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Topic: Why "they" hate us. Who are the fascists? (Read 565 times) |
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Hermit
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Why "they" hate us. Who are the fascists?
« on: 2007-11-17 10:41:08 » |
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Cut Israel Off
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Charley Reese
Dated: 2007-11-17
It is long past time for American politicians to quit carrying water for the state of Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby. Congress' craven obedience to the lobby is a disgrace.
America's strategic interests in the Middle East lie with the Arab countries. Israel is a strategic and economic liability. The U.S. government's slavish support of Israel brands us as a hypocrite and is responsible for most of the hostility toward the U.S.
Americans have been brainwashed into believing that it's the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, who don't want peace. That is a big lie. The Palestinians made an enormous concession when they agreed to settle for a state on 18 percent of Palestine. Saudi Arabia proposed several years ago a peace plan in which all of the Arab countries would recognize Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. The Israelis rejected it out of hand, just as they reject Arab efforts to have the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.
Israel's goal is and always has been to take all of Palestine and to get rid of the Palestinians. The Israelis employed ethnic cleansing in 1948 and again in 1967 to make hundreds of thousands of Palestinians refugees. For 40 years, the Israelis have refused to give back the Palestinian and Syrian lands they seized in war. They have blatantly violated international law by building settlements on occupied land, and by violating the airspace of other sovereign countries.
Palestinians are the victims, not the villains, in this case. The Israelis make their lives miserable in the hope they will give up and leave. At the same time, the Israelis, in cahoots with the American government, maintain a charade of proposed peace talks. They of course never come to fruition. The Israeli government is not about to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state. If they give the Palestinians anything, it will be a patchwork of enclaves completely surrounded and controlled by Israel. Having created 700,000 Palestinian refugees, the Israelis have from the beginning refused to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses, all of which Israel confiscated on the specious grounds that they were "abandoned property."
Without U.S. aid, which now is conservatively estimated to total $108 billion (think of the infrastructure and schools that amount could build in the U.S.), and without the U.S. wielding its veto every time the United Nations tries to act, none of this would be possible.
It is not just the Muslim world that hates our pro-Israel foreign policy, for sound reasons that it is unjust and cruel. Europeans and others around the world are contemptuous of America's slavelike obedience to a small foreign power. It has gotten to the point that to be seen as an ally of the United States is viewed negatively.
The Arab and Muslim people, with the exception of al-Qaeda, don't hate America or Americans. It is the pro-Israel foreign policy and, of course, our invasions of two Muslim countries that they hate. Virtually all of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda generated in this country has its source in the Israeli lobby and in Israel itself.
Thanks to the unconstitutional largess of the cowardly Congress, Israel is a rich country and one of the world's leading military powers. It doesn't need American aid. It is time to quit dancing to the tune of a lobby with dual loyalties and to pursue America's interests.
Americans are being betrayed by their own politicians, and it's time to treat those scoundrels with the contempt they deserve.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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letheomaniac
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Re:Why "they" hate us. Who are the fascists?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-11-29 04:54:29 » |
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[letheomaniac] I think that the following article is good evidence as to why the phrase 'in good odour' could be more accurately applied to a bucket of three day-old fishbait that to the US. Fact of the matter is, it's the attitude that stinks.
Another CIA sponsored Coup D'Etat? Venezuela’s D-Day
Democratic Socialism or Imperial Counter-Revolution
By Prof James Petras
11/28/07 "ICH" --- - On November 26, 2007 the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday (December 2, 2007).
The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled ‘Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer’ and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym ‘HUMINT’ (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government. The Embassy-CIA’s polls concede that 57% of the voters approved of the constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez but also predicted a 60% abstention.
The US operatives emphasized their capacity to recruit former Chavez supporters among the social democrats (PODEMOS) and the former Minister of Defense Baduel, claiming to have reduced the ‘yes’ vote by 6% from its original margin. Nevertheless the Embassy operatives concede that they have reached their ceiling, recognizing they cannot defeat the amendments via the electoral route.
