Iraq crisis: the people suffer, US vultures circle

This article originally appeared on The Kasama Project on 14 June 2014. Reposting here to preserve a broken link. It can also be accessed here.


By ISH

Imperialism's chickens are coming home to roost in Iraq, and once again it is the people of the region who will pay the price.

In a week of events that is in some ways shocking and in other ways not even slightly surprising, a radical Islamic fundamentalist group called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, sometimes translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or referred to by the Arabic name Da'ish) seized Iraq's second largest city of Mosul, and capturing more cities along the way, has advanced as far as Baquba, just 50 kilometers from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

In the face of a sudden advance by the black-clad, black-flag bearing fighters, lightly armed and driving around in open trucks, the massively US-funded and trained Iraqi army melted away. The unravelling of the Iraqi army in the north seems to have been a combination of demoralization and, at least according to some sources, a revolt by former Baathists loyal to the deposed Saddam Hussain.
In any case ISIS seized control of city government, immediately announced the imposition of a strict Islamic law, and reportedly began executions of civilians and other opponents. It also apparently seized millions of dollars from Mosul banks. Hundreds of thousands of civilians including the large Iraqi Christian population of Mosul reportedly fled immediately to the neighboring semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
Fighters from that Iraqi Kurdistan Region quickly seized the moment and occupied the nearby city of Kirkuk, strategically located amidst the northern oilfields and long coveted by Kurdistan as its capital, despite being one of the most multi-ethnic cities in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan first carved out some autonomy in the 1990s after the first US war against Iraq; it's been pushing towards possible independence ever since. (Kurdish independence would certainly be just, despite the massive oil-company induced corruption that now rules the autonomous zone.)

In the face of the ISIS surge, the central Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki has been seemingly paralyzed. Its parliament has been unable to make a quorum. The leaders of Iraq's Shi'a Muslim community have started to rally support to defend Baghdad: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr have called for Iraqi Shi'ites to form militias to defend Shi'ite-populated cities against the ISIS advance. And the government of the neighboring Islamic Republic of Iran, ironically now the chief backer of the Maliki government, is reportedly already sending in troops to defend its fellow Shi'ites from the ISIS attack. One report suggested that Iraqi soldiers lining up to defend the Baghdad “Green Zone” are wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms should they need to make a hasty retreat and discard any signs of allegiance to the government.

What is ISIS?

ISIS is one of the militias that has come out of the bloody civil war in neighboring Syria. While apparently funded by wealthy interests in the Gulf, it competes in the civil war against the Syrian government with forces like the so-called Free Syrian Army, and while it shares a Sunni Muslim identity and a hard right-wing sectarian ideology, it has been deemed too extreme even by Al-Qaeda. It has also been opposed by the Syrian Kurdish movement. Its goal is a unified Islamic state across a wide swath of what is now several different countries.

While from a communist perspective one might be tempted to welcome the success of ISIS against corrupt capitalist governments and former US puppets, it is clear its ideology and practice is deeply sectarian and brutally repressive against the people. Disturbing videos can be seen online showing that ISIS has a policy of horrifying, random terror against those deemed to be its enemies. One video, shot from inside an ISIS vehicle, shows fighters in a speeding car randomly gunning down passing civilians.

ISIS's advance in the north of Iraq is not actually their first major victory. They already control portions of northern Syria, and most of Iraq's Anbar province, having seized the long-suffering city of Fallujah several months ago. Fallujah was of course the scene of brutal battles between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and the US occupation army; it's notorious for being dosed by “depleted uranium” weapons which have left a horrible legacy of health problems for the local population.

Triple legacy of imperialism, Zionism and revisionism

When British and French imperialism co-opted the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago during WWI, they created a patchwork of states that didn't really correspond to real ethnic or religious divisions in the Middle East. States like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq were created to the advantage of imperialism, which understood the growing importance of oil and therefore their strategic imperatives in the region. As in Africa, divide and conquer was their watchword. Soon nationalism and anti-colonialism grew in response to the regional imperialist mandates, forces of rebellion appeared all over the Middle East. Communist parties and militant labor movements blossomed.

