Replies to post #41851 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[calgarylady]

Great post!!

BTW, sorry if I picked on your alma matter..lol. It must be that 20 hour clock we run on. I can be a little slow..lmao

[calgarylady]

Zionist Racism Exposed Again
"...They're Not Human Beings, They are Not People, They are Arabs!"
By Punyapriya Dasgupta
8-23-6


NEW DELHI -- Israel's ambassador in New Delhi, David Danieli, sees Hezbollah as something akin to a scorpion (Times of India, 28 July). His is not much of a new invention. Other Israelis in responsible positions have made similar statements before. A few days earlier, Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative at UN, regretted Kofi Annan's failure to mention that the Hezbollah was a bunch of "ruthless, indiscriminate animals".

During its First Lebanon War in 1982 Israel's chief of staff Rafael Eitan was gleeful that he had shoved the Palestinian " drugged cockroaches" into a bottle.

To Menahem Begin, chief author of the Deir Yassin massacre, who went on to become Israel's prime minister and get a Nobel peace prize, the Palestinians were "two-legged beasts". Immediately after the 1967 war Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, a British Conservative, recounted in the House of Commons a conversation he had with David Hacohen, one-time Israeli ambassador to Burma. As related by Maxwell-Hyslop, Hacohen "spoke with great intemperance and at great length about the Arabs. When he drew breath I was constrained to say: "Dr Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius Streicher [notorious Nazi propagandist] spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing?" I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said: "But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs"." One of the many things Israeli spokesmen seem incapable of realizing is that abuse is no substitute for reason. Israel has amassed much military prowess but remains very poor in logic.

Facts cry out against Israel. The root cause of the present war in Lebanon is, according to the Israelis and Americans, in the capture of one Israeli soldier by Hamas and two by Hezbollah. Not true. It is in the original sin of the partition of Palestine by UN against all moral, historical, demographic, legal reasons. The General Assembly's non-binding Resolution 181 envisaged an astonishingly intricate carving of Palestine into seven pieces to make 608,000 (half of them illegal immigrants) of a total population of 1,935,000 the majority in the biggest possible area. This was the warrant the Israelis needed to begin their relentless drive to restoration of their "historical frontiers" i.e., from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river through the instrumentality of calculated massacres and wars and incredible mendacity.

Had Israel stopped even at the pre-June 1967 lines there would have been no 1973 war, no Lebanon wars, no Hezbollah, no intifadas. Hezbollah was born of the need for an effective resistance to the Israeli juggernaut after the Arab armies had repeatedly failed. Hezbollah ran the Israelis off from Lebanon, excepting Shaaba Farms, a tiny patch Israel treats as a part of the Syrian Golan Heights it conquered and annexed. To the people in the Arab world Hezbollah is their David confronting the Israeli Goliath. Hezbollah's standing firm and inflicting substantial losses on the world's fourth mightiest force this time has heightened Arab expectations.

Mr Danieli's many accusations against Hezbollah include "inventing" the Israeli enemy. The wrong end of the stick. Political invention is an Israeli art. Remember Golda Meir's statement that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people ­ "they did not exist"? Hezbollah was reckoning with unceasing Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty Israel's peace activists say they had watched with alarm the deliberateness behind the Israel's latest war and soldiers admit they had rehearsed the offensives .

Mr Danieli stigmatizes Hezbollah as terrorists. How does he explain the proud confession of Yitzhak Shamir, one-time terrorist and twice prime minister of Israel: "Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat"? Mr Danieli's claim about his government's "calculated restraint" sounds terribly ironic with the current proportion of eight Lebanese dying for each Israeli.

Punyapriya Dasgupta is a journalist - [e-mail]

[F6]

With Lieberman's Loss, the Lobby Takes a Second Hit

Is the Empire Striking Back?

By JOHN WALSH
August 28, 2006

When Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut, a prime loser was the Lobby. Like the Israeli army in Lebanon, the Israel Lobby in Connecticut was exposed as a paper tiger. Joe Lieberman is AIPAC's boy; when he speaks at the yearly AIPAC convention in Washington, he elicits wild cheers, standing ovations, shouts of "Go, Joe, Go." Only the considerably less sanctimonious Dick Cheney does as well with that crowd. If the Lobby is on your side, you are supposed to win elections, and if it is not, down you go. But that did not happen in Connecticut despite the full exertion of the Lobby. In the final days of the campaign 1.5 million dollars poured into Lieberman's coffers, and virtually the entire Dem establishment was ordered into the fray on his side. Lieberman's opponent, Ned Lamont, had his name dragged through every mud puddle in Connecticut and of course was accused of being an anti-Semite. But that was all to no avail; Lamont won and Lieberman lost. A lot of politicians must now wonder whether the Lobby can deliver victories reliably any longer.

This is the second major hit that the Lobby has taken recently. The first was the paper on the Lobby's role in drumming up the war on Iraq by Mearsheimer and Walt, Professors at Chicago and Harvard, respectively [F6 note -- the post to which this post is a reply]. What was the celebrated Mearsheimer and Walt paper all about anyway? There was no new information in it. With all due respect to M and W, a college student could have quickly produced the same tract for a term paper. But since it was authored by recognized figures of the Establishment the Mearsheimer and Walt paper made it respectable to go after the Lobby; and therein lies its significance. It broke the ice and opened the Lobby to attack; at last the truth about the Lobby could be told and the inevitable epithet of anti-Semitism slung at its critics could be tossed aside. That in itself was a great aid to the peace movement.

