POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW PORTER IN THE TELEGRAPH
This is an abuse of language and logic.
There is nothing paranoid about seeking safety when someone is genuinely trying to kill you.
NATO planes and missiles have bombed Gaddafi’s compound on several occasions, killing his son once.
NATO – and of course that is just a fig leaf term for the United States – has completely distorted the UN mandate for a no-fly zone into a bomb-anything-that-moves effort, including the leader of the country.
It’s the purest abuse of power to be doing this, entering into a civil war with high-tech, low-risk (for us) killing machines, trying to tip the balance against a man we don’t like.
Gaddafi is not a pleasant man, but then neither are the last few prime ministers of Israel, men who have killed more civilians almost certainly than Gaddafi has.
And places like Bahrain are just forgotten despite leaders who are every bit as ready to shoot people down in the streets.
There is nothing about this whole enterprise that has anything to do with human rights or democratic values.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
YET ONE MORE MEANINGLESS EDITORIAL ABOUT “THE PEACE PROCESS” – NETANYAHU’S SPEECH TO CONGRESS
POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
This is rather a question-begging editorial.
What “peace process”?
There never has been a “peace process” except on the pages of newspapers.
Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was basically a declaration of war against President Obama.
Israel hasn’t the slightest intention of seeking peace, and it never has.
It wants land, other people’s land, and it wants that land minus the people.
The only people waging war in Israel/Palestine are Israelis.
The only people who conduct an illegal and immoral blockade, keeping a million and a half people at near-starvation level nourishment are Israelis.
The only people who keep another couple of million people in virtual bondage are Israelis.
The only people showing utter contempt for numerous United Nations Resolutions are Israelis.
The only people who carry out piracy on the high seas are Israelis.
So wouldn’t you think it the logical thing to do to pressure Israel?
Blubbery stuff, always talking about two fighting sides, is rather like the school teacher who refuses to deal with the obvious bully in class, instead going on about how everyone is responsible, an ineffective and dishonest approach.
Of course, now that we have a 39.6% majority government led by Harper, Canada will not for a long time demonstrate its dedication to even-handedness and genuine concern for a solution.
Harper’s attitude is like the American Congressmen applauding a dishonest and bloody man who shouldn’t even have been addressing them, each of them applauding to keep the special-interest campaign funds flowing.
____________________________
‘A case can be made that the attack on Gaza was “justified”‘
George Orwell must smile bitter smiles when he looks down to observe such claims.
There was no more justification for Israel’s savage act than the Serbian leaders – one, Mladic, just arrested – had in their savage acts against Muslims.
Four hundred children and another thousand people slaughtered in what is essentially a big fenced-in refugee camp.
For what?
Because Israel does like the government the people elected.
Israel used its muscle-bound friend, the United States, to get a fairly elected government – a number of them are in fact middle-class professionals – declared as terrorists. It’s called demonizing your enemy.
Show me the hundreds of Israelis Hamas slaughtered. Show me the leaders of Israel Hamas has assassinated. Show me the hundreds of buildings in Israel Hamas has destroyed or damaged.
You can’t, but we repeat this garbage claim about a government Israel doesn’t like.
Readers should know that Hamas in its early days was husbanded by Israel’s secret service in order to grow an opponent against Arafat’s Fatah.
Well, they succeeded, but then Israel turned around and claimed the people they nurtured are horrible terrorists.
What Israel wants, as a first choice, is for the people of Gaza to leave their homes en masse and emigrate somewhere, anywhere, they don’t care where. As a second choice, Israel wants a Palestinian government that does exactly what it is told in every respect, a kind of Step-n-Fetch-It bureaucracy to do their dirty work and never raise any issues, a government like the ones apartheid South Africa set up in the Bantustans.
There will never be what most people call peace in Israel/Palestine until Israel is pressured to be reasonable.
Obama is the first American president to understand this, but he has been rather weak in implementing the required policies. He knows the power of The Lobby. He saw it in action with the bloody Netanyahu speaking to Congress, a place he no more reason to be than Mladic would.
____________________________
“Why should any Palestinian recognize Israel’s “right to exist” without even knowing where Israel’s borders are – and while Palestinians are under occupation?”
Exactly.
What is Israel? Where is Israel?
Besides, it is a normal diplomatic procedure to withhold recognition for negotiations.
The United States has done it many times.
In 1948 Truman was not inclined to recognize the self-declared state of Israel.
A monumental lobbying effort by American Jews, plus Truman’s weakness in the coming election, convinced him otherwise.
_____________________________
“The Arabs and the Jews have been engaged in old fashioned tribal warfare for anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 years”
That’s simply a fable.
Someone with a reasonable knowledge of history would never make this statement.
As a matter of fact, it is very likely that much of the Palestinian people are the actual descendants of the Jews resident when Rome conquered the area.
Rome typically did not remove populations in its conquests.
Only if people were difficult and refused to accept Rome’s authority did they come to a bad end, and that did not happen in Palestine.
Also, it is well known that Jews and Arabs are closely linked genetically, both falling under the heading “Semitic.”
No one knows exactly how the Jewish people arose, but the best thinking puts them as a group of religious dissidents in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) who, owing to the unpopularity of their views and harsh religious rules (they would likely all have been ultra-orthodox originally) were much disliked and left.
The pattern resembles that of the original cantankerous English Puritans of the early 17th century. They were extremely unpopular, and many migrated.
This further note on ancient Jews and Arabs, Muhammad always respected the Jews and called them the “People of the Book.” In his earliest religious instructions, the rule was to pray facing towards Jerusalem. He changed it later to Mecca for various reasons. But Moses is still regarded as a prophet.
There’s a lot of loose-lipped talk and propaganda out there on these matters, and it is a reflection of how one-sided the information is that we receive in the press.
This is rather a question-begging editorial.
What “peace process”?
There never has been a “peace process” except on the pages of newspapers.
Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was basically a declaration of war against President Obama.
Israel hasn’t the slightest intention of seeking peace, and it never has.
It wants land, other people’s land, and it wants that land minus the people.
The only people waging war in Israel/Palestine are Israelis.
The only people who conduct an illegal and immoral blockade, keeping a million and a half people at near-starvation level nourishment are Israelis.
The only people who keep another couple of million people in virtual bondage are Israelis.
The only people showing utter contempt for numerous United Nations Resolutions are Israelis.
The only people who carry out piracy on the high seas are Israelis.
So wouldn’t you think it the logical thing to do to pressure Israel?
Blubbery stuff, always talking about two fighting sides, is rather like the school teacher who refuses to deal with the obvious bully in class, instead going on about how everyone is responsible, an ineffective and dishonest approach.
Of course, now that we have a 39.6% majority government led by Harper, Canada will not for a long time demonstrate its dedication to even-handedness and genuine concern for a solution.
Harper’s attitude is like the American Congressmen applauding a dishonest and bloody man who shouldn’t even have been addressing them, each of them applauding to keep the special-interest campaign funds flowing.
____________________________
‘A case can be made that the attack on Gaza was “justified”‘
George Orwell must smile bitter smiles when he looks down to observe such claims.
There was no more justification for Israel’s savage act than the Serbian leaders – one, Mladic, just arrested – had in their savage acts against Muslims.
Four hundred children and another thousand people slaughtered in what is essentially a big fenced-in refugee camp.
For what?
Because Israel does like the government the people elected.
Israel used its muscle-bound friend, the United States, to get a fairly elected government – a number of them are in fact middle-class professionals – declared as terrorists. It’s called demonizing your enemy.
Show me the hundreds of Israelis Hamas slaughtered. Show me the leaders of Israel Hamas has assassinated. Show me the hundreds of buildings in Israel Hamas has destroyed or damaged.
You can’t, but we repeat this garbage claim about a government Israel doesn’t like.
Readers should know that Hamas in its early days was husbanded by Israel’s secret service in order to grow an opponent against Arafat’s Fatah.
Well, they succeeded, but then Israel turned around and claimed the people they nurtured are horrible terrorists.
What Israel wants, as a first choice, is for the people of Gaza to leave their homes en masse and emigrate somewhere, anywhere, they don’t care where. As a second choice, Israel wants a Palestinian government that does exactly what it is told in every respect, a kind of Step-n-Fetch-It bureaucracy to do their dirty work and never raise any issues, a government like the ones apartheid South Africa set up in the Bantustans.
There will never be what most people call peace in Israel/Palestine until Israel is pressured to be reasonable.
Obama is the first American president to understand this, but he has been rather weak in implementing the required policies. He knows the power of The Lobby. He saw it in action with the bloody Netanyahu speaking to Congress, a place he no more reason to be than Mladic would.
____________________________
“Why should any Palestinian recognize Israel’s “right to exist” without even knowing where Israel’s borders are – and while Palestinians are under occupation?”
Exactly.
What is Israel? Where is Israel?
Besides, it is a normal diplomatic procedure to withhold recognition for negotiations.
The United States has done it many times.
In 1948 Truman was not inclined to recognize the self-declared state of Israel.
A monumental lobbying effort by American Jews, plus Truman’s weakness in the coming election, convinced him otherwise.
_____________________________
“The Arabs and the Jews have been engaged in old fashioned tribal warfare for anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 years”
That’s simply a fable.
Someone with a reasonable knowledge of history would never make this statement.
As a matter of fact, it is very likely that much of the Palestinian people are the actual descendants of the Jews resident when Rome conquered the area.
Rome typically did not remove populations in its conquests.
Only if people were difficult and refused to accept Rome’s authority did they come to a bad end, and that did not happen in Palestine.
Also, it is well known that Jews and Arabs are closely linked genetically, both falling under the heading “Semitic.”
No one knows exactly how the Jewish people arose, but the best thinking puts them as a group of religious dissidents in ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) who, owing to the unpopularity of their views and harsh religious rules (they would likely all have been ultra-orthodox originally) were much disliked and left.
The pattern resembles that of the original cantankerous English Puritans of the early 17th century. They were extremely unpopular, and many migrated.
This further note on ancient Jews and Arabs, Muhammad always respected the Jews and called them the “People of the Book.” In his earliest religious instructions, the rule was to pray facing towards Jerusalem. He changed it later to Mecca for various reasons. But Moses is still regarded as a prophet.
There’s a lot of loose-lipped talk and propaganda out there on these matters, and it is a reflection of how one-sided the information is that we receive in the press.
Friday, May 20, 2011
THE LAUGHABLE PRESTON MANNING IS AT AGAIN - PONTIFICATING FROM HIS DESK AS SELF-APPOINTED PRESIDENT OF A SELF-CREATED INSTITUTE - SHIFT IN POLITICAL GRAVITY?
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY PRESTON MANNING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Political gravity has shifted in the country?
Harper through years of work has increased his support from about 30% to 39.6%.
Almost two-thirds of Canadians still reject this man and his party.
The only real lessons from the election are three.
One, we have a serious democratic deficit in Canada when less than 40% of votes turns into a majority.
Honest and conscientious men concerned with our affairs would work towards correcting the situation, not crow about it.
Two, dirty and unethical tactics do achieve some success in politics. The United States is rife with them. Now Harper has introduced them to Canada, debasing the decency of our politics.
As an interesting sidelight here, we get a hint here of how little a role religion - both Harper and Manning being religious - actually plays in genuine ethics.
Three, leadership matters, and the Liberals did not have any.
They appointed a weak man who missed almost every opportunity to respond forcefully to Harper's half-truths, evasions, and outright dishonesty.
This weak man also sneered at a coalition which would have long ago stopped Harper, and he was inept enough to end up being accused of plotting to have one. Pathetic.
___________________________
"Preston just keeps looking better and younger every time his photo appears..."
Preston had a complete make-over at some point, maybe as part of his initiation as president and CEO of the one-man institute founded by himself.
Hair dyed.
Eyebrows skillfully dyed to match.
Dumped the granny glasses and fit-up with contact lens
New wardrobe.
Possibly a few needle-loads of botox.
Coaching on how to look at the camera without making people laugh at the results.
I do think he missed the chance to turn up the back collar of his jacket, a la 1959 rockers. That would be in keeping with his newly-learned smile, rather suggestive of an early Elvis snarl.
Bet with his self-appointed institute job he has a shiny car, maybe something sporty like a pink and black convertible.
The guy's clearly now a regular chick-magnet.
But when he opens his mouth or takes his quill pen from the inkstand, we hear or read the same old crotchety noises.
What was it Obama said during the campaign about putting lipstick on a pig...?
Political gravity has shifted in the country?
Harper through years of work has increased his support from about 30% to 39.6%.
Almost two-thirds of Canadians still reject this man and his party.
The only real lessons from the election are three.
One, we have a serious democratic deficit in Canada when less than 40% of votes turns into a majority.
Honest and conscientious men concerned with our affairs would work towards correcting the situation, not crow about it.
Two, dirty and unethical tactics do achieve some success in politics. The United States is rife with them. Now Harper has introduced them to Canada, debasing the decency of our politics.
As an interesting sidelight here, we get a hint here of how little a role religion - both Harper and Manning being religious - actually plays in genuine ethics.
Three, leadership matters, and the Liberals did not have any.
They appointed a weak man who missed almost every opportunity to respond forcefully to Harper's half-truths, evasions, and outright dishonesty.
This weak man also sneered at a coalition which would have long ago stopped Harper, and he was inept enough to end up being accused of plotting to have one. Pathetic.
___________________________
"Preston just keeps looking better and younger every time his photo appears..."
Preston had a complete make-over at some point, maybe as part of his initiation as president and CEO of the one-man institute founded by himself.
Hair dyed.
Eyebrows skillfully dyed to match.
Dumped the granny glasses and fit-up with contact lens
New wardrobe.
Possibly a few needle-loads of botox.
Coaching on how to look at the camera without making people laugh at the results.
I do think he missed the chance to turn up the back collar of his jacket, a la 1959 rockers. That would be in keeping with his newly-learned smile, rather suggestive of an early Elvis snarl.
Bet with his self-appointed institute job he has a shiny car, maybe something sporty like a pink and black convertible.
The guy's clearly now a regular chick-magnet.
But when he opens his mouth or takes his quill pen from the inkstand, we hear or read the same old crotchety noises.
What was it Obama said during the campaign about putting lipstick on a pig...?
Saturday, May 14, 2011
AN IGNORANT COLUMNIST TERMS CRITICS OF THE STORY OF BIN LADEN'S ASSASSINATION PARANOID - JOURNALISM AT ITS LOWEST SERVING ONLY POWERFUL INTERESTS
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRSHAD MANJI IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"The paranoid can't handle the truth"
The arrogance and just plain ignorance of this article are appalling.
First, Ms Manji lumps together a great variety of people under one heading, the "paranoid."
While there certainly are paranoid people out there, there are also critical thinkers and skeptics galore. Calling them paranoid is willfully ignorant.
Indeed, since paranoia is a genuine mental-health problem, Ms Manji's use of the word flies in the face of all our society's good intentions about removing the stigma from mental health issues.
Would Ms Manji say "Brain cancer patients can't handle the truth"? If she did, she would be castigated for her ignorance and crudeness.
Well, just so the statement about "paranoid."
The childishness of her writing is demonstrated too in an over-used, trite expression from a movie, "You can't handle the truth!" That's high-school writing.
The fact is, in politics and international affairs, we do live in a shadow world where very little of what's in newspapers is complete or accurate.
Why is that? Because very great matters are at stake involving the projects of very powerful organizations.
When, in the early 1960s, a New York Times reporter discovered the impending invasion of Cuba by an American proxy army, the paper suppressed the story. To have done otherwise would have been to invite the wrath of the CIA and Pentagon and White House and an end of the kind of cooperation and leaks so vital to any newspaper.
Does Ms Manji not understand that most of the “great” news stories of the past depend upon such cooperation on a selective basis?
The CIA a few years ago violated its own rules about the release of files of a certain age. It did this concerning the matter of Guatamala in the 1950s. The CIA engineered the coup that brought down an elected government (only one of a number so treated in that era), but judged it was still too early to release the facts on its dirty work.
Even now, almost three-quarters of a century after World War II, new secrets from that time are sometimes released.
We only learned the other day that Israel from 1967 into the 1990s engineered the statelessness of 140,000 Palestinians who happened to travel abroad. Our press never told us that ugly story.
What about apartheid South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal, created with the cooperation of Israel? Our press never covered it. What about Israel’s own still secret nuclear arsenal? What about the fact that President Kennedy made efforts to stop Israel’s getting the bomb? Did our press cover those?
There are countless examples.
Somehow I doubt Ms Manji would show the same deference towards the powers that be and stupid use of language were she writing about women’s issues, but then I may be wrong. She may well be as inept on any issue as she is here and has been in other columns.
_______________________________
"Manji is one of those new breed of wannabe narcissistic writers, who thinks everything they write is important."
Absolutely.
I think it's possible this silly person went to one of those primary schools where kids in grade four have their "works" published (put into covers resembling a real book) and put on display shelf.
The immense ego of this woman - an ego supported by absolutely no demonstration of real learning or intellectual talent - would have been force-fed by such educational silliness into the throbbing monster she unleashes with every "column" she writes.
At least a throwback propagandist like Margaret Wente can be funny at times, but Ms Manji has no discernible talent of any kind.
She displays only earnest arrogance with a remarkable lack of genuine education.
"The paranoid can't handle the truth"
The arrogance and just plain ignorance of this article are appalling.
First, Ms Manji lumps together a great variety of people under one heading, the "paranoid."
While there certainly are paranoid people out there, there are also critical thinkers and skeptics galore. Calling them paranoid is willfully ignorant.
Indeed, since paranoia is a genuine mental-health problem, Ms Manji's use of the word flies in the face of all our society's good intentions about removing the stigma from mental health issues.
Would Ms Manji say "Brain cancer patients can't handle the truth"? If she did, she would be castigated for her ignorance and crudeness.
Well, just so the statement about "paranoid."
The childishness of her writing is demonstrated too in an over-used, trite expression from a movie, "You can't handle the truth!" That's high-school writing.
The fact is, in politics and international affairs, we do live in a shadow world where very little of what's in newspapers is complete or accurate.
Why is that? Because very great matters are at stake involving the projects of very powerful organizations.
When, in the early 1960s, a New York Times reporter discovered the impending invasion of Cuba by an American proxy army, the paper suppressed the story. To have done otherwise would have been to invite the wrath of the CIA and Pentagon and White House and an end of the kind of cooperation and leaks so vital to any newspaper.
Does Ms Manji not understand that most of the “great” news stories of the past depend upon such cooperation on a selective basis?
The CIA a few years ago violated its own rules about the release of files of a certain age. It did this concerning the matter of Guatamala in the 1950s. The CIA engineered the coup that brought down an elected government (only one of a number so treated in that era), but judged it was still too early to release the facts on its dirty work.
Even now, almost three-quarters of a century after World War II, new secrets from that time are sometimes released.
We only learned the other day that Israel from 1967 into the 1990s engineered the statelessness of 140,000 Palestinians who happened to travel abroad. Our press never told us that ugly story.
What about apartheid South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal, created with the cooperation of Israel? Our press never covered it. What about Israel’s own still secret nuclear arsenal? What about the fact that President Kennedy made efforts to stop Israel’s getting the bomb? Did our press cover those?
There are countless examples.
Somehow I doubt Ms Manji would show the same deference towards the powers that be and stupid use of language were she writing about women’s issues, but then I may be wrong. She may well be as inept on any issue as she is here and has been in other columns.
_______________________________
"Manji is one of those new breed of wannabe narcissistic writers, who thinks everything they write is important."
Absolutely.
I think it's possible this silly person went to one of those primary schools where kids in grade four have their "works" published (put into covers resembling a real book) and put on display shelf.
The immense ego of this woman - an ego supported by absolutely no demonstration of real learning or intellectual talent - would have been force-fed by such educational silliness into the throbbing monster she unleashes with every "column" she writes.
At least a throwback propagandist like Margaret Wente can be funny at times, but Ms Manji has no discernible talent of any kind.
She displays only earnest arrogance with a remarkable lack of genuine education.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
BORIS JOHNSON MAYOR OF LONDON CALLS BIN LADEN ASSASSINATION A DESERVED EXECUTION - A LACK OF LOGIC ARGUING FOR BARBARISM - MEANWHILE UN REPORT ON ISRAEL'S KILLING OF CHILDREN
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY BORIS JOHNSON IN THE TELEGRAPH
These are pathetic arguments, Boris Johnson.
Using every bit of logic you have - and that's not much when you cut out the unwarranted assumptions and unproved assertions you make - it could be used to defend almost any act against an accused where the public had been pre-disposed by a barrage of publicity against him to utterly dislike him.
That is not how a free society works.
Nor is it how we have an international community bound by standards of human decency and democratic values.
Yours are the arguments of a 16th century tyrant.
You either have laws and obey them or you do not, in which case anything is possible.
What these events represent is nothing other than the principles of might makes right and to the victor belongs the spoils.
I regard it is barbaric and irresponsible that a man in your position, Mayor of London, in the great nation which gave the world most of its concepts of democratic government and justice through centuries of struggle, speaks as you do.
__________________________
Response to another reader:
No, my friend, you are the one being ridiculous, actually rather more than ridiculous. Yours are the statements of a member of a raving lynch-mob.
