What does Jane Fonda think of Tom now??

ampanget nyo di kayo marunong mag gawa ng essay na para sa mnga bata mahikayat magbasa....geh submit isa pa ang LAKI NG SUBMIT NYO......

What does Hayden want--for Israel to just suffer the bombs and not react? He does not mention what consequences and future actions that would bring.  If Mexico had a hostile government that was lobbing rockets into Texas or California, would Hayden recommend no response?

Herman,

I noticed that you use the words like fear and afraid a lot in your post.  While it’s natural to lash out when one is afraid, it usually is a mistake. Even if Israel “wins” the war militarily it will pay dearly for it in the years to come.

Kudos to Harry H Snyder III for reminding readers of the fact that the term «America» properly refers to the two continents and «Americans» to all their inhabitants ! Perhaps we should be wise to refer to the United States of America as «the US» or «USA», rather than allow that part of America to linguistically misappropriate a term which refers to the whole (much as it has misappropriated the resources of and political and economic control over the two continents). The next step would be to begin to deal with such misleading (Euro-centric) terminology as «Middle East» for Southwest Asia. Remember, the Earth is not flat, and China, for example, borders on the Western Pacific, the United States on the Eastern....

Anyone who begins a post with “you americans"obviously knows very little about the subject("Americans" live from the tip of South America to the top of Hudson’s Bay, in 27 seperate nations)

Even if a person was excused and readers accepted “Americans” as citizens of the 50 State confederation. they would still see a plethora of wildly diverse selection of thoughts and opinions.

I invite you to travel in my country...see Alaska Massachusetts, Mississippi, and California, then come back here and tell me all “Americans(sic)” are of one mind.....about anything!

christ! you americans evaluate everything on how it affects you.

to the ass who commented on WMD’s and Israel contribution to SA.  Don’t you know that somewhere in the annals beneath the CIA, some jack off has commented to his superior what he should do with all the requisition forms confirming that the US sent the WMD’s to Iran? 

Of course there are WMD’s all over the freakin’ Middle East; courtesy of the good ol us of a.

the guy’s superior has said to him WTF? get rid of that shit! we don’t need a trail leading back to us.

America is a country built on the values of acquisition, greed and money. At the very least Israel is guilty of wanting the land that they owned for their people.

Ya bunch of maroons!

Indeed,what about the NYC mayorial race ? How does AIPAC work in one of the most important cities in the United States ? I doubt that the protagonists are going to speak openly about their relations with the Israel lobby, but in the event that Mr Synder has access to the details, I’m sure other readers will be as interested as I am....

levels below national? 

What about the NYC Mayor’s race? 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,53785,00.html

It sounds as if Mr Nasr’s book has many interesting and important things to say about US politics, but it - or rather the passage cited by Mr Snyder - does not quite address the question I posed, which dealt less with big names in national politics, where the influence of Israeli lobby organisations like AIPAC is obvious to any who cares to observe the US Congress, than with the experience of people like Tom Hayden, who was running for California assemblyman. To make the query explicit - do these organisations have the same strangle-hold over state and county-level political organisations that they seem to do over national-level ones ? Are there any readers of Truthdig who have run for assemplyman at the state level, or mayor or councilman or dog catcher at the local level, who have encountered pressures similar to those reported by Mr Hayden and are willing and able to share their experiences with us ? While it is obvious why the Israeli government and Israeli politicians of all stripes are interested in influencing who sits in the Congress which determines how much of the wealth of US taxpayers is to be transferred to certain sectors of the Israeli economy, in particular the military, the connexion with California state assemblymen is less immediately obvious. But state assemblymen sometimes go on to become congressmen and senators, and as the twig is bent so the branch tends to grow. My question, again : do we have access here to spades which can dig up the facts concerning the influence of these lobby organisations at levels below the national ?…

Wow!  Some “mea culpa!” It sounds just like the usual anti-Israel nonsense I can read anywhere, only this time dressed up real nice.

Mr. Hayden, like his former wife and many others from the 1960’s are simply irrelevant in the public discourse these days.  It seems, however, that they have yet to realize it, and fail to understand that no one except the already-converted hardcores care what they have to say.

I hope Israel pounds Hezbollah.  Given the choice between an imperfect democratic society and one filled with murderous thugs who subjugate woman and stone homosexuals to death, I think the choice is obvious.

Our country and its politics have been taken over. Not to mention our media. I don’t want anymore American lives sacrificed for this. These cowardly parasites should fight their own battles. But that will never happen.

Arab and Israeli Terrorism: The Causes and Effects of Political Violence, 1936-1993 - Page 49
by Kameel B. Nasr - 1996 - 261 pages
Robert Kennedy, like the other candidates, upheld the tradition. ... that if he
was elected president he would sent 50 advanced F-4E jet fighters to Israel.

Guess that answers the question below

Hitherto we have been privileged to read a plethora of comments to Tom Hayden’s story, all reflecting with greater or lesser fidelity the political viewpoint of the respective poster. But if this is to be a dig, i e, an investigation that seeks to discover hitherto buried facts rather than simply a forum to let off steam, then Mr Hayden cannot be left to wield the spade alone ! Is there no Truthdig reader with his or her own experience of the nitty-gritty of US electoral politics who is willing, on the basis of that experience, to tell us whether the need for an «Israeli endorsement» as reported by Mr Hayden is something peculiar to Mr Hayden’s electoral district, or something that obtains more widely in the United States ? Here it should be the facts which are at issue, rather than our varied interpretations of how justified - or not - they happen to be....

Re: Comment #15078 by William:

On the whole, quite right.

The EXIT STRATEGY

22-JUL-2006 : After meeting with senior officials of The Administration in Washington, D.C., the Saudi Prince laid out in full, the Final Agenda.

“Give ISRAEL enough rope to hang herself,” he told them, “it’s the only way out.”

Everyone agreed, everyone could see, yes ~ this was the only way out. It was everyone’s long-sought Exit Strategy, and it was politically delicious: Der Dolchstoss!

The American working- and middle-classes, having born the brunt of the blood and treasure cost of The Administration’s fiasco in the MidEast, were beginning to catch on. They felt fooled; they felt betrayed.

