The Posture of Israel in the Middle East

WHY IS THE UK STILL THREATENING ISRAELI POLITICIANS ASKS PHILIP JOHNSTON? THE ANSWER PLUS A COMPARISON OF GUERNICA AND OPERATION CAST LEAD

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PHILIP JOHNSTON IN THE TELEGRAPH: ISRAELI POLITICIANS FEAR CHARGES

Why are we (the UK ) still threatening to arrest Israeli politicians?

Gee, I wonder?

Could it possibly be that they are war criminals?

In the recent past, an author from Britain served time in jail for "holocaust denial," a stupidity but hardly a crime for most minds, but it's okay to slaughter 1400 people, including 400 kids, in a refugee camp?

I was reading a biography the other day and came across a terrible fact.

Guernica , one of the 20th century's iconic horrors and the subject of a famous painting, had about 1600 people killed by German dive bombers.

That's almost the same death toll as Operation Cast Lead, yet in this case we are to ignore the savagery and pretend everything is just fine.

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AMERICA 'S RATHER DERANGED SECRETARY OF STATE CLINTON SPEAKS ABOUT MILITARY DICTATORSHIP IN IRAN AND A NEW ARMS RACE

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO 'S GLOBE AND MAIL: HILLARY CLINTON ON IRAN

Clinton 's remark is pure farce.

The military of Iran is relatively small.

The United States on the other hand, now spends over $700 billion each year on its military, more than the total for all other countries on earth. That's far more than the total GDP of some countries.

Add to that the tens of billions more spent on at least 14 different intelligence agencies, and the size of the American military establishment is breathtaking.

Considering Obama ran with words about peace and now cannot be distinguished in his actions from George Bush, I do think it fair to say that it is the United States which to a large degree is governed by its military.

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The woman has become a tireless and rather deranged servant of Israel .

How can you have a bigger stock of nuclear weapons than the US already has?

And, please, the elephant in the room is Israel with its estimated 150-200 nuclear warheads. The entire Middle East is under its threat.

Why in God's name isn't Israel , with its genuine arsenal and not a hypothetical one, charged with inducing a weapons' race?

Recall her frighteningly insane declaration during her presidential campaign about incinerating Iran . That's over 70 million people. Absolute insanity.
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NOISES IN THE MIDDLE EAST: IS MURDER INCORPORATED PREPARING A NEW WAR?

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK MARTIN IN TORONTO 'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Murder Incorporated has been making all kinds of threatening noises lately.

Threats towards Iran .

Threats towards Syria .

Threats towards Southern Lebanon .

And there's the effort to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza while daily stealing more of the property of others in Jerusalem and the West Bank .

We have a very ugly and threatening situation developing.

Syria is absolutely right to say that if a war starts, Israeli cities would be targets. It is the only way for Israel 's savage leaders to reconsider whatever it is they appear to be planning.

After all, Israel and the U.S. have never hesitated to bomb and shell cities.

Israel used an artillery siege on Beirut in the 1980s. In recent years it has bombed Beirut and dropped ghastly cluster bombs.

Israel caused the deaths of thousands in just the city of Beirut in the 1980s. The U.S. slaughtered civilians in cities all over Iraq , especially in Baghdad . And it regularly bombs civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan . Its holocaust of Hanoi was one of the most bloodthirsty events of the second half of the 20th century.

The U.S. is the only power capable of restraining Israel 's aggression, but it refuses to do so. Policy under Obama, just as under Bush, seems virtually set in Tel Aviv.

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FURTHER TO NOISES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COMMENT IN PATRICK MARTIN'S COLUMN IN TORONTO 'S GLOBE AND MAIL: FORCE IN ISRAEL ’S HISTORY

Israel was indeed created by force.

And a good deal of that force was the purest form of terror from gangs like Stern and Irgun.

Innocent villagers were murdered to terrify the Arab population into running.

And they did run, but not far enough for Israel .

Later, Israel engineered the Six Day War to grab still more of the Palestinians' land, and it was a black operation that was hugely successful.

Ever since, despite countless UN Resolutions, Israel has continued a program of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in those occupied lands.