And your numbers of bin Laden's supposed crimes, too, are beyond ridiculous. Did you get them from the Paranoids' Guide to the Internet Site?
There is not one shred of proof we have ever been given that bin Laden is responsible for anything but intensely disliking the United States and the House of Saud.
We do not know bin Laden's connection with 9/11.
I don't say there is none. I simply don't know whether there is, and you, whether you recognize the fact or not, also do not know.
And if we had proof, it belonged before the Court in The Hague. Full stop.
But the United States has never recognized the International court for War Crimes.
And why not?
Because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would face the Court themselves on the gravest charges.
We certainly don't need paranoid speculation about what those gentlemen did. We know they destroyed an advanced society for a generation, inflicting or contributing to the deaths of about a million souls.
By the way, the number of people killed in 9/11 ten years ago was almost exactly equal to the number of innocent people Israel has killed in just the last few years of its activities in Gaza and Lebanon and on the high seas.
And only recently, we have had a report from Prof. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying that Israeli forces killed 1,335 children in direct military operations and arbitrary shootings over the last decade.
But, of course, Israel only has contempt for the U.N., just as it has for every other international organization dealing with justice or human values.
These are pathetic arguments, Boris Johnson.
Using every bit of logic you have - and that's not much when you cut out the unwarranted assumptions and unproved assertions you make - it could be used to defend almost any act against an accused where the public had been pre-disposed by a barrage of publicity against him to utterly dislike him.
That is not how a free society works.
Nor is it how we have an international community bound by standards of human decency and democratic values.
Yours are the arguments of a 16th century tyrant.
You either have laws and obey them or you do not, in which case anything is possible.
What these events represent is nothing other than the principles of might makes right and to the victor belongs the spoils.
I regard it is barbaric and irresponsible that a man in your position, Mayor of London, in the great nation which gave the world most of its concepts of democratic government and justice through centuries of struggle, speaks as you do.
__________________________
Response to another reader:
No, my friend, you are the one being ridiculous, actually rather more than ridiculous. Yours are the statements of a member of a raving lynch-mob.
And your numbers of bin Laden's supposed crimes, too, are beyond ridiculous. Did you get them from the Paranoids' Guide to the Internet Site?
There is not one shred of proof we have ever been given that bin Laden is responsible for anything but intensely disliking the United States and the House of Saud.
We do not know bin Laden's connection with 9/11.
I don't say there is none. I simply don't know whether there is, and you, whether you recognize the fact or not, also do not know.
And if we had proof, it belonged before the Court in The Hague. Full stop.
But the United States has never recognized the International court for War Crimes.
And why not?
Because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would face the Court themselves on the gravest charges.
We certainly don't need paranoid speculation about what those gentlemen did. We know they destroyed an advanced society for a generation, inflicting or contributing to the deaths of about a million souls.
By the way, the number of people killed in 9/11 ten years ago was almost exactly equal to the number of innocent people Israel has killed in just the last few years of its activities in Gaza and Lebanon and on the high seas.
And only recently, we have had a report from Prof. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying that Israeli forces killed 1,335 children in direct military operations and arbitrary shootings over the last decade.
But, of course, Israel only has contempt for the U.N., just as it has for every other international organization dealing with justice or human values.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
BIN LADEN'S ASSASSINATION - JUST COLD-BLOODED MURDER - AMERICA IS BUILDING A LAWLESS WORLD - THE NIGHTMARE EXAMPLE OF ISRAEL - IF YOU WANT THE PROTECTION OF LAW YOU MUST OBEY IT
POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Bin Laden’s killing was simply cold-blooded murder.
A bunch of heavily-armed thugs grabbed an unarmed man and shot him in the head, and with his family in the house.
A disgusting act, no matter what he may have been guilty of.
He could have been taken to The Hague and charged, but that might require some proof of something.
And we have never, never been given one ounce of genuine evidence that bin Laden was guilty of anything except intensely disliking the United States and its good friend, the House of Saud.
But murder and vengeance and abuse have become American passions, with people cheering murderers and Obama sending fleets of drones and “kill-teams” into Pakistan regularly, taking the lives of hundreds of innocent people.
And even when they do kill a suspected "bad guy," it is done with no legal authority or procedure, no charges or trial. What is the difference from the former Argentinean junta’s death squads making people disappear? None.
And America's high-handed treatment of Pakistan, demanding the right to enter and kill people at will, has had terrible effects within that poor country. Thousands have died with people in revolt against the government's quiet acceptance of America's death machines and "kill-teams" wondering around the land assassinating people as they please.
Our only protection as free societies is in our laws. It has taken centuries to build those laws and treaties and to gain widespread honoring of them.
But the United States has unilaterally decided, since the war criminal Bush and now very much under the savagely unethical Obama, to decide who to bomb and kill in the world regardless of treaties, regardless of laws, regardless of long-term consequences.
You cannot make the world a better place with that kind of vicious descent into lawlessness.
There is the terrible example of Israel's lawless behavior before us. It has kidnapped, tortured, abused, murdered, committed piracy, and plotted against the legitimate interests of its neighbors for decades. It stands in contempt of the United Nations and international law and humanitarian agreements of every description.
And what is the result of all that horror? A small group of people, armed to the teeth and hiding behind walls, huddled in a garrison state surrounded by people whose customs and very existence it has utter contempt for. Its government has built a future for its people of endless abuse and trampling on the rights of others, a bleak netherworld with no hope for decency, integrity, honesty, or any ideals concerning human rights or meaningful democracy to shine through.
That is what the United States is copying, precisely, and the results will be the same, precisely.
If you want to live in a world of laws, then you must honor the laws. There is no other choice.
Bin Laden’s killing was simply cold-blooded murder.
A bunch of heavily-armed thugs grabbed an unarmed man and shot him in the head, and with his family in the house.
A disgusting act, no matter what he may have been guilty of.
He could have been taken to The Hague and charged, but that might require some proof of something.
And we have never, never been given one ounce of genuine evidence that bin Laden was guilty of anything except intensely disliking the United States and its good friend, the House of Saud.
But murder and vengeance and abuse have become American passions, with people cheering murderers and Obama sending fleets of drones and “kill-teams” into Pakistan regularly, taking the lives of hundreds of innocent people.
And even when they do kill a suspected "bad guy," it is done with no legal authority or procedure, no charges or trial. What is the difference from the former Argentinean junta’s death squads making people disappear? None.
And America's high-handed treatment of Pakistan, demanding the right to enter and kill people at will, has had terrible effects within that poor country. Thousands have died with people in revolt against the government's quiet acceptance of America's death machines and "kill-teams" wondering around the land assassinating people as they please.
Our only protection as free societies is in our laws. It has taken centuries to build those laws and treaties and to gain widespread honoring of them.
But the United States has unilaterally decided, since the war criminal Bush and now very much under the savagely unethical Obama, to decide who to bomb and kill in the world regardless of treaties, regardless of laws, regardless of long-term consequences.
You cannot make the world a better place with that kind of vicious descent into lawlessness.
There is the terrible example of Israel's lawless behavior before us. It has kidnapped, tortured, abused, murdered, committed piracy, and plotted against the legitimate interests of its neighbors for decades. It stands in contempt of the United Nations and international law and humanitarian agreements of every description.
And what is the result of all that horror? A small group of people, armed to the teeth and hiding behind walls, huddled in a garrison state surrounded by people whose customs and very existence it has utter contempt for. Its government has built a future for its people of endless abuse and trampling on the rights of others, a bleak netherworld with no hope for decency, integrity, honesty, or any ideals concerning human rights or meaningful democracy to shine through.
That is what the United States is copying, precisely, and the results will be the same, precisely.
If you want to live in a world of laws, then you must honor the laws. There is no other choice.
Saturday, May 07, 2011
BIN LADEN'S ASSASSINATION - ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY ON SHOOTING AN UNARMED FUGITIVE - THE GRAND INQUISITOR TALKS WITH JESUS - WHAT A DARK THING AMERICA HAS BECOME
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN INTIFADA REPEATED FROM THE TELEGRAPH
The Archbishop has long been one of the West's most important moral critics, as one might expect from a genuine Christian leader.
Contrast his tough and honest views with the kind of diplomatic pap we typically get from, say, the Vatican.
Or compare his moral bravery with certain American Christian fundamentalists who sound as though their job was to serve as cheerleaders for the American military-industrial complex.
In books and stories about the past, we invariably praise the kind of character we find in the Archbishop.
But in real life, the establishment and substantial parts of the population have no use for them, because their tough views and moral authority call into question accepted clichés and create inconvenient truths.
Recall the powerful and famous scene in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus returns to earth to meet the Grand Inquisitor, and the two have a conversation.
Jesus himself recognizes none of his teachings in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Inquisitor grows irritated with someone he regards as a nuisance, finally sending Jesus off to be heard from no more.
That is, sadly, the immortal truth of how power and establishment welcome honesty, decency, and truth: they don't, ever.
America has descended to the ghastly moral level of Israel in all of its reactions to 9/11: illegal arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassinations, ignoring international laws and treaties, imposing harsh new laws completely out of the spirit of its Constitution, maintaining an international torture gulag, and making deals with monsters like General Dostum.
When you throw away everything of genuine human value in a place like America, all you are left with is a great imperial power ready to crush anyone with whom it disagrees.
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/obama-bin-ladens-assassination-nothing-to-celebrate-and-no-justice-at-all-considering-the-facts-this-is-just-one-more-proof-of-might-makes-right/
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/more-on-bin-ladens-assassination-the-nonsence-of-al-qaeda-web-sites-making-announcements-the-nonsense-of-al-qaeda-background-on-bin-laden/
The Archbishop has long been one of the West's most important moral critics, as one might expect from a genuine Christian leader.
Contrast his tough and honest views with the kind of diplomatic pap we typically get from, say, the Vatican.
Or compare his moral bravery with certain American Christian fundamentalists who sound as though their job was to serve as cheerleaders for the American military-industrial complex.
In books and stories about the past, we invariably praise the kind of character we find in the Archbishop.
But in real life, the establishment and substantial parts of the population have no use for them, because their tough views and moral authority call into question accepted clichés and create inconvenient truths.
Recall the powerful and famous scene in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus returns to earth to meet the Grand Inquisitor, and the two have a conversation.
Jesus himself recognizes none of his teachings in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Inquisitor grows irritated with someone he regards as a nuisance, finally sending Jesus off to be heard from no more.
That is, sadly, the immortal truth of how power and establishment welcome honesty, decency, and truth: they don't, ever.
America has descended to the ghastly moral level of Israel in all of its reactions to 9/11: illegal arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassinations, ignoring international laws and treaties, imposing harsh new laws completely out of the spirit of its Constitution, maintaining an international torture gulag, and making deals with monsters like General Dostum.
When you throw away everything of genuine human value in a place like America, all you are left with is a great imperial power ready to crush anyone with whom it disagrees.
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/obama-bin-ladens-assassination-nothing-to-celebrate-and-no-justice-at-all-considering-the-facts-this-is-just-one-more-proof-of-might-makes-right/
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/more-on-bin-ladens-assassination-the-nonsence-of-al-qaeda-web-sites-making-announcements-the-nonsense-of-al-qaeda-background-on-bin-laden/
Friday, May 06, 2011
MORE ON BIN LADEN'S ASSASSINATION - THE NONSENCE OF AL-QAEDA WEB SITES MAKING ANNOUNCEMENTS - THE NONSENSE OF AL-QAEDA - BACKGROUND ON BIN LADEN
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Al-Qaeda said?
You certainly do not have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to look on such a statement with hard cynical eyes.
First, we have the word of former British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as well as other distinguished people that there is no "Al-Qaeda," the term being a made-up catch-all for "bad guys" in general.
Since the word literally means "toilet," it has always seemed unlikely there is such an organization even without the testimony of people who know.
Second, we pick these things up off a supposed Al-Qaeda web site?
Please, how long do you think it would take - with the NSA and CIA and other agencies constantly monitoring the Internet - to have special forces breaking down your door if you had a web site designated as an official Al-Qaeda web site?
A day? Maybe hours?
This kind of report lacks journalistic credibility.
_________________________
Response to another reader who says:
"So really the threat is still there and all must be vigilant."
Vigilant for what?
People-eating aliens from space?
The Rapture?
Anti-Christ?
Spores from space?
Asteroids on a collision course with earth?
That is a ridiculous mode of thought which the propagandists and powers that be exploit to the hilt.
People who do murderous things are always part of life, especially in places like the United States.
You don't have call them terrorists, just criminals or violent mental cases.
And responsible citizens have always reported truly doubtful behaviors to authorities.
Today we have lunatics day and night seeing things that aren't there.
__________________________
Response to another reader who asks:
"Was there ever a Bin Laden?"
Yes.
He was a son of a distinguished and rich Saudi family and he is known to have intensely disliked the ruling House of Saud, and that's why he could not live in his own homeland.
He served in America's proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
He is reputed to have been a brave man and a quite intelligent one.
Being an enemy of the House of Saud was itself a very dark mark against him for the United States after his being used in Afghanistan, but he also grew to dislike the United States.
He disliked the U.S. for manipulating his people over Afghanistan. They fought against the Soviets based on the notion that the Soviets were godless interlopers in Afghanistan, set on suppressing Muslims - that is the kind of line the CIA repeated endlessly while handing out Stinger missiles, rifle grenades, and packages of plastique.
After the Soviet defeat, he saw the U.S. beginning to do the very things they used to inflame hatred of the Soviets in a long series of events which saw Americans encroaching on what he and others regarded as sacred land. American troops in Saudi Arabia, land of the Prophet, and supported by the corrupt House of Saud, were especially detested.
Beyond that, our knowledge is pretty sketchy.
The U.S. never offered proof of his involvement in 9/11.
Indeed, the Taleban government in Afghanistan was willing to extradite him when the U.S. requested it after 9/11, if evidence were supplied, that being the normal international procedure in all extraditions.
It was the U.S. who refused, a fact never explained.
The U.S. made up its mind to invade Afghanistan and teach the world a lesson in the meaning of vengeance.
The odd fact is it was not the Taleban who even invited bin Laden to live in the country, it was the previous Northern Alliance government, the very same people the U.S. used to fight the Taleban, the very people who rule there today, and many of them are just as intolerant and backward as the Taleban.
The Taleban, while backward and nasty in their views, need never have been our actual enemies.
Many responsible people believe bin Laden was killed in the horrific bombing of Tora Bora a decade ago. If such were the case, it is reasonable the U.S. would want to keep it a secret to prevent the creation of a martyr.
I don't know, but I was somewhat inclined to accept that.
This recent claim of his assassination, even if true, is so full of uncertainties and inconsistencies that great doubts exist as to what actually happened, and I am not referring to pictures or the lack of them.
It is quite possible that the Pakistani government actually gave him up to the CIA in return for some benefit - as perhaps a slowdown or halt to all the drone attacks and special forces assassinations.
There is a credible report from Pakistan that it was the Pakistani military who landed and entered the compound – this would have the effect of handing Obama a prize for his re-election – something which has not been at all certain.
Any government would be tired and angry about such high-handed treatment. But American activity's impact on fundamentalist areas of Pakistan has been devastating in terms of terror incidents against the government for its silent cooperation. American arrogance has caused Pakistan to pay a high price in instability, literally tens of thousand of deaths.
On the other hand, Obama may just have staged a big show, a setting for announcing what may have been true for ten years.
I don’t see what gruesome pictures would settle since we can be sure there would have been pictures taken ten years ago in the mountains of Tora Bora.
Whatever is the case, I’m sure he is dead, but again we have no idea as to what his responsibility for 9/11 or other acts was. It does seem to me that he provided the United States with something of an Emmanuel Goldstein figure, the mythical arch villain with whom Oceana constantly frightened its citizens in Orwell’s 1984.
Al-Qaeda said?
You certainly do not have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to look on such a statement with hard cynical eyes.
First, we have the word of former British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as well as other distinguished people that there is no "Al-Qaeda," the term being a made-up catch-all for "bad guys" in general.
Since the word literally means "toilet," it has always seemed unlikely there is such an organization even without the testimony of people who know.
Second, we pick these things up off a supposed Al-Qaeda web site?
Please, how long do you think it would take - with the NSA and CIA and other agencies constantly monitoring the Internet - to have special forces breaking down your door if you had a web site designated as an official Al-Qaeda web site?
A day? Maybe hours?
This kind of report lacks journalistic credibility.
_________________________
Response to another reader who says:
"So really the threat is still there and all must be vigilant."
Vigilant for what?
People-eating aliens from space?
The Rapture?
Anti-Christ?
Spores from space?
Asteroids on a collision course with earth?
That is a ridiculous mode of thought which the propagandists and powers that be exploit to the hilt.
People who do murderous things are always part of life, especially in places like the United States.
You don't have call them terrorists, just criminals or violent mental cases.
And responsible citizens have always reported truly doubtful behaviors to authorities.
Today we have lunatics day and night seeing things that aren't there.
__________________________
Response to another reader who asks:
"Was there ever a Bin Laden?"
Yes.
He was a son of a distinguished and rich Saudi family and he is known to have intensely disliked the ruling House of Saud, and that's why he could not live in his own homeland.
He served in America's proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
He is reputed to have been a brave man and a quite intelligent one.
Being an enemy of the House of Saud was itself a very dark mark against him for the United States after his being used in Afghanistan, but he also grew to dislike the United States.
He disliked the U.S. for manipulating his people over Afghanistan. They fought against the Soviets based on the notion that the Soviets were godless interlopers in Afghanistan, set on suppressing Muslims - that is the kind of line the CIA repeated endlessly while handing out Stinger missiles, rifle grenades, and packages of plastique.
After the Soviet defeat, he saw the U.S. beginning to do the very things they used to inflame hatred of the Soviets in a long series of events which saw Americans encroaching on what he and others regarded as sacred land. American troops in Saudi Arabia, land of the Prophet, and supported by the corrupt House of Saud, were especially detested.
Beyond that, our knowledge is pretty sketchy.
The U.S. never offered proof of his involvement in 9/11.
Indeed, the Taleban government in Afghanistan was willing to extradite him when the U.S. requested it after 9/11, if evidence were supplied, that being the normal international procedure in all extraditions.
It was the U.S. who refused, a fact never explained.
The U.S. made up its mind to invade Afghanistan and teach the world a lesson in the meaning of vengeance.
The odd fact is it was not the Taleban who even invited bin Laden to live in the country, it was the previous Northern Alliance government, the very same people the U.S. used to fight the Taleban, the very people who rule there today, and many of them are just as intolerant and backward as the Taleban.
The Taleban, while backward and nasty in their views, need never have been our actual enemies.
Many responsible people believe bin Laden was killed in the horrific bombing of Tora Bora a decade ago. If such were the case, it is reasonable the U.S. would want to keep it a secret to prevent the creation of a martyr.
I don't know, but I was somewhat inclined to accept that.
This recent claim of his assassination, even if true, is so full of uncertainties and inconsistencies that great doubts exist as to what actually happened, and I am not referring to pictures or the lack of them.
It is quite possible that the Pakistani government actually gave him up to the CIA in return for some benefit - as perhaps a slowdown or halt to all the drone attacks and special forces assassinations.
There is a credible report from Pakistan that it was the Pakistani military who landed and entered the compound – this would have the effect of handing Obama a prize for his re-election – something which has not been at all certain.
Any government would be tired and angry about such high-handed treatment. But American activity's impact on fundamentalist areas of Pakistan has been devastating in terms of terror incidents against the government for its silent cooperation. American arrogance has caused Pakistan to pay a high price in instability, literally tens of thousand of deaths.
On the other hand, Obama may just have staged a big show, a setting for announcing what may have been true for ten years.
I don’t see what gruesome pictures would settle since we can be sure there would have been pictures taken ten years ago in the mountains of Tora Bora.
Whatever is the case, I’m sure he is dead, but again we have no idea as to what his responsibility for 9/11 or other acts was. It does seem to me that he provided the United States with something of an Emmanuel Goldstein figure, the mythical arch villain with whom Oceana constantly frightened its citizens in Orwell’s 1984.
Monday, May 02, 2011
OBAMA BIN LADEN'S ASSASSINATION - NOTHING TO CELEBRATE AND NO JUSTICE AT ALL - CONSIDERING THE FACTS THIS IS JUST ONE MORE PROOF OF MIGHT MAKES RIGHT
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Not much satisfaction in this.
He was killed by a far greater butcher, the one responsible for a million deaths in Iraq, three million in Vietnam, and who knows how many in Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Chile, and a dozen other places.
Only the pathetic Peace Prize President - who regularly has his drones killing people in Pakistan - takes any real satisfaction because he is looking forward to a difficult election.
Obama's re-election is hardly something to celebrate, but that is what this unbelievably costly deed concerns.
By the way, there has never been one shred of proof offered of Bin Laden's guilt of anything except not liking the United States.
The FBI never even put him on its Most Wanted List.
Justice has been done?
I truly believe the predatory United States has no concept of what justice is.
_____________________________
The excesses reflected in many comments simply prove the impact of propaganda and public gullibility.
Even if he was guilty as charged - and we have never, never been offered proof - his crime is smaller than many crimes of the same American military who killed him.
His crimes, if so they be, also are absolutely no greater than those of Israel, and just in recent years.