The usual divisive issues no longer had any bite. The polls weren’t responding like they used to: Gay-Baiting / Sexual politics and Race-Baiting / Immigration politics of fear, ever so useful in the past, were no longer effective. Americans were angry ~ and somebody had to pay.

But now at last they had found their Final Agenda. The Saudis could sit back and let ISRAEL pound their nemesis, the Shi’ites. The Anglo-Americans, meanwhile, could set up The Jews to take the fall for their MidEast folly.

_
By then, It was already too late to salvage the Mid-Term, 2006 election ~ they would lose The House, they knew, but The Party was still intact. More important, their grip on the American Main-Stream Media, though frayed, was still functional.

Murdoch, in particular, was alarmed. “I can’t hold this line much longer,” he told them. NASCAR Dad’s and SOCCER Mom’s eyeballs were no longer sticking to the Trailer Trash Pie he was dishing out as “news”.

Priority One was to blame the Neo-Cons = “Jewish Intellectuals” for, in the words of Patrick Buchanan, “mis-leading the leaders of our great country.”

The Neo-Cons would be shunned, hung up to wither and die ~ their brief careers snuffed out under the same FOX fire 24/7 roasting loop of pundits and puffed-up, talk-show demagogues that only months before had been their greatest allies.

There was collateral damage, too ~ a lot of it. Most of the Officer Corps was purged, one result of the House’s Special Committee to Investigate “The Activities of Anti-American Neo-Cons” all over the Federal Government. Federal funding for Jewish organizations, university professors, began to dry up. Then, it got ugly.

“We must question the Family Values of the Jews,” Dobson said. Robertson would come out later that week. “The Jews have failed to assimilate among us. They are practicing abortion and encouraging sex without marriage by promoting birth-control among our children. THEY ARE TEACHING EVOLUTION.”

Angry working- and middle-class Americans quickly seized upon the Talking Points of the new Main-Stream Media “conversation.”

The Democrats, never quick to catch on, found themselves with yet another hideous dilemma confounding them: The Jewish-American voting BLOC was traditionally Democratic. Rovian Republicans had succeeded yet again, beyond their wildest expectaions… Democrats were frozen, their loyalties and logic, maddeningly divided.

Senator Lieberman had already been hounded out of office ~ by the naive NETROOTS progressives; the technorati caught on too late to the blunt RealPolitik of Power. “They would never go THAT FAR,” they blogged ~ never dreaming that SOMEBODY had to take the fall for failure, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be the CronyCapitalists and the corrupt Republican puppets that they had all worked so hard, for so long, to put in power.

Soon Feinstein and the others would be gone, too. “They betrayed us,” exit-polled voters in California said, “We don’t want these Jews in our Party: THEY CAUSED THE WAR!”

“GREENSPAN CAUSED THE HOUSING CRASH!” ... “THE JEWS DEVALUED THE DOLLAR!”

_
22-JUL-2006 : give them enough rope to hang themselves, the Saudi Prince said

The subtlety of political dialogue rests in what is not said and what is implied in the dialogue. Hayden’s whole article is about what he did not say when he knew the facts.

And, the sleaze-ball is still at it. For instance, he writes that Hezbelloh and Hamas engaged in “provocative kidnappings” instead of the capture of several of the occupation troops. Worse, it implies that Hamas and Hezbelloh anticipated the escalation of the massive dehumanization of the civil life of the people of the Gaza and West Bank areas of Palestine and the death and destruction that accompanies it. In essence, Hayden subtly, but assuredly, blames Hezbelloh and Hamas for what is merely the occupation troops’ intensification of Israel’s ongoing drive for the absorption of the rest of Palestine.

Again, he makes reference to “the incessant rocket attacks on Israel”, as though this resistance to the brutalizing, murderous occupation of Palestine and its people is like some mindless, random drive-by shooting. Worse, he characterizes it and the actions of the Israel occupation as a “virulent spiral of vengeance” instead of Palestine’s resistance to the virulence of the Israeli occupation’s imposed terror and suffering.

Finally, Hayden’s perfidy reveals itself most profoundly in his promulgating, hook, line, and sinker, the Israeli assertion that it is about “eradicating Hezbelloh and Hamas altogether” when it is patently obvious that it is the land that they defend against occupation that is in the Israeli eyesight --not as a colonial occupation but as the creation of Eretz (Greater)Israel.

thanks, tom. cruise that is. for putting an intelligent and current rationale to this overpoliticized and johnny come lately ‘confessionale’ by hayden.

i used to think you had to be a jew to understand the jews.

Self-Defence versus Collective Punishment!

At the heart of the American-supported Israeli onslaught on Gaza and Labanon is the issue of self-defence versus collective punishment.

Those who know a little bit of history beyond who won the last football season, will recall that Nazi Germany was mostly a right-wingers enterprise. When the resistence to Nazi occupation started in German’s occupied territories, Hitler ordered that 50 civilians be executed for each German soldier killed. Despite these barbaric measures, and most likely because of them, the resistance intensified, and history records that resistence groups and their sympathizers hastened the defeat of Nazi Germany.

In balance, though the right-wing dominated United States and the right-wing dominated Zionist theocracy have not yet reached the exact equivalent of Nazi Germany at all levels, they both are capitalizing on every opportunity to match and possibly exceed the Nazi record. Yet, it is no secret they both adopt a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment.

For example, for the the some 3,000 American killed in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government under the neo-Nazis, justified the killing of over 200,000 Afghani and Iraqi civilians thus far, and continues to justify this so-called collateral damage as act of “self-defence.” By this count, using simple math, George Bush and his right-wing junta exceeded Hitler’s 50-to-1 ratio.

The ratio on the Israeli side stands at about 50-to-1, if we take into account the numbers coming from Lebanon; exactly as Hitler’s formula.

“Understanding the difference between self-defense and collective punishment is what might separate Israel and the U.S.- on paper, any way- from the Nazis.”

