Posts Tagged ‘American support’

The Absurdity of Spending US Tax Dollars on Israel

March 31, 2009

Paul J. Balles argues that if enough ordinary Americans “feel the pinch and connect the dots between their own financial losses and America’s continued unbridled support of Israel’s devastating war machine, Israel could be forced to make peace with the Palestinians”.

By PAUL J. BALLES | South Lebanon, March 31, 2009

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once quipped that a person is not conscious of his or her little toe until the shoe pinches. Likewise, one typically is not conscious of an event or situation that can have great impact on one’s life until it has a direct affect.

In an article I wrote in September 2007 on “Overcoming the apathy, fear and listlessness of Americans“, I pointed out that, “liberties and freedoms may be squeezed … but until ‘the shoe pinches’, the squeezing won’t hurt most people enough to get them to act”. In short, most people pay little, if any, attention to politics, social issues, environmental problems, economic concerns or military events until they hurt directly.

The things that are now painfully connected to the recent financial crisis in America include health care costs that people are unable to meet, home foreclosures, job losses, excessive credit debt and loss of pay.

Is it possible that an economic catastrophe in America might have a surprisingly positive effect? An article by Jane Stillwater entitled “Our dual-citizenship Congress” suggested an unforeseen result that could be very good for the whole world.

First, Jane’s article reveals that the shoe is pinching ordinary Americans. She writes:

I turned on the television last night and listened to the local news anchor tell me, “The State of California is currently facing bankruptcy.” I live in California.

This is not good news. Plus California’s jobs are drying up, homes are being foreclosed on, stores are going out of business, schools are laying off teachers, banks are eliminating branches. The eighth-largest economy in the world is about to tank. Boy could we use some financial help from the feds.

Then, after asking, “But will we get it?” she concludes, “Probably not.” While California and other states are not receiving bailouts like the banks that will help ordinary people, Jane concludes:

But Congress still continues to enthusiastically pour billions of our taxpayers’ dollars into the Israeli economy each year. What’s with that? Do our Congressional representatives hold dual citizenship with the United States and Israel or what? When are they going to stop voting pork for Israel and start voting bailout money for CA?

Are we Californians going to have to start firing Qassam rockets at Washington to get their attention or what?

After getting Jane’s permission, I sent her article to my Congressman and cc’d it to everyone I know in California. The next day, I received several comments that echoed Jane’s complaint. Why are we continuing to send US taxpayer money to support Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza while we don’t have enough money to support our own economy?

My daughter wrote, “It infuriates me to think that they are spending our tax $$$ for Israel instead of our own country and state. Yes, we are feeling the pain of it too!”

Her husband, a fire captain in Southern California, has just lost 10 per cent of his pay due to the governor’s budget cuts.

How can this possibly have a positive outcome? The economic crisis in both state and federal budgets has already pinched many shoes. Americans are very upset at the damage done to their financial conditions.

If enough people feel the pinch and connect the dots between their own financial losses and America’s continued unbridled support of Israel’s devastating war machine, Israel could be forced to make peace with the Palestinians.

How could that happen? Israel would no longer be able to ignore the Arab peace initiative first proposed in 2002 that offers pan-Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from lands captured in 1967.

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

Time to Stop Playing the Victim Role

February 24, 2009

By Philip Slater | The Huffington Post, Feb 23, 2009

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it’s satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there’s a codicil that goes with that role. You don’t get to act like a victim any more. “Poor little Israel” just sounds silly when you’re the dominant power in the Middle East. When you’ve invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it’s time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don’t. You have sophisticated arms and they don’t. You have nuclear weapons and they don’t. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn’t play well in Peoria.

(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk–always trembling in our boots about terrorists and ‘rogue states’ and ‘evil empires’ when we have enough nukes to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of the world’s nations spend in a year. But just because we’re hypocrites and Nervous Nellies doesn’t mean you have to be).

Calling Hamas the ‘aggressor’ is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy–even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn’t fire a few rockets back.

The Israel lobby has a hissy fit when anyone points out that Israel has been borrowing liberally from the Nazi playbook, but to punish a whole nation for the attacks of a few–which Israel has been doing consistently in Gaza–is a violation of international law–a law enacted in response to the Nazi practice. And please, spare us the hypocrisy–borrowed, I’m ashamed to admit, from my own government–of saying ‘every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties’. When you drop bombs on a crowded city you’re bombing civilians. Bombs don’t ask for ID cards. Bombs are civilian killers. That’s what they do. They’re designed to break the spirit of a nation by slaughtering families. They were used all through World War II by all sides for that very purpose. And that’s what they’re intended for in Gaza.

And please, Israel, try to restrain yourself from using that ridiculous argument, borrowed again from Bush (how low can you get?), that Hamas leaders “hide among civilians”, by living in their own homes. Apparently, in the thinking of Israelis, they should all run out into an uninhabited area somewhere (try to find one in Gaza), surround themselves with flares and write in the sand with a stick, “Here I am!”

Yesterday you shelled three UN-run schools, killing several dozen children and adults, despite the fact that the UN had given you the precise coordinates of all its schools in Gaza. So much for ‘taking every care to avoid civilian casualties’. You seem to feel you can kill whomever you like, whenever you like, and wherever you like, just because you have a blank check from the United States. Every day this assault goes on you’re demonstrating contempt for the UN, the international community, and human life. Talk about a rogue state.

You might also pay attention to the fact that your outdated policy of macho bullying–the policy you’ve been following for decades–isn’t working! The Palestinians are human. They’re not dogs you can beat into submission. The worse you treat them, the more they’ll fight back. That’s what it means to be human. The more you oppress people, the more people resist. We dropped more bombs on Viet Nam than all the bombs dropped by all nations in World War II. Not to mention napalm, herbicides and all kinds of sophisticated land mines. But did they bow down and kiss the feet of their conquerors? They did not.

