Who is the terrorist?

The "settlers" told by "man of peace" Sharon to "grab every hilltop" continue their good work. From Haaretz:

A number of times from the end of 2000 to the end of 2003, the villagers had no water to their homes after unknown perpetrators smashed the water pipes and threw building waste into the water holes.

Oxfam volunteered to finance the pipes' repair, but they were vandalized again. Oxfam then encased the pipes above the surface with concrete and built an iron cage around the water holes to protect them. However, once again the concrete and pipes were smashed and the drinking water fouled with dirty diapers and other waste.

In November 2003, Italian volunteers helped the villagers seal the water hole openings with concrete. But in a few months the villagers started suffering from liver infections and stomach diseases. The contaminated water was banned for use until January this year, when after heavy rainfalls the pollution was reduced. The villagers started using it again, until 10 days ago.

But remember. The Palestinians need to stop the violence before discussion of a state for them can begin.

A couple of days ago in an editorial in the NYT we were told:

The Europeans need to bend too. They should commit themselves to a much greater role in training Iraqi security forces. And they must join the United States in declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization, because it is, and because the message to terrorists must be one and only one.

To the best of my knowledge Hezbollah has not engaged in terrorism (unless one accepts the new US/Israeli definition of terrorism as any attack on occupation forces) for many years. The occasional anti aircraft fire into the occupied Shabaa Farms is usually (always?) a response to Israeli military aircraft entering Lebanese air space.

In Europe vs. America Tony Judt discusses differences between these two.

America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

Not much, unless they are well-off. The US is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty times the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.[2] A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But 45 million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world's developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Amira Hass on the Israeli occupation and the resistance to it:

That's the upside down method: occupy them, their land, their natural resources, take over their lives and judge them as criminals when they resist us - when they kill either civilians or soldiers. We admit we killed civilians, but the "war" apparently not only justifies our cruelty, it erases it. On the other hand, the war - in other words, the occupation, in other words, the war for the preservation of the loot from the 1967 war: the settlements - does not justify or even explain their cruelty in our eyes.

If the Palestinians had warplanes and tanks so their killing was sterile, they would prefer to use those. And then, even if they killed Jewish civilians, they would not be called murderers with blood on their hands but enemy soldiers. And when caught they would be considered prisoners of war. If the policy makers of the Olso Accords really were thinking about peace the way they are said to have been, they would have freed all those prisoners. But then, like now: those who speak about gestures and then only free Marwan Barghouti's son, even if it was at Abbas' request, continue to operate with the old diskette of the colonialist who throws candy to the natives.

In the process of spreading freedom liberty and apple pie round the world a boy must have some fun too. Here is how Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis has fun with the natives of the empire:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. . . . It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling," he said at the forum in San Diego.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," he added. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

We are told that he is "one of the country's bravest and most experienced military leaders"

I am reminded of General Boykin who also has an "outstanding record":

He told one gathering: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol," Gen Boykin said.

He also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed "the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy".

One of these "Only in America" moments. The "American Family Association" publishes an article with the title:
Children's TV Unites to Launch Pro-Homosexual Campaign of 'Tolerance'
SpongeBob, Arthur, Pooh, Bob the Builder, Little Mermaid, Many Others Enlisted in Stealth Effort

This follows the education secratery Margaret Spellings' complaint about, cover your eyes, lesbians, in Buster the bunny.
DOE Director Calls PBS to Account for Pro-Homosexual Cartoon
Ex-Homosexual Evangelist Says 'Buster Bunny's Been Busted' ... and Rightly So

The US "takes down" another UN official, Peter Hansen, head of UNRWA. According to the Guardian:

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, often attacked Mr Hansen, saying he was exceeding his remit and calling him an "Israel hater".

Yet another "only in JesusLand". It would appear that people have complained to the FCC claiming that the opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics were obscene. From the Washington Post:

my children saw an exposed breast during the opening eremonies

also

"How could NBC be allowed to show the male genitalia on national television" during the opening ceremonies.
"I am referring to when the giant white mask that broke apart into a statue of a nude man," the writer explained. (Actually, the writer is referring to the gigantic replica of a Cycladic head, so popular around 2700 B.C., that broke apart to reveal a replica of a Kouros sculpture, all the rage around the 6th century B.C

I enjoyed the LA Times piece on this:

Greece does not wish to be drawn into an American culture war.

An old Barbara Bush quote that I just saw today (March 18 2003) in Mark Crispin Miller's book Cruel and Unusual. It is referenced here. A fine example of compassionate conservatism:

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

The book also reminded me of that golden oldie by Bush the Lesser from 2001:

Now, the American people have got to go about their business. We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business or people don't shop.

Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker on the Bush administration's plans to continue their crusades. Onward Christian soldiers, now to Iran.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Why is Israel leaving the Gaza strip? Well one reason may be because it is one of the poorest places on earth. The CIA tells us unemployment is 50% (ranked 185 in the world) and GDP per capita is $600 (ranked 229)

Incidentally, I must commend the CIA factbook in that when talking of the Israeli population they say:

Population:6,199,008
note: includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, more than 5,000 in the Gaza Strip, and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2004 est.)

