Fuck You, Israel.
After following the news the last couple of days, I can no longer remain silent, as my silence would represent complicity with what I feel are the contemptuous acts of barbarism being committed by the state of Israel towards the Palestinian people and, by default, all intelligent, rational and free-thinking people around the world.
I’d been vocally disgusted with Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip the last month or so, denying the basic necessities of human life to the people trapped beneath the petty iron thumb of the Israeli military and the racist politicians who use these troops to enforce their Apartheid-era agendas.
If it were any other country in the world after World War II, we’d refer to these jackbooted Israeli scumbags as the ideological Nazi’s they so completely have become both in racist ideals and repugnant social acts – and I say so with full approval of the contradictory and embarrassing imagery such accusations would provide. Because as has become obvious to me the last couple of years, one of the things these Jews of Israel have learned from the Nazis of WWII, apparently, is how to rule your country with force while subjugating and crushing the will of those people who are deemed the dreaded “other”.
And as I watched the news today on Democracy Now while eating lunch at work, I felt nothing but rage clutching at me as I heard the stories of people close to what was happening speak and – even more enraging – listening to the mendacious politicians of both Israel and America trying to spin the facts to their advantage.
So today I’m going to share with you a number of quotes from two articles and a TV broadcast I saw today that not only point out what scumbags run the United States and Israel, but also to point out the very different ways in which the story has been reported between two news sources.
On Democracy Now, the most persuasively elegant commentary came from Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website. His (slightly edited for space) comments now follow:
ALI ABUNIMAH: I want to say, Amy, first of all, that we have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States, not just the Bush administration, but apparently as well the incoming Obama administration. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, the Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt. Tzipi Livni, when she issued her threats against Gaza, was in Cairo in the biggest Arab capital, and Aboul Gheit stood next to her silently.
Mahmoud Abbas is not a bystander, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority. For two years since the elections, which Hamas won, he and his coterie have been collaborating with Israel and the United States, first to overthrow the election result and then to besiege Gaza. We have talked before of the Palestinian Contras, funded and armed by the United States, which sought to overthrow Hamas in June 2007 and had the tables turned on them. And now this. The complicity of Mahmoud Abbas is very clear and must be clearly stated. He does not have the authority, moral or otherwise, to call together the Palestinian people for anything. He has gone over to the other side. He has joined the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, and I choose my words very carefully.
And let me say this, as well, Amy, that Israel is trying to produce and promote the fiction that it is engaged in a war with a so-called enemy entity. What Israel is doing is massacring a captive population. You heard—you said in the headlines how Nancy Pelosi, our so-called progressive, liberal, antiwar Speaker of the House, gave her full support to these crimes. Obama has done the same through a spokesman. And that will not change. The United Nations issued a weak statement aimed at covering the backsides, let me say, of those who issued it, not aimed at changing the situation.
And we also have to be clear that those who are accountable—Ehud Barak, his orders over the past few months to withhold insulin, chemotherapy drugs, dialysis supplies, all forms of medicine from the people of Gaza, were just as lethal and just as murderous as the orders to send in the bombers and warplanes to attack mosques, to attack universities. The Islamic University in Gaza is not a military site. It is a university with 18,000 students, 60 percent of them women. Last night, Israeli warplanes attacked a female dormitory in the Islamic University. This is what Israel is attacking. They attacked the fishing port. No food gets into Gaza. People can barely fish enough to sustain them, and Israel has attacked the fishing boats that sustains them. These are historic crimes, and we cannot be silent about them.
And we have to continue this nonsense that there’s fault on both sides. We have a captive occupied population. 80 percent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees. 750,000 of them are children. Where else in the world can these crimes be committed while the world looks on, while our elected politicians in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, sit there applauding, when you see the shameful statement of Howard Berman, the Democrat chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, giving his full support to Israel? People have to stand up to this. We cannot sit on our hands anymore and say change is coming. Change is not coming unless we create it.
Okay, back to me with a brief comment before continuing. While watching Fox News (Channel 5 in NYC) during dinner (are you beginning to get the impression I only listen to the news while eating?) the story of this Middle East “fighting” was reported with the misleading fact that “over 300 people have been killed so far.” So besides the fact that no mention at all was made of the over 1400 people who have also been injured (many probably fatally), Fox News took great pains to NOT mention that it was over 300 PALESTINIANS who had been killed so far, giving the overall impression that perhaps these numbers were a tally of the fatalities so far suffered by both sides.