Gaza , essentially a giant refugee camp from Israel ’s terrors and wars, by the testimony of at least one former prime minister, has always been an Israeli nightmare. Israel seems now to have discovered the solution: starve and bomb them till they leave, using the pathetic excuse that a democratically elected government, many of them professional men of high repute, is nothing but a gang terrorists.

Israel ’s intentions are clearly to take over virtually all of the land that was Palestine , minus the Palestinians.

Israel also coveted Southern Lebanon , and made every effort to hold on to it for years after invading until the Hezbollah drove them away.

Neither Hezbollah in Lebanon nor Hamas in Gaza has ever invaded Israel (nor are they even capable of doing so), but as we all know Israel has invaded them repeatedly, murdered thousands and seems ready to do so again.

And we are all supposed just to watch quietly while violent crimes are committed over and over again, and our illustrious prime minister actually threatens us with treating criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism.

It is simply a human-rights nightmare.

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A FITTING RESPONSE TO A PREVIOUS BIZARRE COLUMN BY ANTHONY JULIUS

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MELANIE MCDONAGH IN THE TELEGRAPH

Melanie McDonagh, you have captured perfectly a sense of Anthony Julius's piece.

The tone of Julius's piece actually struck me as a bit bizarre and off-the-wall.

Why, of all the things you could discuss would you choose this insignificant little remark?

Especially, when you consider the fact we understand today that the charming Diana was a very disturbed person. Are the little confidences of disturbed people to a professional the stuff of publicity? Of course, they are not.

His anecdote just touches the filth which floats around today like stuff on a waste pond: the endless shrill accusations that every critic of Israel is anti-Semitic.

It represents an obsession and a desperately unpleasant effort to cover Israel 's atrocities.

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REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST AND THE NOTION OF INCREASED ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE FACT OF ISRAEL 'S BRUTAL BEHAVIOR

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL GOVE IN THE TELEGRAPH

I certainly do not wish to speak against remembering The Holocaust, but I do believe, as with all titanic and ghastly historical events, it is the natural (and proper) human tendency to eventually consign them to our history texts and a few monuments.

You cannot constantly remember horror: doing so works against innate human tendencies. In our private lives, we have, most of us, a built-in capacity to allow horrors to fade gradually. Otherwise, many could simply not function. Perpetual mourning is not the way Nature built us.

Of course, I’m not in the mainstream of thinking about this, being one of those who believe that war remembrance ceremonies in general have outlived their usefulness, and they are associated with events which extinguished twenty million lives in WWI and fifty million in WWII. But some distinguished old veterans have expressed the same sentiment: it is war which causes or induces our greatest horrors and society should start moving beyond glorifying it.

The Holocaust itself was only possible under the cover of the invasion of the Soviet Union , itself the most destructive and murderous event in all of human history.

I do not believe claims that genuine anti-Semitism is on the rise in the world, and I’m not sure what legitimate procedure could even be used to accurately collect statistics saying otherwise. What we have today, however, is a great deal of criticism of the state of Israel, but that is not the same thing as anti-Semitism, and any statistics which support the notion it is must be viewed as spurious.

I wouldn’t want to live in a society where inexcusable brutality such Operation Cast Lead did not produce revulsion: a society not revulsed by such treatment of others provides exactly the set of conditions which allow barbarism like The Holocaust to occur.

Sadly, Israel in its desire to leave the possibilities of a repeat of barbarism has also managed to leave behind a great many other things, including any consideration for its neighbors.

And every time someone dares to criticize, he or she is immediately accused of anti-Semitism, a shabby trick to shut honest people up.

In a roundabout way, Michael Gove joins this unpleasant practice in this piece.

Israel is a state, and if it is to be treated as any other state, then it must behave as we expect other states to behave.

When you start making exceptions to ethics and humanity, you have started down the road to God knows what. After all, Hitler’s early anti-Jewish activities during the 1930s, before the Wannsee Conference, consisted of beating up people in the street, burning down their homes and businesses, depriving them of equal rights, stealing their property, excluding them from many privileges in society, pushing for their emigration, and even declaring who was fit to marry whom.