But with the creation of the Zionist entity of Israel in the late 1940s, suddenly the obvious divisions of class were not the only faultlines. Palestine was occupied and a whole nation dispersed. Iraq before Israel had a large Jewish population, and this population was a backbone in fact of the Iraqi Communist Party. As Israel insisted on the “Israeliness” of Jewish Arabs, suddenly sectarian identity became crucial, pushing rifts in contradictory societies to the fore. Jewish Arabs fled to Israel en masse. Arab nationalist forces kicked out direct imperialist rule across the Middle East and tried to forge secular societies, often using at least the rhetoric of socialism. Leftists (perhaps best identified as “revisionists”) subordinated their politics to those of the nationalists in country after country, and over the decades found themselves in turn co-opted or brutally repressed. Meanwhile, the State of Israel, opposed by radicalizing, communist-influenced guerrilla armies of Palestinian fedayeen, quietly began to foster the development of Islamic social movements to subvert the influence of secular nationalism and communism.

But with the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 and the collapse of Soviet influence in the region ten years later, nationalism and leftism buckled ineffectively against the continued injustice and brutality of the Zionist state. All of a sudden the sectarian and ethnic tensions began to flare, first with the Lebanese civil war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then the Iran-Iraq war, and eventually three invasions by US imperialism. Islamic fundamentalism gained new legitimacy as an effective form of opposition to local corruption, to imperialism and to some extent Zionism, and suddenly secular ideologies, including Marxism, seemed irrelevant. (Islamic fundamentalism also gained a fortune in aid from the US as it positioned itself against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; even Osama bin Laden was America's best friend for a hot minute in the 1980s).

ISIS, like Al-Qaeda, is a product of this new reality. Social revolution, though vastly different than what how we communists define it, is now the watchword of the religious far right. Of course the Middle East is not the only place where that is increasingly true: there's a serious warning embedded here for leftist revolutionaries. The social revolution promised by ISIS involves a repressive, deeply conservative view of Islam.

Today's Iraqi government was created by US imperialism in the aftermath of its unprovoked invasion in 2003. The government was set up in a power-sharing arrangement between Iraq's Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish populations, inverting the dominance from Sunni under Saddam to Shi'a under al-Maliki. The US stopped a Sunni insurgency through a combination of mass violence and bribery. And then the US left.

The blood-soaked arrogance of US imperialism

Let's be direct: responsibility for the violence in Iraq can now be laid squarely at the feet of US imperialism. The US broke and shattered the country of Iraq by invading and dismantling the existing secular state. Without shedding tears for the anti-communist dictator Saddam, it's important to recognize what happened when the most powerful country in the world (allied with a host of the world's reactionary forces from British imperialism to local reactionaries like the Saudi Arabian monarchy) steamrolled over Iraq. By destroying nation-states and replacing them with cesspools of corruption they have unleashed the worst kind of intercommunal violence.

American media, pundits, and most politicians all cheered the drive to war in the aftermath of 9/11. They ignored the simple fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; they wrapped themselves up in falsified evidence and lies; and they ignored a mass antiwar movement inside the US. So sure of themselves and their superiority in a one-superpower world, they lead the US into a war that cost uncountable thousands of Iraqi lives, and made the daily lives of the Iraqi people a dangerous hell. They bolstered the reactionary Al-Qaeda they claimed to be fighting, sending thousands of Iraqis into its arms as a rallying point for resistance.

The US adventure in Iraq was simply a failure for imperialism. Aside from its atrocious but futile toll in Iraq itself, it had a devastating effect on the US economy. It damaged US hegemony over Europe. And the weakness it revealed in US imperialism's resolve to sustain an extended conflict has emboldened a resurgence of Russian imperialism, which seems to no longer be particularly concerned about US intimidation, witness events in Syria and Ukraine. And now the US is faced with the ignoble prospect of simultaneously bullying and threatening Iran over its nuclear program while watching Iranian ground forces forestall an ISIS sweep into Baghdad. And as further evidence of the wreckage of imperialist policies, US allies have poured millions into Syria to arm reactionary armies including ISIS that the US is now trying to figure out what to do about.