In addition, they referred to a solidarity-with-Palestine rally going on at the United Nations this evening as an “Anti-Israel” rally, once again demonstrating the tried-and-true Americanism of the soon to be thankfully departed Bush administration – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Of the placards of the protesters bobbing in the background of many of the shots, I saw no “Anti-Israel” slogans or accusations; only calls for mercy. And no person they spoke to offered any “Anti-Israel” sentiments either. Only the voice-over of the reporter, far from the actual event and safe in the voice-over booth of the news organization, had the cowardice to safely say the words there instead of saying it at the event he was so dutifully covering.
Fuck you, Fox News.
Here’s some more salient points from Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian lawmaker and activist.
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, let me explain one very specific point. Israel is very proud, with the complicity of some Arab regimes and some of the people in the Palestinian Authority, about what’s going on. But I want to remind you that what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank is nothing but also a slaughter of democracy. We have, as Palestinians—we, the civil society in Palestine, we, the Palestinian democratic forces, jointly with many others—managed to have the best democratic experience ever in the Arab world. Everybody knows that, and President Carter reported it when we had the last elections. And I think this complicity of some certain Arab sides are specifically because they don’t want this democracy to happen. They don’t want this democracy to survive. And if Israel is very proud to be in alliance with dictatorships, then that reveals how democratic Israel itself is.
Israel has been claiming that it’s the only democracy and so on, but why is it slaughtering Palestinian democracy? They did that in 1976, when we had elections for the first time for our municipalities, and within one year, because they didn’t like the elected people, they either bombarded them or deported them or arrested them. And now, after 2006 elections, they are putting forty-five members of our parliament in jail. One of the leaders, one of the members of parliament, is not Hamas. His name is Ahmed Saadat. He’s from the left, from the secular democratic left. He was just sentenced to thirty years in jail, just because he is the secretary-general of a Palestinian organization. It’s amazing how the world is silent about this slaughter of democracy. And if Israel is happy with being in alliance with some dictator, then it is the one that is losing.
The main question here, that I want to come back to some myths that Israel is spreading. They keep stressing that they are attacking Hamas. This is not on Hamas; this is on the whole Palestinian population. They claim that they ended occupation in Gaza. This is not true. They never ended occupation in Gaza. They continue to occupy Gaza. Now they’re changing the form of occupation again, and they’re threatening to complete the invasion again and destroying people’s lives. Third, they claim that it was the Palestinians who broke the ceasefire. This is false. This is incorrect. Israel broke the ceasefire. And now the party that is refusing to have ceasefire is Barak, the Defense Minister of Israel, and he’s the one who is refusing to allow ceasefire to happen again.
I forgot to mention earlier that as part of the Fox News broadcast I saw they took great pains to interview the Israeli envoy at the United Nations for comment. All he had to offer was a burnt missile casing sitting on a table in his office. “Can you imagine sitting at home with your family and watching television when suddenly this comes crashing through your roof?”
Hmmm. Well, I’d imagine that situation has gotta suck on either sides of the Gaza Strip (or West Bank, the area he was referring to). But as the Israeli home would probably remain standing – oh, and unlike the blockades cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world, at least this family HAD electricity (and food, and running water, etc.) – I have to say my sympathy was slightly diminished despite the best efforts of him and the reporter to make me feel otherwise.
Fuck you, Fox News.
And yes, need we be reminded that Hamas WAS actually democratically elected to lead. Just like Al Gore was back in 2000, but when the shadow people who actually run this country don’t like election results from anywhere around the world (and even here at home, as we learned), they’ll find a way to make things come round to how they see things.
As promised, here’s a little bit of perspective from Yahoo News I read earlier today. Here’s the jaw-dropping opening sentence to the piece, credited to Deb Riechmann (no, I’m not making that up):
The White House, calling Monday for a lasting cease-fire in the Mideast, backed Israel's deadly air attacks on the Gaza Strip and said the Islamic militant group ruling there had shown its "true colors as a terrorist organization."
Pot, I’d like you to meet the kettle. Kettle, I’d like you to meet….
Seriously; isn’t that just the most amazing opening sentence? Because if ANYBODY around here knows the true colors of a terrorist organization it’s Bush and his Bushettes.
Sigh.
Gordon Duguid, a spokesperson for Condoleeza Rice added this knee-slapper to the general frenzy of comments:
"We are encouraging all the nations in the region to take an active part in rebuilding the cease-fire so that we can return to the relative calm that was enjoyed in the region over the past six months."