Here is a state which killed 400 children in Gaza and another 1,000 adults, about the same number in Southern Lebanon, who knows how many week-in-week-out in raids of various towns, and of course murdered about ten people on the high seas in an act of savage piracy.
There is no justice in any of this. Only more proof, if any were needed, that might makes right.
Not much satisfaction in this.
He was killed by a far greater butcher, the one responsible for a million deaths in Iraq, three million in Vietnam, and who knows how many in Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Chile, and a dozen other places.
Only the pathetic Peace Prize President - who regularly has his drones killing people in Pakistan - takes any real satisfaction because he is looking forward to a difficult election.
Obama's re-election is hardly something to celebrate, but that is what this unbelievably costly deed concerns.
By the way, there has never been one shred of proof offered of Bin Laden's guilt of anything except not liking the United States.
The FBI never even put him on its Most Wanted List.
Justice has been done?
I truly believe the predatory United States has no concept of what justice is.
_____________________________
The excesses reflected in many comments simply prove the impact of propaganda and public gullibility.
Even if he was guilty as charged - and we have never, never been offered proof - his crime is smaller than many crimes of the same American military who killed him.
His crimes, if so they be, also are absolutely no greater than those of Israel, and just in recent years.
Here is a state which killed 400 children in Gaza and another 1,000 adults, about the same number in Southern Lebanon, who knows how many week-in-week-out in raids of various towns, and of course murdered about ten people on the high seas in an act of savage piracy.
There is no justice in any of this. Only more proof, if any were needed, that might makes right.
Sunday, May 01, 2011
LIBERAL PARTY'S STRANGE DEATH ? PERHAPS BUT THERE IS AN ARC OF POWER FOR ALL PARTIES FAMILIES AND EMPIRES
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Parties, like great families or national empires, do have a limited life.
A great family like the Eatons rose to being a household word and then declined to nothingness in several decades. Except for the name on the Eaton Centre, no ordinary young person of the next generation will even know who they were.
It is possible, but I don't absolutely think so, that Canada's Liberals have begun just that same descent along the arc of power.
To explain this phenomenon of declining power, it is not necessary to assert notions like being spoiled by success.
After all, the set of problems facing a nation changes over time, so much so that in periods of say fifty years, the old problems are forgotten or unrecognized by a different generation.
There have been countless examples of this in my lifetime, the greatest surely being America's barbarous war in Vietnam.
Today, I'm sure if you asked most young adults about that ghastly effort, killing three million people in ten years of terror, many would not know where Vietnam is located and many would have no idea of when the war occurred.
That inevitable process of fading mass memory over the generations is part of why parties fade away.
But also, leadership always plays a key role. We've all seen in great family dynasties the way the iron-willed founders are succeeded often by less capable sons and grandsons.
Just look at Trudeau, one of our great leaders – whether you like his policies or not, he was a great leader. His son Justin, a handsome and intelligent young man, clearly does not possess the same talents and ruthless drive for success. One can almost feel the difference in temperament and attitude and drive.
And the Liberal Party has made some bad choices in its leadership recently.
Then there is the inevitable role of luck and fortune in the rise and fall of parties and families.
Old man Kennedy in the United States made his serious money through work with the Mob during Prohibition. Take away the historical mistake of American Prohibition and likely the Kennedy family would never have risen to such heights.
The bad luck of the Liberals has been two-fold, at least.
First, Quebec having been taken out of play in national politics. Second, the appearance of an opponent more dark and ruthless in his application and abuse of power, Stephen Harper, than they have ever faced.
Harper is simply a new phenomenon in Canada - a man who is perfectly comfortable with the Republican Right types like a Dick Cheney or a Tom Delay or Newt Gingrich - ugly, bad-tempered, ruthless men all.
The Liberals have never faced such a man before. Moreover they do it not with a Trudeau or a Chretien but an Ignatieff, a man of no political experience and little political talent.
____________________________
From another reader:
"Shouldn't Bob Rae be front and centre reminding us what an NDP Government can do to You !!!"
Bob Rae was a responsible and capable premier.
Those were dangerous days economically, and Rae got us through.
He tried the path of the least hurt to people. If it had been someone of Harper's ilk, I guarantee thousands would have lost their jobs, permanently.
Just wait, if Harper gets his majority, the budget will be balanced on tens of thousands losing their jobs as whole departments and programs are abolished.
To say anything else is just ignorance.
The people still whining about Rae Days make themselves sound like pathetic big babies.
Parties, like great families or national empires, do have a limited life.
A great family like the Eatons rose to being a household word and then declined to nothingness in several decades. Except for the name on the Eaton Centre, no ordinary young person of the next generation will even know who they were.
It is possible, but I don't absolutely think so, that Canada's Liberals have begun just that same descent along the arc of power.
To explain this phenomenon of declining power, it is not necessary to assert notions like being spoiled by success.
After all, the set of problems facing a nation changes over time, so much so that in periods of say fifty years, the old problems are forgotten or unrecognized by a different generation.
There have been countless examples of this in my lifetime, the greatest surely being America's barbarous war in Vietnam.
Today, I'm sure if you asked most young adults about that ghastly effort, killing three million people in ten years of terror, many would not know where Vietnam is located and many would have no idea of when the war occurred.
That inevitable process of fading mass memory over the generations is part of why parties fade away.
But also, leadership always plays a key role. We've all seen in great family dynasties the way the iron-willed founders are succeeded often by less capable sons and grandsons.
Just look at Trudeau, one of our great leaders – whether you like his policies or not, he was a great leader. His son Justin, a handsome and intelligent young man, clearly does not possess the same talents and ruthless drive for success. One can almost feel the difference in temperament and attitude and drive.
And the Liberal Party has made some bad choices in its leadership recently.
Then there is the inevitable role of luck and fortune in the rise and fall of parties and families.
Old man Kennedy in the United States made his serious money through work with the Mob during Prohibition. Take away the historical mistake of American Prohibition and likely the Kennedy family would never have risen to such heights.
The bad luck of the Liberals has been two-fold, at least.
First, Quebec having been taken out of play in national politics. Second, the appearance of an opponent more dark and ruthless in his application and abuse of power, Stephen Harper, than they have ever faced.
Harper is simply a new phenomenon in Canada - a man who is perfectly comfortable with the Republican Right types like a Dick Cheney or a Tom Delay or Newt Gingrich - ugly, bad-tempered, ruthless men all.
The Liberals have never faced such a man before. Moreover they do it not with a Trudeau or a Chretien but an Ignatieff, a man of no political experience and little political talent.
____________________________
From another reader:
"Shouldn't Bob Rae be front and centre reminding us what an NDP Government can do to You !!!"
Bob Rae was a responsible and capable premier.
Those were dangerous days economically, and Rae got us through.
He tried the path of the least hurt to people. If it had been someone of Harper's ilk, I guarantee thousands would have lost their jobs, permanently.
Just wait, if Harper gets his majority, the budget will be balanced on tens of thousands losing their jobs as whole departments and programs are abolished.
To say anything else is just ignorance.
The people still whining about Rae Days make themselves sound like pathetic big babies.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
IGNATIEFF'S "LIBERAL VISION" SPEECH - VISIONS IN GENERAL ARE OFTEN CLICHES OR DELUSIONS - IGNATIEFF MAKES ONE MORE INEPT ATTEMPT TO CONVINCE US HE IS NOT A POLITICAL LIABILITY
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
I do have a problem with "visions" generally, but, when someone has no legitimate right to be called a liberal, talks of the "liberal vision," I can only laugh.
I cannot think of one evidence of Ignatieff’s having a genuinely liberal spirit.
Here are just some of the facts:
He does not speak out on any of the great issues of our day.
He didn't subject himself to a democratic contest to gain his leadership job.
He provided the ammunition - his own foolish words at his first convention - for Harper attack ads against the extremely decent and thoughtful Mr Dion.
He came back to Canada rasping and blubbering on one occasion about how you cannot ever oppose America because they'll make you pay.
Presumably that absolutely amoral advice applies even when what America engages in is mass murder, as it was in Iraq.
He was published and broadcast in the United States defending the mass murder in Iraq and accepting "mild" torture.
He has distinguished himself in nothing, shown no political courage, since becoming leader.
He well deserves to fall on his face.
I will always hold his ambition and ego responsible if Harper gains a majority and proceeds to tear down the decent Canada we all love.
Intellectuals are supposed to "know themselves," and it couldn't be more clear that Ignatieff either has no idea of his own limited political capacities or has such an ego he believes himself capable of tasks for which he has no talent.
Good-bye, Mr Ignatieff, you won't be missed.
As the saying goes, don't forget to close the door on your way out.
____________________________
Again, so long as Quebec has been out of play for the Liberals and Conservatives - the very basis for the horrible minority freak show we've experienced for some years - the only way to defeat Harper is through a coalition.
Mr. Dion and Jack Layton both understood this basic truth, but the Don Quixote of Canadian Liberal politics, the one wearing the colors of the Pentagon on his sleeve, did not.
This silly man actually sneered at Dion's signing up to a coalition.
Ignatieff is so ineffective a politician, he countered Harper's appeal to ignorance with his dishonest "stab in the back" stuff about coalitions "stealing elections" only by the most insipid statements.
Well, Harper has been a prime minister with the support of only one-third of Canadians. The two-thirds against him all represent some degree or other of progressive vote.
That's not democracy.
A coalition of the two-thirds would have been.
And just try telling the dozens of governments in the world who have been or are ruled by coalitions that they stole elections.
Only the truly ignorant repeat this Hitler-like mantra.
Coaltions are everywhere and always a valid part of parliamentary government.
You blew it, Ignatieff, big time.
Unfortunately, we'll all have to pay for your blundering and meddling.
I do have a problem with "visions" generally, but, when someone has no legitimate right to be called a liberal, talks of the "liberal vision," I can only laugh.
I cannot think of one evidence of Ignatieff’s having a genuinely liberal spirit.
Here are just some of the facts:
He does not speak out on any of the great issues of our day.
He didn't subject himself to a democratic contest to gain his leadership job.
He provided the ammunition - his own foolish words at his first convention - for Harper attack ads against the extremely decent and thoughtful Mr Dion.
He came back to Canada rasping and blubbering on one occasion about how you cannot ever oppose America because they'll make you pay.
Presumably that absolutely amoral advice applies even when what America engages in is mass murder, as it was in Iraq.
He was published and broadcast in the United States defending the mass murder in Iraq and accepting "mild" torture.
He has distinguished himself in nothing, shown no political courage, since becoming leader.
He well deserves to fall on his face.
I will always hold his ambition and ego responsible if Harper gains a majority and proceeds to tear down the decent Canada we all love.
Intellectuals are supposed to "know themselves," and it couldn't be more clear that Ignatieff either has no idea of his own limited political capacities or has such an ego he believes himself capable of tasks for which he has no talent.
Good-bye, Mr Ignatieff, you won't be missed.
As the saying goes, don't forget to close the door on your way out.
____________________________
Again, so long as Quebec has been out of play for the Liberals and Conservatives - the very basis for the horrible minority freak show we've experienced for some years - the only way to defeat Harper is through a coalition.
Mr. Dion and Jack Layton both understood this basic truth, but the Don Quixote of Canadian Liberal politics, the one wearing the colors of the Pentagon on his sleeve, did not.
This silly man actually sneered at Dion's signing up to a coalition.
Ignatieff is so ineffective a politician, he countered Harper's appeal to ignorance with his dishonest "stab in the back" stuff about coalitions "stealing elections" only by the most insipid statements.
Well, Harper has been a prime minister with the support of only one-third of Canadians. The two-thirds against him all represent some degree or other of progressive vote.
That's not democracy.
A coalition of the two-thirds would have been.
And just try telling the dozens of governments in the world who have been or are ruled by coalitions that they stole elections.
Only the truly ignorant repeat this Hitler-like mantra.
Coaltions are everywhere and always a valid part of parliamentary government.
You blew it, Ignatieff, big time.
Unfortunately, we'll all have to pay for your blundering and meddling.
Monday, April 25, 2011
IS DONALD TRUMP THE LEADER AMERICA DESERVES? YES BUT NOT FOR THE REASONS YOU MIGHT EXPECT
EXPANSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IAN BROWN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Donald Trump is, indeed, the perfect fit as leader of contemporary America: a big-mouthed bore who never seriously thinks about anything and is always ready to communicate attitudes as though he came equipped with a megaphone for a mouth.
The youth cult is part and parcel of America, and Trump also fits there perfectly. He fluffs and dyes his pathetic patch hair, growing it far longer than a man of his age should and combing it as though he believes he is still a teenager and the date is 1960. The total effect is rather like an exhibit in Madam Tussaud’s chamber of horrors.
Money is Trump’s only interest, which corresponds nicely with America’s only interest. And ditto Trump’s favorite hobby of pushing people around.
It all fits so perfectly.
Here is Mr. America for 2012, a deflated old tire of a man who just keeps pounding away by force of his sheer arrogance and greed.
He reminds me very much of what some of the late and most corrupt Roman emperors must have been like.
Surely, the perfect captain for a sinking ship.
Donald Trump is, indeed, the perfect fit as leader of contemporary America: a big-mouthed bore who never seriously thinks about anything and is always ready to communicate attitudes as though he came equipped with a megaphone for a mouth.
The youth cult is part and parcel of America, and Trump also fits there perfectly. He fluffs and dyes his pathetic patch hair, growing it far longer than a man of his age should and combing it as though he believes he is still a teenager and the date is 1960. The total effect is rather like an exhibit in Madam Tussaud’s chamber of horrors.
Money is Trump’s only interest, which corresponds nicely with America’s only interest. And ditto Trump’s favorite hobby of pushing people around.
It all fits so perfectly.
Here is Mr. America for 2012, a deflated old tire of a man who just keeps pounding away by force of his sheer arrogance and greed.
He reminds me very much of what some of the late and most corrupt Roman emperors must have been like.
Surely, the perfect captain for a sinking ship.
A COLUMNIST SAYS IGNATIEFF IS A MASTER OF DELIVERY BUT NO ONE IS LISTENING - HOW WRONG THE COLUMNIST IS - THE COMING HELL OF A HARPER MAJORITY
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JOHN IBBITSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Speaking of being a "master of delivery," consider Ignatieff's ridiculous ad running over and over on CBC Radio, the one about his mother - yes, you heard right, his mother - and health care.
It is absolutely off-putting.
Instead of talking hard and seriously about a major issue, this so-called master of delivery talks about mom.
Who in his right mind is going to pay attention to that?
It's a pathetic effort to play on emotions associated with motherhood to gain support. Yuck.
And it is clearly also a weak further attempt to cement the idea that he is, after all, a local boy.
Ignatieff has always been overrated as an intellectual, as a speaker, and as a man concerned with human rights.
Many people clearly see all this, and it's why Ignatieff is falling on his face.
Again, what "master of delivery" plays Pa Kettle on a long cross-country bus trip and thinks he is doing anything worthwhile?
Playing Pa Kettle was already an admission of failure.
People aren't listening because they know the Ignatieff Show is boring, and his season is about to be cancelled.
He will win only a bitter legacy of being responsible for Stephen Harper's winning a five year term, free to tear apart the Canada so many of us love.
Ignatieff is the perfect example of hubris - a man of no political talents and not having the character to resist taking what was handed to him by some sorry backroom politicians.
_______________________
From another reader:
"Freedom of choice, Harper and, his Evangelical Christian Theo-Cons if successful at a Majority Government dream of a roll back of same-sex marriage laws plus enshrine fetal rights on the citizens of Canada"
Harper represents a far more pervasive threat than that, an act which would be next to impossible.
Harper will eliminate federal subsidies to parties, thus opening the gates to complete special-interest campaign contributions. You want to see what a set of disasters this can open up? Look at the United States where this is the way it’s done.
Supreme Court appointments represent the some kind of long-term danger as campaign-finance changes.
Harper will continue marching in lock-step with the United States on a huge range of issues, from purchasing the clunker F-35 which costs the GNP of a small nation to sending more Canadians on America's now regular crusades against those with whom it disagrees and to a perimeter treaty and to giving the US a special place in our Arctic.
Of course, we will continue for years to hear intellectual trash about criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. Maybe we'll even get a law in that police-state direction.
He will build his new gulag of prisons, no matter what the cost.
The Foreign Service - Pearson's beloved Foreign Service - will continue to be told that there are no such things as child soldiers.
Our reputation internationally goes from being another Sweden to being another Pinochet's Chile.
Program cuts to end the deficit. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Speaking of being a "master of delivery," consider Ignatieff's ridiculous ad running over and over on CBC Radio, the one about his mother - yes, you heard right, his mother - and health care.
It is absolutely off-putting.
Instead of talking hard and seriously about a major issue, this so-called master of delivery talks about mom.
Who in his right mind is going to pay attention to that?
It's a pathetic effort to play on emotions associated with motherhood to gain support. Yuck.
And it is clearly also a weak further attempt to cement the idea that he is, after all, a local boy.
Ignatieff has always been overrated as an intellectual, as a speaker, and as a man concerned with human rights.
Many people clearly see all this, and it's why Ignatieff is falling on his face.
Again, what "master of delivery" plays Pa Kettle on a long cross-country bus trip and thinks he is doing anything worthwhile?
Playing Pa Kettle was already an admission of failure.
People aren't listening because they know the Ignatieff Show is boring, and his season is about to be cancelled.
He will win only a bitter legacy of being responsible for Stephen Harper's winning a five year term, free to tear apart the Canada so many of us love.
Ignatieff is the perfect example of hubris - a man of no political talents and not having the character to resist taking what was handed to him by some sorry backroom politicians.
_______________________
From another reader:
"Freedom of choice, Harper and, his Evangelical Christian Theo-Cons if successful at a Majority Government dream of a roll back of same-sex marriage laws plus enshrine fetal rights on the citizens of Canada"
Harper represents a far more pervasive threat than that, an act which would be next to impossible.
Harper will eliminate federal subsidies to parties, thus opening the gates to complete special-interest campaign contributions. You want to see what a set of disasters this can open up? Look at the United States where this is the way it’s done.
Supreme Court appointments represent the some kind of long-term danger as campaign-finance changes.
Harper will continue marching in lock-step with the United States on a huge range of issues, from purchasing the clunker F-35 which costs the GNP of a small nation to sending more Canadians on America's now regular crusades against those with whom it disagrees and to a perimeter treaty and to giving the US a special place in our Arctic.
Of course, we will continue for years to hear intellectual trash about criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. Maybe we'll even get a law in that police-state direction.
He will build his new gulag of prisons, no matter what the cost.
The Foreign Service - Pearson's beloved Foreign Service - will continue to be told that there are no such things as child soldiers.
Our reputation internationally goes from being another Sweden to being another Pinochet's Chile.
Program cuts to end the deficit. You ain't seen nothing yet.
MORE ON THE SILLY BUSINESS OF NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS - AND MORE ON MICHAEL IGNATIEFF AS A POLITICIAN
ADDITIONAL RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Response to another reader’s comment:
While I agree with your view of traditional Conservatives, genuinely decent men like Joe Clark or Peter Lougheed or Robert Stanfield, what does the once-great Liberal Party now bring us?
An arrogant putz - there is no other word for this dull and uninspiring man who doesn't even have the faith in democratic values to gain his leadership through democratic means, just as he was parachuted into his riding at the beginning of his Don Quixote quest for political success.
And in the end, his values are nothing of which to be proud. He supported the slaughter of a million Iraqis. He speaks out on none - absolutely none - of the world's great human-rights problems today despite the flaks’ puff stuff about him as human-rights defender.
He doesn’t object to the sad waste of our lives and treasure wasted in Afghanistan. He doesn’t question the idiocy of Canadian planes joining the Americans in their Libyan crusade, taking sides in a civil war he doesn’t even understand. Israel is just fine continuing its apartheid policies involving assassination, torture, kidnapping, and the regular theft of other peoples’ homes.
And he doesn't say he won't serve Pentagon interests by, for example, buying (helping to subsidize) the world's costliest clunker of a plane, the F-35. No, he dances around saying the procedures were wrong, and he would correct them. Talk about a mamby-pamby nothing.
He goes on the radio with a pathetic ad about his mother and healthcare. Yuck, even a clever high-schooler would know better.
He is a totally inept politician, and his terrible dam-ing legacy will likely be the next five years of Harper's ripping the guts out of our beloved country and its international reputation as a fair and decent place, turning Canada into a thin-gruel version of Republican Texas.
Thanks, Michael Ignatieff, for not having the courage to admit you do not have what it takes while yet having the diseased ego to proceed anyway.
_____________________
A newspaper has no business offering "shoulds" and "it were bests" to its readers, especially in political or religious matters.
It is paternalistic at best, just plain arrogant at worst.
Your job is to report events as scrupulously as you can - in effect, supplying the crucial information for an informed democracy.
Response to another reader’s comment:
While I agree with your view of traditional Conservatives, genuinely decent men like Joe Clark or Peter Lougheed or Robert Stanfield, what does the once-great Liberal Party now bring us?
An arrogant putz - there is no other word for this dull and uninspiring man who doesn't even have the faith in democratic values to gain his leadership through democratic means, just as he was parachuted into his riding at the beginning of his Don Quixote quest for political success.