When ISIS swept Iraq last week, all the familiar stinking vultures of the US political scene started squawking. Everybody from ideologue-fantasist Kenneth Pollack and disgraced government media agent Judith Miller who both stoked the 2003 invasion to actual war criminal John McCain have started to offer their opinions and demand US action. The Republican speaker of the house, John Boehner, virtually called President Obama a “lazy ni**er” for failing to send in the bombers. When Obama finally spoke up, he outrageously lectured the Iraqi government about how it should be respecting Iraq's religious diversity better. He says he has not yet decided how to respond to the ISIS advance. It is certainly possible he will unleash his war machine, which is good news for nobody but imperialism.

Obama was elected in large part due to his vote against the Iraq war; and while he has long ago come to own the US adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan, he knows that as disinterested in international affairs as Americans seem, they're not eager to put up with another military adventure that puts boots on the ground; especially on the same ground that so many lives were already thrown away. Probable presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who voted in favor of George Bush's 2003 invasion, has also chosen the grotesque path of lecturing the Iraqi government. She dared to say, “Because you’d be fighting for a dysfunctional, unrepresentative, authoritarian government and there’s no reason on earth that I know of that we would ever sacrifice a single American life for that.”

Really these politicians are shameless, disgusting pigs. Their path is a nightmare for the people of the Middle East and indeed the whole world.

No US intervention!

US imperialism cares absolutely nothing for the people of Iraq. They don't care how many lives are wasted. They don't care if their victims are Shi'ite or Sunni or atheist. They just care about their power. We must stop any further US intervention in Iraq: no invasion, no bombing, no drones, no proxies or "contractors," no mercenaries, no "no fly zones," no advisers, no bases.

The antiwar movement after 9/11 was significant. It dissipated in the face of the 2004 elections. Occupy in 2011 was a significant challenge to the domestic status quo. It dissipated in the face of the 2012 elections (and in the face of coordinated repression directed from Washington). President Obama went from being a supposedly anti-war candidate to the master of drones that have killed thousands of civilians in over a half dozen countries across the Middle East and Africa. Hillary Clinton's record of support for war is perfectly clear. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren has already indicated her hawkishness on Iran and Israel.

The next elections, including the upcoming 2014 midterms and the following 2016 president elections are a loser's game where the people are guaranteed to lose no matter who wins. Just like the previous elections, they're a trap for social movements in the US.

It's time to stop worrying about those creepy, lying politicians and start to build and sustain a real anti-war movement to stop the machinations of the empire. The best way those of us inside the belly of this beast can help the beleagured Iraqi people is to destroy US imperialism from within. The mess imperialism has left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests how weak imperialism actually is. It's dangerous, it's intimidating, but it's not invincible. We need to stand up and oppose any further US intervention in the middle east, Africa, or anywhere else.

The movement against the Vietnam war back in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized US society. It obviously wasn't successfully transformed into a movement to defeat capitalism itself, but it shows us how things can begin.

Are you as disgusted at what's happening now as I am? Let's get to work!

Right-wing Porn Magnate Gets Humanitarian Activists Kicked Out of Gay Community Center

Siegebusters is a local New York City lesbian and gay Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions group in solidarity with the Palestinians and building opposition to the Apartheid blockade of Gaza. It's been meeting at New York City's LGBT Community Center, and was planning an upcoming event for Israeli Apartheid Week. The people behind Siegebusters are not random disinterested parties, but well-known activists in the lesbian and gay community.

Israeli-American gay porn magnate and conservative activist Michael Lucas has just succeeded in getting Siegebusters booted out of the gay community center by falsely equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Siegebusters have mounted an online petition campaign, "Save New York’s LGBT Center! Don’t Let Wealthy Bigots Shut Down Free Speech." I urge Cahokian readers who support basic fairness to sign this petition. Disgustingly equating defenders of Palestinian rights with hate groups, Lucas said, "If the LGBT Center wants to host a fundraising and awareness party for anti-semites, they might as well go all the way and host a tea dance for Fred Phelps." The petition protesting Lucas's campaign to shut down discussion and democracy says in part, "If activists allow this decision to stand, the Center will go from being a liberated space of democracy and free speech to yet another occupied, homogenized venue where wealthy and powerful voices can squelch all the rest. Lucas’s accusation that the March 5 event and groups organizing to build it are “anti-Semitic” is not simply an odious lie, it is an attempt to manipulate hatred of anti-Semitism to draw attention away from the ongoing Israeli crimes of dispossession, systematic racism, collective punishment and wholesale warfare on a population guilty of nothing other than their own existence. An international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel has global support, including diverse voices from queer theory icon Judith Butler and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Auschwitz survivor and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network spokesman Hajo Mayer."