Mnost commentators ignore the Jerusalem settlers.

According to the Washington Post:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein.

No weapons found. So, no doubt the media will start firing journalists, editors, who unquestioningly parroted the US administration's line taking us up to war. Surely these reporting failures are as important as the errors in the Dan Rather/CBS reporting on the miserable failure's war record.
And what of al the Iraqi scientists and bearcats held in captivity while the search for non weapons went on? When will they be released, and will they be compensated?

From the BBC website:

Former head of UN weapons inspections Hans Blix also said there was no surprise in the announcement.

"We have believed that there weren't any weapons since around May or June 2003. First came David Kay in September 2003 [who said] that he hadn't found any weapons and that was a big sensation - but he thought that there were programmes still," he told the BBC.

"But then came Duelfer last November [who] said that he hadn't seen any programmes, but maybe Saddam would have intended to restart the programme, and there is no evidence of that.

Mr Blix said he assumed it would be natural for the United States to now report their finding to the UN Security Council "because the US took the inspections out of the hands of the UN to undertake it themselves".

Is life in the US so much better than that in "old europe" countries such as Greece, France? Depends on what you mean by life.



Infant Mortality Rate: deaths/1,000 live births

country	total population	male	female
US	6.63	7.31	5.91
Greece	5.63	6.19	5.04
France	4.31	4.83	3.78

Life Expectency

country	total population	male	female
US	77.43	74.63	80.36
Greece	78.94	76.44	81.59
France	79.44	75.8	83.27

Literacy: definition: age 15 and over can read and write

country	total population	male	female
US	97	97	97
Greece	97.5	98.6	96.5
France	99	99	99

GDP/Capita

country	GDP
US	$37,800
Greece	$20,000
France	$27,600

The BBC reports the donor levels for tsunami relief. If you ever hear US-supremassists crowing about their generosity compared to the "euro-weenies" tell them that US=$550m, Germany $1.1bn and the EU $628m.

In the Guardian today, a first hand account from 'liberated' Fallujah. The concluding paragraph:

The US military destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out around the country. They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq by using their new national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, when a foreign journalist, an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni - the way the Irish do because they have that thing about the IRA - I said I was Sushi. My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never cared about these things. Now, after Falluja, it matters.

Rahul Maharajan pointed me to this article in Newsweek:

" Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. "

Some while ago there was a Sy Hersh article on the Israeli finger in such a plan...

"Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war."

Now that Negroponte and Sharon are working together to assure the freedom of Iraqis we can all feel secure and happy.

Even the NYT has realized that blindly supporting Ariel Sharon's lunacy may be not the best possible policy.

To be just, workable and sustainable, any peace plan will have to divide that land into two coherent territories that are defensible and economically viable. The presence of more than 250,000 Israeli settlers scattered across the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, leaving aside the added complications of East Jerusalem, make that division immeasurably harder.

Incidentally adding the colonisers in East Jerusalem takes their numbers to more like 400,000.

More Abu Graib revelations from the Washington Post.
"There were two MP dog handlers who did use dogs to threaten kids detained at Abu Ghraib"

Compassionate liberation. Four more years.

Bush in his ad tells us of the 'liberation' of Iraq, Afghanistan. We are told "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes."

In Sports Illustrated members of the Iraqi football (soccer) team give their views. One player says: "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself."

Another player:"How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."

The coach: "The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"

More on this from the Guardian, the coach: "We do not have freedom in Iraq, we have an occupying force. This is one of our most miserable times. Freedom is just a word for the media."

Meanwhile in Afganistan, the Red Cross is pulling out because it is so unsafe, following Medecins Sans Frontieres who declared they are leaving some time ago (link).

Comments on the 2004 Democratic Party platform :
The word "terror" appears 59 times.
The phrase "war on terror" 7 times.
The word "homeland" 10 times.
The word "security" 57 times.
The word "education" 29 times.
The word "hunger" appears 2 times.
The word "homeless" 1 time.
The word "unemployed" 1 time.

We are told "U.S. and international policies must take into consideration the best interests of the Iraqi people", I suppose an improvement over the Bushies but hardly a powerful statement of support for the rights of Iraqis.

On Israel/Palestine, we are told "we will ensure that under all circumstances, Israel retains the qualitative edge for its national security and its right to self-defense". The Palestinians, (of course) need to be "committed to fighting terror" while accepting that "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and should remain an undivided city", in other words that occupied East Jerusalem will never be part of a Palestinian state.
The Democrats give away more Palestinian rights: "The creation of a Palestinian state should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel."
My favorite is: "Furthermore, all understand that it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
I guess I am not one of all, neither are the vast majority of the Palestinians, nor numerous Israeli activists, US Jewish groups, the United Nations, the International Court, the European Union, the Geneva Conventions, ...

Thumbs up.