And in the end, his values are nothing of which to be proud. He supported the slaughter of a million Iraqis. He speaks out on none - absolutely none - of the world's great human-rights problems today despite the flaks’ puff stuff about him as human-rights defender.
He doesn’t object to the sad waste of our lives and treasure wasted in Afghanistan. He doesn’t question the idiocy of Canadian planes joining the Americans in their Libyan crusade, taking sides in a civil war he doesn’t even understand. Israel is just fine continuing its apartheid policies involving assassination, torture, kidnapping, and the regular theft of other peoples’ homes.
And he doesn't say he won't serve Pentagon interests by, for example, buying (helping to subsidize) the world's costliest clunker of a plane, the F-35. No, he dances around saying the procedures were wrong, and he would correct them. Talk about a mamby-pamby nothing.
He goes on the radio with a pathetic ad about his mother and healthcare. Yuck, even a clever high-schooler would know better.
He is a totally inept politician, and his terrible dam-ing legacy will likely be the next five years of Harper's ripping the guts out of our beloved country and its international reputation as a fair and decent place, turning Canada into a thin-gruel version of Republican Texas.
Thanks, Michael Ignatieff, for not having the courage to admit you do not have what it takes while yet having the diseased ego to proceed anyway.
_____________________
A newspaper has no business offering "shoulds" and "it were bests" to its readers, especially in political or religious matters.
It is paternalistic at best, just plain arrogant at worst.
Your job is to report events as scrupulously as you can - in effect, supplying the crucial information for an informed democracy.
LEAK SUGGESTS CERN HAS DISCOVERED THE HIGGS BOSON
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD GRAY IN THE TELEGRAPH
Here is the world's genuinely important news.
Politicians' blubbering, Royal weddings, the Pope's silly words - all reported as significant, which they are not.
Meanwhile, the real heroes of our age, the scientists and mathematicians, quietly work away making astounding discoveries of incalculable value.
Here is the world's genuinely important news.
Politicians' blubbering, Royal weddings, the Pope's silly words - all reported as significant, which they are not.
Meanwhile, the real heroes of our age, the scientists and mathematicians, quietly work away making astounding discoveries of incalculable value.
FORGET THE GIMMICKS ON EARTH DAY? INDEED ALL OF THEM - THERE REALLY IS ONLY ONE GREEN PROBLEM
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW MIALL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Forget gimmicks indeed. Earth Hour. Earth Day. Sustainable this or that.
But you can also forget focusing on energy as Andrew Miall advocates.
There is only one genuine Green Problem, all the others, and especially energy, being nothing but symptoms.
Human population growth is threatening its own environment.
But the United States Congress still won't even support aid measures which go against right-wing religious beliefs.
The crazy old Pope keeps preaching nonsense about which he knows nothing.
And off we are on a trajectory of doubling our already groaning population in a matter of decades.
Halve the world's population, and we could have a good life on earth for all.
It truly is that simple, but also that hard.
Our prejudices and superstitions and that little reptilian piece in our brain condemns us to not deal with the most obvious of problems.
Forget gimmicks indeed. Earth Hour. Earth Day. Sustainable this or that.
But you can also forget focusing on energy as Andrew Miall advocates.
There is only one genuine Green Problem, all the others, and especially energy, being nothing but symptoms.
Human population growth is threatening its own environment.
But the United States Congress still won't even support aid measures which go against right-wing religious beliefs.
The crazy old Pope keeps preaching nonsense about which he knows nothing.
And off we are on a trajectory of doubling our already groaning population in a matter of decades.
Halve the world's population, and we could have a good life on earth for all.
It truly is that simple, but also that hard.
Our prejudices and superstitions and that little reptilian piece in our brain condemns us to not deal with the most obvious of problems.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
CRITICISM OF THE LIBERAL STRATEGY - MORE ON COALITION - TAX RISES - SERVICE CUTS - HEALTH CARE AS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE - AMERICA'S COMING ECONOMIC TSUNAMI
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
I think you may be right, Mr. Simpson, as you so often are, being the country’s most astute political commentator after the late Jim Travers.
But the Liberals' great strategic blunder, pre-dating this insipid election effort, was appointing Ignatieff as their leader.
The insiders responsible for this did our country a grave disservice, as will become painfully evident if Harper gets even the slimmest of majorities.
Ignatieff has almost no political skill and appears to be a poor strategic thinker.
More than that, I think it remarkable that a man with the reputation of "intellectual" shows almost no original or innovative thought. I have heard nothing from him that makes me say to myself, well, that’s right.
And, for a guy who supposedly was such a human-rights figure, his voice is never heard on the great human-rights issues of our day, but then I knew his genuine record – not the puff - before he opportunistically made his return to Canada.
Now while there are virtually no good qualities in Harper – poor ethics, poor democratic values, pandering to groups, a poor record of appointments, and a shabby record of dismissing those he doesn’t want to hear from - you must grant him a great strategic grasp of our electoral process. He is a one-man show of extraordinary dark political skills.
A political anti-Christ, I think it fair to say. Not a leader, not an idea man, not a man of principle, but a calculating machine to achieve dominance - a very dangerous man indeed.
Some choice we are given.
No wonder people in Quebec are turning to Layton, who like Elizabeth May, actually stands for some principles, whether they are ones you agree with or not.
But that too is go-nowhere development.
Layton's replacing some of Duceppe 's seats does not really change the dangerous political calculus that may see Canada damaged seriously over the next five years.
What a great irony that Ignatieff, the very man who literally sneered at Dion's coalition, should be attacked by Harper for intending "to steal the election" with a coalition.
What a great disappointment that so many Canadians are revealed to be so poorly educated that they believe Harper's school-yard name-calling.
So long as we have the situation we have in Quebec - where Conservatives and Liberals are not contenders - the only way to stop a minority tyrant-bully like Harper is through a coalition.
And coalition is both legal and entirely proper in a parliamentary democracy.
Dion understood that. The pathetic Ignatieff has not.
_______________________________
"Promising to TAX more? Mr Simpson, I'm pretty sure that even Mr. Ignatieff isn't that silly."
Here again is the kind of stuff which painfully reveals lack of education in a good deal of our voting populace, and ignorant democracy is dangerous.
How does anyone like that think Harper will make his vast deficits disappear?
And, at the same time, pay for gigantic and unnecessary commitments like buying that costly clunker of a fighter plane and building a new gulag of prisons?
Of course, the simplistic answer is cuts, and I, as a retired professional economist, am not against judicious cuts.
But you cannot spend the way Harper spends and have a deficit like those Harper has created, and cut your way to a balanced budget.
People like the commenter do not understand that some of our program spending is actually a competitive advantage for Canada, health care being a chief one.
We spend about 2/3 per capita to what Americans spend on health care, and - the statistics speak loudly - we get better overall outcomes by measures such as population longevity and infant mortality.
It is largely because of our health care that traditionally American corporations such as the big auto companies have viewed Canada as an efficient place in which to invest.
Not because our workers work harder, not because they are better educated, but because they start on the job by the companies not having to buy the horribly costly and inefficient private health insurance they must buy in America.
And just so for other of our national programs.
____________________________________
The single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is, and has long been, heath-care costs.
It is nothing to envy.
Anyway, readers, I think it quite possible that all the political sound and fury will be for nothing.
Despite Harper and his flaks' constant blubbering about his economic management, when the other shoe falls in the United States, all bets are off.
People are still walking away from their mortgages there in huge numbers, and the country is spending money it does not have with wars on multiple fronts. It is also running unbelievable deficits in every account you care to mention, from the national budget to current accounts and to personal debt.
A gigantic economic tsunami is approaching the United States, and despite Harper's childish bragging, it will not spare Canada.
I think you may be right, Mr. Simpson, as you so often are, being the country’s most astute political commentator after the late Jim Travers.
But the Liberals' great strategic blunder, pre-dating this insipid election effort, was appointing Ignatieff as their leader.
The insiders responsible for this did our country a grave disservice, as will become painfully evident if Harper gets even the slimmest of majorities.
Ignatieff has almost no political skill and appears to be a poor strategic thinker.
More than that, I think it remarkable that a man with the reputation of "intellectual" shows almost no original or innovative thought. I have heard nothing from him that makes me say to myself, well, that’s right.
And, for a guy who supposedly was such a human-rights figure, his voice is never heard on the great human-rights issues of our day, but then I knew his genuine record – not the puff - before he opportunistically made his return to Canada.
Now while there are virtually no good qualities in Harper – poor ethics, poor democratic values, pandering to groups, a poor record of appointments, and a shabby record of dismissing those he doesn’t want to hear from - you must grant him a great strategic grasp of our electoral process. He is a one-man show of extraordinary dark political skills.
A political anti-Christ, I think it fair to say. Not a leader, not an idea man, not a man of principle, but a calculating machine to achieve dominance - a very dangerous man indeed.
Some choice we are given.
No wonder people in Quebec are turning to Layton, who like Elizabeth May, actually stands for some principles, whether they are ones you agree with or not.
But that too is go-nowhere development.
Layton's replacing some of Duceppe 's seats does not really change the dangerous political calculus that may see Canada damaged seriously over the next five years.
What a great irony that Ignatieff, the very man who literally sneered at Dion's coalition, should be attacked by Harper for intending "to steal the election" with a coalition.
What a great disappointment that so many Canadians are revealed to be so poorly educated that they believe Harper's school-yard name-calling.
So long as we have the situation we have in Quebec - where Conservatives and Liberals are not contenders - the only way to stop a minority tyrant-bully like Harper is through a coalition.
And coalition is both legal and entirely proper in a parliamentary democracy.
Dion understood that. The pathetic Ignatieff has not.
_______________________________
"Promising to TAX more? Mr Simpson, I'm pretty sure that even Mr. Ignatieff isn't that silly."
Here again is the kind of stuff which painfully reveals lack of education in a good deal of our voting populace, and ignorant democracy is dangerous.
How does anyone like that think Harper will make his vast deficits disappear?
And, at the same time, pay for gigantic and unnecessary commitments like buying that costly clunker of a fighter plane and building a new gulag of prisons?
Of course, the simplistic answer is cuts, and I, as a retired professional economist, am not against judicious cuts.
But you cannot spend the way Harper spends and have a deficit like those Harper has created, and cut your way to a balanced budget.
People like the commenter do not understand that some of our program spending is actually a competitive advantage for Canada, health care being a chief one.
We spend about 2/3 per capita to what Americans spend on health care, and - the statistics speak loudly - we get better overall outcomes by measures such as population longevity and infant mortality.
It is largely because of our health care that traditionally American corporations such as the big auto companies have viewed Canada as an efficient place in which to invest.
Not because our workers work harder, not because they are better educated, but because they start on the job by the companies not having to buy the horribly costly and inefficient private health insurance they must buy in America.
And just so for other of our national programs.
____________________________________
The single greatest cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is, and has long been, heath-care costs.
It is nothing to envy.
Anyway, readers, I think it quite possible that all the political sound and fury will be for nothing.
Despite Harper and his flaks' constant blubbering about his economic management, when the other shoe falls in the United States, all bets are off.
People are still walking away from their mortgages there in huge numbers, and the country is spending money it does not have with wars on multiple fronts. It is also running unbelievable deficits in every account you care to mention, from the national budget to current accounts and to personal debt.
A gigantic economic tsunami is approaching the United States, and despite Harper's childish bragging, it will not spare Canada.
TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL SETS THE STAGE FOR ITS ELECTION ENDORSEMENT DISPLAYING ITS RECORD OVER MANY YEARS - BUT ENDORSEMENTS ARE OUTDATED AND INAPPROPRIATE
POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
The business of political endorsement by a newspaper is an entirely outdated and inappropriate concept.
It is a practice going back to the days in the late 18th century when parties each literally owned their own newspapers, the newspapers being used for the same manipulation of public opinion we call propaganda when it occurs in places like the good old USSR.
In the 20th century, ownership had graduated to secret smoky room deals between big newspaper magnates and politicians.
Things aren’t quite that black-and-white anymore, but we do know that certain papers favor certain parties, even though they may occasionally break with their favorite when endorsement would be a waste of breath and would possibly endanger relations with a new government, the results being so predictable.
How, in any way, is a group of editors qualified to suggest how people should vote?
It is almost mumbo-jumbo to suggest that they are.
Indeed, you are so dependant on relations with government for everything from access to leaks, your endorsement cannot be genuinely based on fair analysis.
So why don't you set an example, Globe, for the 21st century and just forget this puffed-up nonsense?
But judging from the day-to-day quality of the editorials in the Globe, cloudcuckooland stuff for certain, there'll be no stopping your people from marching around the office with laughable gravity and pretensions galore, preening their feathers and expecting to be made much of by the hopeful candidates (or is it hopeless candidates in this election?).
The Globe's editorial writers have what must rank as the world's highest usage of words like "should," "must," and “incumbent upon,” exceeded only by America's large flock of evangelical tent preachers.
Grow up, please.
The business of political endorsement by a newspaper is an entirely outdated and inappropriate concept.
It is a practice going back to the days in the late 18th century when parties each literally owned their own newspapers, the newspapers being used for the same manipulation of public opinion we call propaganda when it occurs in places like the good old USSR.
In the 20th century, ownership had graduated to secret smoky room deals between big newspaper magnates and politicians.
Things aren’t quite that black-and-white anymore, but we do know that certain papers favor certain parties, even though they may occasionally break with their favorite when endorsement would be a waste of breath and would possibly endanger relations with a new government, the results being so predictable.
How, in any way, is a group of editors qualified to suggest how people should vote?
It is almost mumbo-jumbo to suggest that they are.
Indeed, you are so dependant on relations with government for everything from access to leaks, your endorsement cannot be genuinely based on fair analysis.
So why don't you set an example, Globe, for the 21st century and just forget this puffed-up nonsense?
But judging from the day-to-day quality of the editorials in the Globe, cloudcuckooland stuff for certain, there'll be no stopping your people from marching around the office with laughable gravity and pretensions galore, preening their feathers and expecting to be made much of by the hopeful candidates (or is it hopeless candidates in this election?).
The Globe's editorial writers have what must rank as the world's highest usage of words like "should," "must," and “incumbent upon,” exceeded only by America's large flock of evangelical tent preachers.
Grow up, please.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
CANADA'S JACK LAYTON CRITICIZED FOR NOT COSTING PLATFORM AS THOUGH ANYTHING IS COSTED IN GOVERNMENT - PLUS MORE ON THE IDIOTIC MANTRA ABOUT STEALING THE ELECTION WITH A COALITION
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"The NDP platform seldom gets a costed look. It’s a pastiche of guesses and conjectures."
Please, it is exactly the same for all parties, only in the case of Conservatives, we're not talking about election platform items, we're talking about actual policy.
We have no idea, and Parliament has no idea, of the cost of current Conservative policies and proposed legislation. None.
The complete lack of costing of government proposals and policies and campaign policies is one of the greatest flaws in our democracy - a hole big enough to drive a fleet of trucks through.
An ignorant vote is no vote at all.
__________________________
"Steal the election?"
Enough, please, of such complete ignorance. Reading this kind of line makes one think we live in Orwell's 1984.
Coalitions are, and always have been, a completely legitimate part of parliamentary government.
Just because Canada has not used the tool to any extent does not make it an inappropriate one.
Dozens of parliamentary democracies have been governed this way, including at this moment Britain and Israel.
The mindless repetition of Harper's thoughtless slogans about coalition sadly demonstrates the poor knowledge of a large part of our electorate.
An ignorant democracy really is not much of a democracy, but this kind of sad ignorance is at the very foundation of all Harper's efforts.
Indeed, Mr. Simpson, I think Harper's use of this slogan is more dangerous than anything else being said by anyone.
If he fails to get his majority, he is setting up people in the West for deep resentment about the East.
It reminds me quite sadly of Hitler's "stab in the back" line about why Germany lost World War I.
This kind of intellectual and ethical filth works.
But it works only at the peril of civil society and democratic values.
__________________________
Our democracy is in genuine trouble.
Mr. Ignatieff is an appointed leader in the 21st century.
Mr. Harper is a control-freak who feels free to bend every rule and tradition of Parliament to keep his place and promote his agenda.
No one seems to care and no one seems to be able to do anything about a man who stands in contempt of Parliament and a man who has abused democratic values in countless situations in committees and in appointments.
Everyone points to the Bloc in Quebec as being against our values when in fact the Bloc's existence and our tolerance of it represent the finest part of Canadian civil and ethical values.
Indeed, it is a sad thing to have to say, but Mr. Duceppe, in a number of ways, represents democratic values and statesmanship better than the current leaders of our two major parties.
This whole election is meaningless. Harper plays the tiresome and anti-democratic game of seeking out a limited number of "swing" ridings and in those ridings blasts his horn on narrow wedge issues of little interest to anyone else.
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does Mr. Harper offer us a set of cohesive policies around which we can unite as Canadians.
And Ignatieff is not much better, a man of surprisingly mediocre political talents considering his noted background.
And Harper spews the anti-democratic venom of "the stab in the back" if he doesn't get his way.
Harper represents the most poisonous individual ever to hold high office in Canada and he will leave a legacy of hateful ads, secrecy, no tolerance, poorly-considered comments, pandering to certain groups, and a whole lot more.
Texas-style hateful politics.
"The NDP platform seldom gets a costed look. It’s a pastiche of guesses and conjectures."
Please, it is exactly the same for all parties, only in the case of Conservatives, we're not talking about election platform items, we're talking about actual policy.
We have no idea, and Parliament has no idea, of the cost of current Conservative policies and proposed legislation. None.
The complete lack of costing of government proposals and policies and campaign policies is one of the greatest flaws in our democracy - a hole big enough to drive a fleet of trucks through.
An ignorant vote is no vote at all.
__________________________
"Steal the election?"
Enough, please, of such complete ignorance. Reading this kind of line makes one think we live in Orwell's 1984.
Coalitions are, and always have been, a completely legitimate part of parliamentary government.
Just because Canada has not used the tool to any extent does not make it an inappropriate one.
Dozens of parliamentary democracies have been governed this way, including at this moment Britain and Israel.
The mindless repetition of Harper's thoughtless slogans about coalition sadly demonstrates the poor knowledge of a large part of our electorate.
An ignorant democracy really is not much of a democracy, but this kind of sad ignorance is at the very foundation of all Harper's efforts.
Indeed, Mr. Simpson, I think Harper's use of this slogan is more dangerous than anything else being said by anyone.
If he fails to get his majority, he is setting up people in the West for deep resentment about the East.
It reminds me quite sadly of Hitler's "stab in the back" line about why Germany lost World War I.
This kind of intellectual and ethical filth works.
But it works only at the peril of civil society and democratic values.
__________________________
Our democracy is in genuine trouble.
Mr. Ignatieff is an appointed leader in the 21st century.
Mr. Harper is a control-freak who feels free to bend every rule and tradition of Parliament to keep his place and promote his agenda.
No one seems to care and no one seems to be able to do anything about a man who stands in contempt of Parliament and a man who has abused democratic values in countless situations in committees and in appointments.
Everyone points to the Bloc in Quebec as being against our values when in fact the Bloc's existence and our tolerance of it represent the finest part of Canadian civil and ethical values.
Indeed, it is a sad thing to have to say, but Mr. Duceppe, in a number of ways, represents democratic values and statesmanship better than the current leaders of our two major parties.
This whole election is meaningless. Harper plays the tiresome and anti-democratic game of seeking out a limited number of "swing" ridings and in those ridings blasts his horn on narrow wedge issues of little interest to anyone else.
Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does Mr. Harper offer us a set of cohesive policies around which we can unite as Canadians.
And Ignatieff is not much better, a man of surprisingly mediocre political talents considering his noted background.
And Harper spews the anti-democratic venom of "the stab in the back" if he doesn't get his way.
Harper represents the most poisonous individual ever to hold high office in Canada and he will leave a legacy of hateful ads, secrecy, no tolerance, poorly-considered comments, pandering to certain groups, and a whole lot more.
Texas-style hateful politics.
CANADA'S ELECTION: A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE? THAT DOESN'T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THE SITUATION
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GEOFFREY ROWAN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate leadership vision"
The author clearly does not understand what this election is about.
Harper's concept of an election is focusing on key "swing" ridings and using specific wedge issues in each in hopes of tipping enough to gain a slim majority.
No ideas, no inspiration, and no democratic values. Just a technical game to gain power.
Apart from that sad effort there is only dumb fear-mongering about things like separatism and coalitions offered the nation at large.
Ignatieff, in going after him, is like a cop in a squad car with flat tires.
The man does nothing but make sounds about new programs.
He is not even honest about dumb matters like the F-35 purchase. He doesn't say we won't buy it - which we certainly should not - but only that the process needs review, leaving people to believe maybe he will not buy the world's costliest clunker.
He is totally ineffective in going after Harper's own clear dishonesty and misrepresentation. Many of us know there are all kinds of quotes and films from Harper's career which should be used against him. That is not attacking, that is reminding people of the truth.