Details on Israeli Apartheid Week events can be found here.


Lucas's efforts are part of the international propaganda campaign known as "pinkwashing," using Israeli's liberal laws on homosexuality to buy support from the lesbian and gay community at the expense of the Palestinian people. Pinkwashing is usually accompanied by disgusting racist fear mongering about Muslim and Arab countries. Needless to say, when Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza in recent years, they didn't bother to ask any of the thousands of innocent people they killed whether they were gay first. Israel's liberal laws for its gay citizens are irrelevant when the Israeli state is built on a foundation of racism, and when its Arab citizens are given second-class rights and the residents of the occupied territories are denied rights altogether.

There's a great account of the recent speaking tour of Palestinian Queer Activists at the Al Qaws website of lesbian/gay/queer Palestinians. (The New York event was filled to capacity and I was unable to get in). Maggie Sager reports, "Queer Palestinians, like Afghan and Iraqi women, have consistently found their discourse co-opted by neo-conservative hawks and progressives alike in order to justify war and occupation under the assumption that such actions will ‘liberate’ the oppressed. It is this cynical manipulation that the forum’s speakers work to disparage. Claiming their own voices and movement, queer Palestinian activists are clamoring to be heard and wish for their American brothers and sisters to spread their message. So what is it they have to say? The clearest message resounding from all three speakers was that if one actually cares about LGBT rights within Palestine, one should be working to end the occupation. That Israel has cultivated a vibrant and open gay enclave is laudable, yet such accomplishments do not give the ‘Jewish State’ a free pass to violate human rights, including the rights of the gay Palestinians they allegedly care for. As Haneen dryly explained, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami echoed the same sentiment, jibing that “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”


(The photos on this post are from last year's Gay Pride Parade in Istanbul, Turkey, in June. See a whole portfolio of these photos at Radikal.com. Thanks to Joe.My.God. for making me aware of them.)

The Face of Racism, 2

A year ago I posted an iconic photograph of the relationship between Apartheid Israel and the Palestinians. Here's a replacement.

From the blog Dimi's Notes, here is a now-removed photo from the Facebook page of Eden Abergil, a young Israeli woman then serving in the Israeli army, or IDF. She's posing coquettishly in front of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners. One of her equally heartless friends commented on the photo: "LOL all my loves in one picture!!! My heart is pumping hard!!!"

Airplane Hijacking, Freedom Fighters, and the New York Times

Last week the New York Times printed a remarkable OpEd piece by Gal Beckerman of the Jewish Daily Forward entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny." The article recounts the planned 1970 hijacking of a small Soviet airplane by a group of dissident Jews in Leningrad. Arrested before they could seize their intended plane, the hijackers hoped to fly the plane to Sweden and then emigrate to Israel. Led by one Yosef Mendelevich, the hijackers hoped that successfull or not, their action "would make their demand for free emigration impossible to ignore." Eventually the attempt by the Soviet state to prosecute the hijackers rebounded, and a massive movement for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was born. Furthermore, as the piece puts it, "The bravery of the hijacking plotters also ignited a movement in the United States that would lead Congress, a few years later, to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which withheld preferred trading status from the Soviet Union until it allowed tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate...As a result, not only were hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Berlin Wall and, eventually, an empire — a world-shaking transformation born from the hopes once placed on a small airplane that never even left the ground."

I am fascinated that the New York Times ran this piece, because it calls to mind other freedom-fighting airplane hijackers who the New York Times would never acknowledge in a similar way. Long before airplane hijacking came to imply the indiscriminate murder of civilians or the smashing of airplanes into office buildings, airplane hijacking was used as a desperate symbolic measure by Palestinian freedom fighters, who just like these desperate oppressed Soviet Jews, hoped it would call attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of oppressed people and snowball into events that would bring down a state that was the instrument of that oppression.

