Keep the Piñata in Christmas

Pushing the limits of Episcopalian latitudinariansim to an extreme, Rev. Raymond J. Lawrence has called for taking the Christ out of Christmas. (Counterpunch, 15 December 2007, Liberating Christmas from Christianity). Lawrence rightly reminds us that the planetary phenomenon known as the Winter Solstice is something experienced (naturally enough) around the world and has been celebrated by the peoples of the world in different ways from time immemorial. It is not, he insists, the property or copyright of Christians.

All that is true enough; and certainly a bit of historical perspective could hardly hurt an ethnocentric U.S.culture that is bloated with self-righteousness and thinks that “ancient” refers to the 1950’s. However, in calling for a return back to pagan Saturnalia and like festivities from which Jesus Christ was absent, Lawrence reverts to a fundamentalist originalism that has always been the Achilles Heel (so to speak) of Protestantism.

To put it in a nutshell: it is perfectly true that Christmas evolved (in significant part) out of pre-existing pagan solstice holidays -- Celtic, Roman and German. However it is equally and no less importantly true the pre-existing pagan solstice holidays evolved into Christmas. The process of change -- of being and becoming -- which is the life force of true traditionalism must take both the alpha and the omega into account. That is why the Roman Catholic Church has always insisted that tradition -- the evolving life and custom of the whole Church in Time -- is as much the source of truth and revelation as Sacred Scripture. To posit some “truer” pre-existing state of being to which we must go back is the way of stunted growth if not, in fact, death.

What would Rev. Lawrence have next? To take the Jesus out of Easter? And if so, what then would there be left for Christians to celebrate? Julian the Apostate himself could not have wished a greater curse on the Church.

Christmas or at least the Roman Catholic variants of it are in fact an amalgamation and permutation of pre-existing customs and beliefs -- AmerIndian and African, as well as Germano-Roman. The star-shaped Mexican piñata illustrates the point. The piñata’s origin is in fact Italian, it having been the custom of Franciscan friars to hand out little clay-bowls -- pignatta -- filled with dried fruits and nuts to the poor on Christmas Day. The friars brought the custom to the New World where, somehow, the charity-crock got painted up and tassled into a star which could be smashed causing a rain of goodies. How did that happen?

It happened because the origin of the pignatta also happens to be Indian. The celebratory or ritualistic smashing of clay pots was an Aztec ritual. The Aztecs used decorated clay pots filled with water to represent the rain god Tlaloc who would be ritually struck with a stick so as to cause a symbolic rain storm. At year’s end, they used clay pots decorated with feathers and filled with trinkets which would cascade to the ground when the pot was hoisted and hit with a stick. And so it is that with a clay pot and a stick this now Mexican Christmas ritual fuses indigenous symbols of fertility and regeneration into a Christian liturgy of re-born hope.

Cultural and religious evolution are continuous. Since the 1950’s Mexicans have enthusiastically taken to Christmas trees, proving the adage that we shall never see something as beautiful as a tree. Today Christmas in Mexico is a riot of customs embracing Azteco-Franciscan clay pots and feathers, Spanish liturgical processions and festivities known as posadas, rituals from the dark Teutonic forests and accounts of miraculous events in Judea.

Around the world, those celebrations we know as “Christmas” reflect similar processes of permutation and amalgamation with pre-existing customs. Taking the Christ out of Christmas would not make these celebrations richer but poorer.

The process of natural and cross-cultural evolution ought not be confused with the insidious commercial bastardization and perversion of Christmas. Not content with gnashing up resources and the environment, the voracious maw of capitalism devours even the way we think about things. The “fetish of the commodity” -- Marx's term for the dementia of seeing and conceptualizing everything through the constructs and needs of the capitalist system -- today has people talking of something known as “Black Friday”. And what day is this? The day Christ was crucified? The day of some crash, plague, outbreak of war or natural disaster? No. In what surely reflects the depths of cultural perversion, Black Friday is a good thing; it is the day after Thanksgiving when merchants’ account balances go from red to black because consumers are so overspending themselves that they go from black to red. If there is a Saturnalia today, it is to be found in a Goya etching.