You’ll have to kill them all. And when you do, you may finally lose the support even of the United States.

Remember that American support is based entirely on the notion that no politician can win without the Jewish vote. But not all American Jews think Israel is on a divine mission from God. A great many American Jews believe in international law and justice.

I can understand how Israel could resent this lecture coming from an American. After all, isn’t this what we Americans did? Came into someone else’s country, slaughtered 95% of its inhabitants and took over? And didn’t we go all Nervous Nellie whenever they fought back, accusing them of aggression to justify even more genocidal slaughter? And didn’t we get away with it?

Yes, but I’m sorry to tell you, Israel, you came on the scene too late. Genocide just doesn’t fly any more. I know it isn’t fair, you have every right to feel aggrieved about this, but the world’s smaller, cowboys are passé, and bullies aren’t heroes any more.

Zionism versus democracy

August 7, 2008

By Frank Scott
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Online Journal, Aug 7, 2008

“The Zionist power configuration’s primary loyalty is to the state of Israel and its policy is designed to colonize the US congress on behalf and to the benefit of the ‘mother country,’ Israel” –James Petras

James Petras speaks to a reality rarely discussed in circles accustomed to whispered criticism, at best, of the U.S. performance in support of Israel. He mentions Congress, but the executive branch has been equally “colonized.” The scripted performances by major party presidential candidates, whether bowing before the Israel — American lobby in Washington or praying before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, are evidence enough. The dominance exercised by what he calls the Zionist Power Configuration is a very critical problem for a public that remains generally oblivious to its existence, let alone the control it has over our political system.

With a crippled economy and over extended armed forces, America’s global position has old establishment groups trying to retake control before mindless dedication to the Jewish state brings about total ruin. A revival of the old WASP (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) power cabal finds it in a struggle with the newer Jewish power bloc. This clash of establishment gangs will hardly bring social justice and peace to America, but it could give the public a chance to come to its senses. Support for a racist state that brutalizes its native population in a way that shocks veterans of apartheid South Africa can only continue with a public kept in the dark.

Under the dominance of propaganda that tells us innocent Israeli Jews are being persecuted by evil Palestinian Arabs, the U.S. continues to prop up the Jewish state with money, and wage nation destroying wars on its behalf. Constantly retelling the story of past dreadful persecution makes it seem that because German Nazis brutalized European Jews, Israeli Ashkenazis are morally justified to brutalize Palestinian Arabs. Settlers in a land which they believe, with no evidence save religious faith, is where they originated, are seen as natives, while the people who’ve lived there for centuries are expelled, treated as terrorists, and despite their Semitic origins, called anti-Semites by those whose only connection to Semitism is their belief system.

This situation would be the ultimate black comedy, if it were not so dangerous to all humanity. Israel is run by some seriously disturbed people who are not waving an ax, but are armed with nuclear weapons. These, of course are respectfully never mentioned by what is called the international community, which means America, Israel and a handful of their lackey states.

How can the U.S.A. continue its multi-trillion dollar funding of Israel, the waging of endless war, and the maintenance of military bases in hundreds of foreign countries, while its people suffer a seriously declining economic status? Only with the help of a media that tells us our problems originate in faraway places rather than at home, and that our most important ally in the world is Israel. Both are in complete denial of material reality. An individual acting on such presumptions would be judged clinically insane and institutionalized. Our society behaves as though delusions were reality, lies were the truth, and a psychotic condition was a sign of excellent mental health.

The U.S.A. is in hock for trillions of dollars and hated not only in the Middle East, but increasingly in other parts of the world. This has led to calls for change which have seen the WASPs reasserting, to regain control from the power bloc that has played a major role in creating the present crisis, though not the unacknowledged longer standing one which is capitalism itself. That major threat to the future of humanity hardly depends on whether the ruling group is gentile or Jewish, but on whether we allow that system to destroy the entire planet, and not just the Middle East.

The relation of policy and its reportage is clear in the preparing of Americans for a war with Iran, and then priming them into a maybe we will maybe we won’t indecision. Each time heated talk about Iran cools slightly, the price of gasoline declines. Until the next surge of fanatic babble that claims Iran will nuke Israel and exterminate all Jews, at which point the price goes up again.

These fluctuations in maniacal rhetoric and petroleum prices are part of the struggle to exercise control over U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fact that Americans are not using as much gasoline has not escaped the awareness of petro-capital and it surely plays a role in the recent price decrease, which is still much higher than it was a year ago. The notion that oil powers provoked us into the war in Iraq is still widely believed, despite the fact that this would mean Big Oil decided to endanger its foreign relations and watch Americans consume less of its product. That ridiculous story is a measure of the extent of Jewish-Israeli power over not only the government, but the media which controls the consciousness of the American public.

Continued fables of an alleged Iranian threat, based on the same fictional evidence, supernatural fears and psychotic tendencies that transform Israel from a national nightmare for Palestinian Arabs into a Paradise Disneyland for Israeli Jews, make it more vital than ever to put a stop to this madness. Electing a new member of the colonized population to the presidency, whether in the USA or Palestine, will not make a substantial difference. Rather than a simple change at the top, which is part of the problem, we need a profound awakening to action by the mass population at the bottom, which could bring about the real solution: A 50-state democracy in the U.S.A., and a one state democracy in Palestine.

Copyright © 2008 Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in the Coastal Post, a monthly publication from Marin County, California, and on numerous web sites, and on his shared blog at legalienate.blogspot.com. Contact him at frankscott@comcast.net.