The memo then recommends that Operation Pincer (OP) [Operación Tenaza] be operationalized. OP involves a two-pronged strategy of impeding the referendum, rejecting the outcome at the same time as calling for a ‘no’ vote. The run up to the referendum includes running phony polls, attacking electoral officials and running propaganda through the private media accusing the government of fraud and calling for a ‘no’ vote. Contradictions, the report cynically emphasizes, are of no matter.
The CIA-Embassy reports internal division and recriminations among the opponents of the amendments including several defections from their ‘umbrella group’. The key and most dangerous threats to democracy raised by the Embassy memo point to their success in mobilizing the private university students (backed by top administrators) to attack key government buildings including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. The Embassy is especially praiseworthy of the ex-Maoist ‘Red Flag’ group for its violent street fighting activity. Ironically, small Trotskyist sects and their trade unionists join the ex-Maoists in opposing the constitutional amendments. The Embassy, while discarding their ‘Marxist rhetoric’, perceives their opposition as fitting in with their overall strategy.
The ultimate objective of ‘Operation Pincer’ is to seize a territorial or institutional base with the ‘massive support’ of the defeated electoral minority within three or four days (before or after the elections – is not clear. JP) backed by an uprising by oppositionist military officers principally in the National Guard. The Embassy operative concede that the military plotters have run into serous problems as key intelligence operatives were detected, stores of arms were decommissioned and several plotters are under tight surveillance.
Apart from the deep involvement of the US, the primary organization of the Venezuelan business elite (FEDECAMARAS), as well as all the major private television, radio and newspaper outlets have been engaged in a vicious fear and intimidation campaign. Food producers, wholesale and retail distributors have created artificial shortages of basic food items and have provoked large scale capital flight to sow chaos in the hopes of reaping a ‘no’ vote.
President Chavez Counter-Attacks
In a speech to pro-Chavez, pro-amendment nationalist business-people (Entrepreneurs for Venezuela – EMPREVEN) Chavez warned the President of FEDECAMARAS that if he continues to threaten the government with a coup, he would nationalize all their business affiliates. With the exception of the Trotskyist and other sects, the vast majority of organized workers, peasants, small farmers, poor neighborhood councils, informal self-employed and public school students have mobilized and demonstrated in favor of the constitutional amendments.
The reason for the popular majority is found in a few of the key amendments: One article expedites land expropriation facilitating re-distribution to the landless and small producers. Chavez has already settled over 150,000 landless workers on 2 million acres of land. Another amendment provides universal social security coverage for the entire informal sector (street sellers, domestic workers, self-employed) amounting to 40% of the labor force. Organized and unorganized workers’ workweek will be reduced from 40 to 36 hours a week (Monday to Friday noon) with no reduction in pay. Open admission and universal free higher education will open greater educational opportunities for lower class students. Amendments will allow the government to by-pass current bureaucratic blockage of the socialization of strategic industries, thus creating greater employment and lower utility costs. Most important, an amendment will increase the power and budget of neighborhood councils to legislate and invest in their communities.
The electorate supporting the constitutional amendments is voting in favor of their socio-economic and class interests; the issue of extended re-election of the President is not high on their priorities: And that is the issue that the Right has focused on in calling Chavez a ‘dictator’ and the referendum a ‘coup’.
The Opposition
With strong financial backing from the US Embassy ($8 million dollars in propaganda alone according to the Embassy memo) and the business elite and ‘free time’ by the right-wing media, the Right has organized a majority of the upper middle class students from the private universities, backed by the Catholic Church hierarchy, large swaths of the affluent middle class neighborhoods, entire sectors of the commercial, real estate and financial middle classes and apparently sectors of the military, especially officials in the National Guard. While the Right has control over the major private media, public television and radio back the constitutional reforms. While the Right has its followers among some generals and the National Guard, Chavez has the backing of the paratroops and legions of middle rank officers and most other generals.
The outcome of the Referendum of December 2 is a decisive historical event first and foremost for Venezuela but also for the rest of the Americas. A positive vote (Vota ‘Sí’) will provide the legal framework for the democratization of the political system, the socialization of strategic economic sectors, empower the poor and provide the basis for a self-managed factory system. A negative vote (or a successful US-backed civil-military uprising) will reverse the most promising living experience of popular self-rule, of advanced social welfare and democratically based socialism. A reversal, especially a military dictated outcome, will lead to a massive blood bath, such as we have not seen since the days of the Indonesian Generals’ Coup of 1966, which killed over a million workers and peasants or the Argentine Coup of 1976 in which over 30,000 Argentines were murdered by the US backed Generals.
