Joel Kovel: Overcoming Zionism

Here's an interesting book for you, published last year in England and Canada (though Ann Arbor is also listed on the © page).

Subtitle is "Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine.  Kovel calls it Palesrael. I much prefer Palisreal, reversing the 'a' 'e' order into a "get real" configuration. The prose is sometimes difficult to wade through, especially when Kovel gets into "negating the negatives to get to the positives," but it's yet another recent work that takes note of just what kind of terrorist state Israel has become as it furthers its goal, slowly but surely, of reaching the "final solution" to its Palestinian problem — namely, what appears to be the extirpation of the Palestinians.

I wouldn't really be interested in this topic at all but for the fact that the failure to resolve this matter fairly turns the US into an international pariah, an international hypocrite; it sucks massive amounts of aid from the US treasury (though certainly some of it comes back into the US military-industrial-legislative complex (what Peter Dale Scott — more of him later — calls "The Deep Government") as the Israeli Defense Force(s) purchase war materiel from the US, contribute some good chunk of their expenses over the fence to feed the advertising campaigns of our "elected" officials, which also feeds to coffers of the "caretakers" of our "public broadcast media."

Seems to me that this is another one of those global situations where anyone with a cubic centimeter of empathy for the down-trodden, the terrorized, the huddled masses yearning to be free, can't help but ask the question,  "Who the hell do they think they are?!"

 Really. Who the hell do the Zionists think they are? Their lobby in the US, not registered as a foreign lobby (just as Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaties), pretty much successfully squelches freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of (regulated) radio, freedom of (regulated) TV, Cable 'n' what-not.

This business of continuing to build "settlements" on the few remaining hectares of what once was, and even currently is, described as Palestinian land? What's that about? Have these illegal settlers been labeled terrorists and their illegal settlements terrorist enclaves by any world body? If it throws rocks like a terrorist, steals land like a terrorist, stalks like a terrorist, pollutes and poisons like a terrorist, can you really justify calling it a duck? Not hardly, methinks.

As I've commented before, this "never again" attitude loses all of its moral suasion when the ones who are "doing it again" (this time to the Palestinians) are the ones saying "never again." 

I would also be much happier to hear Jewish folks noting that the Shoah/Holocaust death toll was not six million, but 11 (eleven) million, of whom six million were Jews. The balance of the 11 million were a less unified group of gypsies (Roma), unionists, Russians, gays, handicapped and whomever else offended Hitler's minions. 

 Kovel's background?

Concerning myself, the reader who may be worrying whether I have succumbed to the odd condition of "self-hating Jew," may rest assured that any such tendencies have been cured through the above-mentioned detachment of Jewishness from Zionism, that is, its overcoming. This does not make me a Zionist-hating Jew — though I do loathe Zionism. Rather, the lengthy process of negating the various threads of my Jewish identity has altered the very fabric of Jewishness.

[More TK]

By the way, did you ever hear of Rachel Corrie? I hadn't, 'til I read about her in Kovel's book. Allegedly run over, forward and reverse, by a Caterpiller "D9 Armored Bulldozer" w/ blade down as she tried to block, with bull-horn blaring, the razing of Palestinian houses in Gaza. Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square biped/tank stand-off, this 'dozer didn't stop. And, unlike what generally used to happen in America with eminent domain, "…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation," that nifty little phrase tacked onto the 5th Amendment to our US Constitution.

You might be interested to know that Bonnie Old England has a nifty word for such destruction, usually of castles. It's slighted. The army of Lord Northbrooke's men slighted the castles and keeps of Lords Easterbrooke, Southerby and Westerbrook (made up, but probable). Kind of an apt word for the destruction of Palestinian property by the Israelis, doncha think? Slighted? They slighted the Palestinians by slighting their homes, offices, schools, factories, hospitals. The damage, however, has not been slight. 

Hmm. Perhaps I should submit this item of etymological interest to Hot For Words. Lord, I'm 66 and I can still remember the difficulty I and my fellow male freshman English classmates had maintaining our attention to 6 Weeks to Words of Power with the young and comely Lesta May Collins at the head of our classroom. Just imagine how teen focus would fade if confronted by this new YouTube Phenom, this Femme Fatale of Philology, this Doyen of Dictionary & Decolletage, this Blonde of Belle Poitrine, this Pulchritudinous Paragon of Philology. Gawrsh, even Billy O'Reilly factored this Marina into his predictable, diurnal, sesquipedalian-yet- quotidian rants.

