not too distant future... speculative, maybe, as you say, in the year 2023.  It is worth checking out if you are so inclined.

Anyway, for what it is worth, Hendrix will always play, restricted or otherwise...and the song is: Purple Haze Along the Watchtower... 

James, I don't understand what you are saying.  Did you read the link that says leftists don't give to charity?

Are you making excuses for leftists not giving to charity and wanting to force income redistribution on us all?

No Dreams - Just the nightmare of reality!!!

American Democracy at its finest.

"Army of Altruists" supporting "Military Keynesianism" as government created $Billionaires rob the Altruists blind. 

Your on a roll.

"Sun bless America"

 

Look at this article, apparently leftists are the caring group of individuals they claim to be. 

 

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDkzYjQ0NTZiYmI1YjM0ZjAyZDhiZjlhZjdhOWYxMjM=