A decisive vote for ‘Sí’ will not end US military and political destabilization campaigns but it will certainly undermine and demoralize their collaborators. On December 2, 2007 the Venezuelans have a rendezvous with history.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Why "they" hate us. Who are the fascists?
« Reply #2 on: 2007-11-29 13:40:12 » |
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[Blunderov] And who are the fascist enablers?
"Oh, how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things remind me of..."
Judith Miller.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_dave_lin_071129_news_not_fit_to_prin.htm
News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela?
by Dave Lindorff Page 1 of 2 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com
By Dave Lindorff
The New York Times had a news article about Venezuela in Thursday’s edition, but it was about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saying he would cut diplomatic ties with neighboring Colombia. There wasn’t a word about a memo from a CIA operative in Caracas to CIA Director General Michael Hayden, uncovered yesterday, outlining a plan for interfering with a Venezuelan referendum set for Dec. 2, and laying out the steps for instigating and backing a coup.
The plot, called “Operation Pliers,” and laid out in the letter to Hayden by an undercover operative named Michael Steele, who reportedly works in the US Embassy as a “regional affairs officer,” was intercepted by Venezuelan intelligence and released publicly on state TV yesterday.
In the Nov. 20-dated letter, Steele refers to an $8 million US-funded in-country propaganda campaign against Chavez and the referendum, already being implemented, which is designed to institutionalize many of Chavez’s socialist reforms and to permit him to continue to run for president beyond his current two-term limit. He proposes trying to stall the referendum, which pro-Chavez forces are expected to win handily, and failing that, to then promote a campaign to refuse to accept the results. Steele further confirms that the agency is working with international news agencies in an effort to distort reports about the referendum and the reforms. (CNN had to apologize for a “mistake” which led to the words “Who killed him?” superimposed over a photo of Chavez broadcast on CNN’s Spanish-language international broadcast in Venezuela. Was this a deliberate CIA-inspired black-op?)
Among the tactics Steele recommends in his letter are:
* Promoting street demonstrations and violent protests
* Creating a climate of ungovernability
* Provoking a general uprising
* Working through the US military attaché at the embassy to coordinate with ex-military officers and former coup plotters against Chavez.
Even more darkly, the letter calls for initiating “military actions” to support opposition mobilizations and strategic building occupations, involving US military bases in neighboring Curacao and Colombia to provide support, and even taking control of parts of Venezuela in the days after the referendum, while encouraging a “military rebellion” inside the Venezuelan National Guard.
The CIA communication has been reported in articles filed by the Associated Press, but the Times and other major US news organizations have not mentioned it
.
Instead, the Times today ran a column by Roger Cohen, which compares Chavez to the fascists of 1930s Europe, and which calls for defeat of the referendum. (Are Cohen and the Times part of the CIA's propaganda campaign?)
The Cohen column is so rabid that it would be almost comical, were it not for the fact that there is a real threat of a bloody CIA-inspired coup in the democratic nation of Venezuela.
In fact, I thought it would be fun and instructive to alter Cohen’s hit piece a bit, substituting the US for Venezuela, and Bush and Cheney for Chavez, to show its hypocrisy. Here then, a sample of the only lightly tweaked column:
________________
Shutting Up America’s Bush and Cheney
By Richard Cohen (courtesy of editing by Dave Lindorff)
It was a fascist general in 1930s Spain who coined the phrase “Viva la muerte!” or “Long live death!” Essentially meaningless, the words captured the cult of soil, blood and savagery that coursed through European Fascism, in its Francoist and other forms.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney hate Islamo-fascists; they are central to their repertoire of insults. But they have not hesitated to deploy the imagery of death to bolster their rightist brand of petro-authoritarianism, now operating under the ludicrous banner of “Homeland, Free Markets and Democracy!”
The slogan looks almost quaint in its anachronism. Bush and Cheney would no doubt claim American Revolutionary, rather than Spanish fascist, roots for it (Patrick Henry also invoked liberty and finality). The bottom line is this. America’s oil-gilded caudillos are getting serious about instituting executive rule, much like Franco and Mussolini.