Tom Hayden : It is simply not adequate for you to write this Mea Culpa 25 years too late. It is Liberals like you who were duped in the ‘60s by the Zionist wolves wearing the sheepskin of Human Rights and incited to break down the US establishment. After compromising the American Liberal Tradition those wolves are showing their fangs and using the EVIL RACIST OLD TESTAMENT to influence the American Right to engage in new crimes of aggression.

The least you can do is to March on DC to EXPOSE THE JEWISH HYENAS and take back this country from the clutches of the Zionist Neo Cons that you yourself once so willingly collaborated with !!

We do not give Israel billions of dollars we give them a debit card to buy construction and destruction equipment, bulldozers and bombs. My state has a fund where they invest ? number of dollars in an Israelie enterprize.

The Idea that 9/11 was an inside job makes some sense. 

Sort of a “Pearl Harbor” incident to unite Americans..  Worked less well than Pearl Harbor, but does anything these days work as well as in the Forties?

I’ll have to give this some thought....

Thank you Fadel Abdallah

Regarding Comment #14929 by mz on 7/23 at 7:36 am:

I agree with every word, including a, and, and the.

To “Jew Haters Gone Wild”:

Sir, increasing numbers of Americans are not angry at Jews per se.  We are angry that our government, for whatever reason, puts Israeli interests above U.S. interests.  This attack on Lebanon (like most of our Middle Eastern policy) is NOT in the interests on the American people. 

Never have the interests of the American people and its government been so far from each other.  That 410-8 vote illustrates it.

Your post argues that Israel is morally justified to attack terrorists who attack it.  If that was an accurate statement about what is happening now I would (1) not dispute it; and (2) still argue that it is not in the American people’s interest to take a side in Israeli disputes.

The facts are these, however: (A) Hezbollah captured and killed a small number of SOLDIERS.  (B) At the same time, Israel has over 9000 Arabs (not the Israeli Arabs) in its prisons, and at least 17 members of Hezbollah.  In the months prior to the Hezbollah raid, Israel had crossed into Lebanon and killed people.  (C) Israel and Hezbollah have previously exchanged prisoners.  Consequently the capture of the Israeli soldiers and killing of other soldiers was not an act of terrorism.  It was a part of an ongoing, low-level border war between Israel and the Shi’a Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  (D) Israel’s bombing and attack of Lebanon was not a spontaneous response, but had been planned for at least a year.  (E) One-third of the dead Lebanese have been children.  The vast majority of killed Lebanese were not Shi’a and not Hezbollah.  (F) A family of Canadians, including four young children, were killed by the indiscriminate Israeli bombing, which has also threatened 25,000 Americans in the country and at least cost them thousands of dollars each as they are forced to flee (the US has helped some,but only to Cyprus). (G) Collective punishment is a war crime.  (H) Hezbollah was formed in the early 1980s after Israel invaded Lebanon and committed war crimes against the Shi’a there.  previously, the Shi’a of southern Lebanon had NOT been enemies of Israel.  Hezbollah has never attacked Americans except for the attack on our Marines in 1983 in Lebanon - where our Marines, President Reagan correctly concluded, did not belong.  (I) Israel has between 200-400 nuclear warhead, which guarantee that no country will ever invade them.

As you can see, the issues for Americans isn’t about Israel’s right to attack and kill children; nor is the issue terrorism in the US, because Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9-11 and does not threaten us. 

As for Israel - its existence is not threatened by terrorists - only Israel’s desire to enlarge its borders is threatened. 

My overall point here is that the USA gives billions of dollars a year to Israel, and we skew our foreign policy to do almost everything Israel wants us to do in that region, and this is NOT IN THE INTERESTS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.  There’s nothing anti-Semitic about this conclusion.  You are right that Jews have made invaluable contributions to the world, but this is not relevant to whether our continuing support for Israel is HARMFUL to Americans or not.  (And BTW the vast majority of Jewish contributions to the world have not come from Israel.) There is a WORLD of difference between the Jews I work and eat lunch with and the crazy Israelis who think nothing of collective punishment and bombing children in retaliation for the capture of two soldiers.  So I suggest you knock off your attempts at making gentiles feel like we owe Israel the billions of dollars we give them annually.  Instead, try arguing that our support of Israel is in the interests of the American people.

It is easy to see that IsraHELL controls America…

http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/bushlist.htm

And AIPAC has the Senate and Congress BRIBED to vote for anything the jews ask for…

http://www.washington-report.org/html/aipac.htm

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_Aug_2004/0407027.html

Just one comment regarding someone stating that the Romans did the crucifying.  Would they have crucified HIM if the jewish high priests had not insisted on it?

Thank you, Tom, for sharing.

The Israel problem is a significant one. In fact, Israel, is a significant part of American state terrorism. (By Israel, I mean the controlling Israeli power structure.) It should be pointed out that Jews and Israel are not synonymous or equivalent. Israel is the only country on Earth that has a majority of Jewish people. About 75% of the Israeli population is Jewish.

Proof of Israel being an important part of American state terrorism is the amount of foreign aid that the United States government gives to Israel. From 1949 to 2000, the United States government has given Israel $91 billion. With interest costs, which have been borne by the United States, the total cost to American taxpayers has been over $140 billion. The total aid to Israel is about one third of the American foreign-aid budget.

This is an extraordinary fact. Israel is the 30th wealthiest nation in terms of per capita gross domestic product even though they don’t have any oil. That means over 162 countries are poorer than Israel. Why in the world would the United States government be giving one third of its foreign aid to a relatively wealthy nation? This is especially puzzling, because Israelis make up less than 0.1 percent of the people on Earth. If the United States distributes its foreign aid equally among the peoples of the Earth, then Israel is getting over 300 times its share. But Israel is a wealthy country, so its share should be even less, which means it is probably getting over one thousand times its fair share. What is happening here? It appears several things.

One, the United States has armed Israel to the teeth and helped make it the most powerful compact military force in the Middle East, with about 170 nuclear weapons. The United States sold $1 billion worth of weaponry to Israel in direct commercial sales alone in 2002.

Two, most Muslims in the Middle East consider Israel a US military base. And who could argue against this viewpoint? The United States doesn’t sell that many weapons to the rest of the Middle Eastern world combined.