Leila Khaled was--and is--a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the left-wing faction of the Palestinian movement led by George Habash that accused the mainstream Fatah movement of Yassir Arafat of accommodation to Israel. That's her on the Palestinian wall stencil above. She led a spectacular hijacking of a TWA jet in 1969, blowing up the plane in Syria after the passengers were safely taken off. She was captured in 1970 while attempting to hijack a second plane as part of the "Black September" campaign. Released in a prisoner exchange in 1971, Leila Khaled became a spokeswoman for the Palestinian cause in later years in Jordan. The PFLP soon set aside the tactic of airplane hijackings; Khaled and the PFLP always maintained that their intention was never to harm innocent civilians in their actions, though it does seem like some actions the PFLP had connection to did unfortunately cross that line.

Now as someone who has flown in airplanes let me state clearly I hope never to be hijacked. I think it's wrong, murderous intent or propaganda-only intent, to make innocent people suffer, even if not fatally, for the faults of evil and corrupt governments. I don't think hijacking airplanes was the finest hour of the PFLP or of Palestinian freedom fighters in general. And if the PFLP didn't intend to hurt civilians, clearly those who carried on the hijacking tradition after them have had no such qualms; 9/11 RIP. But Leila Khaled was not a terrorist, only a Palestinian born in a city to which she is unable to return, and neither was Yosef Mendelevich, trapped in a country where anti-semitism ran rampant. We need not associate Ms. Khaled with 9/11 any more than the New York Times associates Mendelevich with 9/11.

Clearly, the attempted seizure of this Soviet airplane in 1970 by Jewish dissidents was inspired by the seizures of airplanes by Palestinian dissidents. We shall be quietly waiting for the Times editorial board to thank Leila Khaled for freeing Soviet Jewry. And when the struggle for justice in Palestine is finally won, and the Apartheid State of Israel is swept aside like the Apartheid State of South Africa before it, and all the citizens of Palestine are living together in multicultural secular democracy, we look forward to reading, in a reevaluation of Leila Khaled's hijacking, "not only were hundreds of thousands of Palestinians able to build new lives, but forces were set in motion that would bring down the Separation Wall and, eventually, a State — a world-shaking transformation born from hopes the once placed on a small airplane."

(Above photo of wall stencil in Bethlehem snagged from tsweden's flickr)

Things Everybody Knows

I find myself a little at a loss for words over the Israeli act of war against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and its aftermath. It's not that Israel has not done many brutal things before: as body counts go this one pales before Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza in the past few years. There's just something so shameless about the rationalizations offered up by Israel's defenders, the horrifying lies and justifications of murder offered up by Israel's mouthpieces, and the utter complicity of the American press and worse, the American government. Everybody knows that Israel will rationalize its actions, Everybody knows that Israel will claim anyone it has killed is a terrorist.

I'm not one for stoking the fires of international conflict among the den of thieves known as NATO, but shouldn't it be a scandal that Israel attacked a NATO member's civilian vessel and the other NATO members are standing around whistling in a corner? I'm not one for the arbitrary valuing of American life above foreign life, but shouldn't it be a scandal that Israel murdered a completely innocent born-in-America Turkish/American young man -- Furkan Dogan, shown above -- with four bullets to the head and one to the chest, and the U.S. is equivocating? Everybody knows that there's no real justice; that Israel and the U.S. determine how so-called international law is applied.

I listened to NPR radio last night to the most vile propaganda imaginable, and the Israeli ambassador to the US basically admitted
Israel's premeditated assault on the Turkish ship where so many were killed and wounded: "The particular ship that did encounter the violent incident was simply too large to stop by nonviolent means. The others ships were not and that is one of the reasons they were towed safely to port," Oren said on the program that aired today.

Worst of all is this ridiculous American notion that there must be some truth to both sides, that sure, Israel has done some bad things, but HAMAS are TERRORISTS! ROCKETS! MISSILES! ROCKETS! SELF-DEFENSE! Let me say that unequivocally here: there are not two sides to this story, and anybody who says there are is complicit in the racist and inhuman demonization of the Palestinian people. All those rockets Hamas is supposed to have fired have killed fewer people than Israel just did this week in its attack on the Freedom Flotilla. As I have written before, if you are for separation of church and state, if you are for equal civil rights for all people, if you are for peace, you must recognize Israel for the murderous monstrosity that it is. Everybody knows that to listen to the lies of the Israelis you must shut your mind to the truths of the Palestinians.