Does that all not sound familiar to those who follow events in the Middle East ?

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BRITISH APOLOGIST FOR BLOODSHED, CON COUGHLIN, SAYS ISRAEL IS A DIFFICULT ALLY BUT ITS LEADERS ARE HARDLY WAR CRIMINALS

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CON COUGHLIN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Well, if the leaders of Israel are not war criminals, just who in the world qualifies?

Murdering 400 children in Gaza ? Deliberately targeting UN observers bravely doing their job in Lebanon ? Laying a blanket of nightmarish, barbaric cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon ? And refusing to cooperate in removing them?

Keeping a million and half souls in Gaza under siege, even after killing 1,400 of them? Institutionalizing slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank ? Stealing homes and farms from families who have lived there for centuries to hand over to immigrants from London or New York ?

Over forty years of humiliation and abuse for the people of the territories occupied in 1967, captured in a war which Israel is known to have engineered to this very purpose? Many thousands held in prison with no proper legal procedures? Building a new Berlin Wall and building it on the property of others?

Arresting the members of a cleanly elected government – far more so than was the case for Mr. Bush - because you disagree with their party? Refusing even to talk to those you disagree with?

Assassinating scores of individuals with no charges or trial or legal procedure, an exact copy of the bloody activity of juntas in South America who made people disappear?

The only reason Israel ’s leaders are not all severely dealt with by the Western world is the immense, smothering influence of the United States whose foreign policy in many parts is virtually written in Israel .

A United States , by the way, whose last president was the world's reigning living war criminal with a million dead souls to his credit.

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Footnote on the USS Liberty attacked by Israel in the 1967 war. Previous comments have made some ridiculous claims about bloody event.

The ship was extremely well marked. The lead pilot of the Israeli attack force made low passes over the ship before the attack, exchanging waves with sailors on deck.

Then, suddenly, a savage two-hour assault with every weapon the Israeli planes had - guns, bombs, and torpedoes. The lame claim made afterward: it was a mistake.

Of course, Israel was trying to get the US into the war. It would have blamed Egypt for the attack.

There is also speculation that Israel was destroying the recorded evidence – the ship was a sophisticated spy craft - of its atrocities in the Sinai where Israelis murdered hundreds of Egyptian troops who had surrendered rather than be burdened with them in advancing.

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HILLARY CLINTON "CLARIFIES" HER COMMENTS ON ISRAEL 'S SETTLEMENT - JUST ONE SAD PART OF OBAMA'S ALREADY-FAILED NEW MIDEAST POLICY

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO 'S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well, how nice to find Ms Clinton has caught up with the world's people.

Despite what their governments may say under various kinds of pressures, most people in the world know Israel 's policy of settlements is not legitimate. Indeed, it is outright theft, besides breaking international agreements on occupations.

It is disheartening to see the way Obama - starting with a fresh mandate, a good mind, and the knowledge that there can be no peace without real pressure on Israel - has given in to the relentless efforts of the Israel Lobby.

There seems to be no hope for a rational and humane settlement. Israel just carries on with apartheid and a gradual, relentless ethnic-cleansing while it stands in contempt of dozens of UN resolutions, any one of which could have been used as a reason for UN military intervention.

And we are to simply pretend it is not happening and never criticize Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic.

A true nightmare for human rights and freedom.

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ON ISRAEL ’S “NO COMMENT” ABOUT ITS ASSASSINATION OF A HAMAS MEMBER IN DUBAI

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN BOTH TORONTO ’S GLOBE AND MAIL AND THE INDEPENDENT

Well, you wouldn't expect the psychopaths of the American Mafia's former Murder Incorporated or Detroit 's Purple Gang to confirm their bloody work, would you?

Or how about the colonels of some of South America 's past juntas who kidnapped people they didn't like and flew them out over the ocean to drop them from the plane?

Those are historical excesses which exactly describe the nature of Israel 's behavior.

It is simply brutal and criminal, and the state of Israel itself is coming more and more to remind one of nothing so much as a vast criminal conspiracy.