Walt had been a Dean at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and one does not get to be a Dean there simply because of sterling scholarship. Mearsheimer is a buddy of Zbigniew Brzezinski who has made known his feeling that the War on Iraq is an unmitigated disaster for the Empire, which he has served so diligently for so many years. Was the M and W paper the first serious blow that the Empire struck at the Lobby for engineering the disastrous war on Iraq? Is the Empire striking back?

Just a few blocks from Professor Walt's office at Harvard stands the main library for undergraduates. It is named the Lamont Library after Ned Lamont's great grandfather, Thomas William Lamont, Jr., whose benefaction built the library. As Wikipedia reveals, Thomas was a representative of the U.S. Treasury Department at the Treaty of Versaille, and in 1920 went to Japan on a semiofficial mission to look after American interests in Asia. On Black Tuesday, 1929, he was acting head of J.P. Morgan and became its Chairman in 1943. Thomas William Lamont, Jr., was at the center of the action when the U.S. Empire was entering its heyday. He begat Corliss Lamont (see below) and Thomas Stillwell Lamont, vice chairman of Morgan Guarantee Trust and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation. Thomas Stillwell begat Edward Lamont, Sr., aka Ted, who was an economist with the Marshall Plan and later worked in Housing and Urban Development for Richard Nixon, the last "liberal" president. And Ted begat Ed, Jr, aka Ned, who trounced the vicious warmonger, Joseph Lieberman. Ned Lamont is heir to the whole kit and kaboodle of the Lamont fortune and worth hundreds of millions. For his own exercise in begetting, Ned chose Ann Greenlee Huntress one of the quartet of senior managers in Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm, with $8.4 billion in committed capital. The Lamonts do not have to scrimp to put the kids through college ­ in a way they own the college. And they are old hands at Empire.

Ned's dad, Ted, the one who worked for Nixon, has not voted Republican since 1988, complaining to the Hartford Courant that "Eastern moderates no longer have a place in the GOP." And in this he is reminiscent of another side of the Lamont family, the side represented by Corliss Lamont, Ned's great uncle. Corliss was a long-time socialist and also a director of the ACLU for many years. While Senator Prescott Bush, father of Bush I, was trending right and falling in love with the Nazis during the near mortal crisis of Capitalism, the Lamonts were drifting "left." They apparently saw Roosevelt as the system's savior and no doubt had some socialist sympathies as many thinking, decent persons did. But they remained within the bounds of respectability, and Corliss authored a tract, "Why I Am Not A Communist." The Lamonts appear to represent "enlightened capitalists," as they were once called.

When the neocons struck back at Ned, it was Corliss who seemed to agitate them most. Neocon Martin Peretz's anti-Lamont diatribe on the editorial page of the WSJ (August 7) is riddled with terms like "Stalinist," "fellow traveling habits," "Stalin's agents," etc. These neocons seem to live in inexplicable fear that Joe Stalin will rise from the dead, pick up an ax and come after them. But after the Red-baiting (in 2006!), Peretz gets down to the brass tacks of foreign policy ­ and he faults Lamont on four counts, all having to do with Israel of course. First is the war on Iraq, which Peretz assures us, is "a just cause." Second come the Palestinians where Peretz's words are especially interesting: "Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to Israel and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here he blithely assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated." And worse, after his primary victory Lamont had a private dinner with Shimon Peres in NYC. Who knows, Rabin too may rise from the dead with Oslo in tow ­ when the neocons thought they had put a stake through the heart of that beast with the murder of Rabin that they engineered. Third comes Iran and to this Martin Peretz devotes most space. Here he quotes Lamont disapprovingly: "We should work diplomatically and aggressively to give them (the Iranians) reasons why they don't need to build a (nuclear) bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive diplomacy. I'd like to bring the allies in when we can. I'd like to use carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the debate. Lieberman is the one who keeps talking about keeping the military option on the table." Horror of horrors: end the war on Iraq, devise a peace between Palestinians and Israelis and forget about war on Iran. Sounds like a Commie to me.

For the moment the Lobby and the neocons have suffered a setback, but they are nothing if not dogged. It took them over a decade after the first Gulf War to foist upon us the occupation of Iraq for which they yearned. And they will try to make a comeback in Connecticut. To weaken the Lobby for 2008, Lieberman must be defeated in Connecticut in the Fall. In itself that will be sweet. Failing that, we may all be one step closer to a worldwide conflagration sparked in the Middle East. I would say that Lamont needs a good mushroom cloud advert.

John Walsh can be reached at [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh08282006.html

[F6 note -- in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=12630009 and preceding]

[StephanieVanbryce]

And to think what they said about Walt & Mearsheimer . . .

by Adam Horowitz on September 14, 2011



For more coverage of the Israel lobby see Commentary. [ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/14/obama-religious-jews-and-elderly-jews/#more-767916 ]

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/09/and-to-think-what-they-said-about-walt-mearsheimer.html WITH great! COMMENTS