This corruption of Christmas which inaugurates Advent with a barrage of advertising in lieu of an Annunciation can rightly be called satanic because it undermines everything the Winter Solstice has symbolised, stood for and been celebrated for in all cultures. Lawrence is right to point out that a reaction against this phenomenon founded in moralizing religiosity goes nowhere. Such a puritanical approach simply substitutes one kitsch for another. But taking the Christ out of Christmas is the wrong remedy for the true ill. It would not solve the true problem which is an economic system and a mercantile class that exploits human hope for profit to the detriment of human wellbeing.

© WCG, 2007

Political Profiling

Why is it that Jewish names keep on cropping up in stories about Venezuela? On the morrow of Chavez’s defeat, some US mudia (CNN or Fox or who knows) was interviewing the opposition for their pronouncements on the state of Venezuela. Both persons were Jewish (one evidently an entrepreneur). They could not find people with Hispanic names to quote? Then I read the following in a leftist take by by Gaël Brustier in Rue89

“ This electoral demonstration embarrasses those who profess an unshakable faith in a neo-conservative vision of the world.

“ The "neo-cons" have, in fact, the air of a discomfited Savonarola. According to them, there can be no critical support for Chavez, whom they don't hesitate to compare to and amalgamate with Ahmadinejad (on the basis of the industrial agreements signed between Iran and Venezuela), "explaining" this way that Chavez is anti-Semitic (consequently Nazi). By this means, anyone who supports the Venezuelan Left or criticizes American hyperpower becomes a Nazi who more or less acknowledges the same....

“This Manichean vision of the world professed by former leftists who have turned right (André Glucksmann in France, to name one), whose verbal violence leaves one stunned, must replace analysis and criticism. “

It’s interesting that others are making the connection, howsoever obliquely it may be stated. At the same time, it worth remembering that all profiling is both useful and easily abused. In detecting "conspiracies" one has to tread a fine line between actually shared traits and accidental properties.

©WCG, 2007

Neo Blasphemy

With a wizardry befitting medieval alchemy, Jewish and Zionist groups have long labored to turn criticism of anything jewish or zionist into a sign of anti-semitism, using the shrill cry of “persecution!” to silence political opposition and even cultural preferences.

And so, one had to reach for the salt, when Haaretz reported (18 XI 07) that Jewish groups in Holland had monitored a 64% rise in anti semitic “attacks”. The article explained that of the 261 “attacks” six or seven involved actual violence. According to the group’s report, the “The research focused only on unmistakably anti-Semitic incidents and remarks.” However, included in “unmistakably” was mail, addressed to Jewish groups, that “accused them of acting like Nazis because of Israel's actions.” In that case, a spokesman said, “we considered these mails to be anti-Semitic.”

The unstated premise of this demonology is that Jews are incapable of acting like Nazis -- which is why saying that they do can only be regarded (so it is said) as an unfounded insult inspired by personal hatred. The theological kernel in the premise is thus that Nazis are that than which nothing more evil can be conceived -- i.e. they be the deebils!

Of course, this is utter nonsense. A more scientific appraisal would begin with the fact that Germans and Jews, cowboys and indians are, like the rest of us, human beings, everyone of whom is capable of both good and evil. As such, inter-group behavioral comparisons are entirely reasonable. The comparison between Nazi and Zionist pseudo racial ideologies, has long been noted. It is hardly difficult to fathom. Both ideologies aimed to preserve a given ethno-cultural identity while annexing territory and “segregating out” the local population. The rhetoric used by both ideologies has at times been indistinguishable.

“The source of national feeling ...lies in a man's blood ...in his racio-physico type and in that alone. ...For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation. It is inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a Frenchman.”

Hitler? Nein. Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the founders of zionism. (Iron Wall, (1925).) Jabotinsky founded that current of zionism whose political descendant today is represented by the Likud Party. Jabotinsky was equally blunt about the “colonization” of Palestine,

“All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.” (Op. cit.)

It hardly requires a great mental exertion to see the evident similarities. On the contrary, what requires exertion is the hypocrisy and obscurantism which currently passes for zionist apologetics.

Of course, there is no single variant of zionism just as there was no single variant of national socialism. Political movements are by nature created by a consensus that embraces even inconsistent policies under one umbrella. On the other hand, there is always the pudding ... the net outcome on the ground, so to speak. And it is quite legitimate to compare the Nazi and Israeli puddings on the ground.

