Headzup: McCain’s Junta Man

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Diane Warth
on 16 May 2008
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Read more about McCain’s pick to run the Republican convention.

Cindy McCain “sold off more than $2 million in mutual funds” after an AP reporter revealed the investments benefited the government of Sudan. John McCain didn’t have anything nice to say about such investors in an event hosted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies in April 2007, amongst other criticisms saying, “As long as petro-dollars flow freely to them, those regimes have little incentive to open their politics and economies so that all their people may benefit from their countries’ natural wealth.”

Now that John McCain knows about his wife’s “free-flowing petrol dollars” should he ask her to donate the sale proceeds and profits to Myanmar or Darfur relief?

McCain claims to be ignorant of the details of his wife’s vast fortune. He’s neither cautious nor curious about the moral core of the woman who raised and rears his children and who listens to him vent when he comes home from a hard day in the Senate so long as the campaign is funded, the jets keep flying, and the vacation homes are stocked with beer and brats.

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McCain Iraq, Iran Policies Make Him Favored Candidate to Saudis

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Diane Warth
on 16 May 2008
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By Hans Nichols and Janine Zacharia

May 16 (Bloomberg) — John McCain, who is trying to strike a distance from the policies of President George W. Bush, accuses Saudi Arabia of sponsoring insurgents in Iraq and condemns it for human-rights violations, including imprisoning people whose “only crime is to worship God in their own way.”

That should make the prospect of a McCain presidency a nightmare for the Saudi rulers, who have enjoyed close ties to the Bush family. Instead, Saudis are privately rooting for the presumptive Republican nominee, discounting some of his rhetoric because he’s the only candidate to promise to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and to deter Iran.

[Read the report]

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McCain: Bewildered or experiencing technical difficulties?

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Diane Warth
on 16 May 2008
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George Bush delivered a speech before the Knesset in which he insinuated that Barack Obama is a Neville Chamberlain-like appeaser who if elected will oversee the destruction of Israel. The Obama campaign released a statement. Obama responds today in South Carolina; his remarks are predictable.

The pundits are not dissecting John McCain’s response to this contrived crisis. He stated that Iran is supplying Iraqis with weapons that kill Americans.

Is McCain bewildered, is his campaign experiencing technical difficulties?

Where is the media?

Gareth Porter: Bogus Claim, al-Maliki Stall U.S. Plan on Iran Arms

WASHINGTON, May 14 (IPS) - Early this month, the George W. Bush administration’s plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shiite militias in Iraq encountered not just one but two setbacks.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to endorse U.S. charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to the Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms were of Iranian origin.

The news media’s failure to report that the arms captured from Shiite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the U.S. military from a much bigger blow to its anti-Iran strategy. [Read the report]

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Eric Rouleau: Are the Jews an invented people? | Judaism is universal

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Diane Warth
on 14 May 2008
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Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2008

How the Jewish people were invented, from the Bible to Zionism is the provocative title of the most recent book to be published in Israel by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University (forthcoming in French with Fayard). Sand, one of the “new” historians, attacks what he calls the myth that the Jews are the descendants of the Hebrews, exiled from the kingdom of Judaea. He has attempted to show that the Jews are neither a race nor a nation, but ancient pagans – in the main Berbers from North Africa, Arabs from the south of Arabia, and Turks from the Khazar empire – who converted to Judaism between the fourth and eighth centuries CE. According to Sand, the Palestinians are probably descended from Hebrews who embraced Islam or Christianity.

Sand doesn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist or the notion of its sovereignty, but he thinks that sovereignty is undermined by its exclusively ethnic base, which stems from the racism of Zionist ideologues. In other words, Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state, but a democratic secular one which belongs to all its citizens.

[Continue reading | hat tip]

Judaism is universal

Avraham Burg is the scourge of the Israeli establishment. Though he has been in turn a prominent leader of the Labour Party, chairman of the World Zionist Organisation and speaker of the Knesset, he regularly expresses opinions at odds with those of most of his fellow Israelis. Burg lost hope of influencing those in power and quit politics in 2004.

The views he expresses in his latest book The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (to be published by Macmillan in autumn 2008) are brutally frank. On the occupation of the Palestinian territories he writes: “For years I tempered my position to avoid a breach within Israeli society. I have now changed. Today I ask: are [all Jews] my brothers? My answer is no… Since the Shoah, I believe there is no such thing as genetic Judaism, only Jewish values… Even if they are circumcised and respect the Sabbath and the Ten Commandments, the wicked occupiers are not my brothers.”

