Avigdor Leiberman, Israel’s newly appointed “Minister for Strategic Threats” has very productively been launching more than a few of them. Today, in a single speech, he:
- * urged Israel to take back full control of Gaza’s border with Egypt,
* called for the assassination of entire (elected into office) Hamas leadership,
* dismissed elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas as too ineffectual to be worth dealing with, and
* dismissed the entire post-Oslo peace process, ditto.
In Israel, Meretz Party chairman Yossi Beilin has denounced Lieberman’s statements and called on PM Olmert to dismiss him from office.
But what about the attitude expressed toward Lieberman’s statements by US policymakers? So my question to the men and women in the US administration, and the members of the US Congress is this:
How much longer will you use the tax monies and the legitimacy given you by the US citizenry to fund and give strong political support to a government that contains an individual so damaging to the peoples of the Middle East and the security of key US interests in the region?
“How much longer will you use the tax monies and the legitimacy given you by the US citizenry to fund and give strong political support to a government that contains an individual so damaging to the peoples of the Middle East and the security of key US interests in the region?”
It has long seemed to me that the US should reduce our annual aid to Israel by whatever amount that country spends subsidising the illegal West Bank settlements – and continue to reduce it by that amount every year until Israel withdraws into internationally recognized borders.
Most people in the US don’t care what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. I think certain parties in the Israeli leadership mistake that indifference for support. Some of them get so carried away, they think the American people would also support an Israeli attack on Iran. But that’s a whole different ballgame. It’s not that Americans care about Iranians. They don’t. But they really hate scary situations that make them feel out of control. War with Iran would be very scary and out of control. Hey look, Israel already blew it once, as far as the American people are concerned, with that piss-poor showing against Hezbollah. Any more mistakes like that, and it’ll be time to clean house.
Kudos to Mr. Beilin for speaking out against Leiberman’s vicious policies.
And kudos to the crowd of people who gathered in protest of the destruction of that commander’s house in the refugee camp, showing the bravery and passive resistance Helena had described for the women at that mosque incident, and for someone in the IDF who finally realized that airstrikes that endanger so many civilian lives can’t go on.
Except for the US I think it is safe to say the entire world is shocked, disgusted and at long last fed up at the continuing conflict in Isr/Pal and especially at Israel’s bombing in Lebanon. I know that was the final straw for me.
Our aid to Israel is nothing but a political and weapons industry ponzi scheme with taxpayers dollars.
Our money could be better spent in nations that are starving and suffering horrible health issues.
And will someone get the Israeli lobby out of our goverment please? It is a slap in the face to every decent American to see US elected politicans openly serving a foreign country and defending things like the use of cluster bombs on civilians in Lebanon. It’s the most sickening thing I have ever seen.
Let’s face the fact that the 40% of the US population that are Evangelicals believe some Bible nonsense about supporting Israel and hurting her enemies. It is most of the remaining 60% that really don’t pay attention or just don’t care. Thus Bush plays to this base by allowing the most extreme of the right wing Israelis to do whatever they choose to the Palestinians. The Israeli left and the supporters of peace have all but disappeared from the Israeli political scene, at least in part , because the US has abandoned them. We have abandoned our policies of the past 40 years because our leader seeks the support of that 40% who believe in fairy tales.
I have always felt that the US should be responsible for repairing the bomb damage in Lebanon, with the funds to come from our Israel aid money.
The US policy will continue as long as the citizenry are ignorant and propagandized by the media.
Gordon Reed
“I have always felt that the US should be responsible for repairing the bomb damage in Lebanon, with the funds to come from our Israel aid money.”
I remember reading in a previous one of these comments threads that the bombs were manufactured in the US. This is irrelevant, since their proliferation was in any case funded by the US, but I was interested if anyone knows.
“Let’s face the fact that the 40% of the US population that are Evangelicals believe some Bible nonsense about supporting Israel and hurting her enemies. It is most of the remaining 60% that really don’t pay attention or just don’t care. ”
Reminds me of this TomDispatch article I read recently, that pointed out that the major undeveloped and unanalyzed story of the recent Election Day was that only 40.4% of voters showed up. http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=139783
Also, I think it’s a truism that the more passionate you are about a cause, the more likely you are to take it up. Which accounts for why you have less apathetic and uninterested people voting and more deeply convinced, or religious, or nationalist, people who are clearly swayed by some ideology or association or other.
Anyway, Jack, you make a good point about the fairy tales. In particular, one of the major fairy tales we are confronted with is that of David and Goliath: where Israel is the threatened David struggling against the might Goliath, the huge mass of angry Islamists that want to throw David into the river! Now, this assumption has been the modus operandi of Israeli foreign policy since at least 1967, but I think that this particular fairy tale needs some reevaluation in terms of historical context. And there is such a thing as a fairy objective interpretation of history. So now, Israel has many nuclear weapons and is still occupying land that they took from the Palestinians, namely the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights from the Syrians, and more. Further, they have ensured that Palestinians have horrible living conditions, that their civil servants do not get paid due to Israel holding onto their taxes, and that they regularly die from Israeli shelling of civilians. Israel, this threatened David, somehow went into Lebanese territory and killed civilians there and destroyed their infrastructure and killed clearly marked UN observers.
Now, Israel is no longer David, rather, it is Goliath. It has peace treaties with most of its neighbors, and has the military and financial support of the regional behemoth- the US.
“It was only the considerably more shocking and awful events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally persuaded the emperor and his people to surrender.”
Is this true?
The US knew by June/July ’45 that the Japanese were looking for ways to end the war. They simply weren’t willing to surrender unconditionally, i.e. to ditch the emperor. And that stance didn’t change after Nagasaki, either.
Truman then had the choice of either dropping more bombs or accepting the stripe of surrender he’d rejected out of hand at Potsdam…
“They took the babies and children from their mothers’ arms, beat the women and shot the children,” said one witness, Adam Gamer Umar. “They said, ‘We’re killing your sons and when you have more we will come and kill them too’.”
Just felt like posting that here, it’s been a while since you posted on Darfur. And I’m trying very hard not to ” convey the false impression (as Messinger did) that all the deaths have been inflicted by one side in the conflict.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2459992,00.html
The US knew by June/July ’45 that the Japanese were looking for ways to end the war. They simply weren’t willing to surrender unconditionally, i.e. to ditch the emperor.
I think that most historians agree that the problem was not so much with the emperor as with the empire. The military leadership wanted to maintain a portion of the empire – perhaps Korea and Manchuria – as a condition to surrender.
Is it politically correct to call Lieberman:
1) a Jewish terrorist ?
2) an anti-Semite who wants to wipe out all the members of a democratic elected government (Hamas) ?
3)a wise politician in the israeli government?
If his dispicable statement was uttered by an Arab or a Muslim, how will the civilised nations react?