Three, Israel is the most westernized nation in the Middle East. We could consider it a miniature US state in the region. It has strong ties to the United States and often parrots American voting in the United Nations.

Four, an argument can be made for Israel being the major destabilizing force of the Middle East. A united Islam, with its massive oil wealth, squarely facing the United States would scare the pants off of our government. It is better to have the ire of Islam to piddle away its religious and nationalistic energies against Israel, than to demand a fair price for its black gold, respect for its people and religion, or to have them expose United States criminal interventions in the Middle East.

What’s sad for me to imagine is what will happen in twenty years, when the oil spigots are sputtering. Without having built any significant industrial infrastructure, the burgeoning Middle Eastern populations will suddenly become much poorer than they are today. The United States won’t care one whit about Israel. With our policy of backing hard-line Israeli administrations, the hatreds of the poor millions of economically dispossessed Middle Easterners will descend upon Israel in a truly biblical fashion. I’m talking old Testament wrath.

The only advice I could give Israel is to stop being a puppet for the United States government. They don’t care about you. Stop taking their money. You don’t owe them anything. You can’t be like the United States because you’re too small. You can’t possibly accomplish the amount of mayhem that the United States government has with impunity. You just don’t have our resources or our horsepower.

Address the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians. Ask the surrounding Islamic countries for aid in exchange for kicking out the United States government from your country. You may just find out, in twenty years, that you have the best neighbors in the world.

The only advice I can give the Palestinians is to not let their past destroy their future. On our planet, wealthier and more powerful groups have always taken advantage of the poor. Israel could never have done the terrible things it has without the support and the blessings of the United States government. Israel is not your main enemy. Break the cycle of vengeance and work for your future.

Allah has shown himself to the Jews in the Torah. Allah has shown himself to the Christians in the Gospels. And Allah has shown himself to you in the Quran. The first man who raises his fist to another does not respect Allah. All children deserve a chance to know Allah. Do not keep them from that wisdom, just because your heart is hardened. Respect Allah.

It is time to tell the truth about Israel.

Israel are racist hate-mongers who want to exterminate the Goy (anybody who isn’t Jewish). Zionism is the problem, not freedom-loving nations of the world—Palestine and Lebanon among them. Hezbollah and Hamas are not ‘terrorist organizations’ any more than were the Founding Fathers of America. These groups were formed in reaction to Israeli agression. Regarding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli commanders boasted for years that they ‘created’ Hezbollah, but you didn’t hear this on TV now did you? Hey, people gotta defend themselves from tyranny, and those courageous Lebanese and Palestinian ‘terrorists’ are the Mid-East’s version of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. That is the unadulerated (unfiltered by Jewish media) truth.

Israel/Zionism is the problem. Their Talmud is racist ideology. The Zionists are behind both WWI and WWII. They are the people behind the 20th Century blood-baths all over the globe, not Nazis, not Russia, not America. We Americans are currently being used by the ‘puppet-masters’, and those people are Jews. It isn’t ‘Anti-Semitic’ to stand up and defend the truth. It is very reasonable when your country—and the future of humanity—is under attack. All freedom-loving people should know and understand this instinctively.

Study your history. And skip WIKPEDIA while you are at it. It is a Zionist publication, as are ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, NY Times, LA Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Yahoo—most outlets Americans go to get their news. Call these publications ‘Jews News’ because these outlets (collectively termed Mainstream Media or MSM) will never tell the truth about Zionism.

By the way, Israelis are by-and-large not Semitic in origin, and it is NOT ‘Anti-Semitic’ to oppose their policies. Do NOT be afraid of that smear word. They know you are afraid of it, and use this to their advantage.

Besides, Israelis are NOT Semitic in the first place. They are Khazarian (Eastern European) AshkeNAZI Jews (recognize the term?). They are false-Jews, and such is their bellicose behavior. IF YOU NEED TO KNOW WHO A PERSON IS—PAY ATTENTION TO THEIR BEHAVIOR. Are the current Israeli Jews the “Chosen People of God” ?? WATCH THEIR BEHAVIOR. Does it seem God-like to you?

The current Israelis are really Aryan White Supremicists in the true-est sense of the term. These people created and funded the Nazis, the Communists, and the KKK in America (David Duke is a Jew).

Why does this matter? The AshkeNAZI Jews currently run the US Government, they control the US money supply, an

While hardly surprising, it is sad to see that facile canard that those who dare to question Israel’s domestic and foreign policies are «Jew haters» who, moreover, have «gone wild» appearing on this forum. Some of these so-called «Jew haters» who condemn the criminal policies followed by Israeli governments, whether led by Likud, Labour, or Kadima, are, in fact, eminent citizens of Israel with a Jewish background, but for these, people like our dear anonymous correspondent have coined a new epithet - «self-hating Jews». Indeed, there are contributors to this forum who seem to dislike Jews in the much the same way that «Wow Jew Haters Gone Wild» seems to dislike Muslims - «whereever [sic ! MHD] there’s trouble, muslims are there trying to dominate and destroy non muslims» - but a reasonable reading of the postings indicates that they are a minority. The problem with those in power in Israel is not what they are but what they do, just as the problem, made so explicit by Tom Hayden’s account of his political experience, with AIPAC and its members is not who they are, but what they do. This, of course, is what the subject of our discussion should be, but people like «Wow ...» can’t seem to accept this type of discourse, and so always attempt to turn it into one of for (the side of the angels) or against (the other side) the Jews - indeed, making the Jews qua Jews the centre of the discussion (die Judenfrage) is, to my mind the very essence of anti-Semitism....

For what should be the subject of the discussion, readers are encouraged to take a look at Ted Rall’s recent cartoon (but the figure of the «US ambassador», who, of course, would fully and whole-heartedly collude with the «Holocaust maneouvre», would have to be replaced with one representing the «progressive forces in the USA», who, alas, are so stymied by AIPAC that they haven’t a clue). To see the consequences of waging a principled fight against that organisation, it is enlightening to consider the experience of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, one of the very few that has had the balls to do so....

Harry,

live long and prosper.

I must address the complete drivel that was Mr Jeff Gershoff’s comment.