On those occasions when Israel’s avid supporters leave off name calling and join the issue on the merits, they invariably point to the “fact” that Israel has not “gassed six million Palestinians in factories of death.” This is said in such tones as to indicate that the speaker believes it to be the piece de difference. Q.E.D. Ergo non nobis and it is “pure” anti-semitism to “even attempt” to make the comparison. But to assert as much is simply to state the demonological premise in another fashion. If “gassing six millions in factories of death” is the touchstone, then comparison is a fortiori impossible.

However, it is not “gassing” that’s the key, but policies of oppression including “genocide.” Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the word “genocide” and who made a detailed study of Nazi policies in the occupied territories never mentioned “gassing.” In his view, mass murder was only one of several different types of graduated policies which comprised genocide. Equally important and often-times as effective were: economic embargoes, cultural embarrassments, denial of essential social services, segregations and starvation. In fact, untold millions died of death-through-labor in Stalinist work-camps; and such a fatally punitive regimen when applied to a single ethnic group would count as genocide just as much (albeit with infinitely more personal pain and suffering along the way) as shooting and gassing.

Far from being “beyond the pale” comparing historical facts on the ground -- let the pudding fall where it may -- is the only way to learn from history. Anything else is touhou bouhou.

Stupidly enough, there are those who use the “fascist” and “nazi” as an epithet signifying some ill-defined form of police state or oppressiveness. Used as such, the term reflects that the speaker has perceived that one party has his boot on the neck of the other. While that perception may not be articulated in detail or with the great learning, for all that it is not necessarily inaccurate. No less than apes and dogs detect injustice even if they can’t explain it very well. A scientific or Socratic approach would be to elicit, step by step, what it is the speaker means to say and to test it for veracity.

But that is not what the zionist cabals are about. What they are about is stifling debate and intimidating criticism. In a recent interview given to Wajahat Ali, Norman Finklestein put it thus,

“Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict diplomatically or on account of its human rights violations, it revives the extravaganza called The New Anti-Semitism. In 1974 the Anti-Defamation League, an Israel lobby group in the U.S., put out a book called The New Anti-Semitism and in 1981 it put out another book called The Real Anti-Semitism. Right after the new intifada began, the Israel lobby again started with The New Anti-Semitism. The purposes of this agitprop are pretty obvious: to delegitimize all criticism of Israel as motivated by anti-Semitism and to turn the perpetrators into the victims. It seems to have less effect in recent years due to overuse: once you start calling Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite, people really begin to wonder.”

Yes... even Man eventually begins to wonder.

©WCG, 2007

Finklestein Interview
http://www.counterpunch.org/ali11202007.html

Jabotinsky quotes, cited in Leni Brenner “Zionism in the Age of Dictators” (1983)
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/index.htm
http://aaargh-international.org
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When Puppets get Puppity.

It was all kind of funny... Pakistan’s general gone mufti re-attached his shoulder boards, sacked n’ stacked his supreme court and suspended elections all -- he insisted -- in order to protect his eight year long “transition to democracy” against assorted terrorist threats.

Anticipating the anguished howl that indeed hit the heavens over Washington, Musharaff was ready with a bunch of handy quotes from Saint Lincoln.

“I would at this time, Musharraf said, “venture to read out an excerpt of President Abraham Lincoln, specially to all my listeners in the United States. As an idealist, Abraham Lincoln had one consuming passion during that time of crisis, and this was to preserve the Union… towards that end, he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties.

"His justification was necessity and explaining his sweeping violation of Constitutional limits he wrote in a letter in 1864, and I quote, ‘My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of preserving by every indispensable means that government, that Nation of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution?’”

Musharraf went on to quote Lincoln, as political surgeon:

“By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save life but a life is never wisely given to save a life.”

Mussolini couldn't have said it better.

Leaping forward, Musharraf took a page from President Nixon and groused about an “activist judiciary” that was bringing the nation to wrack and ruin.

What Musharraf most likely did not know was that somewhere between 25% to 33% of listeners in the United States still consider “the Original Gorilla” to have been a bloody tyrant. And with good reason. Lincoln subverted the rule of law and for much the same reasons invoked by all state idolaters .