I might add Vladimir Putin to that list. Like the Russian leader, Bush and Cheney have already used fears of terrorism, a pliant judiciary, subservient institutions like the Congress, and the galvanizing appeal of vitriolic anti-Arabism to concoct a 21st-century authoritarianism, complete with gulags and arrest and indefinite detention without charge. But even Putin has not contemplated going as far as Bush and Cheney with their doctrine of pre-emptive war and “regime change” abroad.
Americans will vote next November most likely between two candidates for president who endorse many of the new powers already claimed by Bush and Cheney, and the Congress, even under Democratic control, continues to grant them additional powers, including the power to conduct sweeping spying on electronic communications without any court order or demonstration of probable cause, the power to declare martial law anywhere in the country on the slightest of pretexts, and the power to expropriate private property of those deemed to be “threatening” the American occupation in Iraq.
The measures amount to a constitutional coup,” said Teodoro Petkoff…etc.
…Bush’s and Cheney’s grab for emperor status is grotesque and dangerous—as Fascism was—a terrible example for a world that is moving towards democracy. Venezuela’s Chavez got it right when he told the assembled delegates at the United Nations General Assembly, shortly after President Bush had left the podium after addressing the same group, that he could still “smell the sulfur” left in the room by the American president.
____________________
Of course, we in America only read such things about foreign governments, not about our own.
Which may explain why despite the constitutional coup that has been occurring in the US over the last seven years, we have yet to see any hearing in the Judiciary Committee on the impeachable crimes of Bush and Cheney.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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letheomaniac
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Re:Why "they" hate us. Who are the fascists?
« Reply #3 on: 2007-12-04 07:26:09 » |
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[letheomaniac] I bet the champagne corks are flying down at the Capitalist Indoctrination Agency today... Not that I am a socialist (far from it) but I do hold the opinion that the citizens of a country should be able to make descisions as to what takes place in their country without the Emperor of Washington and his corporate stooges interfering. I don't regard this view as being idealistic, merely reasonable. Without further delay, on to the bad news (sadly the only stories I could find on the referendum this time were all written by corporatist barkers - a tablespoon of salt or so should be taken with the following article)...
Chavez Loses Constitutional Vote
By EURSOC Four Published: 03 December, 2007 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's plans to "rule until 2050" were came unstuck yesterday as his country voted to reject his proposed new constitution.
Chavez loyalists were celebrating victory in the streets before polls closed, but as the results came in, it became clear that the leader of the oil-rich nation, who hoped the referendum would install a "permanent Socialist revolution" in the country, faced his first defeat. Voters rejected the treaty 51-49: Disappointed Chavistas left the streets of the nation's capital Caracas as the opposition - a coalition of student groups and small opposition parties - took over the party.
Despite describing opponents of the new Constitution as "fascists", "retards", "traitors" and "friends of George Bush" in the weeks leading up to the vote, Chavez accepted defeat with grace. It remains to be seen, however, if he will have to step down in 2013 as the Constitution demands, rather than attempt to reign for another fifty years as he claimed the rejected Constitution would have allowed him to.
Polls last week suggested that opponents of the Constitution had gained ground over Chavez's supporters: The result of the referendum still took many by surprise, however. Commentators suggest Chavez lost the support of "light" Chavistas who back the President in elections (and might continue to do so) but who are wary of his plans to convert Venezuela into a Socialist State.
"I want him to stay in office but on a leash," said one.
We Europeans know a thing or two about failed Constitutions. Several times, EU nations have rejected Brussels treaties in referenda only to have them pushed through in slightly different formats (in the case of Ireland, the tactic has been to ask the same question again, until the answer Europe wanted in the first place is forthcoming). [letheomaniac] The illusion of choice once again in evidence...
Wouldn't it be amusing if Chavez, widely criticised for his autocratic antics, was to respect the wishes of his voters, while that beacon of freedom the European Union trampled over the votes of citizens?
Unfortunately for ironists, Chavez has already indicated that his proposals are "still alive" and only defeated "for the time being." Perhaps he could fly to Brussels for lessons.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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