I’m assuming by “relative calm” he means the stranglehold on the Palestinians who’ve been without proper food, medical treatment or other basic human necessities the last two months. Because as far as I know, that’s the best way to keep dem uppity desert folks “calm”.
Now here’s an interesting development that I hadn’t anticipated. When I sent the link to this piece of Yahoo News to some folks earlier today I cut-and-pasted a few money quotes from it that I thought were so unbelievable that they had to be highlighted.
But as I’ve now gone back to check the piece to gather up my quotes for this posting, my favorite line has since been removed.
Thankfully, for posterity and as a blow against whatever Winston Smith character made the change to the article over the course of the last eight hours, I will now present that quote to you, oh lucky reader, preserved by my prescient e-mail japery.
White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe had this to say (this is the part that is still available in the article):
Asked if the administration believes it permissible for Israel to launch attacks in Gaza, Johndroe said: "The United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself."
Here, however, is the very next line from the piece that has since been expunged by some smart little editor type who has probably since been promoted for his due diligence (or, even more unbelievably, realized that Hamas really WASN’T the one that broke the cease fire).
Asked why Hamas broke the cease-fire, "You know, it's hard for me to get into the minds of terrorists ... so it's impossible for me to answer."
I again need to emphatically state that I HAVE NOT made up this quote. It’s as real as Israel – and just as stupid and dangerous as any desert dweller of any stripe with high-powered weaponry and an unshakeable belief in the righteous power of their one-true-god.
Alright, that’s almost enough for tonight.
Almost.
I now feel the need to make myself clear about something that’s been bothering me all day since listening to this news.
I can now no longer allow myself to be associated in any way, shape or form in a historical, ideological or religious way to the hideous Israeli scumbags and their Jewish supporters who “bravely” yell their support from the United States (put yer money where your mouths are and go live in that parched battleground you fucking cowards).
So I now renounce all things Jewish and divest myself from the religion, the culture and the mindset.
I will henceforth no longer refer to myself as Jewish or be bound to the social or religious beliefs of this foul, racist breed.
Fuck you, Israel.
Okay, now that is enough for tonight.
Thanks for taking a look, if you made it this far….
Scooter McCrae
I’d been vocally disgusted with Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip the last month or so, denying the basic necessities of human life to the people trapped beneath the petty iron thumb of the Israeli military and the racist politicians who use these troops to enforce their Apartheid-era agendas.
If it were any other country in the world after World War II, we’d refer to these jackbooted Israeli scumbags as the ideological Nazi’s they so completely have become both in racist ideals and repugnant social acts – and I say so with full approval of the contradictory and embarrassing imagery such accusations would provide. Because as has become obvious to me the last couple of years, one of the things these Jews of Israel have learned from the Nazis of WWII, apparently, is how to rule your country with force while subjugating and crushing the will of those people who are deemed the dreaded “other”.
And as I watched the news today on Democracy Now while eating lunch at work, I felt nothing but rage clutching at me as I heard the stories of people close to what was happening speak and – even more enraging – listening to the mendacious politicians of both Israel and America trying to spin the facts to their advantage.
So today I’m going to share with you a number of quotes from two articles and a TV broadcast I saw today that not only point out what scumbags run the United States and Israel, but also to point out the very different ways in which the story has been reported between two news sources.
On Democracy Now, the most persuasively elegant commentary came from Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website. His (slightly edited for space) comments now follow:
ALI ABUNIMAH: I want to say, Amy, first of all, that we have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States, not just the Bush administration, but apparently as well the incoming Obama administration. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, the Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt. Tzipi Livni, when she issued her threats against Gaza, was in Cairo in the biggest Arab capital, and Aboul Gheit stood next to her silently.
Mahmoud Abbas is not a bystander, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority. For two years since the elections, which Hamas won, he and his coterie have been collaborating with Israel and the United States, first to overthrow the election result and then to besiege Gaza. We have talked before of the Palestinian Contras, funded and armed by the United States, which sought to overthrow Hamas in June 2007 and had the tables turned on them. And now this. The complicity of Mahmoud Abbas is very clear and must be clearly stated. He does not have the authority, moral or otherwise, to call together the Palestinian people for anything. He has gone over to the other side. He has joined the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, and I choose my words very carefully.