Mass murders like Operation Cast Lead, assassinations, torture, illegal imprisonment, theft of other people's houses and farms – the list goes on and on, all of it outside the laws of civilization.

It's ghastly beyond words, but we are expected never to criticize and keep being reminded that it is a democracy.

Some democracy: democracy for us, and the butt of a gun for everyone else.

And besides, democracies are perfectly capable of terrible behavior. The American Confederacy was a democracy for those running it. So was apartheid South Africa . So was Mexico of the PRI.

But we are never to criticize Israel .

Well, I'll tell readers something very important: it was the people who keep their mouths shut in the face of injustice and terror who make all great injustices possible, it was just such people who made the Holocaust possible.

Israel is on a very slippery slope, one that ends by descending into pure barbarism.

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"...these Hamas terrorists...."

What a tiresome refrain of official propaganda.

Hamas has in fact far less of a terrorist record than Israel itself, far less.

Most of the senior people in Hamas are professionals, educated men, and they were elected in a clean election.

When was the last time Hamas invaded Israel ? When was the last time Hamas murdered a senior Israeli politician? When was the last time Hamas stole the property of Israelis? When was the last time Hamas arrested a large part of the Israeli cabinet?

On the other hand, several of Israel 's past prime ministers, let alone many other officials, were members of Stern or Irgun or other bloody outfits.

There was a great deal of wanton terror at Israel 's founding in order to scare the Palestinians away: outright mass murder of civilians by these gangs.

The trouble is the Palestinians did not run far enough away to suit Israel .

That's why we had the Six Day War and more than forty years of occupation and abuse.

Israel is still defining its boundaries, and those boundaries go only in one direction, onto the property of others.

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ON ISRAEL ’S “NO COMMENT” ABOUT ITS ASSASSINATION OF A HAMAS LEADER IN DUBAI

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN BOTH THE TOTONTO GLOBE AND MAIL AND THE INDEPENDENT

Well, you wouldn't expect the psychopaths of the American Mafia's former Murder Incorporated or Detroit 's Purple Gang to confirm their bloody work, would you?

Or how about the colonels of some of South America 's past juntas who kidnapped people they didn't like and flew them out over the ocean to drop them from the plane?

Those are historical excesses which exactly describe the nature of Israel 's behavior.

It is simply brutal and criminal, and the state of Israel itself is coming more and more to remind one of nothing so much as a vast criminal conspiracy.

Mass murders like Operation Cast Lead, assassinations, torture, illegal imprisonment, theft of other people's houses and farms – the list goes on and on, all of it outside the laws of civilization.

It's ghastly beyond words, but we are expected never to criticize and keep being reminded that it is a democracy.

Some democracy: democracy for us, and the butt of a gun for everyone else.

And besides, democracies are perfectly capable of terrible behavior. The American Confederacy was a democracy for those running it. So was apartheid South Africa . So was Mexico of the PRI.

But we are never to criticize Israel .

Well, I'll tell readers something very important: it was the people who keep their mouths shut in the face of injustice and terror who make all great injustices possible, it was just such people who made the Holocaust possible.

Israel is on a very slippery slope, one that ends by descending into pure barbarism.

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"...these Hamas terrorists...."

What a tiresome refrain of official propaganda.

Hamas has in fact far less of a terrorist record than Israel itself, far less.

Most of the senior people in Hamas are professionals, educated men, and they were elected in a clean election.

When was the last time Hamas invaded Israel ? When was the last time Hamas murdered a senior Israeli politician? When was the last time Hamas stole the property of Israelis? When was the last time Hamas arrested a large part of the Israeli cabinet?

On the other hand, several of Israel 's past prime ministers, let alone many other officials, were members of Stern or Irgun or other bloody outfits.

There was a great deal of wanton terror at Israel 's founding in order to scare the Palestinians away: outright mass murder of civilians by these gangs.

The trouble is the Palestinians did not run far enough away to suit Israel .

That's why we had the Six Day War and more than forty years of occupation and abuse.

Israel is still defining its boundaries, and those boundaries go only in one direction, onto the property of others.

ENDS

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