But Ignatieff, the unelected leader of a once great party, is a lame excuse for an effective politician.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfiuGgsNZdxlQl1AdpdF5vDksXAxyfVwXOt7Pa4hxrKYxX3lA0nPNuBbEAyRnYequu_wAIzWUJ094gBrAixBwatCzgeCCHvEpUzPp2qzzt_AqtZeZqvibaRdCDVGOPf0MQg2-i7Q/s1600/CHUCKMAN+-+HARPER+-+CAMPAIGN+AD
"What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate leadership vision"
The author clearly does not understand what this election is about.
Harper's concept of an election is focusing on key "swing" ridings and using specific wedge issues in each in hopes of tipping enough to gain a slim majority.
No ideas, no inspiration, and no democratic values. Just a technical game to gain power.
Apart from that sad effort there is only dumb fear-mongering about things like separatism and coalitions offered the nation at large.
Ignatieff, in going after him, is like a cop in a squad car with flat tires.
The man does nothing but make sounds about new programs.
He is not even honest about dumb matters like the F-35 purchase. He doesn't say we won't buy it - which we certainly should not - but only that the process needs review, leaving people to believe maybe he will not buy the world's costliest clunker.
He is totally ineffective in going after Harper's own clear dishonesty and misrepresentation. Many of us know there are all kinds of quotes and films from Harper's career which should be used against him. That is not attacking, that is reminding people of the truth.
But Ignatieff, the unelected leader of a once great party, is a lame excuse for an effective politician.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfiuGgsNZdxlQl1AdpdF5vDksXAxyfVwXOt7Pa4hxrKYxX3lA0nPNuBbEAyRnYequu_wAIzWUJ094gBrAixBwatCzgeCCHvEpUzPp2qzzt_AqtZeZqvibaRdCDVGOPf0MQg2-i7Q/s1600/CHUCKMAN+-+HARPER+-+CAMPAIGN+AD
Saturday, April 16, 2011
THE CONTINUING POLITICAL SOAP OPERA OF CANADA'S MADCAP HELENA GUERGIS AND OUR ABUSIVE MINORITY PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
I am sure, as Ms Guergis charges, the ruthless Stephen Harper has treated her badly.
After all, that is what Harper does to people. Witness his behavior towards Belinda Stronach or our former nuclear regulator.
Brutal treatment of those with whom he disagrees is one of his defining characteristics. His entire approach towards his political opponents in the past has had the tone of brutal frat boy who enjoys practical jokes which hurt people.
And yet it is truly difficult to find any sympathy for Ms Guergis. Her past behaviors, as the example of the airport meltdown, have been truly appalling.
Her behaviors suggest either drug use or mental instability, yet here she is still pushing herself into the limelight, as though she were qualified for high office, which she most certainly is not.
Her husband is nothing less than a disgrace: he beat just charges of drunk driving and possessing significant amounts of hard drugs on a technicality. He belongs in prison.
And just hearing her voice on the radio is annoying as they play snippets of her statements.
The woman sounds like a Midwestern small-town homecoming queen speaking in her eeny-teeny voice. Her voice as well as her words are just plain insipid.
So while Harper may have treated her badly, she was always someone just setting themselves up for bad treatment - that is the nature of both mental illness and drug addiction.
Go away with some quiet grace, Ms Guergis, but I waste my breath.
I am sure, as Ms Guergis charges, the ruthless Stephen Harper has treated her badly.
After all, that is what Harper does to people. Witness his behavior towards Belinda Stronach or our former nuclear regulator.
Brutal treatment of those with whom he disagrees is one of his defining characteristics. His entire approach towards his political opponents in the past has had the tone of brutal frat boy who enjoys practical jokes which hurt people.
And yet it is truly difficult to find any sympathy for Ms Guergis. Her past behaviors, as the example of the airport meltdown, have been truly appalling.
Her behaviors suggest either drug use or mental instability, yet here she is still pushing herself into the limelight, as though she were qualified for high office, which she most certainly is not.
Her husband is nothing less than a disgrace: he beat just charges of drunk driving and possessing significant amounts of hard drugs on a technicality. He belongs in prison.
And just hearing her voice on the radio is annoying as they play snippets of her statements.
The woman sounds like a Midwestern small-town homecoming queen speaking in her eeny-teeny voice. Her voice as well as her words are just plain insipid.
So while Harper may have treated her badly, she was always someone just setting themselves up for bad treatment - that is the nature of both mental illness and drug addiction.
Go away with some quiet grace, Ms Guergis, but I waste my breath.
STILL MORE ON THE NIQAB - FREEDOM OF SPEECH - UGLY ASPECTS OF MANY RELIGIONS - NO ONE WHO LOVES FREEDOM WOULD SUPPORT SARKOZY
FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY NAZEEN SHEIKH IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"Freedom of speech does not include freedom to oppress others."
That is so obvious a truth it need not be stated. It is the ethical equivalent of announcing that the earth revolves around the sun.
Its author here only uses it as a lead-in, a way to gain the first favorable nod of the reader's head, to the bits of prejudice he wants to plant.
That is the well-established method of propagandists and prejudiced people everywhere.
Our laws, as are those of France, are sufficient to deal with all instances where true oppression might be involved. A woman claiming oppression would be supported by all agencies of the state.
Like so many other religious groups, conservative Muslims in Third World countries sustain ancient practices which we view as foolish.
Almost any aspect of the practices of African Animists is repulsive by our lights. Not just silly stuff like witch doctors, but common practices like female genital mutilation - an African, not a Muslim, practice - or the common practice of older men in villages raping young girls. How about the hunting down and killing and magical use of dismembered body parts of people unfortunate enough to be born albinos?
In backwater India, a poor family will sell a good-looking daughter, at 12 years old, to a rich old man who pays them a "dowry." When the old man dies in not many years, the poor girl will likely inherit nothing, and she will be consigned to terrible abusive practices towards widows. She must never marry again, she must wear only certain clothes, she must eat only certain foods, and she must not socialize in any normal way. She is consigned to living death at perhaps 18 or 20.
Or how about the young girls sold to certain temples to “serve” there? They become institutionalized prostitutes at very young ages, and they are subject to the ravages of venereal diseases from all the old men who use them.
I could go on and on.
The practices of Ultra-orthodox Jews are as ugly as anything at the extremes of Islam - yet note that we tolerate them in our society. We actually allow Ultra-orthodox rabbis to give a woman's children to her husband upon divorce, and she has no recourse unless she wants to leave her faith entirely. Such people in fact live under a Jewish form of Sharia Law right here in our society, something we would not tolerate for Muslims. And they wear clothes as impossible and ridiculous as any fundamentalist Muslim in the Third World.
And just so our conservative Mennonites - many of their practices are not quaint and charming, they are brutal and outdated, yet we tolerate them.
Going on and on about the small number – and it is a very small number – of traditional Muslim women who wear the niqab is absurd. They hurt no one. They are free at any future date to give it up.
But telling them through force of law that they cannot wear the niqab is simply the tactics of a police state.
Sarkozy has a shameful record concerning minorities, including his nasty deportation of gypsies, something reminding one of the early days of the Third Reich when Hitler focused on deportation and abuse, murder coming later.
No one who loves a free society will embrace Sarkozy.
_________________________
@David_C3:
You assume this is "enforced."
You have no factual basis for saying so, but I suspect prejudice.
Lots of religious or culturally conservative people do things I think are silly or even offensive, but if they mind their own business, they have every right to carry on.
Should Ultra-orthodox Jews be required to shave and remove their big hats? In effect, the men's faces are virtually hidden.
Should Ultra-orthodox Jewish women have equal rights in marriage and with their children, something they do not have unless they leave their religion?
The world is full of foolishness, and worse.
A few women wearing the niqab is hardly an issue worth writing about. But forbidding their right is very much worth writing about.
__________________
There is a lot of confusion about the various female Muslim garments.
In general, for readers:
The niqab is a sheer veil worn over the lower face. It was not that long ago regarded in the West as attractive and mysterious, but not now in the insanity of the war-on-terror world, we read nonsense accusations. The niqab is not typical in the Muslim world and few migrants wear it.
The hijab is a headscarf, not much different to a babushka. Anyone criticizing this is being ridiculous, considering how many others cover their heads, including Mennonite women, many Jewish men, and senior Catholic Priests. It wasn't many decades ago that Western women routinely wore hats and very often veils.
The burqa is a head-to-toe sack with a meshed face slot. The burqa is almost exclusively used in truly backwater places like rural Afghanistan. Only a tiny percent of Muslim women use this.
The chador is a robe worn over the head which goes to the feet. It may be worn with or without the niqab. The chador is associated with Iran.
If you look at films from Egypt or Syria or other places, you will see an immense variety of women's dress, from purely Western to chadors.
________________________
The naiveté of people writing about why some Muslim women use these various modes of dress would be funny were the consequences not so deadly serious.
I recall nuns decades back, dressed in their immense, flowing head-to-foot habits, many of them with huge uncomfortable starchy head gear, who were such strong individuals they might take your breath away.
I am sure, there are Muslim women, wearing the chador and or the niqab who are exactly the same way.
How very foolish it is to assume they are all just beaten beasts, but that kind of cheap assumption comes with the blindness of prejudice.
We are in the midst of a great conflagration of anti-Muslim prejudice. It is a fire constantly stoked by those with an interest in demeaning and demonizing Muslims.
Again,
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOUnI9BiJnHqfVMrBng_gH9AOFXlBv51S9K2zi3_rEa6Wuc4zL_5rBCM8QooOOKMJWD1Tq0Cg0ox6KxwoTCRn15YHF5AuNeeyyPE-oEomJ8nUvjneJgSxRQgAL2TAoyYe4kGs1/s1600/HIJAB+-+WHY+I+LAUGH+AT+LUNACY+OVER+THE+HIJA
"Freedom of speech does not include freedom to oppress others."
That is so obvious a truth it need not be stated. It is the ethical equivalent of announcing that the earth revolves around the sun.
Its author here only uses it as a lead-in, a way to gain the first favorable nod of the reader's head, to the bits of prejudice he wants to plant.
That is the well-established method of propagandists and prejudiced people everywhere.
Our laws, as are those of France, are sufficient to deal with all instances where true oppression might be involved. A woman claiming oppression would be supported by all agencies of the state.
Like so many other religious groups, conservative Muslims in Third World countries sustain ancient practices which we view as foolish.
Almost any aspect of the practices of African Animists is repulsive by our lights. Not just silly stuff like witch doctors, but common practices like female genital mutilation - an African, not a Muslim, practice - or the common practice of older men in villages raping young girls. How about the hunting down and killing and magical use of dismembered body parts of people unfortunate enough to be born albinos?
In backwater India, a poor family will sell a good-looking daughter, at 12 years old, to a rich old man who pays them a "dowry." When the old man dies in not many years, the poor girl will likely inherit nothing, and she will be consigned to terrible abusive practices towards widows. She must never marry again, she must wear only certain clothes, she must eat only certain foods, and she must not socialize in any normal way. She is consigned to living death at perhaps 18 or 20.
Or how about the young girls sold to certain temples to “serve” there? They become institutionalized prostitutes at very young ages, and they are subject to the ravages of venereal diseases from all the old men who use them.
I could go on and on.
The practices of Ultra-orthodox Jews are as ugly as anything at the extremes of Islam - yet note that we tolerate them in our society. We actually allow Ultra-orthodox rabbis to give a woman's children to her husband upon divorce, and she has no recourse unless she wants to leave her faith entirely. Such people in fact live under a Jewish form of Sharia Law right here in our society, something we would not tolerate for Muslims. And they wear clothes as impossible and ridiculous as any fundamentalist Muslim in the Third World.
And just so our conservative Mennonites - many of their practices are not quaint and charming, they are brutal and outdated, yet we tolerate them.
Going on and on about the small number – and it is a very small number – of traditional Muslim women who wear the niqab is absurd. They hurt no one. They are free at any future date to give it up.
But telling them through force of law that they cannot wear the niqab is simply the tactics of a police state.
Sarkozy has a shameful record concerning minorities, including his nasty deportation of gypsies, something reminding one of the early days of the Third Reich when Hitler focused on deportation and abuse, murder coming later.
No one who loves a free society will embrace Sarkozy.
_________________________
@David_C3:
You assume this is "enforced."
You have no factual basis for saying so, but I suspect prejudice.
Lots of religious or culturally conservative people do things I think are silly or even offensive, but if they mind their own business, they have every right to carry on.
Should Ultra-orthodox Jews be required to shave and remove their big hats? In effect, the men's faces are virtually hidden.
Should Ultra-orthodox Jewish women have equal rights in marriage and with their children, something they do not have unless they leave their religion?
The world is full of foolishness, and worse.
A few women wearing the niqab is hardly an issue worth writing about. But forbidding their right is very much worth writing about.
__________________
There is a lot of confusion about the various female Muslim garments.
In general, for readers:
The niqab is a sheer veil worn over the lower face. It was not that long ago regarded in the West as attractive and mysterious, but not now in the insanity of the war-on-terror world, we read nonsense accusations. The niqab is not typical in the Muslim world and few migrants wear it.
The hijab is a headscarf, not much different to a babushka. Anyone criticizing this is being ridiculous, considering how many others cover their heads, including Mennonite women, many Jewish men, and senior Catholic Priests. It wasn't many decades ago that Western women routinely wore hats and very often veils.
The burqa is a head-to-toe sack with a meshed face slot. The burqa is almost exclusively used in truly backwater places like rural Afghanistan. Only a tiny percent of Muslim women use this.
The chador is a robe worn over the head which goes to the feet. It may be worn with or without the niqab. The chador is associated with Iran.
If you look at films from Egypt or Syria or other places, you will see an immense variety of women's dress, from purely Western to chadors.
________________________
The naiveté of people writing about why some Muslim women use these various modes of dress would be funny were the consequences not so deadly serious.
I recall nuns decades back, dressed in their immense, flowing head-to-foot habits, many of them with huge uncomfortable starchy head gear, who were such strong individuals they might take your breath away.
I am sure, there are Muslim women, wearing the chador and or the niqab who are exactly the same way.
How very foolish it is to assume they are all just beaten beasts, but that kind of cheap assumption comes with the blindness of prejudice.
We are in the midst of a great conflagration of anti-Muslim prejudice. It is a fire constantly stoked by those with an interest in demeaning and demonizing Muslims.
Again,
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOUnI9BiJnHqfVMrBng_gH9AOFXlBv51S9K2zi3_rEa6Wuc4zL_5rBCM8QooOOKMJWD1Tq0Cg0ox6KxwoTCRn15YHF5AuNeeyyPE-oEomJ8nUvjneJgSxRQgAL2TAoyYe4kGs1/s1600/HIJAB+-+WHY+I+LAUGH+AT+LUNACY+OVER+THE+HIJA
Thursday, April 14, 2011
MORE ON FRANCE'S HORRIBLE NIQAB LAW - HERE AN UPPER-CLASS MUSLIM WOMAN WHO WANTS US TO JOIN THE MOB AND SUPPORT SARKOZY
POSTED RESPONSE FROM A COLUMN BY NAZEEN SHEIKH IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
This is simply blather from Nazneen Sheikh, rather dangerous blather, demonstrating not understanding but attitude.
It is well known that neither the niqab nor the burqa are requirements for the world's billion or so Muslims.
But they are nevertheless deeply traditional parts of some primitive cultures, and indeed primitive cultures everywhere have backward and superstitious customs. That is precisely what it means to be backward.
Societies leave their backward customs behind when they enjoy healthy economic growth. They don't bind women's feet anymore in China or Japan.
What still goes on in the backward corners of India, South America, Thailand, Africa, and other places is appalling. Countless savageries are committed daily against women from accepted rape and selling children into prostitution to bride-burning and “honor killing.”
Considering the vast scope of horrors against women in this world, I think it slightly ridiculous to be riveted on the situation of several hundred immigrant women in France who wear the niqab, and that is the order of magnitude we are concerned with here because the overwhelming majority of Muslim women in France have never worn the niqab.
As anyone who studies the ways of people without a political agenda knows perfectly well, you cannot change backward customs quickly.
Indeed, if you try, you do so with tyrant behavior as bad or worse than the custom itself, and often run the risk of bad reactions from those charged with special and unfair laws.
It sometimes takes a couple of generations in a new land for strongly-entrenched customs to fade, as we can easily observe in other groups who live in Canada.
Indeed, some seem never to change, and one may ask justly, why should they if that is their choice? They live quiet lives, just as the Muslims with their niqabs.
Hasidic Jewish men still wear full face beards and large dark hats.
Traditional Mennonite women wear ugly long formless dresses with ugly caps on their heads and they drive in silly box carriages pulled by horses.
Both those groups are stuck somewhere in the 19th century. They both also do not truly integrate into the greater society, keeping in their own close-knit communities.
And so long as they do no one any harm and obey our laws, who cares?
Telling people what they must or must not wear is in the same spirit of human rights as telling people what they should say.
Sarkozy is only responding to the increased popularity of the National Front, effectively setting himself a race with the society's least decent political party.
Hardly admirable, but we should know from many of Sarkozy's other deeds and words that he is an unpleasant man altogether, from his treatment of gypsies to his calling people scum.
Yet, the thoughtless writer of this piece sets him up as someone to be emulated.
I suspect Ms Sheikh to be one of those people who are ashamed of their more backward cousins, but that is no excuse to advocate corrupting the laws of civil society.
I suspect, too, this is one of her ways of responding to the irrational pressure created by the “war on terror” with its daily freely-communicated ignorant prejudices against Muslims in our society. It is a way of responding - jumping on the simpler and more backward members of her community - that is aimed at gaining approval from the ugly noisy mob, when it is the mob that is the problem.
How quickly our perceptions vary under such conditions. Not that long ago, the niqab was viewed as alluring and mysteriously beautiful, highlighting the eyes as it does. We saw that in countless movies and television shows and read it in many books. Suddenly, it is evil and must be expunged.
Ridiculous, unthinking, and unenlightened.
This is simply blather from Nazneen Sheikh, rather dangerous blather, demonstrating not understanding but attitude.
It is well known that neither the niqab nor the burqa are requirements for the world's billion or so Muslims.
But they are nevertheless deeply traditional parts of some primitive cultures, and indeed primitive cultures everywhere have backward and superstitious customs. That is precisely what it means to be backward.
Societies leave their backward customs behind when they enjoy healthy economic growth. They don't bind women's feet anymore in China or Japan.
What still goes on in the backward corners of India, South America, Thailand, Africa, and other places is appalling. Countless savageries are committed daily against women from accepted rape and selling children into prostitution to bride-burning and “honor killing.”
Considering the vast scope of horrors against women in this world, I think it slightly ridiculous to be riveted on the situation of several hundred immigrant women in France who wear the niqab, and that is the order of magnitude we are concerned with here because the overwhelming majority of Muslim women in France have never worn the niqab.
As anyone who studies the ways of people without a political agenda knows perfectly well, you cannot change backward customs quickly.
Indeed, if you try, you do so with tyrant behavior as bad or worse than the custom itself, and often run the risk of bad reactions from those charged with special and unfair laws.
It sometimes takes a couple of generations in a new land for strongly-entrenched customs to fade, as we can easily observe in other groups who live in Canada.
Indeed, some seem never to change, and one may ask justly, why should they if that is their choice? They live quiet lives, just as the Muslims with their niqabs.
Hasidic Jewish men still wear full face beards and large dark hats.
Traditional Mennonite women wear ugly long formless dresses with ugly caps on their heads and they drive in silly box carriages pulled by horses.
Both those groups are stuck somewhere in the 19th century. They both also do not truly integrate into the greater society, keeping in their own close-knit communities.
And so long as they do no one any harm and obey our laws, who cares?
Telling people what they must or must not wear is in the same spirit of human rights as telling people what they should say.
Sarkozy is only responding to the increased popularity of the National Front, effectively setting himself a race with the society's least decent political party.
Hardly admirable, but we should know from many of Sarkozy's other deeds and words that he is an unpleasant man altogether, from his treatment of gypsies to his calling people scum.
Yet, the thoughtless writer of this piece sets him up as someone to be emulated.
I suspect Ms Sheikh to be one of those people who are ashamed of their more backward cousins, but that is no excuse to advocate corrupting the laws of civil society.
I suspect, too, this is one of her ways of responding to the irrational pressure created by the “war on terror” with its daily freely-communicated ignorant prejudices against Muslims in our society. It is a way of responding - jumping on the simpler and more backward members of her community - that is aimed at gaining approval from the ugly noisy mob, when it is the mob that is the problem.
How quickly our perceptions vary under such conditions. Not that long ago, the niqab was viewed as alluring and mysteriously beautiful, highlighting the eyes as it does. We saw that in countless movies and television shows and read it in many books. Suddenly, it is evil and must be expunged.
Ridiculous, unthinking, and unenlightened.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
MORE ON THE KENNEDY CLAN AND THEIR DARK SECRETS IN RESPONSE TO A COLUMN ABOUT A TELEVISION MINI-SERIES
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY ANDREW COHEN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
The Kennedys were simply America's Borgias.
The Borgias had grace and beauty and wealth, but they also were ruthless and murderous and had ambition beyond bounds.
The full story of the Kennedy's greed and manipulation has not been - and likely never be - told. Despite many revelations coming to light, the family has succeeded time and again in suppressing much evidence.
This film may or may not be what the author of this article claims, but it does seem strange to me a man who wants to be taken seriously would spend time criticizing a television show.