And let me say this, as well, Amy, that Israel is trying to produce and promote the fiction that it is engaged in a war with a so-called enemy entity. What Israel is doing is massacring a captive population. You heard—you said in the headlines how Nancy Pelosi, our so-called progressive, liberal, antiwar Speaker of the House, gave her full support to these crimes. Obama has done the same through a spokesman. And that will not change. The United Nations issued a weak statement aimed at covering the backsides, let me say, of those who issued it, not aimed at changing the situation.
And we also have to be clear that those who are accountable—Ehud Barak, his orders over the past few months to withhold insulin, chemotherapy drugs, dialysis supplies, all forms of medicine from the people of Gaza, were just as lethal and just as murderous as the orders to send in the bombers and warplanes to attack mosques, to attack universities. The Islamic University in Gaza is not a military site. It is a university with 18,000 students, 60 percent of them women. Last night, Israeli warplanes attacked a female dormitory in the Islamic University. This is what Israel is attacking. They attacked the fishing port. No food gets into Gaza. People can barely fish enough to sustain them, and Israel has attacked the fishing boats that sustains them. These are historic crimes, and we cannot be silent about them.
And we have to continue this nonsense that there’s fault on both sides. We have a captive occupied population. 80 percent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees. 750,000 of them are children. Where else in the world can these crimes be committed while the world looks on, while our elected politicians in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, sit there applauding, when you see the shameful statement of Howard Berman, the Democrat chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, giving his full support to Israel? People have to stand up to this. We cannot sit on our hands anymore and say change is coming. Change is not coming unless we create it.
Okay, back to me with a brief comment before continuing. While watching Fox News (Channel 5 in NYC) during dinner (are you beginning to get the impression I only listen to the news while eating?) the story of this Middle East “fighting” was reported with the misleading fact that “over 300 people have been killed so far.” So besides the fact that no mention at all was made of the over 1400 people who have also been injured (many probably fatally), Fox News took great pains to NOT mention that it was over 300 PALESTINIANS who had been killed so far, giving the overall impression that perhaps these numbers were a tally of the fatalities so far suffered by both sides.
In addition, they referred to a solidarity-with-Palestine rally going on at the United Nations this evening as an “Anti-Israel” rally, once again demonstrating the tried-and-true Americanism of the soon to be thankfully departed Bush administration – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Of the placards of the protesters bobbing in the background of many of the shots, I saw no “Anti-Israel” slogans or accusations; only calls for mercy. And no person they spoke to offered any “Anti-Israel” sentiments either. Only the voice-over of the reporter, far from the actual event and safe in the voice-over booth of the news organization, had the cowardice to safely say the words there instead of saying it at the event he was so dutifully covering.
Fuck you, Fox News.
Here’s some more salient points from Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian lawmaker and activist.
DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: Well, let me explain one very specific point. Israel is very proud, with the complicity of some Arab regimes and some of the people in the Palestinian Authority, about what’s going on. But I want to remind you that what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank is nothing but also a slaughter of democracy. We have, as Palestinians—we, the civil society in Palestine, we, the Palestinian democratic forces, jointly with many others—managed to have the best democratic experience ever in the Arab world. Everybody knows that, and President Carter reported it when we had the last elections. And I think this complicity of some certain Arab sides are specifically because they don’t want this democracy to happen. They don’t want this democracy to survive. And if Israel is very proud to be in alliance with dictatorships, then that reveals how democratic Israel itself is.
Israel has been claiming that it’s the only democracy and so on, but why is it slaughtering Palestinian democracy? They did that in 1976, when we had elections for the first time for our municipalities, and within one year, because they didn’t like the elected people, they either bombarded them or deported them or arrested them. And now, after 2006 elections, they are putting forty-five members of our parliament in jail. One of the leaders, one of the members of parliament, is not Hamas. His name is Ahmed Saadat. He’s from the left, from the secular democratic left. He was just sentenced to thirty years in jail, just because he is the secretary-general of a Palestinian organization. It’s amazing how the world is silent about this slaughter of democracy. And if Israel is happy with being in alliance with some dictator, then it is the one that is losing.
The main question here, that I want to come back to some myths that Israel is spreading. They keep stressing that they are attacking Hamas. This is not on Hamas; this is on the whole Palestinian population. They claim that they ended occupation in Gaza. This is not true. They never ended occupation in Gaza. They continue to occupy Gaza. Now they’re changing the form of occupation again, and they’re threatening to complete the invasion again and destroying people’s lives. Third, they claim that it was the Palestinians who broke the ceasefire. This is false. This is incorrect. Israel broke the ceasefire. And now the party that is refusing to have ceasefire is Barak, the Defense Minister of Israel, and he’s the one who is refusing to allow ceasefire to happen again.