And sure, go ahead. I dare you. Just try to tell me that well-formed women casting cleavage into the culture are not guilty of sexual harassment of males! "My eyes are up here!" indeed!!! Males, the researchers have found, respond first to visual stimuli. And of course women don't know that. Which is why there is cleavage, trussing, rouge, lipstick, eye-liner, mascara, eyelash prosthetics, nail polish, hair-dye (more modern than the ubiquitous henna, sold the world over, e.g., sold from overflowing barrels in Istanbul's Kapali Çarsi). And let's not forget perfume, to help men forget the stench of the 8 hours swink and sweat in their good ol' factories, all for inculcating companionship, friendship and sensitivity in menfolk, right? 

Not that there are any Americans working in ol' factories or new factories these days.

There may be something to this burkha business after all. Though, to be fair, men too would have to don them, even at the risk of unisex burkhas causing confusion in every household (everyone would be forced to ask, "Who's sari now?"). 

But I digress. Still, Hot For Words has the sexiest schwa on the planet. Perhaps this is the phenomenon Aldous Huxley was sugesting in Brave New World about pneumatic women, sex and Soma (has BigPharma ®ed, ™ed, reg. US Pat. Off.ed, ©ed that drug name? Why, yes indeed they have!) 

So all of the pills pushed on the populace by BigPharma and MSM Broadcasters (in the public interest, they were once) are all part of the Huxley's prescient Soma strategy — all the Cymbaltas [no I won't], OxyContins[ditto] and the rest: Methylin ER, Seroquel XR, Sinequan, Xanax XR, Abilify, Paxil, Xanax, Celexa, Elavil, Parnate, Cymbalta, Remeron, Effexor, Effexor XR, Zoloft, Endep, Lexapro, Luvox, Marplan, Pexeva, Surmontil, Emsam, Prozac, Vivactil, Nardil, Seroquel, Wellbutrin SR, Abilify Discmelt, Adapin, Alprazolam Intensol, Anafranil, Asendin, Atapryl, Aventyl, Aventyl HCl, Budeprion, Budeprion XL, Carbex, Desyrel, Desyrel Dividose, Eldepryl, Limbitrol, Limbitrol DS, Ludiomil, Niravam, Norpramin, Pamelor, Paxil, Prozac Weekly, Rapiflux, Remeron SolTab, Serzone, Tofranil, Tofranil-PM, Vanatrip, Wellbutrin XL, Zelapar, and Gepirone ER “in the pipeline,” according to this website on anti-depressant , etc., chemicals for humans.)

All of that, sex and drugs, to numb us all to the real pain going on in the world around us. Pain which is not reported. Out of sight, out of mind. If it's invisible, it doesn't exist. If a child dies in the cess or is blown to bits by a blind "smart bomb" and no one watches his and her death-throes, has the child actually died? If he or she doesn't have a birth certificate, did they ever exist? If he or she never watched a Disney DVD from the back seat of an SUV, did they ever live?

Guess not, hunh? Guess I'll take a Huxley Soma so I won't cry and gum up my keyboard.

And a great, great many of the Israelis I respected and had great joy in working with, it turns out, have made a "reverse" aliyah and "descended" from Israel to the United States. Why is that, one wonders.

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Scott McClellan: Well, how ABOUT those oaths!?!

Well, I haven't read Scotty's "tell some" book yet, but the brief bits of substance that have trickled out of the missing-in-action media have left me "puzzled" indeed.

Here's what I'm "puzzled" about.

First, why was the press secretary "not in the mainstream"?.

Howcome Congress has never been "making good progress" towards impeaching the Cheney/Bush Administration?.

Sure, we all know that "war is hard," and that "no one suffers the pain of our dead soldiers' families like George and I do," according to the White House, but why no press challenges to this propaganda. (War is not hard; war is lethal, deadly, murderous. War, when you're killing off women and children and old men, is state-sanctioned terrorism.)