We know, absolutely, that such a show will be vapid, whether it dwells on the sleaze or not.
Here are some reflections on Kennedy, the president, people may enjoy:
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/the-dark-aspects-of-kennedys-road-to-the-white-house-were-far-darker-than-described-by-british-journalist-andrew-marr/
_______________________________
Joe Kennedy wasn't just a crook as a reader has commented.
He was a ruthless and highly immoral man whose behavior included acts like bringing home young women he picked up or paid for sex right in front of his family gathered in the living room.
He was also brutally anti-British in his views, and correspondingly somewhat of a Hitler admirer.
He was so stupidly outspoken in these unpleasant views that the British government asked the United States to withdraw him as ambassador to Britain, not a common occurrence in diplomacy, a request with which Roosevelt complied.
Joe made his fortune in illegal alcohol, working with some very unpleasant and murderous gangsters, a connection which was exploited later in getting funds and support for his son's drive to be president.
Jack himself, while a far classier guy on the surface with his tailored suits and quotes and manners, shared a number of his father's characteristics, albeit in varied forms.
John’s womanizing we all know about, although not everyone is aware that at least one of the women - Judith Exner, a woman who paid him calls right in the White House - was tied to high levels of the Mob.
And not everyone knows that one of his early relationships, while in the military, was with a woman German spy. J Edgar Hoover was on to it, and had it not been for the Kennedy wealth and influence, his career would have died right there.
The abuse of privilege, in avoiding responsibility for your actions, was just as big a part of the Kennedys as it was that dishonest mediocrity and ignorant frat boy, George W Bush.
Much was made of John's PT-109 exploits at the time of his running, and he did help save a man's life, but the entire incident - the loss of his craft and the misery of his crew - was owing to his incompetence and lack of appropriate caution as a commander.
The same behavior from anyone else, without the connections, might well have resulted in a court martial.
Kennedy’s good taste included taking on people like Theodore Sorensen as writer/advisor – his family wealth allowed them to hire what essentially became a platoon of smart flaks, people who helped very much in smoothing over the bumps in the road of family history and who gave an aura of intelligence and worth.
But it is certain that more dishonesty came into play here too. Sorensen almost certainly wrote Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, although he was such a loyal follower he denied it always. Sorensen also, to a certainty, was author of speech phrases like “Ask not what….” If you read Sorensen’s book about Kennedy, the cadence and style of the writing are so recognizable.
John also played a very two-faced game in the White House with regard to Cuba. After the Missile Crisis blew up in his face - and the CIA, as well as attempting to assassinate Castro many times, had been very much in the business of planning another invasion of Cuba as Khrushchev feared when he considered sending missiles to Cuba – the agreement that ended the crisis was Kennedy’s agreeing to not invade Cuba as well as withdrawing certain missiles from Turkey.
Word of the agreement made the anti-Castro thugs the CIA had sponsored for years – Osama’s boys in the mountains made a peanut-sized operation compared to the multi-million dollar terror operation the CIA ran in the early 1960s (just one of countless examples of U.S. hypocrisy around the use of terror) – bitterly, fiercely angry, making them one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s assassination.
Kennedy had his brother, as Attorney General and stand-in voice of the President, make a big show of raiding camps in the South where these thugs carried on with their CIA-provided weapons and training. Robert also secretly was in charge of more attempts to murder Castro.
The Kennedy brothers were always getting involved in heated battles. For reasons that still are not clear, Robert conducted a vendetta against a number of big mobsters, despite the fact that the Mob had financed his brother’s presidential campaign and kept such connections as Judith Exner. That behavior made the Mob another chief suspect for Kennedy’s assassination.
Both of the Kennedys actually, for whatever well-organized group killed Jack knew they also had to kill Robert if he was going to become President. Robert’s ruthless use of power meant that the full powers of the office of the president would go after his brother’s assassins, as the pathetic Warren Commission never made any attempt to do.
Sleaze in fancy suits, ruthless people with a veneer of class – that’s the Kennedys.
The Kennedys were simply America's Borgias.
The Borgias had grace and beauty and wealth, but they also were ruthless and murderous and had ambition beyond bounds.
The full story of the Kennedy's greed and manipulation has not been - and likely never be - told. Despite many revelations coming to light, the family has succeeded time and again in suppressing much evidence.
This film may or may not be what the author of this article claims, but it does seem strange to me a man who wants to be taken seriously would spend time criticizing a television show.
We know, absolutely, that such a show will be vapid, whether it dwells on the sleaze or not.
Here are some reflections on Kennedy, the president, people may enjoy:
http://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/the-dark-aspects-of-kennedys-road-to-the-white-house-were-far-darker-than-described-by-british-journalist-andrew-marr/
_______________________________
Joe Kennedy wasn't just a crook as a reader has commented.
He was a ruthless and highly immoral man whose behavior included acts like bringing home young women he picked up or paid for sex right in front of his family gathered in the living room.
He was also brutally anti-British in his views, and correspondingly somewhat of a Hitler admirer.
He was so stupidly outspoken in these unpleasant views that the British government asked the United States to withdraw him as ambassador to Britain, not a common occurrence in diplomacy, a request with which Roosevelt complied.
Joe made his fortune in illegal alcohol, working with some very unpleasant and murderous gangsters, a connection which was exploited later in getting funds and support for his son's drive to be president.
Jack himself, while a far classier guy on the surface with his tailored suits and quotes and manners, shared a number of his father's characteristics, albeit in varied forms.
John’s womanizing we all know about, although not everyone is aware that at least one of the women - Judith Exner, a woman who paid him calls right in the White House - was tied to high levels of the Mob.
And not everyone knows that one of his early relationships, while in the military, was with a woman German spy. J Edgar Hoover was on to it, and had it not been for the Kennedy wealth and influence, his career would have died right there.
The abuse of privilege, in avoiding responsibility for your actions, was just as big a part of the Kennedys as it was that dishonest mediocrity and ignorant frat boy, George W Bush.
Much was made of John's PT-109 exploits at the time of his running, and he did help save a man's life, but the entire incident - the loss of his craft and the misery of his crew - was owing to his incompetence and lack of appropriate caution as a commander.
The same behavior from anyone else, without the connections, might well have resulted in a court martial.
Kennedy’s good taste included taking on people like Theodore Sorensen as writer/advisor – his family wealth allowed them to hire what essentially became a platoon of smart flaks, people who helped very much in smoothing over the bumps in the road of family history and who gave an aura of intelligence and worth.
But it is certain that more dishonesty came into play here too. Sorensen almost certainly wrote Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, although he was such a loyal follower he denied it always. Sorensen also, to a certainty, was author of speech phrases like “Ask not what….” If you read Sorensen’s book about Kennedy, the cadence and style of the writing are so recognizable.
John also played a very two-faced game in the White House with regard to Cuba. After the Missile Crisis blew up in his face - and the CIA, as well as attempting to assassinate Castro many times, had been very much in the business of planning another invasion of Cuba as Khrushchev feared when he considered sending missiles to Cuba – the agreement that ended the crisis was Kennedy’s agreeing to not invade Cuba as well as withdrawing certain missiles from Turkey.
Word of the agreement made the anti-Castro thugs the CIA had sponsored for years – Osama’s boys in the mountains made a peanut-sized operation compared to the multi-million dollar terror operation the CIA ran in the early 1960s (just one of countless examples of U.S. hypocrisy around the use of terror) – bitterly, fiercely angry, making them one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s assassination.
Kennedy had his brother, as Attorney General and stand-in voice of the President, make a big show of raiding camps in the South where these thugs carried on with their CIA-provided weapons and training. Robert also secretly was in charge of more attempts to murder Castro.
The Kennedy brothers were always getting involved in heated battles. For reasons that still are not clear, Robert conducted a vendetta against a number of big mobsters, despite the fact that the Mob had financed his brother’s presidential campaign and kept such connections as Judith Exner. That behavior made the Mob another chief suspect for Kennedy’s assassination.
Both of the Kennedys actually, for whatever well-organized group killed Jack knew they also had to kill Robert if he was going to become President. Robert’s ruthless use of power meant that the full powers of the office of the president would go after his brother’s assassins, as the pathetic Warren Commission never made any attempt to do.
Sleaze in fancy suits, ruthless people with a veneer of class – that’s the Kennedys.
Monday, April 11, 2011
FRANCE'S BENIGHTED BAN OF THE NIQAB AND THE ARREST TODAY OF TWO WOMEN FOR THE TERRIBLE CRIME OF WEARING IT - ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICE IS WIDE - CHRISTIANITY'S BLOODY HISTORY
SERIES OF POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Banning the niqab is one of the most foolish things France has done in my memory, exceeded perhaps only by the arrest of two women wearing it today.
You do not tell immigrants what to wear.
And you most certainly do not tell citizens in general what to wear. Not in a free society.
Telling people what to wear reflects the same values as telling them what to say. All censorship is abhorrent to a free society.
It is very easy to make fun of such customs, as a commenter called Mich Johnson has done here, but that is the purest proof of an adolescent thinking, not the basis for government policy.
All migrants eventually give up old customs. A decent society lets them do it as they choose.
___________________
"Even non-radical muslims view the world as a map to be coloured in varying shades of green, depending on the degree of islamic implantation."
Why not try thinking before commenting?
For hundreds of years, Christians of all types have sent out missionaries to convert the world.
And that included the ghastly Catholic ones who presented South American indigenous people with the choice of conversion or being burnt alive, indigenous people murdered by the thousands.
American society itself has fought a battle with intolerant puritanical Christians for two centuries, the Constitution being religion-blind but some Christians insisting stupidly that America was a "Christian country," too ignorant to know that most of the Founding Fathers were either Deists or Agnostics wanting freedom from religion.
Today people like the Mormons are sending armies of missionaries all over the world - even though it could argued by outsiders that Mormonism is a religion with ridiculous beliefs and superstitions.
Missionaries of all kinds go abroad by the thousands, essentially bearing the message that the native people’s religion is inadequate, so they must have Christianity instead.
Your comment is just prejudice against Muslims dressed up as thought.
___________________________
"Now, let's see these women fight for the freedom of other religions in the Muslim world.If they did that I might believe their commitment to religious expression."
Have you even considered how many of our religious women fight for the freedom of other religions?
Catholic nuns? Hasidic Jews? Mennonites? Mormons?
You're proposing a standard that's phony, comforting yourself that you defend freedom.
Hardly a notion communicating your dedication to principle.
___________________________
"Everywhere in the world where Islam is in the majority, it has brought backwardness, bigotry, oppression, destruction and tremendous suffering."
Oh, so you have studied the practices of more than a billion people?
Your comment is nothing more than a few news snippets strung together to try characterizing something you don't like.
I believe that's called prejudice.
People seem to have no idea of the blood-soaked history of Christianity when they make these kinds of assertions.
They also always conveniently ignore the savageries of Israel in our own time.
Readers may enjoy:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/of-war-islam-and-israel/
______________________________
"The election's in a year and Sarkozy's only hope is to unite France behind him against the foreign element. How many "gypsies" did he deport en masse a few months back?'
Yes indeed. Thanks for an informed comment.
And don't forget the National Front has shown new strength in France.
Here is Sarkozy using the National Front's own nasty methods against them politically.
A race to the sewer.
_____________________________
"Why is no one dealing with the growing use of beards and mustaches these days?
"They deface the person, and are not very hygenic.
And while we're at it, why should people wear sunglasses, what are they trying to hide?"
Thanks for another thoughtful comment.
Yes, indeed, why not ban the huge beards and big dark hats of Hasidic Jews?
As for someone’s ridiculous comment about some terrorist dressing up in a niqab to commit a crime, I have to say his words are stunningly unthinking.
How many bank robberies, home invasions, and break-and-enters employing ski masks or rubber Halloween face masks do you think the world saw in the year alone?
Hundreds? Thousands?
Surely, by such feeble logic, all advanced states should ban ski masks and Halloween's rubber face masks.
The comments on this subject sadly just get dumber and more unthinking as we go.
There's a huge amount of prejudice out there, and here is prima facie evidence of it offered up voluntarily by all the haters.
___________________________
"Women wera [sic] it, because of peer pressure from relatives. Not because they chose so, period."
Oh, you've conducted a study have you?
Please share your expert knowledge with the world by publishing in a journal.
Your comment is sad and dumb. Period.
_________________________
"Jesus didn't teach any sort of "jihad". Those who keep insisting on comparing the two need to stop. You cannot compare islam to Christianity because it is only islam that specifically condones violence as a means to an end."
Well, here's another fine example of the old saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
Christianity has killed more people than any other religion on earth.
Again see my published piece:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/of-war-islam-and-israel/
Christians have never, never followed what Jesus said.
The famous scene in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov called “The Grand Inquisitor” has Jesus returned to earth talking to the Inquisitor.
Jesus can make no sense of what he sees Christianity has become, and the Grand Inquisitor has no use for Jesus' words and ends by sending him off to the Inquisition.
That fact too is an essential part of the religion's history.
Banning the niqab is one of the most foolish things France has done in my memory, exceeded perhaps only by the arrest of two women wearing it today.
You do not tell immigrants what to wear.
And you most certainly do not tell citizens in general what to wear. Not in a free society.
Telling people what to wear reflects the same values as telling them what to say. All censorship is abhorrent to a free society.
It is very easy to make fun of such customs, as a commenter called Mich Johnson has done here, but that is the purest proof of an adolescent thinking, not the basis for government policy.
All migrants eventually give up old customs. A decent society lets them do it as they choose.
___________________
"Even non-radical muslims view the world as a map to be coloured in varying shades of green, depending on the degree of islamic implantation."
Why not try thinking before commenting?
For hundreds of years, Christians of all types have sent out missionaries to convert the world.
And that included the ghastly Catholic ones who presented South American indigenous people with the choice of conversion or being burnt alive, indigenous people murdered by the thousands.
American society itself has fought a battle with intolerant puritanical Christians for two centuries, the Constitution being religion-blind but some Christians insisting stupidly that America was a "Christian country," too ignorant to know that most of the Founding Fathers were either Deists or Agnostics wanting freedom from religion.
Today people like the Mormons are sending armies of missionaries all over the world - even though it could argued by outsiders that Mormonism is a religion with ridiculous beliefs and superstitions.
Missionaries of all kinds go abroad by the thousands, essentially bearing the message that the native people’s religion is inadequate, so they must have Christianity instead.
Your comment is just prejudice against Muslims dressed up as thought.
___________________________
"Now, let's see these women fight for the freedom of other religions in the Muslim world.If they did that I might believe their commitment to religious expression."
Have you even considered how many of our religious women fight for the freedom of other religions?
Catholic nuns? Hasidic Jews? Mennonites? Mormons?
You're proposing a standard that's phony, comforting yourself that you defend freedom.
Hardly a notion communicating your dedication to principle.
___________________________
"Everywhere in the world where Islam is in the majority, it has brought backwardness, bigotry, oppression, destruction and tremendous suffering."
Oh, so you have studied the practices of more than a billion people?
Your comment is nothing more than a few news snippets strung together to try characterizing something you don't like.
I believe that's called prejudice.
People seem to have no idea of the blood-soaked history of Christianity when they make these kinds of assertions.
They also always conveniently ignore the savageries of Israel in our own time.
Readers may enjoy:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/of-war-islam-and-israel/
______________________________
"The election's in a year and Sarkozy's only hope is to unite France behind him against the foreign element. How many "gypsies" did he deport en masse a few months back?'
Yes indeed. Thanks for an informed comment.
And don't forget the National Front has shown new strength in France.
Here is Sarkozy using the National Front's own nasty methods against them politically.
A race to the sewer.
_____________________________
"Why is no one dealing with the growing use of beards and mustaches these days?
"They deface the person, and are not very hygenic.
And while we're at it, why should people wear sunglasses, what are they trying to hide?"
Thanks for another thoughtful comment.
Yes, indeed, why not ban the huge beards and big dark hats of Hasidic Jews?
As for someone’s ridiculous comment about some terrorist dressing up in a niqab to commit a crime, I have to say his words are stunningly unthinking.
How many bank robberies, home invasions, and break-and-enters employing ski masks or rubber Halloween face masks do you think the world saw in the year alone?
Hundreds? Thousands?
Surely, by such feeble logic, all advanced states should ban ski masks and Halloween's rubber face masks.
The comments on this subject sadly just get dumber and more unthinking as we go.
There's a huge amount of prejudice out there, and here is prima facie evidence of it offered up voluntarily by all the haters.
___________________________
"Women wera [sic] it, because of peer pressure from relatives. Not because they chose so, period."
Oh, you've conducted a study have you?
Please share your expert knowledge with the world by publishing in a journal.
Your comment is sad and dumb. Period.
_________________________
"Jesus didn't teach any sort of "jihad". Those who keep insisting on comparing the two need to stop. You cannot compare islam to Christianity because it is only islam that specifically condones violence as a means to an end."
Well, here's another fine example of the old saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
Christianity has killed more people than any other religion on earth.
Again see my published piece:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/of-war-islam-and-israel/
Christians have never, never followed what Jesus said.
The famous scene in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov called “The Grand Inquisitor” has Jesus returned to earth talking to the Inquisitor.
Jesus can make no sense of what he sees Christianity has become, and the Grand Inquisitor has no use for Jesus' words and ends by sending him off to the Inquisition.
That fact too is an essential part of the religion's history.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
A JOURNALIST WRITES ABOUT WHAT THE F-35 BRINGS TO THE FIGHT - MISSING THE POINT THAT THIS IS LIKE A RESIDENT OF GEORGIA BUYING A DELUXE SNOW-BLOWER AND MISSING TOO HOW WARS START
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY PAUL KORING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
This guy is shilling for Harper.
We can "maintain our air defense" with much less costly weapons.
Besides, there are no serious challenges to our air defense. None.
We need planes to escort errant air liners and the like. That doesn't require the ultimate sophistication.
Having a large storehouse of highly sophisticated weapons is an open invitation to getting involved with nonsense like Libya or war crimes like Iraq.
Many of the best historians agree that the useless horror of WWI started in large part because all of Europe was a heavily armed camp.
Politicians and military people will always use power if it is there.
Just so right now in Libya, a lunatic business we do not even discuss.
And just so America's pointless crusade in Afghanistan where we have spent a considerable number of lives and great treasure.
A sheer waste.
_______________________
"However, if you throw your back out trying to shovel deep snow when it does fall, you can be very uncomfortable for a long time. That event can make the snowblower look cheap and handy.
Note to Putin or any other aggressive interloper - we understand the need for snowblowers. Don't even think about messing with us or our pals."
A totally false analogy.
A snow-blower is a useful and time-saving tool, used many times a year.
And snow-blowers never start wars, the most wasteful and savage enterprise on earth.
A high-tech supersonic fighter is useless unless something extraordinary happens.
It just sits on the tarmac most of the time, gets its exquisitely fine-tuning put out of tune by jet jockeys taking it out for a playful spin, and absorbs vast amounts of cash on maintenance.
Even mentioning Putin marks the writer as something of a right-wing crank.
Its the cheap Harper ploy on Arctic sovereignty, ignoring the genuine threat against which these planes are useless.
We have infinitely less to fear from Putin's Russia truly than we do from the United States, a country which now regularly attacks and bombs countries it doesn't agree with.
Arctic sovereignty and Great Lakes water are two great targets for American interests.
Were the United States inclined to flex its muscle on us, this small number of jets would be shot down in a day.
The contract represents little more than a subsidy to the Pentagon trying to develop this costly machine.
____________________________
Further on the silly snow-blower analogy.
If you live in Georgia, a snow-blower is an utterly useless thing with no conceivable use ever, a vast waste of money and time.
In terms of geo-politics, we actually do live in Georgia.
The world's Frankenstein military resides next door, watching with unblinking eyes.
No one else, but I mean no one, is going to come calling.
So we do not need this plane for any possible circumstance.
The Pentagon wants us to buy it - as it wants other NATO countries to buy it - to help subsidize its astronomical cost.
Just as when the US fights its various wars, it is always cajoling and pressuring its allies to join them - effectively a subsidy of activities they chose alone to engage in.
What a damn poor way to blow tens of billions of dollars.
Remember, Harper is the most pathetically servile prime minister towards the United States in our history.
He supports and goes along with whatever they choose to do but he is always disingenuous about just what he is doing, and just so this silly plane.
His stuff about Arctic sovereignty is a cheap political game because he entirely ignores the genuine threat to it, instead serving its interests without hesitation, and even completely adopting the political methods and language of the Republican Party.
This guy is shilling for Harper.
We can "maintain our air defense" with much less costly weapons.
Besides, there are no serious challenges to our air defense. None.
We need planes to escort errant air liners and the like. That doesn't require the ultimate sophistication.
Having a large storehouse of highly sophisticated weapons is an open invitation to getting involved with nonsense like Libya or war crimes like Iraq.
Many of the best historians agree that the useless horror of WWI started in large part because all of Europe was a heavily armed camp.
Politicians and military people will always use power if it is there.
Just so right now in Libya, a lunatic business we do not even discuss.
And just so America's pointless crusade in Afghanistan where we have spent a considerable number of lives and great treasure.
A sheer waste.