First and foremost, in 2002, with the full backing of the Arab league, Saudi Arabia offered the Israeli’s a peace treaty - I repeat - a peace treaty in the form of the Egyptian and Jordanian ones, stating the formal end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, recognition of Israel, and a whole host of other concessions in return for Israel returning all of the Occupied Territories captured during the 1967 war, and a just solution to the Palestinian humanitarian problem, amongst other concessions.

Generalissimo Sharon outright refused to aknowledge this peace deal, and it withered. US Administration said nothing, the US media allowed the story to die. So your statement:

“Let Hamas and Hezbolah recognize Israels right to exist and there can be peace.  Let them keep strapping explosives to themselves and killing women and children, let them keep lobbing missles into Israel and Israel will continue doing what they are doing until one of them cannot get up off the canvas anymore.”

is quite irrelevant, seeing as Hamas was not governing the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah was not governing Lebanon in 2002. A general Peace deal with the Arab World was allowed to die, and you suggest that Israel will be willing to deal with two entities it thinks are terrorist organisations.

Furthermore, you ask for the Arabs to make the first move. Always, the onus is on the Arab side to make many concessions even before Israel consider negotiation. There is no equal footing with which to negotiate with Israel because Israel will not allow it to be so. History and current events show that even if the Arabs were to accede to all Israeli demands, there is no gaurantee that the Israeli’s will not find some other demand in order to stall, or even to not just ignore Arab overtures out of spite. Indeed, judging from recent events, they seem quite capable of it.

Your statement:

“No one gave a rats ass about the Palestinians when their “home land” was squalor, flies, and dirt.  Israel turned it into a garden and now everyone demands Palestine for the Palestinians.”

seems to imply that imprisonment in an Israeli garden; where your house can be demolished, or your olive and fruit groves be uprooted depending on your heritage, is much better than freedom in your own country, however squalid, fly-ridden or dirty. Furthermore, a land totally at peace would need no-one to give ‘a rat’s ass’ (in your parlance) about it anyway, and is a misrepresentation of the historical situation. Your statement smacks of the colonialist attitude of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Would you also hold this view for all those people of colour, who were enslaved and brutalised in many instances around the world? Would you believe that the sexual slavery of women practices in some parts of the world somehow beneficial to the women who must suffer those indignities?

It’s obvious from your comment that you harbour a prejudice for Palestinians in particular, and Arabs in general; they aren’t fit for the land they occupy, and only Israeli’s can make the Middle East bloom. Thus, by extension, all Arabs deserve to suffer under the heel of Zionism, for their own good. Corrrect? Does this sound eerily like the whole ‘White Man’s Burden’ trollop that precipitated the excesses of the colonisation of Africa? It certainly does, and it fits with the Israeli mindset as well.

Israel likes to spy on the country that feeds it to the tune of billions to date and then calls the traitor who spied on us, a hero -just the kind of ally we need in the middle east.  By the way, they also like to sell our military technologies even if we tell them not to - China sure appreciates it.  Remember, do not forget the USS Liberty.  Some Brits certainly remember that these same Israelis that cry holy terror about terrorism were terrorists themselves when the Brits were in Palestine and they to this day are unrepentant for the terrorist acts they performed.

WOW, THIS IS AMAZING. AS A VIETNAM VETERAN AND A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN I AM GLAD YOU ARE SPEAKING OUT.  WE SURE DONT NEED ALL THIS STRIFE AND BLOODSHED WE SURE HAVE NOT LEARNED OUR LESSON FROM THE PAST. WE HAVE GOT TO REGAIN OUR FREEDOM FROM ISRAELI TYRANY. MAKE NO MISTAKE WE NEED TO STAND UP FOR OUR NATION BEFORE WE ARE EMBROILED IN A CONFLICT WE CANNOT WIN.

Wow Jew Haters Gone Wild said:

Jews have contributed their energy, intellect, resources to every progressive cause in modern history.  And yet you so-called progressives just turn your back, raise the chorus of Jew blame, and think you’re moral? [....]

Well, yeah, I guess. In some ways, I think it could be argued that the Navajo have done far more.

But the power-mad neozionists that have hijacked the Nation of Israel have been treating all their neighbors worse than cockroaches for decades. And they have warped, probably wrecked our American society in the process. They collaborated with the vicious apartheid Union of South Africa to enable the South African tyrants and themselves to develop nuclear WMDs. So that just doesn’t make me feel friendly toward neozionists.

As far as the question of weather I harbor any actual hatred of Jewish people themselves, you will never begin to be able to discover the answer to that. I could easily bear the fervent wish that every Jew be burned alive in an oven, all the while pretending to love the Jews. Or I could accept Jews as just people who practice a particular religion, bearing no ill-will at all against them, while proclaiming to Jew-hating neighbors that I detest the Jews as much as they do. But you will never be able to begin to decipher what I truly feel.

Israel and the U.S.A. are, by their present alliance to dominate, taking a walk to the wild side just like Hitler and Nazi Germany.

To plunger, message # 14774

You piece on 9/11 is well reasoned and makes a lot of sense, and I thank you much for your interst in digging out the truth about this very tragic event and its far-reaching disastrous consequences on the whole world.

There is no hope of finding physical evidence to prove who and how it all happened. This is so for the simple fact that the sophisticated team that planned this inside job made sure to destroy any physical evidence possible.

In light of this, serious thinkers are only left to use their intellectual reasoning and circumstantial evidence to reach an approximation about the facts related to 9/11.

Yours is indeed a very serious analysis, and, most likely, very close to the truth. That’s why I was intrigued by your piece. I was particulary intrigued about your being specific on the Mossad role as a way to blackmail the political establishment. Remember Monica Lewinsky? I theorized, at the time, and wrote about her being an Israeli Mossad agent, planted in the White House to bring about the fall of Clinton, who was getting a little bit sympathysing to solving the Palestinian problem. 

Your piece also supports my thinking about 9/11; about which I wrote a short comment somewhere else on the truthdig. In case you have not read my piece, I am attaching it below:

“To Janice A. # 14474:

You’re very smart Janice. You’re one of the few thousands in America and around the world who believe 9/11 was an inside evil job, to create the atmosphere of fear in preparation for the trauma and mind control you talked about.