The barrage of "puzzlement" about Scott's book by members of the criminals in the C/B admin leaves me wondering why they still think Americans and the American press are stupid and will swallow this, um, codswallop. Ohh, yeah. Right. They/we still are swallowing it.

So far as I've heard, no reporters have asked the contumelious choristers questions like: "Were you 'puzzled' that Cheney fired Powell, Zinni, Garner after they had "shared their reservations and concerns" about Cheney/Shrub policy with members of the White House mafia?

And how about this question, which to me is the nil and ens, the A and Ω, the beginning and end, be-all and end-all, whole ball of wax, enchilada, nine (cubic) yards, etc., of public service: Why did you not honor your oath of office? You swore (or affirmed) to "support and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Cheney, oops--domestic."

Then the follow up: Have you ever read the US Constitution, either before or after you took that oath to defend it?

Finally: Don't these latest "revelations in print" about the unconstitutional activities of the cheney/shrub administration provide sufficient ammunition to blow the Members of Congress off their backsides and move to impeachment? 

I mean, really! When is enough enough for these pusillanimous oath-takers? Do they need anything else to prompt them to honor their own oaths of office?

And as a perhaps completely moot matter: Are these things ol' goodbody Patrick J. Fitzgerald knew about and did nothing about in the face of that knowledge? Or did Cheney & Shrub — our Unitary Liar-In-Chief, don't forget — just lie to Fitzie? 

At least Henry Waxman's interested. Me too. Anyone else curious?

And will anyone have the moxie to subpoena Acting President Cheney and the ULIC to testify before Congress? (Ohhh, forgot: Executive barricade. Stand-up Moslers. Disk-wipers. Stonewalls.)

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None So Blind As Those Who "Saw It With My Own Eyes"

I was visiting with my 92-year-old mother (actually, she's 91, but in her 92nd year, truth be told), in the Eastern Heartland of central Pennsylvania over the past week or so.

I was heartened to see a series of three Ron Paul Revolution/RLoveUtion yard signs all in a row. Mom, who used to be a "little old lady in tennis sneakers" (and for about 25 years the chairman of her town Republican Committee), noted that in each of those homes lived related family members. Apparently all of similar mind.

I stopped for a moment to ask one family member, who was weed-wacking the tall grass that ran up a 6-foot berm from the edge of the 16-rod road (those narrow, but paved, old country roads with a high crown and new pavement dressing only in front of the houses — to keep down the dust that maybe would choke the livestock and soil the freshly washed clothes hanging out on the line to dry — up to his large, lush lawn) what in particular got him about Ron Paul. It was Paul's view of the Constitution as being the most significant thing we have to keep the country together, then Iraq, health care, the wrecked economy, gasoline, food. I told him that's why I was trying to get on the ballot to run for Congress in my Commonwealth (both MA and PA have that in common, as well as lush green flora in the spring). He wished me luck. 

However, I was later disheartened to hear from another denizen of this Heartland, one whose opinion I take seriously given all the education he's had and his general overall smarts, that there was nothing further to discuss about the events of September 11, 2001. "I saw it with my own eyes," he said.

While his practice, and most of his education, is in medicine and biology, not physics, he's pretty much a renaissance man. So it troubled me that he has absolutely no opening to even consider what I figure were the 43,000-or-so separate explosive devices that were required to demolish the three World Trade Center buildings, the WTC buildings numbered 1, 2 & 7, that were taken down on 9/11/01. Towers #1 and #2 were EXploded, while the 47-story Salomon Building, which Larry Silverstein said was "pulled," or demolished with carefully placed and timed  explosives, was IMploded, the more "classic" method of building demolition, as it limits damage to adjacent buildings — for which damage the demolitions firm or the demolished buildings' owners would have to pay.

In the case of WTC #7, there were three adjacent buildings Silverstein did not control. But in the case of WTC #1 and #2, there was a good bit of distance between the towers and neighboring buildings. But even that distance was not enough. Because of the extreme force of the explosives (tell me how else 220 floors of 4-inch, reinforced concrete would get pulverized to dust, even at the very top-most floors, onto which nothing could "pancake"), multi-ton hunks of the towers still managed to cross the open spaces and stick high up into the buildings as if Thor had turned his thunderbolts into projectiles for a dart game with Loki. And I certainly hold that the stories  about Thor and Loki, Odin and Freya, are more credible than the modern oral mythology Phillip Zelikow set to words in his best-selling novel, The Official 9/11 Commission Report.