_______________________
"However, if you throw your back out trying to shovel deep snow when it does fall, you can be very uncomfortable for a long time. That event can make the snowblower look cheap and handy.
Note to Putin or any other aggressive interloper - we understand the need for snowblowers. Don't even think about messing with us or our pals."
A totally false analogy.
A snow-blower is a useful and time-saving tool, used many times a year.
And snow-blowers never start wars, the most wasteful and savage enterprise on earth.
A high-tech supersonic fighter is useless unless something extraordinary happens.
It just sits on the tarmac most of the time, gets its exquisitely fine-tuning put out of tune by jet jockeys taking it out for a playful spin, and absorbs vast amounts of cash on maintenance.
Even mentioning Putin marks the writer as something of a right-wing crank.
Its the cheap Harper ploy on Arctic sovereignty, ignoring the genuine threat against which these planes are useless.
We have infinitely less to fear from Putin's Russia truly than we do from the United States, a country which now regularly attacks and bombs countries it doesn't agree with.
Arctic sovereignty and Great Lakes water are two great targets for American interests.
Were the United States inclined to flex its muscle on us, this small number of jets would be shot down in a day.
The contract represents little more than a subsidy to the Pentagon trying to develop this costly machine.
____________________________
Further on the silly snow-blower analogy.
If you live in Georgia, a snow-blower is an utterly useless thing with no conceivable use ever, a vast waste of money and time.
In terms of geo-politics, we actually do live in Georgia.
The world's Frankenstein military resides next door, watching with unblinking eyes.
No one else, but I mean no one, is going to come calling.
So we do not need this plane for any possible circumstance.
The Pentagon wants us to buy it - as it wants other NATO countries to buy it - to help subsidize its astronomical cost.
Just as when the US fights its various wars, it is always cajoling and pressuring its allies to join them - effectively a subsidy of activities they chose alone to engage in.
What a damn poor way to blow tens of billions of dollars.
Remember, Harper is the most pathetically servile prime minister towards the United States in our history.
He supports and goes along with whatever they choose to do but he is always disingenuous about just what he is doing, and just so this silly plane.
His stuff about Arctic sovereignty is a cheap political game because he entirely ignores the genuine threat to it, instead serving its interests without hesitation, and even completely adopting the political methods and language of the Republican Party.
Monday, April 04, 2011
JUDGE GOLDSTONE IS WRONGLY CLAIMED TO HAVE RETRACTED THE TRUTHS OF HIS GAZA-INVASION REPORT AND ISRAEL ARROGANTLY DEMANDS THE UN TRASH THE REPORT
EXPANDED VERSION OF POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL WEISS IN THE TELEGRAPH
What a nonsense column.
First, Judge Goldstone has not retracted what he wrote, rather he has made some very qualified statements about aspects of it a long time afterward.
Even in Goldstone’s original report he went out of his way to portray the event as less of a one-sided slaughter than it in fact was, knowing full well he would be subjected to god-awful treatment afterward.
But even his qualified words come after Judge Goldstone's life having been made a living hell by Israeli apologists with accusations, sneers, shunning, and violent threats.
Israel and its apologists are known for the intense and ugly pressure they can bring to bear on anyone who fails to follow the official script.
After all, that's how Israel got itself recognized by the United States in the first place.
President Truman was not inclined to recognize the terrorists who declared themselves a state in 1948.
But he was given the full treatment - he was hounded by apologists and lobbyists in a way he never before experienced.
Moreover, he was running for re-election and the situation looked grim, so the last thing he needed was a howling mob chasing him around the country.
And by finally relenting and granting recognition, he got the kind of campaign contributions he badly needed.
Nothing has changed since 1948.
The truth is we do not really need a report although it is always a good thing to have documentation of terrible events.
Everyone except the howling Israeli apologists knows what happened. We saw it. We heard it. We felt the people’s misery.
And it should make no difference to Israel since Israel has never had any respect for the UN. It stands in contempt of a whole list of resolutions, and, in another of its recent atrocities, the invasion of Southern Lebanon, it deliberately targeted and killed four UN workers bravely doing their job of observation.
When Israel invaded Gaza, it shut down a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, and attacked the occupants as though they were going to war with an army. It attacked civilians with tanks and planes and modern weapons, even employing horrors like white phosphorus.
Israel killed 300 to 400 children alone (plus a thousand others), and we have testimony that Israeli soldiers used children as human shields.
The streets ran red with blood, and the pictures were on the Internet.
And for what? Israel and its apologists insisted on calling it a war, insisted it was justified because some Palestinians, frustrated beyond endurance by Israel’s ill treatment, had been shooting into Israel home-made fireworks called Qassam rockets. Thinking people knew, despite a wall of words over these toy rockets, that that was not what Israel’s atrocity was about.
Well, only the other day Ehud Olmert, prime minister at the time and surely a war criminal now, said the army didn't do its job in Operation Cast Lead. The job was killing all the members and leaders of a cleanly elected government which Israel hates.
Some respect for democracy and human rights.
And as for the mad pack, well, nothing on earth you could say or do would ever convince them that Israel is the nasty piece of work that it truly is, a brutal garrison state with no respect for any of its neighbors or anyone else who doesn’t agree with its views and demands.
According to the pack, we are all supposed to pretend the plainly naked emperor actually is wearing clothes. We are all supposed to drop our precious and hard-won values regarding human rights and just say Israel must be right whenever it starts slaughtering people.
Cloudcuckooland, only stinking of human gore.
What a nonsense column.
First, Judge Goldstone has not retracted what he wrote, rather he has made some very qualified statements about aspects of it a long time afterward.
Even in Goldstone’s original report he went out of his way to portray the event as less of a one-sided slaughter than it in fact was, knowing full well he would be subjected to god-awful treatment afterward.
But even his qualified words come after Judge Goldstone's life having been made a living hell by Israeli apologists with accusations, sneers, shunning, and violent threats.
Israel and its apologists are known for the intense and ugly pressure they can bring to bear on anyone who fails to follow the official script.
After all, that's how Israel got itself recognized by the United States in the first place.
President Truman was not inclined to recognize the terrorists who declared themselves a state in 1948.
But he was given the full treatment - he was hounded by apologists and lobbyists in a way he never before experienced.
Moreover, he was running for re-election and the situation looked grim, so the last thing he needed was a howling mob chasing him around the country.
And by finally relenting and granting recognition, he got the kind of campaign contributions he badly needed.
Nothing has changed since 1948.
The truth is we do not really need a report although it is always a good thing to have documentation of terrible events.
Everyone except the howling Israeli apologists knows what happened. We saw it. We heard it. We felt the people’s misery.
And it should make no difference to Israel since Israel has never had any respect for the UN. It stands in contempt of a whole list of resolutions, and, in another of its recent atrocities, the invasion of Southern Lebanon, it deliberately targeted and killed four UN workers bravely doing their job of observation.
When Israel invaded Gaza, it shut down a giant, fenced-in refugee camp, and attacked the occupants as though they were going to war with an army. It attacked civilians with tanks and planes and modern weapons, even employing horrors like white phosphorus.
Israel killed 300 to 400 children alone (plus a thousand others), and we have testimony that Israeli soldiers used children as human shields.
The streets ran red with blood, and the pictures were on the Internet.
And for what? Israel and its apologists insisted on calling it a war, insisted it was justified because some Palestinians, frustrated beyond endurance by Israel’s ill treatment, had been shooting into Israel home-made fireworks called Qassam rockets. Thinking people knew, despite a wall of words over these toy rockets, that that was not what Israel’s atrocity was about.
Well, only the other day Ehud Olmert, prime minister at the time and surely a war criminal now, said the army didn't do its job in Operation Cast Lead. The job was killing all the members and leaders of a cleanly elected government which Israel hates.
Some respect for democracy and human rights.
And as for the mad pack, well, nothing on earth you could say or do would ever convince them that Israel is the nasty piece of work that it truly is, a brutal garrison state with no respect for any of its neighbors or anyone else who doesn’t agree with its views and demands.
According to the pack, we are all supposed to pretend the plainly naked emperor actually is wearing clothes. We are all supposed to drop our precious and hard-won values regarding human rights and just say Israel must be right whenever it starts slaughtering people.
Cloudcuckooland, only stinking of human gore.
Friday, March 25, 2011
THE MEANINGLESS CONCEPT OF ETHICAL WAR: THE CASE AGAINST INTERVENTION
March 25, 2011
THE MEANINGLESS CONCEPT OF ETHICAL WAR
The Case against Intervention
John Chuckman
French air force planes struck the first blows: using “intelligent” munitions, the planes struck tanks and artillery which threatened the people of Benghazi.
Now, who wouldn’t be heartened to learn that mechanized forces being used against civilians, civilians whose only demand was freedom from tyranny, were destroyed?
One might easily regard intervention, limited strictly to such targets, as both ethical and desirable, but the truth is that intervention is never limited to such targets, and the realities motivating it are loaded with error and, most importantly, with intentions at odds with high-sounding public statements.
The record for intervention is one of greater death and destruction than the threats it is supposed to stop where it is used and of allowing monstrous crimes to go unchallenged where it is avoided. Indeed, it has been avoided always where monstrous crimes are involved, the very situations in which its human costs might be more than offset by what it prevents. Nowhere in the record is there any consistency with regard to principle despite the press releases accompanying every new bombardment.
The glimmer of moral satisfaction we feel at the first instance of an event such as the French jets destroying some of Gaddafi’s armor about to attack a city is badly misplaced, for if ethics or morality is to mean anything, it must absolutely be consistent in application. You cannot meaningfully speak of selective ethics.
At the very time of the events in Libya, we have the same civil unrest and demands for an end to absolute and unaccountable government in Yemen and Bahrain, and they have been met with fairly large-scale abuse and killings by police. Literally scores have been shot dead in the streets. In the case of Bahrain, we have troops from Saudi Arabia – an absolute monarchy much resembling something from the 14th century – entering the country to assist Bahrain’s government in stopping its people seeking freedom.
Now, anyone who knows anything about the Mideast knows that Saudi Arabia would not march a single platoon of soldiers across its border without explicit approval from Washington. It just cannot be otherwise because America keeps an intensely close watch on matters affecting its client-state, Israel, and because Saudi Arabia’s advanced weapons come from America, and also because, following 9/11, most of the perpetrators having been Saudi nationals, Saudi Arabia has had to work long and hard to gain some trust back from Washington.
So where is the moral or ethical balance? Help the tyrant in Bahrain and attack the one in Libya? Why is only Libya a target?
There are many reports, not carried in the mainline press, about Israel supplying the African mercenaries who have been doing most of the bloody work in Libya. They are said to have been supplied by an Israeli military contracting firm connected to Mossad at the kind of high per diem rates which Gaddafi’s oil wealth allows. One of Gaddafi’s sons also made a visit for private talks in Israel in the early days of the rebellion’s repression. Such events, we can be absolutely sure, also do not happen without approval from Washington.
It appears America has both indirectly helped the tyrant while directly, albeit belatedly, fighting him. I don’t see any evidence of ethics in that situation.
Gaddafi certainly has grown into an unpleasant figure, displaying signs of deteriorating mental health while commanding the powers of a fairly rich small state. His early days as a rather dashing and intelligent revolutionary figure – few people recall he was featured in a cover story of the New York Times Magazine decades ago portraying him in rather flattering son-of-the-desert terms, the kind of article about a foreign leader which always has the imprimatur of the CIA – are lost in the reality of a mumbling old tyrant who has proved ready to strike down civilians to maintain his position. Naturally, people feel exhilarated to see him lose some military advantage.
Most humans do appear to be programmed by nature to cheer in situations where there is a clear bad guy and a good guy going after him. That is why blockbuster Hollywood movies and professional wrestling generate billions of dollars in revenue by repeating endlessly the same simple plot with only changes of costume. But world affairs are never so simple.
Just consider Israel’s assault on Gaza a few years ago, a place which is essentially a large, fenced-in refugee camp possessing no serious weapons. Israel killed something like 1,400 people, including hundreds of children, estimated at 400 young souls, and its soldiers committed such barbarities as using children as human shields. One saw pictures on the Internet of blood running like sewer overflow in the streets of Gaza. Yes, hundreds of children killed and with no rebuke from Washington or Paris or London and certainly no threat of having a no-fly zone or other violent measures imposed.
Up to the point of intervention, information from Libya suggests nothing on quite that scale of barbarism had occurred, rather there was the beginning of a conventional civil war with one side having better resources. So why the immense difference in response between the two situations? Why did we see Libyan victims on television, but the worst of what Israel committed could only be found on the Internet? Selectivity is at work always in these matters from the very start.
Not long before the Gaza atrocity, we had yet another invasion of Southern Lebanon by Israel. More than a thousand people were killed in their own land, and here we had the added horror of hundreds of thousands of bomblets from that cruellest of weapons, American cluster bombs, being showered over civilian areas, destined to kill and cripple for years to come. Along the way, Israel showed its contempt for international law by deliberately targeting a group of United Nations’ observers who died bravely doing their duty.
Yet there was no effort to punish or even restrict Israel as we see today imposed on Gaddafi. How can anyone claim that the response in Libya is ethical?
Libya is now being so heavily bombed that some Muslim states which joined the “coalition” are making loud noises about the United Nation’s mandate being exceeded. If you read newspapers from Britain as well as North America, you will know that there is disagreement between the public statements of the British and American governments as to what constitutes legitimate targets.
But when it comes to bombing, America never does anything by halves.
Shortly after the French attack at Benghazi, 124 cruise missiles, mostly American, began destroying targets in Libya. Reports say four B-52s flew from Europe, each with 30 tons of bombs, and three B-2 stealth bombers, carrying a total of 45 two thousand-pound, “bunker-buster” bombs, flew from the United States. And that was just the start.
Despite protestations, American targets certainly included sites associated with Gaddafi himself, his own compound having been destroyed.
And there you have another of many problems with intervention, or, as some like to call it, ethical war: it depends upon the Frankenstein military of the United States because no one else has its destructive capacities, forces which we have seen, again and again, not only kill in great excess but which typically are directed to dark tasks not featured in the propaganda leading up to the effort.
Recall the American “humanitarian” mission in Somalia in the early 1990s, the one that ended with “Blackhawk down.” We were all conditioned by endless pictures of starving Somalis to welcome efforts at their relief, but the American military, instead of serving the roles of distributing relief supplies and guarding those distributing relief supplies – the ostensible purposes of the mission - almost immediately went after what they regarded as “the bad guys.”
They attempted to kill one of the major local warlords with special planes equipped with modern Gatling guns, circling the sky and spraying large-calibre shells in built-up areas, at the rate of thousands per minute, much of that indiscriminate firepower killing innocent people and destroying property in a poor region. Hundreds of Somalis were killed by the American efforts, and some reports put the number at 10,000.
But we will never learn the truth from the American government, which, since its debacle in Vietnam, always suppresses the numbers it kills. It did so in the first Gulf War where tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits sitting behind sand walls in the desert were carpet-bombed by B-52s, their bodies later bulldozed into the ground. It did so in Afghanistan, where it regularly has killed civilians for ten years. And it did so in that pure war crime, the invasion of Iraq.
America’s effort to get the “bad guy” in Somalia was an act of complete arrogance and sheer stupidity, clearly reflecting America’s ingrained streak of hell-and-damnation Puritanism and its Captain Ahab obsession with chasing the white whale over whole oceans. All Americans achieved was to make a deadly enemy, as they shortly learned. They ended up, pretty much leaving the country shamefully and forgetting their first purpose in going there, distributing relief to the starving, something Canada’s soldiers and others routinely do without creating such aggression and such violent results.
Recall again President Clinton’s launching a large salvo of missiles in 1998 towards targets in the Afghan mountains and at a Sudanese plant in Khartoum. They were said to be aimed at terrorist targets, but the public was given no detailed information. We do know the plant in Sudan proved to be just what it was claimed by locals, a pharmaceutical plant, Dozens of innocent people were killed and property worth many millions of dollars was destroyed to no purpose, based entirely on incorrect information.
Clinton also launched 23 cruise missiles towards targets in Baghdad in 1993, supposedly in retaliation for an Iraqi-sponsored attempt on former-President George Bush when he visited Kuwait, although the public was given no details of the supposed plot. Even granting there was a plot, if you are entitled to hurl thousands of pounds of high explosives at a distant city owing to a faulty dark operation, what are we to say of the many countries and millions of people who have been victims of America’s many dark operations? What principle is at work here other than might makes right?
Ethical war is an absurd term, just as is the idea of bombing for democracy is. Always and anywhere, as soon as the military engines are started, just as is said for truth, ethics are left behind. War is a playground for adventurers and psychopaths. Just recall those American pilots during the first Gulf War whose cockpit transmissions were broadcast on television while they strafed Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait City: their chilling words included, “Hey, this’s like shootin’ fish in a barrel!” And readers should remember that that first Gulf War was itself little more than an American dark operation intended to put Hussein into a compromising position and topple him.
Deeply discrediting the whole confused concept of ethical war are not just the many crimes committed in its name but the many greater omissions. Genocide has become one of the most abused and misused terms of our time, someone ignorantly using it every time a group of people is killed anywhere, but we have had several authentic genocides since World War II, and I think we can all agree if ever there could be a case for ethical war, it would be the case of genocide. But it is precisely in the case of genocide that all the powers simply hide, the United States having a completely shameful record.
In the case of Indonesia, following the downfall of President Sukarno in 1967, about half a million people had their throats slashed and their bodies dumped into rivers because they were, or were suspected of being, communists. The entire nation was turned temporarily into an abattoir for humans, and where was the United States, defender of freedom, during the horror? Rather than any effort to stop the terror, it had employees of the State Department on phones around the clock feeding the names of people they’d like to see included in the extermination.
In the case of Cambodia during the late 1970s, the “killing fields” saw about a million people murdered by the mad ideologues of the Khmer Rouge. Where was the United States? Nowhere to be seen or heard, off licking its wounds from its long, pointless war in Vietnam, except when Vietnamese forces finally crossed the border to stop the bloodshed, the United States yelped, “See, we told you so, the ‘domino effect’ is now at work!” And to this day, few Americans take any responsibility for their county’s role in creating the “killing fields.” In its desperate efforts to win in Vietnam, President Nixon’s government launched huge aerial bombardments and incursions by troops into a neutral country, finally so destabilizing it that the Khmer Rouge took power.
In the case of Rwanda in 1994, the world watched something on the order of 800,000 people hacked to pieces, the victims selected merely for their ethnic identity. President Clinton knew every detail from the beginning but made every effort to avert his eyes and prevent the United States from being involved.
So much for the notion of ethical war in the very cases where it could conceivably have made a difference.
The United States’ motives for intervening in Libya are complex and anything but ethical. It was reluctant even to speak out at first. The truth is that stability in the Middle East – stability as defined by the bloody likes of Henry Kissinger – at the complete expense of democratic values or human rights has been bedrock American policy for decades. This policy had the duel objectives of securing the production of oil and making a comfortable climate for Israel.
The United States dithered during recent momentous events in Egypt precisely because Israel benefited from that country’s dictator and was not interested in seeing anything resembling democracy emerge in large Arab states, despite its hypocritical and much-repeated refrain about being the only democracy in the region. Numerous Israeli leaders made the most embarrassingly revealing and shameful statements while the scales were tipping against President Mubarak. But the events proved so unprecedented and so overwhelming and pretty much unstoppable without immense bloodshed that the United States finally came down on the right side, working to restrain Mubarak and to ease the transition in power.
The North African version of Europe in 1848 is very much viewed as a threat by Israel. Imagine all the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, some four million people, plus the non-Jewish people of Israel proper, about a million, stirred by events in North Africa, rising up to demand their rights? Stopping the series of rebellions against unrepresentative governments along the Mediterranean shores must be high on Israel’s list of current foreign policy objectives because it is clear that continued successes encourage new attempts.
Even further, as we have seen, Chancellor Merkel of Germany has rebuked Prime Minister Netanyahu in public for doing nothing for peace, asserting rightly that the changing conditions of the Arab world make it incumbent upon Israel to pursue genuine peace.
There is some hard truth assiduously avoided in Western mainstream press and by Western governments in their public communications: that what anyone outside of Israel would call peace has simply never been an objective of Israel’s government. There is no other way of understanding Israel’s actions over decades than its aiming to acquire virtually all the Palestinian lands without the Palestinians, or, at least, with a reduced number of Palestinians put into utterly subservient arrangements with no political integrity and very limited rights.
But again in Libya, events soon outdistanced United States’ policy. Images of freedom-fighters there being attacked by bloody mercenaries and mechanized forces affected public opinion and allowed of no further dithering, as did the initiatives taken by Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron and France’s President Sarkozy, each for their own political and economic reasons. The truth is that most people are decent, and the general public is always sympathetic with the victims seen in such images, which is precisely why American networks never show images of American troops brutalizing Iraqis or Israelis brutalizing Palestinians.
Gaddafi has long been a disliked third-world leader in the West - independent-minded leaders never are liked by the American government and there is a long list of them who have been overthrown or assassinated regardless of their democratic bona fides - and in a sense the West’s own past extravagant claims about his being a grand sponsor of terror has blown back on it. Added to the fact that he now appears rather mad and to the image of heroic Libyans winning and then losing in their fight for freedom, public opinion has made the course the United States intended difficult if not impossible.