I simply could not believe and will never believe that some people living in caves and constantly on the run could have carried out such sophisticated operation. This is not to say that Al-Qaeda had not enough hate for America to attempt hurting it in a big way when they could; but from a scientific point of view, know-how and sophisticated human resources, they did not have that, and no small group of enemies will ever have what it takes to prepare and carry out such operation. And imagine that!! The hijackers had only box-cutters as their weapons! From all those on board the hijacked planes, wasn’t there a few courageous enough who were willing to get injured and possibly die to prevent a bigger disaster?!!

Elements in the Pentagon, CIA, FBI with possibly a lot of help from the Israeli Mossad must have started working on this just as Bush was put on the throne by the Supreme Court! For Bush and the Neocons to continue ruling the country and taking it in the direction they have taken it, something tragically big must have to take place! Everyone knows, that in every country and society there is that class of people called the merchants of death! For what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and now Lebanon, 9/11 was a must prerequisite!

Sad as it is to invoke thoughts about the 9/11, I always find consolation to find like-minded people. Thank you Janice for being a free thinker and publicly join the small but privileged group!”

By the way: if Americans generally ever finally start to figure out what a false ally Israel really is, there is of course the danger of an upwelling of anti-Semitism in America. Let’s look at exactly why this is so.

The essential misunderstanding that may lead to such a horrible development is a failure of Americans to distinguish between Israel and “the Jews”. This is a conflation that Israel and many American Jewish leaders have done much to encourage.

Any strong condemnation of Israel’s actions, of its ethnocratic ideology, or of its interference in our political process, is regularly condemned as inherently “anti-Semitic” by prominent members of the mainstream American Jewish community. Right-wing American Christians — perhaps even more extreme than American Jews in their adherence to the notion of Israel’s blameless holiness — eagerly echo this charge.

And so, despite the fact that American Jews are in fact over-represented among intellectuals and activists who expose and denounce the crimes of the state of Israel, we may well see such a surge of anti-Semitic backlash in this country, if and when most Americans come to some glimmer of understanding concerning the worse-than-useless US/Israeli “alliance”.

Americans in general are not terribly sophisticated. This is why such a ludicrously one-sided alliance, so destructive to American interests, was ever possible in the first place. And it’s why an anti-Semitic reaction may accompany its end.

If this backlash should happen, then to Israel and to the American Jews who have laid the foundation for it, I have three words from a great Jewish philosopher: AS YE SEW.

Wow, just read this thing and be amazed at the level of knee jerk jew hating, blindness to history, and desire for the death of Israel.  So sad.  If these terror groups lay down their weapons and agreed to stop attacking Israel tomorrow, that would be the end of war.  If Israel lay down their weapons and agreed to stop hitting back at the terror groups, it would be overrun tomorrow and a new holocaust would ensue.  Apparently, that suits the jew haters just fine.  Islamic fascism is fascism, and again Jews stand against it while the moral ambivalence or antisemitism of non Jews seeks to guarantee yet another cycle of jew killing.  SHAME, SHAME.  It’s sad that Israel’s only friend can be found in the Bush government, but that doesn’t make ISrael complicit in anything that Bush does.  If you have only one friend and you’re fighting for your life, you don’t question that friendship.  More power to Israel in this fight for their life.  Look at the numbers of arabs killed by arabs, of non muslims killed by muslims, of the track record of muslims in the world today (whereever there’s trouble, muslims are there trying to dominate and destroy non muslims).  Jews have contributed their energy, intellect, resources to every progressive cause in modern history.  And yet you so-called progressives just turn your back, raise the chorus of jew blame, and think you’re moral?  You better hope that in the end we don’t all get what we deserve.

I surely didn’t say anything about Jews crucifying anyone…

HOWEVER crucifiction was hardly exclusively a “Roman thing”

This means of punishment was practiced by Persians, Seleucids, Jews, Carthaginians, among others.  There is even some evidence it was practiced in Egypt.

reflex action?  by whom?

Marcia, of course Ishrael wants peace.....a piece of Iraq, a piece of Iran, a piece of Syria and a piece of lebanon.
They also have our own government by the balls through, bribery, extortion and threats. I and thouroughly disgusted and sick to my stomach from it all.
It is time for a new American revolution.
We must:
Take our government back from those who have corrupted it for their own benefit, including Ishrael.
Prosecute those within the Whore House for betraying our nation, our constitution and its people. The punishment must be severe enough to deter any who might think about doing it again in the future.
Stop paying tribute to that miserable little zionist state. No more money period! enough is enough, goddamn it!
Congress should get its collective asses kicked, and maybe in the balls as well.
Break all ties with Ishrael..they are on their own from now on. That way they will have to behave themselves. As long as they have the U.S. as their
rich poodle Ishrael will continue to act like a pitbull.
Round up the zionists, MOSSAD, AIPAC and the jew lobby and send them packing back to zionland.
Use the laws we have to break up the jewish stranglehold on our media, including the newspapers. There are enough anti monopoly laws with which to use.
Please realise I have nothing against people of Judaism. It’s the rabid, racist, zionist who I find to be our own worst enemy.
Thank you Tom, for finally coming out with enough
guts and patriotism to speak out on this matter.
Even our founding fathers spoke out against zionism.
Unless we change the course of our nation, we will be “undone”. I fear for my country and for those in the middle east for they are the ones who are the victims of zionist aggression.
Now I will wait for the zionists to send their hitmen to my house.

Harry,

Crucifiction was a Roman thing. Jews have often been on the receiving end of brutality. Whether they have more often been teachers of brutality or learners from brutality can be disputed. That they have killed more Arabs in the last 60 years than Arabs have killed Jews in that same time period cannot be disputed. The side that the United States has taken in the disagreement cannot be disputed. It was interesting to see your reflex action.

This article has pushed me beyond some point of critical mass. My world-view will never be the same.

What we are looking at here goes beyond issues like anti- Jewish sentiment, terrorism, capitalism, etc, etc, etc. We have been victims to a vast media conspiracy that has parlayed a typical religious ideal into a powerful, violent cult of death, and allowed that cult to play a key role in the establishment of a fascist regime in the United States. It needs to be called the neocon/ neomedia/ neozionist conspiracy of treason, or something like that.