This is denial on a massive scale. Everybody knows that the twin evils of the war on drugs and the narco-trafficking criminal empire which waste so much life, so much money, strand so many people in prisons, cause such pain, plunge entire nations into the depths of corruption, all these things, would just go away if drugs were legalized. Well here's the news: the violence in the middle east? The rise of fundamentalism and terrorism? The corruption of undemocratic regimes? The waste of so much life, human suffering on a grand scale? The solution for these problems is before us as well, and everybody knows it. The white people of South Africa have lived with majority rule for almost two decades now. There are challenges, to be sure. But the arrival of justice did not bring genocide. The Jewish people living in Palestine can adjust to being equal citizens with their Arab neighbors. A future of justice and decency demands it. The time is coming for the end of Israel as we know it.

Here are some more links of value about the Flotilla massacre. I will not link to any of the Israeli propaganda videos justifying their murder of innocents.

Eyewitness account from Mary Hughes, cofounder of Free Gaza movement.

Another survivor's account here.

Putting Names to the Faces of those Murdered by Israel

Evidence of digital fakery in Israel's so-called proof

Naomi Klein on the shooting of an American art student during a protest of the flotilla massacre on the West Bank.

Glenn Greenwald speaking truth to the corrupt media/political establishment.

The AngryArab puts narcissist NYT columnist Thomas Friedman in his place

Finally thanks to Jews Sans Frontieres for publicizing the graphic below:



Update: Required reading, a detailed refutation of Israeli talking points.

Don't Forget This Axis of Evil: USA, Israel & Apartheid South Africa

This is an interview from the RT network with Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the Council on Foreign Relations discussing his revelation that Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons to the white racist apartheid regime of South Africa in 1975. Polakow-Suransky details the relationship that began under the Peres-Rabin Labor government in Israel and deepened during the subsequent Likud government. His information is detailed and fairly nuanced; he does not suggest that in the end South Africa purchased the nukes. Of course Israel is denying these reports.

But something needs to be said that seems forgotten these days. At the height of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa had two main allies and defenders, and they were the State of Israel...and the United States of America.

I found this 1986 column from Carl Rowan: "The more President Reagan talks about South Africa, the clearer it becomes that his heart and mind are with the white minority that is holding power through brutal oppressions. During his Tuesday press conference in Chicago, it became obvious that Mr. Reagan could not have been a blinder ally of the Afrikaners if he had been a puppet with Pretoria's President Pier Botha pulling the strings. There was Both Tuesday afternoon telling the congress of his ruling National Party that communism is at the root of all the evils and woes of South Africa. Then came Mr. Reagan that same evening asserting that the Communist Party of South Africa 'joined with and just moved into, the African National Congress...And right now...the ones we're hearing from and that are making the statements, are the members of the African Communist Party." President Reagan tried to veto sanctions against apartheid South Africa; basically called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and spent millions backing South Africa's proxy wars against Cuban/Soviet backed governments in Mozambique and Angola. Meanwhile South Africa became the star client of Israel's armaments industry, purchasing billions of dollars worth of hightech weapons and fighter jets. In return South Africa supplied uranium to Israel's nuclear power plant.

The United States sacrificed the black majority in South Africa to its cold-war strategy. Ironic, of course, since apartheid was US-style Jim Crow segregationism taken to dramatic new levels. All the separation laws of the American south and its defacto deprivation of rights for black people were made government policy in South Africa. It was racial separation writ large and legal. Eventually the South African regime set up puppet black microstates in tribal areas as showcases of plausible deniability that everything they did was motivated by racism. The truth is that the spirit of Apartheid is kept alive today in one place and that place is Israel. The Arabs in the so-called occupied territories are subject to separation and deprivation of rights...and once again, despite its occasional protestations, the main backer of the new apartheid regime is the USA.

Stop U.S. Threats Against Iran, redux

I've said this before, and I am saddened to have to say it again: Nuclear weapons are evil. So are warplanes, machine guns, artillery, missiles, grenade launchers, mines. But as long as Israel and the United States have nuclear weapons pointed against Iran, as long as American naval and air forces encircle that country, as long as American politicians (yesterday it was Bush and Condi Rice, today it is Obama and Hillary Clinton) threaten Iran, Iran has as much a right to these machines of war as the U.S. does.