In the 1864 letter from which Musharraf quoted, written but ten days before his assassination, Lincoln expressed his conviction that his oath to “preserve the constitution” was really an oath “to preserve that nation of which the Constitution was the organic law.” By that handy-dandy inversion Lincoln could justify violating the Constitution he had sworn not to violate.

The appeal to “the Nation” or “das Volk” or “the Motherland” is always the same. It is the Golden Calf for which tyrants everywhere justify their violation of law. And if laws can be overridden in order to protect the ultimate, supreme good of "the State"... who is a mere limb to complain when he is sacrificed on doctor's orders for the good of the All?

The difficulty with this appeal, at least in so far as the United States is concerned, is that “our nation” is indisputably the creature of the constitution -- not the other way around. Not only are we a nation of laws we are a nation born of constitutional law. Without that birth certificate there is no United States; and that is why the United States is the most quintessentially liberal country ever to have existed. It is the creature of contract.

Musharraf's uppity act was wilder still if it is borne in mind that he merely applied the same raison d’etat that the present administration itself uses to suspend constitutional liberties, and to do away with judicial review: “to protect the Uhmur’can People from turrurism.” The Pakistani leader hardly needed to have gone so far back as Lincoln. He could have quoted Imbecile's nominee for Attorney General, who just the week before informed the Senate that the president was not necessarily bound to observe the law if he determined he was defending the country.

And so, the Administration was reduced to howling an impotent protest against a puppet that was getting all strings tangled by doing what the puppet handler itself was doing with it other hand on another stage.

Damn! They just don’t make puppets like they used to.

©WCG, 2007
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Let Them Light Candles

AS reported by news media around the world, Israel decided several days ago to interrupt fuel and electricity supplies to Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel -- actually on the township of Sderot, 1 kilometer from the Gaza border. In view of the Palestinian attacks on innocent civilians, Israel’s intermittent power cut seemed to bespeak a super human patience and forbearance. Why God Himself could hardly be as mild in his judgements. Inconvenient? Well Let them light candles!

But there is always the “fine print”. Overlooked in all the blather about electricity cut offs was the following, courtesy of the New York Times:

"Israel said Sunday day that they had begun reducing fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip and had closed one of the two crossings through which food, medicine and other supplies pass into the area. ... As a result, only limited supplies of basic goods are allowed to enter the strip, and all exports of produce are prohibited. ...

"[According to a government spokesman,] the number of trucks of food and other goods entering Gaza will be reduced to roughly 55 trucks a day from 100 to 120, “We will allow in the minimum amount of food and medicines necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis,” he said.”

A fifty percent reduction in food supplies? On a per-capita basis that boils down to a starvation diet. The “humanitarian crisis” Israel labors hard to avoid means what? The avoidance of “mass death”? But wait, what do starvation diets lead to?

Perhaps one could take a page from Raphael Lemkin’s seminal work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” According to Lemkin, who coined the term, genocide operated on cultural, social, economic and biological levels. Lemkin writes:

“The destruction of the foundations of the economic existence of a national group necessarily brings about a crippling of its development, even a retrogression.”

The physical debilitation and even annihilation of national groups in occupied countries is carried out mainly in the following ways:

1. Racial Discrimination in Feeding. Rationing of food is organized according to racial principles throughout the occupied countries. "The German people come before all other peoples for food," declared Reich Minister Göring on October 4, 1942. In accordance with this program, the German population is getting 93 per cent of its pre-war diet, while those in the occupied territories receive much less: in Warsaw, for example, the Poles receive 66 per cent of the pre-war rations and the Jews only 20 per cent.

2. Endangering of Health. The undesired national groups, particularly in Poland, are deprived of elemental necessities for preserving health and life. This latter method consists, for example, of requisitioning warm clothing and blankets in the winter and withholding firewood and medicine. . . . Such measures, especially pernicious to the health of children, have caused the development of various diseases.

Lemkin’s schema of genocide has not been fully incorporated into international law. Nevertheless, it provides a cogent framework for analyzing genocidal policies from sociological and ethical perspectives. Cutting back on food deliveries in Gaza is strictly analogous to the General Gouvernement’s food “policies” in occupied Poland.