These pseudo- religious traitriots are destroying America and the rest of the world too, including the people of the Middle East, including the Jewish ones, apparently for sport. This is evil in its purest form. I am stunned.

John;

Back when crucifiction was occuring in the Middle East the Brits were drawing and quartering folks, the Spanish were killing witches and most of Europe was pre civilized.

I will not be a party to a conversation where we blame one side or the other for this disagreement which clearly has enough blame to cover the northern hemisphere.

I thought the point of Tom’s message was that there are two valid points of view here?

ISRAEL BLACKMAILS AMERICA

NUCLEAR WAR IMMINENT.

“PURE EVIL” Does A Deal With “THE DEVIL.”

PURE EVIL is Dick Cheney.

THE DEVIL is Israel’s Mossad.

THE DEAL was 9/11.

Cheney perceived the perfect partner in the perfect crime to be Israel’s Mossad.  Cunning, ruthless, skilled, connected, covert - the “False Flag” experts.

As is now clear and agreed upon by all, the Bush Sr. / Cheney Administration (in which Shrub is merely a spokesperson and useful idiot) adopted the PNAC plan as its own.  Cheney found within it the opportunity to capture vast resource-rich territory in a World War blamed on others, and thereby enrich himself and his friends.

9/11 proved not to be the perfect crime, and the co-conspirators actually got caught, and have been covering up their crime and silencing their “enemies” ever since.

Israel and Cheney were both caught red-handed on 9/11 itself.

Cheney was caught when Norm Minetta walked in on him in the midst of barking out the orders that allowed the A3 Skywarrior to strike the Pentagon without being shot down.

Israel’s Mossad was caught when their five agents were arrested after being observed celebrating and filming the impact and subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers.  They weren’t just arrested, they had with them video taped evidence of themselves celebrating on camera as the towers fell (as would a demolitions team after a successful implosion).

These events are factual.  They occurred.

The lengths to which the US and Israeli governments have gone to bury these and other historic events are evidence of their complicity in 9/11.

Cheney was wrong to have selected Israel as any kind of partner in crime.  Israel was not going to be content to share the spoils of war, Israel wants ALL the spoils of war, and has at its disposal ALL of the tools and leverage to literally destroy the United States, and is in the midst of doing so right this very moment.

Why the silence from the Bush Administration with respect to Israel’s destruction and acquisition of territory?

BLACKMAIL - plain and simple.

Through Abramoff, Franklin, Lieberman, Chertoff and their thousands of moles within the US Government, in concert with their vast network of installed monitoring software, data retrieval and listening devices, Israel has compromised virtually every Administration official AS WELL AS nearly every US Senator and Congressman.

Israel has evidence of all of them accepting bribes, because Israel was behind the bribes and recorded evidence of all of it.  Israel has evidence of sexual escapades out of wedlock, because Israel arranged for it, and documented it.  Israel has direct evidence of the Administrations role in 9/11, because Israel partnered in it.

Israel controls the Mainstream US Media, and the Administration KNOWS IT.

As we speak, Israel is threatening the administration with the total exposure of their role in 9/11 if they even begin to interfere with Israel’s plan to take out not just Lebanon, but also Syria AND Iran, using NUCLEAR WEAPONS - all within the next ten days.

The bombs that we are rushing to Israel at this very moment...the bunkerbusters to be delivered by the F-15s - are they nuclear?

If the US had any ACTUAL LEVERAGE or ability to slow down Israel’s mad territory grab and death machine, the least they would be doing is holding back delivery of bombs.

As with EVERY member of the Bush Administration, Condaleeza Rice has no power whatsoever over Israel.  They’re blackmailing her too.

Israel has already accomplished its goal.  It has completely compromised the integrity and security of the United States Of America.  It is in total control of the US Treasury, Defense Department, Congress - every institution and branch of government.

The culture of corruption in Washington met its match in Israel.  The co-conspirators thought they had an equal partner in crime, but they have now come to realize that this was a very long term and elaborate sting - for the ultimate prize - control of the United States Of America and its Nuclear Arsenal.

This is where we stand today.  Literally everyone in Washington knows it.  All of the retired Generals and Bush Senior advisors are on highest alert.

The Bush Administration is in the midst of the biggest disaster ever conceived, and unless they do EVERYTHING that Israel demands, the evidence of their crimes will be plastered across every major newspaper in the United States.

The Administration knows for a fact that Israel is going to nuke Iran and Syria.  The only choice the Administration has to stop Israel from nuking these two countries, is to Nuke Israel itself.  Even this though will not prevent the Truth of 9/11 from being revealed.

CHECKMATE.

Nuclear war is coming either way, and its coming right now.

“The Crazies” as Colin Powell referred to the Zionists, have won - and he personally enabled it.

“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. ‘God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan’.” “And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...’ And I did.

Secretary of State Rice’s response to the disaster in New Orleans was: “The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time.” She added: “If we just wait.” “On time”? How does Rice know the exact time Armageddon starts? “If we just wait”? That means in her, that is our, lifetime!

“At Church one day [Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader] listened as the pastor declared that ‘the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.’ DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘what has been spoken here tonight is the truth of God.’”

LESS THAN ONE MONTH AFTER 9/11:

“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” - Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

Only by revealing the entire truth and arresting all of the guilty parties can the threat of Blackmail be removed.

Somewhere along the way, long before the United States fought a proxy war for Israel in Iraq, the Jews learned a lot about crucifying people.

I have a suggestion: let’s all send big checks to those lonely 8 or so Congresspersons who bravely defied AIPAC by voting against the resolution blessing dear little Israel’s sickening murder of Lebanon.

Tom,

About your comment:

“Otherwise we will witness a tacit alliance between Israel and the U.S. to dominate the Middle East militarily.”