[Continue reading | hat tip]

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Ran HaCohen: Israel at Sixty

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Diane Warth
on 14 May 2008
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By Ran HaCohen, Antiwar.com, 14 May 2008

Christians – the ancient self-designated heirs to the Jews – commemorate Christ’s tormented way to resurrection and redemption in the weeks leading to Easter. Zionists – the modern self-designated heirs to the Jews – have their Lent after Passover, commemorating what they construct as their via dolorosa leading to the “Jewish State.” In the weeks following Pesach the country indulges in a nationalistic orgy, hardly imaginable in any other modern state, reminiscent of a primitive tribe. If you want to understand how a whole nation is led to defy its own interests, to follow a corrupt, de facto military leadership wasting the nation’s fortune and blood on unnecessary wars and immoral occupation for decades, pay a visit to Israel shortly after Pesach.

A couple of decades ago, it all started with the Holocaust Remembrance Day, about a week after Passover (all Israeli public holidays follow the Jewish calendar, which is otherwise used only for religious purposes). This is no longer the case: the weeks before that are an ever more popular time for Jewish pilgrimage to Poland, where Israeli teenagers, a year or two before their military service, are taken to a series of concentration camps, destroyed Jewish communities, and other sites of memory. These journeys – at least eight days long – earn the blessing of the state and are regulated by the Ministry of Education: an official goal is “to boost national feelings.” The ministry also demands that all the young pilgrims, even the secular ones, consume only kosher food flown from Israel and served soaked and lukewarm in Polish hostels. Parents, however, have to pay the entire costs themselves, about $1,500 per child, which makes it a privilege of the middle class and above. This makes sense, of course. The middle class has to be persuaded ideologically; the obedience of the poor is secured by more violent means.

[Read the article]

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Akiva Eldar: Bush Should Stay Home

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Diane Warth
on 14 May 2008
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By Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz, 12 May 2008

If George Bush were a true friend of Israel, he would seize the investigation against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as an excuse to stay home tomorrow. Unless he has a rabbit in his hat, this will be the third time in the past half year that the U.S. president shows the Palestinians and the entire Arab world that they are wasting their time by trying to end the occupation by peaceful means. Not only have matters not improved since he troubled dozens of leaders from around the world to come to Annapolis in late November, 2007; since then, the occupation has been progressing, while the vision of two states has been receding. The number of new buildings erected in the settlements in the last few months rivals only the number of roadblocks that have been added since Bush last visited Jerusalem, in January.

Bush is an accomplice to an offense far worse than all of the criminal offenses of which Olmert is suspected combined. Every speech made by the president is one more bit of exposure of the nakedness of the Palestinian circles who tied their collective fate to the Annapolis declaration, which pledged to “make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.” In light of the stasis in the negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) seems likely to resign even before Olmert does.

[Read the article | hat tip ]

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Hillary Clinton’s Sunset Blvd

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Diane Warth
on 12 May 2008
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Wafa Amr: 60 years on, refugees visit lost Jerusalem homes

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Diane Warth
on 11 May 2008
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Sun May 11, 2008 6:09pm EDT
By Wafa Amr

JERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) - Eighty-year-old Beatrice Habesch sobbed when she caught sight of her father’s house in Jerusalem on Sunday and remembered how it was taken over by Jews in 1948.

“This is our house! This is my house!” she shouted as fellow Palestinians held her back from running towards the building.

Some 300 Palestinians marked 60 years since Israel’s founding in May 1948 with a protest walk through affluent Jewish parts of west Jerusalem that were once home to many Arabs. They wore black T-shirts with “This is my House” printed on the back.

[Read the report]

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Reuters Video: Palestinian couple yearn for home

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Diane Warth
on 11 May 2008
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May 7 - It’s only a short drive from their house in East Jerusalem to their ancestral home in West Jerusalem, but the journey is a long one for one Palestinian couple.

As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday, Wilhelmine and George Baramki return to the ancestral home in Jerusalem which they fled during fighting when Israel declared its independence.

Now, they wonder whether they will ever enjoy the ‘right of return’ enshrined in Palestinian demands for statehood.

Helen Long reports.

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