But that does not mean public opinion is right about intervention, a subject not well understood by the average citizen. Even the case of a no-fly zone, something judging from the glib words seems to be considered by many a not very aggressive form of help, is not well understood. A no-fly zone is a complex and highly destructive operation, pushing the operator into something approaching a state of war, and yet having little likelihood of success in turning events on the ground.
Planes first had to fly all over Libya to get the radars turned on. Then attack planes and missiles quickly had to follow-up to destroy the located radars. Airfields and parked planes are also targets. Many people on the ground get killed in the effort, but that's only the beginning. Twenty-four hour-a-day flyovers must be maintained afterwards to assure radars are not replaced and to attack planes which break the ban, all of which involves more civilian deaths. And from the first day in Libya, the air attacks have gone beyond imposing a no-fly zone, as we saw in the French attack at Benghazi and, at this writing, British attacks on Libyan armor at Ajdabiya.
Anyone who has kept track of American pilots’ efforts in Afghanistan and in Iraq knows that they have killed very large numbers of innocent people, and that even in situations where they have complete air superiority. They still kill innocent Afghans regularly, scores at a time, thousands in total.
The record of no-fly zones is not a happy one. The United States maintained one against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a decade after the first Gulf War, a decade of flying over the country and shooting up anything suspicious. There were countless incidents of American planes shooting and bombing people, but the no-fly zone did not prevent Saddam Hussein from achieving his objectives. Unless you are prepared to do to a country what the United States did to Japan during World War II – incinerate whole cities both with conventional or atomic weapons – air power cannot determine the direction of events on the ground with a determined opponent.
Reports at this writing from Libya suggest exactly the same result.
Once the no-fly zone is established, frustration over the opponent’s success on the ground creates a constant temptation to say, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and to commit more force. You may easily find yourself engaged in yet another war. And everywhere and always in the modern era, the victims of war are mainly not the enemy soldiers or their “bad guy” leaders but the people just trying to live their lives. Just think about the roughly one million people who have perished in Iraq plus the more than two million refugees who fled their country, and consider the fact that one of the Arab world’s most advanced countries is now reduced to a generation without jobs, without dependable electric power and clean water. Saddam Hussein never dreamed of doing that much damage to his people despite his atrocities.
When your objectives going in are confused and uncertain, as are those of the United States, what is the hope for a good outcome? Not great I think. It’s a little like pouring concrete without having constructed a mold. And that is another reason why war for ethical of humanitarian motives has such a poor record: huge investments in death and destruction are made suddenly, upon the occurrence of unanticipated events, and often involving quick turns-around against long-established policy.
Perhaps the worst charge against intervention is that each instance only makes it easier and more acceptable in the future. The long list of minor to major interventions by the United States in the postwar era – most of them with no pretence of international legality or an ethical nature - should serve as a severe warning against going in this direction. From toppling democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, or Chile to the holocaust in Vietnam with its estimated three million victims and a land left saturated with poisons and landmines, there is virtually no case for intervention that does not make future abuse and horror more likely by those with great power.
It is also well to remember that we have a greatly changed world political environment since the events of 9/11. Today the United States, without hesitation, sends drones into a country with which it is not even at war, Pakistan, and kills hundreds of innocent people. Its so-called “kill-teams” perpetrate horrors in Afghanistan, and recent events suggest they have been at work in Pakistan. It still holds people prisoner with no proper law in the secret locations of its CIA international gulag. The abomination of Guantanamo remains. The honouring of international law and agreements has suffered greatly in favour of doing as you please so long as you have the might.
Even the accepted institution for warranting ethical war, the United Nations, as it exists is a highly inadequate institution to exercise such authority. The United States frequently stands against pretty much the entire world there in opposing perfectly appropriate resolutions and gets its way. And when it wants a resolution approved, member states are subject to behind-the-scenes bribes, cajoling, and threats to produce the votes America wants. No one else has such vast economic, financial, and diplomatic leverage to get what they want there. America has exercised its unique power over the organization many times, from the Korean War to the invasion of Afghanistan. Sometimes, rarely, its demands are so unreasonable that enough of the world’s countries find themselves in a position to resist, as was the case for invading Iraq.
THE MEANINGLESS CONCEPT OF ETHICAL WAR
The Case against Intervention
John Chuckman
French air force planes struck the first blows: using “intelligent” munitions, the planes struck tanks and artillery which threatened the people of Benghazi.
Now, who wouldn’t be heartened to learn that mechanized forces being used against civilians, civilians whose only demand was freedom from tyranny, were destroyed?
One might easily regard intervention, limited strictly to such targets, as both ethical and desirable, but the truth is that intervention is never limited to such targets, and the realities motivating it are loaded with error and, most importantly, with intentions at odds with high-sounding public statements.
The record for intervention is one of greater death and destruction than the threats it is supposed to stop where it is used and of allowing monstrous crimes to go unchallenged where it is avoided. Indeed, it has been avoided always where monstrous crimes are involved, the very situations in which its human costs might be more than offset by what it prevents. Nowhere in the record is there any consistency with regard to principle despite the press releases accompanying every new bombardment.
The glimmer of moral satisfaction we feel at the first instance of an event such as the French jets destroying some of Gaddafi’s armor about to attack a city is badly misplaced, for if ethics or morality is to mean anything, it must absolutely be consistent in application. You cannot meaningfully speak of selective ethics.
At the very time of the events in Libya, we have the same civil unrest and demands for an end to absolute and unaccountable government in Yemen and Bahrain, and they have been met with fairly large-scale abuse and killings by police. Literally scores have been shot dead in the streets. In the case of Bahrain, we have troops from Saudi Arabia – an absolute monarchy much resembling something from the 14th century – entering the country to assist Bahrain’s government in stopping its people seeking freedom.
Now, anyone who knows anything about the Mideast knows that Saudi Arabia would not march a single platoon of soldiers across its border without explicit approval from Washington. It just cannot be otherwise because America keeps an intensely close watch on matters affecting its client-state, Israel, and because Saudi Arabia’s advanced weapons come from America, and also because, following 9/11, most of the perpetrators having been Saudi nationals, Saudi Arabia has had to work long and hard to gain some trust back from Washington.
So where is the moral or ethical balance? Help the tyrant in Bahrain and attack the one in Libya? Why is only Libya a target?
There are many reports, not carried in the mainline press, about Israel supplying the African mercenaries who have been doing most of the bloody work in Libya. They are said to have been supplied by an Israeli military contracting firm connected to Mossad at the kind of high per diem rates which Gaddafi’s oil wealth allows. One of Gaddafi’s sons also made a visit for private talks in Israel in the early days of the rebellion’s repression. Such events, we can be absolutely sure, also do not happen without approval from Washington.
It appears America has both indirectly helped the tyrant while directly, albeit belatedly, fighting him. I don’t see any evidence of ethics in that situation.
Gaddafi certainly has grown into an unpleasant figure, displaying signs of deteriorating mental health while commanding the powers of a fairly rich small state. His early days as a rather dashing and intelligent revolutionary figure – few people recall he was featured in a cover story of the New York Times Magazine decades ago portraying him in rather flattering son-of-the-desert terms, the kind of article about a foreign leader which always has the imprimatur of the CIA – are lost in the reality of a mumbling old tyrant who has proved ready to strike down civilians to maintain his position. Naturally, people feel exhilarated to see him lose some military advantage.
Most humans do appear to be programmed by nature to cheer in situations where there is a clear bad guy and a good guy going after him. That is why blockbuster Hollywood movies and professional wrestling generate billions of dollars in revenue by repeating endlessly the same simple plot with only changes of costume. But world affairs are never so simple.
Just consider Israel’s assault on Gaza a few years ago, a place which is essentially a large, fenced-in refugee camp possessing no serious weapons. Israel killed something like 1,400 people, including hundreds of children, estimated at 400 young souls, and its soldiers committed such barbarities as using children as human shields. One saw pictures on the Internet of blood running like sewer overflow in the streets of Gaza. Yes, hundreds of children killed and with no rebuke from Washington or Paris or London and certainly no threat of having a no-fly zone or other violent measures imposed.
Up to the point of intervention, information from Libya suggests nothing on quite that scale of barbarism had occurred, rather there was the beginning of a conventional civil war with one side having better resources. So why the immense difference in response between the two situations? Why did we see Libyan victims on television, but the worst of what Israel committed could only be found on the Internet? Selectivity is at work always in these matters from the very start.
Not long before the Gaza atrocity, we had yet another invasion of Southern Lebanon by Israel. More than a thousand people were killed in their own land, and here we had the added horror of hundreds of thousands of bomblets from that cruellest of weapons, American cluster bombs, being showered over civilian areas, destined to kill and cripple for years to come. Along the way, Israel showed its contempt for international law by deliberately targeting a group of United Nations’ observers who died bravely doing their duty.
Yet there was no effort to punish or even restrict Israel as we see today imposed on Gaddafi. How can anyone claim that the response in Libya is ethical?
Libya is now being so heavily bombed that some Muslim states which joined the “coalition” are making loud noises about the United Nation’s mandate being exceeded. If you read newspapers from Britain as well as North America, you will know that there is disagreement between the public statements of the British and American governments as to what constitutes legitimate targets.
But when it comes to bombing, America never does anything by halves.
Shortly after the French attack at Benghazi, 124 cruise missiles, mostly American, began destroying targets in Libya. Reports say four B-52s flew from Europe, each with 30 tons of bombs, and three B-2 stealth bombers, carrying a total of 45 two thousand-pound, “bunker-buster” bombs, flew from the United States. And that was just the start.
Despite protestations, American targets certainly included sites associated with Gaddafi himself, his own compound having been destroyed.
And there you have another of many problems with intervention, or, as some like to call it, ethical war: it depends upon the Frankenstein military of the United States because no one else has its destructive capacities, forces which we have seen, again and again, not only kill in great excess but which typically are directed to dark tasks not featured in the propaganda leading up to the effort.
Recall the American “humanitarian” mission in Somalia in the early 1990s, the one that ended with “Blackhawk down.” We were all conditioned by endless pictures of starving Somalis to welcome efforts at their relief, but the American military, instead of serving the roles of distributing relief supplies and guarding those distributing relief supplies – the ostensible purposes of the mission - almost immediately went after what they regarded as “the bad guys.”
They attempted to kill one of the major local warlords with special planes equipped with modern Gatling guns, circling the sky and spraying large-calibre shells in built-up areas, at the rate of thousands per minute, much of that indiscriminate firepower killing innocent people and destroying property in a poor region. Hundreds of Somalis were killed by the American efforts, and some reports put the number at 10,000.
But we will never learn the truth from the American government, which, since its debacle in Vietnam, always suppresses the numbers it kills. It did so in the first Gulf War where tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits sitting behind sand walls in the desert were carpet-bombed by B-52s, their bodies later bulldozed into the ground. It did so in Afghanistan, where it regularly has killed civilians for ten years. And it did so in that pure war crime, the invasion of Iraq.
America’s effort to get the “bad guy” in Somalia was an act of complete arrogance and sheer stupidity, clearly reflecting America’s ingrained streak of hell-and-damnation Puritanism and its Captain Ahab obsession with chasing the white whale over whole oceans. All Americans achieved was to make a deadly enemy, as they shortly learned. They ended up, pretty much leaving the country shamefully and forgetting their first purpose in going there, distributing relief to the starving, something Canada’s soldiers and others routinely do without creating such aggression and such violent results.
Recall again President Clinton’s launching a large salvo of missiles in 1998 towards targets in the Afghan mountains and at a Sudanese plant in Khartoum. They were said to be aimed at terrorist targets, but the public was given no detailed information. We do know the plant in Sudan proved to be just what it was claimed by locals, a pharmaceutical plant, Dozens of innocent people were killed and property worth many millions of dollars was destroyed to no purpose, based entirely on incorrect information.
Clinton also launched 23 cruise missiles towards targets in Baghdad in 1993, supposedly in retaliation for an Iraqi-sponsored attempt on former-President George Bush when he visited Kuwait, although the public was given no details of the supposed plot. Even granting there was a plot, if you are entitled to hurl thousands of pounds of high explosives at a distant city owing to a faulty dark operation, what are we to say of the many countries and millions of people who have been victims of America’s many dark operations? What principle is at work here other than might makes right?
Ethical war is an absurd term, just as is the idea of bombing for democracy is. Always and anywhere, as soon as the military engines are started, just as is said for truth, ethics are left behind. War is a playground for adventurers and psychopaths. Just recall those American pilots during the first Gulf War whose cockpit transmissions were broadcast on television while they strafed Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait City: their chilling words included, “Hey, this’s like shootin’ fish in a barrel!” And readers should remember that that first Gulf War was itself little more than an American dark operation intended to put Hussein into a compromising position and topple him.
Deeply discrediting the whole confused concept of ethical war are not just the many crimes committed in its name but the many greater omissions. Genocide has become one of the most abused and misused terms of our time, someone ignorantly using it every time a group of people is killed anywhere, but we have had several authentic genocides since World War II, and I think we can all agree if ever there could be a case for ethical war, it would be the case of genocide. But it is precisely in the case of genocide that all the powers simply hide, the United States having a completely shameful record.
In the case of Indonesia, following the downfall of President Sukarno in 1967, about half a million people had their throats slashed and their bodies dumped into rivers because they were, or were suspected of being, communists. The entire nation was turned temporarily into an abattoir for humans, and where was the United States, defender of freedom, during the horror? Rather than any effort to stop the terror, it had employees of the State Department on phones around the clock feeding the names of people they’d like to see included in the extermination.
In the case of Cambodia during the late 1970s, the “killing fields” saw about a million people murdered by the mad ideologues of the Khmer Rouge. Where was the United States? Nowhere to be seen or heard, off licking its wounds from its long, pointless war in Vietnam, except when Vietnamese forces finally crossed the border to stop the bloodshed, the United States yelped, “See, we told you so, the ‘domino effect’ is now at work!” And to this day, few Americans take any responsibility for their county’s role in creating the “killing fields.” In its desperate efforts to win in Vietnam, President Nixon’s government launched huge aerial bombardments and incursions by troops into a neutral country, finally so destabilizing it that the Khmer Rouge took power.
In the case of Rwanda in 1994, the world watched something on the order of 800,000 people hacked to pieces, the victims selected merely for their ethnic identity. President Clinton knew every detail from the beginning but made every effort to avert his eyes and prevent the United States from being involved.
So much for the notion of ethical war in the very cases where it could conceivably have made a difference.
The United States’ motives for intervening in Libya are complex and anything but ethical. It was reluctant even to speak out at first. The truth is that stability in the Middle East – stability as defined by the bloody likes of Henry Kissinger – at the complete expense of democratic values or human rights has been bedrock American policy for decades. This policy had the duel objectives of securing the production of oil and making a comfortable climate for Israel.
The United States dithered during recent momentous events in Egypt precisely because Israel benefited from that country’s dictator and was not interested in seeing anything resembling democracy emerge in large Arab states, despite its hypocritical and much-repeated refrain about being the only democracy in the region. Numerous Israeli leaders made the most embarrassingly revealing and shameful statements while the scales were tipping against President Mubarak. But the events proved so unprecedented and so overwhelming and pretty much unstoppable without immense bloodshed that the United States finally came down on the right side, working to restrain Mubarak and to ease the transition in power.
The North African version of Europe in 1848 is very much viewed as a threat by Israel. Imagine all the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Gaza, some four million people, plus the non-Jewish people of Israel proper, about a million, stirred by events in North Africa, rising up to demand their rights? Stopping the series of rebellions against unrepresentative governments along the Mediterranean shores must be high on Israel’s list of current foreign policy objectives because it is clear that continued successes encourage new attempts.
Even further, as we have seen, Chancellor Merkel of Germany has rebuked Prime Minister Netanyahu in public for doing nothing for peace, asserting rightly that the changing conditions of the Arab world make it incumbent upon Israel to pursue genuine peace.
There is some hard truth assiduously avoided in Western mainstream press and by Western governments in their public communications: that what anyone outside of Israel would call peace has simply never been an objective of Israel’s government. There is no other way of understanding Israel’s actions over decades than its aiming to acquire virtually all the Palestinian lands without the Palestinians, or, at least, with a reduced number of Palestinians put into utterly subservient arrangements with no political integrity and very limited rights.
But again in Libya, events soon outdistanced United States’ policy. Images of freedom-fighters there being attacked by bloody mercenaries and mechanized forces affected public opinion and allowed of no further dithering, as did the initiatives taken by Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron and France’s President Sarkozy, each for their own political and economic reasons. The truth is that most people are decent, and the general public is always sympathetic with the victims seen in such images, which is precisely why American networks never show images of American troops brutalizing Iraqis or Israelis brutalizing Palestinians.
Gaddafi has long been a disliked third-world leader in the West - independent-minded leaders never are liked by the American government and there is a long list of them who have been overthrown or assassinated regardless of their democratic bona fides - and in a sense the West’s own past extravagant claims about his being a grand sponsor of terror has blown back on it. Added to the fact that he now appears rather mad and to the image of heroic Libyans winning and then losing in their fight for freedom, public opinion has made the course the United States intended difficult if not impossible.
But that does not mean public opinion is right about intervention, a subject not well understood by the average citizen. Even the case of a no-fly zone, something judging from the glib words seems to be considered by many a not very aggressive form of help, is not well understood. A no-fly zone is a complex and highly destructive operation, pushing the operator into something approaching a state of war, and yet having little likelihood of success in turning events on the ground.
Planes first had to fly all over Libya to get the radars turned on. Then attack planes and missiles quickly had to follow-up to destroy the located radars. Airfields and parked planes are also targets. Many people on the ground get killed in the effort, but that's only the beginning. Twenty-four hour-a-day flyovers must be maintained afterwards to assure radars are not replaced and to attack planes which break the ban, all of which involves more civilian deaths. And from the first day in Libya, the air attacks have gone beyond imposing a no-fly zone, as we saw in the French attack at Benghazi and, at this writing, British attacks on Libyan armor at Ajdabiya.
Anyone who has kept track of American pilots’ efforts in Afghanistan and in Iraq knows that they have killed very large numbers of innocent people, and that even in situations where they have complete air superiority. They still kill innocent Afghans regularly, scores at a time, thousands in total.
The record of no-fly zones is not a happy one. The United States maintained one against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a decade after the first Gulf War, a decade of flying over the country and shooting up anything suspicious. There were countless incidents of American planes shooting and bombing people, but the no-fly zone did not prevent Saddam Hussein from achieving his objectives. Unless you are prepared to do to a country what the United States did to Japan during World War II – incinerate whole cities both with conventional or atomic weapons – air power cannot determine the direction of events on the ground with a determined opponent.
Reports at this writing from Libya suggest exactly the same result.
Once the no-fly zone is established, frustration over the opponent’s success on the ground creates a constant temptation to say, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and to commit more force. You may easily find yourself engaged in yet another war. And everywhere and always in the modern era, the victims of war are mainly not the enemy soldiers or their “bad guy” leaders but the people just trying to live their lives. Just think about the roughly one million people who have perished in Iraq plus the more than two million refugees who fled their country, and consider the fact that one of the Arab world’s most advanced countries is now reduced to a generation without jobs, without dependable electric power and clean water. Saddam Hussein never dreamed of doing that much damage to his people despite his atrocities.
When your objectives going in are confused and uncertain, as are those of the United States, what is the hope for a good outcome? Not great I think. It’s a little like pouring concrete without having constructed a mold. And that is another reason why war for ethical of humanitarian motives has such a poor record: huge investments in death and destruction are made suddenly, upon the occurrence of unanticipated events, and often involving quick turns-around against long-established policy.
Perhaps the worst charge against intervention is that each instance only makes it easier and more acceptable in the future. The long list of minor to major interventions by the United States in the postwar era – most of them with no pretence of international legality or an ethical nature - should serve as a severe warning against going in this direction. From toppling democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, or Chile to the holocaust in Vietnam with its estimated three million victims and a land left saturated with poisons and landmines, there is virtually no case for intervention that does not make future abuse and horror more likely by those with great power.
It is also well to remember that we have a greatly changed world political environment since the events of 9/11. Today the United States, without hesitation, sends drones into a country with which it is not even at war, Pakistan, and kills hundreds of innocent people. Its so-called “kill-teams” perpetrate horrors in Afghanistan, and recent events suggest they have been at work in Pakistan. It still holds people prisoner with no proper law in the secret locations of its CIA international gulag. The abomination of Guantanamo remains. The honouring of international law and agreements has suffered greatly in favour of doing as you please so long as you have the might.
Even the accepted institution for warranting ethical war, the United Nations, as it exists is a highly inadequate institution to exercise such authority. The United States frequently stands against pretty much the entire world there in opposing perfectly appropriate resolutions and gets its way. And when it wants a resolution approved, member states are subject to behind-the-scenes bribes, cajoling, and threats to produce the votes America wants. No one else has such vast economic, financial, and diplomatic leverage to get what they want there. America has exercised its unique power over the organization many times, from the Korean War to the invasion of Afghanistan. Sometimes, rarely, its demands are so unreasonable that enough of the world’s countries find themselves in a position to resist, as was the case for invading Iraq.
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