To argue that such measures are “reprisals” against a so-called barrage of rocket attacks on civilian Sderot is simply beside the point. International law prohibits indiscriminate reprisals. The whole purpose of the prohibition is precisely to put limits on the kinds and degrees of retaliation allowed. The limitations presuppose that there is something to retaliate over in the first place. To argue that the “right to retaliate” wipes away limits is simply to wipe away international law itself.

Precisely that kind of “they-started-it” argument was rejected at Nuremberg. The Nazi leveling of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, was done in response to the unlawful, indisputably terrorist murder of Heydrich, the duly appointed administrator of those occupied territories. What made the Nazi response to that and other partisan acts of sabotage and murder a crime was not that retaliation was not allowed, but rather that the retaliation employed was excessive and indiscriminate, if not altogether an excuse to engage in counter-terror over and above deterrence and extermination over and above lawful reprisal.

Israel's trail of tu quoque’s can ultimately only lead back to the inceptional fact that European Zionists sought to colonize and invade a land that was not theirs by any genealogical or mythological stretch. That aside, the you started it gambit doesn’t work because the “its” are neither militarily nor morally equivalent.

Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in a conflict over land. But in this conflict, Israel -- among the world’s foremost military powers -- holds all the cards. It has control of Gaza’s borders. It has control of Gaza’s finances. It has control of Gaza’s air space. It has control of Gaza’s electricity and power. It has control of all entry and exit into Gaza. When democratic elections produced results Israel did not appreciate, it simply resorted to economic strangulation. No Indian Reservation was so controlled as Gaza whose only historical analog in recent memory are Lodz and Warsaw -- and, like Lodz and Warsaw , Gaza is one if not the most crowded places on earth. To claim some kind of moral equivalence from such state of inequality is simply perverted.

All animals will resist their capture and imprisonment. The human animal is no different. It is entirely natural that Palestinians, not wanting to live under Israeli domination, should resist. One should not expect otherwise . To self-righteously intone that they ought not to resist is to dress up in flimsy moral tissue a demand for abject and acquiescent submission.

Gazan resistance is in fact puny and pathetic. They cannot inflict any real damage on Israel. The facts bespeak the inequalities. According to Human Rights Watch, since 2005 there have been 2,700 Q’assam rocket attacks “into Israel”. The holocaustian horror conjured up by such a phrase qua headline is that of Jerusalem, O Jersualem recoiling under a barrage of missiles. Reading the usual zionist histrionics, one might think that a new “holocaust” was in the making. But these “missiles” (jumbo firecrackers really) have a range of a few kilometers and no more. In fact, just about the only place they can hit is the border village of Sderot. Human Rights Watch reports that as a result of these 2,700 attacks four Israeli civilians have been killed and 75 injured.

Contrast these “horrendous” casualties with the almost daily reports of 9, 5, 17, 23, 4, ...... Palestinians killed in some Israel counter-action. We have gotten so accustomed to the daily reports of Palestinian dead that no one pays attention. Adding insult to injury, these dead are brushed aside as “collateral damages”. Israel routinely has some low level corporal announce that Israel was targeting a “military installation” and oooops ... just happened to blow up the surrounding civilian neighborhood. Needless to say, the “military installation” is the rooftop from which the Q’assam rocket was allegedly fired.

Who the hell is the one taking the punches here? Any moron can see that it’s the Palestinians who are hemorrhaging. How the hell does it all add up here? Very simply this: Palestinians and Israelis are trading punches. In this wretched game of retaliation, Israel consistently gets in the better and more bloody punch. So be it. But now comes Israel decked out in the usual sack cloth and ashes and says that in addition to its regime of retaliatory collateral damage it has decided that it “has to” further retaliate by putting all of Gaza under a starvation regimen.

Shit by any other name stinks just as bad; and putting an entire civilian population on a “minimal” allotment of food and medicine qualifies as genocide.

©WCG, 2007

Links
07/10/30 Israel Restricts Gaza Crossing as Firing Persists - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/world/middleeast/29mideast.html?pagewanted=print

Rafael Lemkin on Web:
http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/index.htm

Human Rights Watch Reports
http://hrw.org/reports/2007/iopt0707/1.htm#_Toc170198335

How Zio-Cons seek to Deride & Deflect Criticism

“I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy,” said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, “that Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice

Ah yes!. The ridicule that admits. How does this work?