I remember seeing an interesting film in my Evidence class in the third year of law school. The topic under consideration was eye-witness testimony. I don't remember all the details, but it was set up to provide several "episodes" of the same story, each episode providing more "middle" to the brief beginning and ending events that began the series. 

The tape was paused after each episode, and class members were asked to "testify" as to what they'd observed. The majority of us agreed that the first scene showed a crime being committed, something like a wallet-snatching as best I can remember. But the tape only showed a somewhat disconcerted-looking woman rummaging in her purse, followed by a shot of a young man running and turning into an alley. There was no "middle" to the story, but we created one.

As more information was revealed, the crime story was embellished with the new details, until finally the full sequence was played, and the "crime" turned into a woman looking for coins to make a phone call and the man chasing after his hat, which a gust of wind had blown into the alley.

Our professor noted that this was the pernicious difficulty with eye-witness testimony: people make stuff up to complete incomplete stories. And they're adamant about what they've "seen with their own eyes." It takes very, very careful interrogation — with absolutely NO information furnished by the interrogator (no "leading the witness" permitted) — to establish what the witness said she saw and what she actually did see.

Of course, when someone is ready to hand with details, opinions, assessments of what was there to be seen, the placebo effect (leading the witness with suggestions, conclusions, etc.) takes over, and even the "smartest" of people become unable to distinguish between what they actually perceived and what they think they MUST have seen in order for it to fit the conclusion that they reached about what they "saw with their own eyes."

And of course the "smarter" people think they are, the more certain they are about the "reality" of their conclusions. None so blind as those who would not see, goes the apothegm. Furthermore, when there is a well-nigh incessant repetition of the official myth, it is difficult for anyone to escape the mythology. Tell a lie big enough and long enough and everyone will believe it, goes the Hitlerian or Goebbelsian trope. Or, as Sir Arthur Ponsonby put it in his reflections on British WWI propaganda, Falsehood In War-Time, 

A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums.

Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind — and this is true in all countries — than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables. They were able to clothe the tough tissue of falsehood with phrases of literary merit and passages of eloquence better than the statesmen. Sometimes by expressions of spurious impartiality, at other times by rhetorical indignation, they could by their literary skill give this or that lie the stamp of indubitable authenticity, even without the shadow of a proof, or incidentally refer to it as an accepted fact.* The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting. [Emphasis added. Ed.]

 [* Recall the disgusting Iraq cheerleading performance of virtually all of our "MSM," our  Mainstream Media. As Tejas populist Jim Hightower put it, in the title of his recent book, Swim Against the Current, Folks! (Even a dead fish can go with the… mainstream).  Hightower uses flow instead of mainstream, but mainstream works better for my purposes. Wm.]

There may soon come a time when the "official" 9/11 mythology evaporates and US citizens who have become less than patient with the eight years of lies told by our Unitary Liar-In-Chief and the Cheney/Bush administration in general to actually start investigating the "true facts" about what happened before, during and after 9/11/2001.

However improbable it may seem, there are SOME — not many, but some — of our high officials who may actually be embarrassed into finally honoring their oaths of office and actually "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Cheney, et al." Or they may be voted out of office and replaced by men and women who WILL take seriously their promise to We the People, so help them, Higher Power. (And we're not talking George H.P. Bush here.)

So far, by my reckoning, maybe only three members of Congress, Reps. Paul and Kucinich, and certainly Sen. Byrd, take their oaths seriously. Sen. Pat Leahy talks a good game on the topic, but, sadly, seems unwilling to go the extra mile and have Congress's Sergeant-At-Arms arrest and imprison all the folks of the Cheney/Bush Administration currently in Contempt of Congress. The Capitol, I read, actually has jail cells somewhere in the basement. It certainly wouldn't take much additional effort to add water-boarding equipment. Maybe these administration miscreants could be made to confess their roles in the murders, etc., on 9/11/01. (Ahh, but would this testimony be admissible in a special military tribunal, I wonder.)

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