I forgot to mention earlier that as part of the Fox News broadcast I saw they took great pains to interview the Israeli envoy at the United Nations for comment. All he had to offer was a burnt missile casing sitting on a table in his office. “Can you imagine sitting at home with your family and watching television when suddenly this comes crashing through your roof?”
Hmmm. Well, I’d imagine that situation has gotta suck on either sides of the Gaza Strip (or West Bank, the area he was referring to). But as the Israeli home would probably remain standing – oh, and unlike the blockades cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world, at least this family HAD electricity (and food, and running water, etc.) – I have to say my sympathy was slightly diminished despite the best efforts of him and the reporter to make me feel otherwise.
Fuck you, Fox News.
And yes, need we be reminded that Hamas WAS actually democratically elected to lead. Just like Al Gore was back in 2000, but when the shadow people who actually run this country don’t like election results from anywhere around the world (and even here at home, as we learned), they’ll find a way to make things come round to how they see things.
As promised, here’s a little bit of perspective from Yahoo News I read earlier today. Here’s the jaw-dropping opening sentence to the piece, credited to Deb Riechmann (no, I’m not making that up):
The White House, calling Monday for a lasting cease-fire in the Mideast, backed Israel's deadly air attacks on the Gaza Strip and said the Islamic militant group ruling there had shown its "true colors as a terrorist organization."
Pot, I’d like you to meet the kettle. Kettle, I’d like you to meet….
Seriously; isn’t that just the most amazing opening sentence? Because if ANYBODY around here knows the true colors of a terrorist organization it’s Bush and his Bushettes.
Sigh.
Gordon Duguid, a spokesperson for Condoleeza Rice added this knee-slapper to the general frenzy of comments:
"We are encouraging all the nations in the region to take an active part in rebuilding the cease-fire so that we can return to the relative calm that was enjoyed in the region over the past six months."
I’m assuming by “relative calm” he means the stranglehold on the Palestinians who’ve been without proper food, medical treatment or other basic human necessities the last two months. Because as far as I know, that’s the best way to keep dem uppity desert folks “calm”.
Now here’s an interesting development that I hadn’t anticipated. When I sent the link to this piece of Yahoo News to some folks earlier today I cut-and-pasted a few money quotes from it that I thought were so unbelievable that they had to be highlighted.
But as I’ve now gone back to check the piece to gather up my quotes for this posting, my favorite line has since been removed.
Thankfully, for posterity and as a blow against whatever Winston Smith character made the change to the article over the course of the last eight hours, I will now present that quote to you, oh lucky reader, preserved by my prescient e-mail japery.
White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe had this to say (this is the part that is still available in the article):
Asked if the administration believes it permissible for Israel to launch attacks in Gaza, Johndroe said: "The United States understands that Israel needs to take actions to defend itself."
Here, however, is the very next line from the piece that has since been expunged by some smart little editor type who has probably since been promoted for his due diligence (or, even more unbelievably, realized that Hamas really WASN’T the one that broke the cease fire).
Asked why Hamas broke the cease-fire, "You know, it's hard for me to get into the minds of terrorists ... so it's impossible for me to answer."
I again need to emphatically state that I HAVE NOT made up this quote. It’s as real as Israel – and just as stupid and dangerous as any desert dweller of any stripe with high-powered weaponry and an unshakeable belief in the righteous power of their one-true-god.
Alright, that’s almost enough for tonight.
Almost.
I now feel the need to make myself clear about something that’s been bothering me all day since listening to this news.
I can now no longer allow myself to be associated in any way, shape or form in a historical, ideological or religious way to the hideous Israeli scumbags and their Jewish supporters who “bravely” yell their support from the United States (put yer money where your mouths are and go live in that parched battleground you fucking cowards).
So I now renounce all things Jewish and divest myself from the religion, the culture and the mindset.
I will henceforth no longer refer to myself as Jewish or be bound to the social or religious beliefs of this foul, racist breed.
Fuck you, Israel.
Okay, now that is enough for tonight.
Thanks for taking a look, if you made it this far….
Scooter McCrae
posted by Scooter McCrae at 9:04 PM
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