Prima facie, there is no such thing as a card-carrying neo-con conspirator. In the American historical lexicon, the phrase alludes to McCarthy era “card-carrying communists” and is intended to suggest (1) an organized, (2) secret (3) subversive (4) economic & political (5) conspiration. The image conjured up is that of communists infiltrators and spies, meeting in dark corners, leaving messages in telephone booths and burrowing their way into government, a la Tinker Tailor & Spy

Of course the analogy is rife with an inherent ridiculousness. Not only are conservatives not communist but neo-conservatives are, in fact, apostated communists. However, since the unmistakable allusion is to the discredited McCarthy hearings which are generally viewed as an disgraceful example of “witch hunting,” bear baiting and official persecution, the phrase infuses the ridicule with a strong flavor of odiousness.

The art of making something loathsome and ridiculous at the same time is the hallmark of the Meister Sophist, propagandist and rabble-rouser. If you've ever wondered why Bill Kristol has a perpetual smirk on his face, now you know why.

However, in the hierarchy of eristical sophistries, Kristol ascends higher than a mere monsignor; for, it will be noted that in this case, Kristol has inverted the trick. It is not the "card-carrying conservative" who is exposed as ridiculously loathsame, but rather the characterization of conservatives as "card carrying"

No one has actually gotten up and accused that neo-cons of being “card carrying conspirators”. No one has actually drawn an analogy to the Communist Party of the 30’s and 40’. The only one who has done that is Kristol himself. What Kristol has managed is something like a pre-emptive strike, making pre-ridicule of something that has not been said, and letting it be known that it would be ridiculous to even think of saying it. Deride and Deflect.

But Kristol’s tactic has a deeper allusion; one that is intimately and intuitively understood by neo-conservatives themselves. McCarthy’s harum scarum about card-carrying communists was itself an allusion to the older fascist accusastion directed at Jewish-Communists or Jewish Bolsheviks. It is odd how for certain purposes the human ear seems to require certain alliterations; but, in all events, McCarthy took the anti-semitic race card and replaced it with a carrying card. These deeper allusions are congenitally understood and would never be overlooked by neo-conservatives since their founding lights -- Irving Kristol, Norm Podhoretz et al. -- were exactly the people McCarthy and fascists alluded to: Jewish Communist-Leftists.

Of course, the whole point of neo-conservativism is that it founders apostated from anything remotely “left”. With this history in mind, Kristol’s ridicule is structured into the very paring of “card-carrying” with “conservative” and adds a strong dash bitterness to the broth.

What is understood equally by then Jewish-Communists and now Jewish neo-cons , is that the "Jewish-Bolshevik" label of the early 1900's was itself an offshoot of the infamous Protocols of Zion of the 1860’s. For those innocents who may never have heard, the Protocols was a forged document which was allegedly “discovered” by the Tsarist secret police and which detailed a plan for Jewish World Domination. The Protocols became the totem of anti-semites.; and it is fair to say that no one who considers himself a Jew is not alive to any hint of Protocol-talk. Thus, at bottom, Kristol’s preemptive strawman is aimed at denying and denigrating the notion that neo-conservativism might be a Jewish or Zionist “conspiracy”.

But the question has to be asked, why would Kristol go out of his way to dredge all this crap up, just in order preemptively ridicule it? Has anyone accused the neo-conservatives of meeting in dark subway tunnels to plot jewish world domination? Well.... anyone not in Idaho, at least?

Neo conservatives seem to think so. According to Joshua Muravchik, a Jewish fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, "Neocon” is now widely synonymous with “ultraconservative” or, for some, “dirty Jew.” [ here ] Is this paranoia or what? While there certainly has been growing criticism of the pro-Israeli tilt in U.S. policy, critics have gone out of their way to avoid equating "zionism" and "judaism" and have carefully avoided anything that might smack of "dirty Jew" talk. No - it is Kristol and Muravchik who are in fact playing the “race card”. What they are saying is don’t even dare to think, much less say, that we are a card carrying jewish conspiracy.