I don't like the Iranian government; the Islamic Revolution hijacked and derailed the real revolution against the Shah back in 1979. But dealing with the Iranian government is the work of the Iranian people. I don't like nuclear power, either; but until irrational capitalism with its profit motive gives way to more rational systems that can explore safer technologies like solar power, Iran has as much right to nuclear power as anyone else.

The saber ratting against Iran needs to stop. And the media need to be reminded that it's not Iran starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it's Iran responding defensively to the one that the Israelis have long already begun.

The face of racism

This picture was in the Times today. It shows an Israeli "settler" casually assaulting a Palestinian woman in Hebron, on the West Bank. It reminds me of those pictures from the 1950s and 1960s of white crackers casually spitting on black civil rights marchers in the south. Simply horrifying.

Heartless Beasts Watch Mass Murder

Here is an entire article with pictures and quotes about the Israelis going out to watch the mass murder:

""Look at that," she shouts, clapping her hands as four artillery rounds pound the territory in quick succession. "Bravo! Bravo!""

Found this link on Angry Arab.

Their morals and ours

From The Angry Arab News Service: Arabs will see this picture, and they will remember it. They will take note that when the Israeli terrorist army was butchering Palestinian women and children, Israeli "civilians" stood and watched cheeringly, while sipping their beverages. "A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists. Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he had carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more.""

Oh yes. This is a closeup of what made them laugh. The heart numbs.

"We've hit the Hamas military machine from the air" and now the ground invasion

Pictured above, the Hamas military machine.

I weep for the world. The Israelis are murdering butchers.

No Happy New Year in Palestine

The Zionist murder rampage in Gaza continues.

The parade of lying Israeli politicians continues.

In order to assassinate one Hamas leader--without trial, without jury, without verdict--the Israelis murdered everyone in his block: men, women, children. Such terrorism and collective punishment has not been seen since, I will say it, the terror of the Nazis in Europe. Confronted with the murder of these children, the Israeli unapologists say, "we blame Hamas for the deaths of civilians." Disgusting.

--

In brighter news, the Cuban revolution has now survived fifty years, despite repeated provocation and blockade from the mightiest imperialist nation on the planet, which is also its very bad neighbor. Long may the flag of Cuban freedom wave.

Terrorists Kill Almost 300 Civilians In Two Days of Targeted Attacks

In two days of targeted attacks, terrorists calling themselves the State of Israel have murdered almost 300 people, mostly civilians, in the walled-off ghetto they control in the Gaza region of Palestine.

Targeting infrastructure of the region's elected government, the terrorist forces -- already engaged in a blockade of the region and in random individual assassinations -- have used the pretext of the Palestinian peoples' self defense as an excuse for the brutal attacks.

Once again the world turns a blinded eye to the murder of innocents and the outrages of the racist settler regime. It is beyond time for this cruel entity to be wiped off the map.

A Little Reality Check

So after his briliant speech last night, upon his apparent win of the Democratic Party nomination, Obama today joined the parade of politicians kowtowing before the (conservative, republican) zionist confab AIPAC.

Sadly, Obama said noxious things like Jerusalem must remain "undivided" and the capital of Israel, and went out of his way to show his support of Jews by showing his support of toughness for Israel and against its victims, er, opponents.

One of the tragedies of Israel is what it has done to the America's Jews. The Jewish political establishment is no longer an institution of social justice or labor; it's a cheering section for the vile and racist zionist settler state. Just as America is turned blind to the racism, futility and organized-crime-enablement of the war on drugs, so does this knee-jerk support of Israel turn peace-loving people into the allies of monsters who use cluster bombs, apartheid/nazi style ghettos, nazi-style collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, land-stealing, and military confrontation.

I'm glad Obama says he "supports the Jews" but I am horrified that he is doing the same old dance of stupidity to the orchestra of Zionism. One should not need to prostrate oneself before the state of Israel to show one's commitment to social justice for all American ethnic groups. No matter how much Obama is forced to grovel, these war-mongering conservative Zionists will not support him anyway; they are too poisoned by their cheerleading of the up-is-down politics of Zionism. They have moved on from the civil rights movement and the black-Jewish alliance of old time social justice.

On the other hand, since I don't really believe in a two-state solution, I guess Jerusalem should remain undivided. As capital of a democratic and secular state of Palestine, open to all its Muslim, Christian and Jewish residents. One can only hope.