Far from being a “tacit alliance” something else is at work. So I share this revelation-

A NEW, “11th COMMANDMENT” FROM GOD VIA GEORGE WASHINGTON TO YOU:

“WITH A 410 to 8 VOTE IN CONGRESS, IT IS NOW CLEAR TO LOYAL AMERICANS THAT ONLY A REVOLUTION CAN PROTECT THE NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES, AND A REVOLUTION IS THUS REQUIRED TO DEFEND THE HISTORIC IDENTITY AND INDEPENDENT INTERESTS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
--THIS TALLY OF WILLFUL SUBSERVIENCE IS WAY BEYOND “ENTANGLING ALLIANCES” --IT IS A TOTAL CORRUPTION OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNANCE BY A FOREIGN POWER MINUS EIGHT HONORABLE VOTES.”

It is hard for us regular working folks, those not spending all our time studying this issue, to determine the “right” and “wrong”. 

Growing up in New York, I have many Jewish friends some of whom I love dearly.  Working on the Pine Ridge in the Seventies, I am deeply concerned by land theft.

Who owns the Middle East?  Christians, Jews, and Muslims have history on the site of present day Isreal. 

Abraham had two wives.  It would have helped the current situation if he favored his offspring equally.

Amy,

Obviously it never occurred to you that the vote in congress (410-8) yesterday was animated by moral clarity.

Don’t worry about Israel’s transgressions, Iran will finish them off.  The U.S. better start worrying about the World wide depression if they or Israel attacks Iran.  The planet long term will be better off.  The Moslems in the Middle East do not contribute to Global Warming.

It is indeed a strange world* in which we live. (The leadership of) the USA has the rest of the world by a certain sensitive part of the anatomy and thereby can turn off the blood supply to the brain at will - witness the enormous brouhaha that occured when North Korea, a small country of 23 millions which hasn’t been involved in a shooting war since 1953 (that no peace treaty has been signed to replace the armistice which ended fighting in Korea is due to decisions made not by the North Korea, but by the government of the United States) and which, while it may or may not possess six to eight «nuclear devices», has never tested one, recently tested a few missiles (its adversaries, the US and Japan test missiles all the time). When, on the other hand, India, a rather large country with a population exceeding a thousand millions, and which since 1947 has been involved in three major and one minor war with one neighbour (the last as recently as 1999) and one border conflict with another, and is estimated to possess as many as 100 nuclear warheads, which have been tested, performs a test a couple of days later, «the international community» reacts with utter silence (save, of course, for Pakistan, which might once again feel the brunt of a war made in India). Of course, the difference is that India had received imperial authorisation for its test by no less a personage than General Pace (cf Praful Bidwai’s insightful article, India exposed by missile failure in the Asia Times of 12 July), as the US leadership hopes that India may prove useful in countering China....

This grip on the rest of the world can be explained by the USA’s size (300 millions), military (a budget greater than that of the rest of the world combined and a willingness to invade others that has been demonstrated time and again after WW II), economic (still the world’s biggest, whose consumption fuels the production that takes place elsewhere), and cultural (what film or TV-programme did you last watch ?) prowess. But just as the US has a the rest of the world in a bind, a small country of 6 millions, which admittedly is no military slouch, having an estimated 200 nuclear warheads (like those of the North Koreans, untested, unless somebody has done it for them) and a confirmed willingness to use its military power on others, but which is dependent for its existence upon annual largesse from US taxpayers, has manage to couple that same grip on the mighty USA itself ! Tom Hayden’s article goes a long way to explaining how....

*Mondo cane

Writes “JF” ("Jewish fascist”?):

“Israel must expand. period.
Now it seems they have found the balls to actualize that wish.
Who will stop them? Her every child is a soldier!
And so many kids per mother! ...Historical forces are not moral in any fixed way. “

OK, then, if this is simply an amoral process of might making right,of the Master Race taking its rightful Lebensraum, then we can dispense with all the usual justifications for lavish US support of Israel, which are wholly based on nauseating upgutches of moral and religious sentiment.

Now, since we’re being so amoral about it: looking at it coldly, from the point of view of AMERICAN interest, we must drop this tar baby, which is nothing but a parasitically expensive terrorism magnet for the United States of America.

For all those who still wonder ‘why do they hate us’.

The date on Mohamed Atta’s last will and testament is 11 April 1996.

The date of the last Israeli invasion of Lebanon is 11 April 1996.

From Antiwar

The recent resolution that was passed in the House of Representatives supporting Israel in their fight against Hizbollah by a 410-8 margin, clearly shows that the Israel lobby has a level of influence unmatched by any foreign power. 

It becomes problematic when the US is making policy decisions that benefit Israel at the expense of our own self interest.  The war in Iraq was rationalized in part, as a way to bring peace to replace regimes which are hostile to Israel with regimes that were friendly.  Of course, things didn’t turn out as planned.

Now the US offical policy is to allow Israel to attack lebanon at will, regardless of innocent casualties and loss.  I can’t beleive it’s in our interest to fully back a war which is immoral, or illegal, if not both.

In fact, Israel could very well be the loser in the long run, the hatred and emnity this war will produce will outlast any gains against Hizbollah. Ironically, Israel would have been far better served by the US if we had said from the very beginning, no.

Thanks VERY much, Tom, for this courageous statement and its clarity and precision.  I teach at the University of Oklahoma and I’m a bit embarrassed that one of my students sent me this link (instead of vice versa)… He had read DEMOCRACY IS IN THE STREETS last semester…

The most important thing is how to get this statement more widely noticed, more widely read, more media attention.

Tom, thank you very much for writing about what happened in 1982. Those photos taken on the border bothered me for years, even though I’ve always understood the exigencies. Talking about how you got there gives added credibility to what you’re saying now.

Tom, great article. You really nailed it. I’m sending it to Boxer and Feinstein (yeah, that’ll work). Thanks Tom.

Please go to http://julywar.epetition.net and sign the Save the Lebanese Civilians Petition and forward this invitation to your friends. If you think this has nothing to do with security, think again! Israeli bombs, paid by the US taxpayer, are not only killing hundreds of civilians but are also recruiting a whole new generation of terorists.

Lebanese civilians have been under the constant attack of the state of Israel for several days. The State of Israel, in disregard to international law and the Geneva Convention, is launching a maritime and air siege targeting the entire population of the country. Innoce