Why not? Facts are facts. The fact is that neo-conservatices are card-carriers. They carry identity cards that allow them into the halls and conclaves of AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, and AEI (to say nothing of Israel itself). Let these institutes speak for themselves:

AIPAC (American-Israeli Political Action Committee) was founded to “help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong."

WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) was founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, then research director for AIPAC and later U.S. ambassador to Israel, in order to promote[ ] an American engagement in the Middle East committed to strengthening alliances, nurturing friendships, and promoting security, peace, prosperity, and democracy for the people of the region."

JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security) was established (1) "To educate the American public about the importance of an effective U.S. defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded; and (2) To inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East."

AEI (American Enterprise Institute) was established primarily to promote international neo-liberalism, but it's policy paper track record has been unmistakably and markedly pro-Israel, and Islamic and in favor of "preemptive" strikes against nations it labels as "terrorist".

The policy statements of these organizations themselves make it crystal clear that they are pursuing a pro-Israeli, zionist agenda which they have conflated with U.S. interests. Moreovoer, a cursory look at their actual papers will reveal that they are the ones who most conflate "judaism" with "zionism" and deny the existence of those Jewish voices that are not zionist and that are appalled by Israel's conduct.

I am not here arguing the merits of this agenda; I am simply pointing out that it exists. There is a group of people a substantial percentage of which are Jews, who are united in an political agenda and who meet regularly (behind closed doors, in fact) to churn out papers and strategies to advance that agenda...which, among other things, is unquestionably supportive of Israeli-Zionist aims.

Are the merits of this agenda a proper subject of discourse? Yes. Does Kristol seek to pre-empt debate on the merits by a pre-emptive veiled accusation of anti-semitism? That too yes. Kristol and fellow zio-cons should recall, if they can, that their tactics usually become self-fulfilling prophecies.

©WCG, 2007
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Mr. Depravity To Spew More Sulfur

The presidential imbecile is scheduled to throw an official temper tantrum before a crowd of Cuban hysterics, White House staffers announced today. According to the New York Times, Bush will warn Cuba, in stern and unbending terms, that he will not accept a transfer of power from Fidel to Raul Castro. Of course, the transfer occurred last year. But never mind.

Imbecile is expected to demand that Cubans continue to resist the Castro regime, as they most certainly must have been doing for the past 60 years.

His Depravity is expected to blather that “while much of the rest of Latin America has moved from dictatorship to democracy” Cuba “continues to use repression and terror to control its people” who have “suffered economically” as a result of Castro’s rule.

No. No. No. Cuba has suffered economically as a result of a US imposed embargo (aka siege) designed to strangle and starve.

No. No. No. The ones who terrorized their people were US-imposed scum like Videla who tossed kids out helicopters, Stroessner who walled up people alive and Pinochet who had women waterboarded and bottle-raped.

It is certainly true that about half of Latin America has moved from US backed dictatorships to US extorted neo-liberal sell-offs. Either way, half the continent continues to live lives of no-win, economic struggle and deprivation while the even less fortunate, the bands of ragged kiddie orphans wandering through Foochimori’s Lima, struggle to find enough sniffing glue to dull the hunger pains.

It is true that, as a communist state, Cuba does not permit capitalist multi-party democracy, that it has curtailed dissent and, at times, imprisoned opposition that went no further than words. At worst, such a record would put Cuba politically on par with a number of Latin-American "democracies" and many others as well. The difference is that the Cuban leadership works for the people's health, education, housing and welfare as best it can; whereas beneath Mr.Depravity's spew of liberal slogans -- odious on account of the policies to which they have been prostituted -- is the naked aim to turn Cuba into yet another third world cesspool where human beings can toil for $1.00 a day and be reduced to picking for scraps on festering garbage heaps.

While the smirking punk that besmirches the Offal Office may congratulate himself on his pimping for corporate brutality and greed; the other half of Latin America has had enough of Hell’s Nostrums, US style "democracy" and malignant US corporations bankrolling murderous bands of White Guard thugs. That half, is closing US bases, sending the IMF packing, founding its own development bank and elaborating economic polices and social programs that actually help their fellow human beings.

May Batista’s snarling exiled Ferengi gag -- and gag deeply -- on Mr. Depravity's sulfurous fuming.

©WCG, 2007
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