Christopher Hitchens sobered up enough (or got sobered up enough) to notice some scary stuff happening in our "ally"(*) Israel:
The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.The difference between Hamas and Israel's radical right is, apparently, only one of number, not of kind. They're both radical extremists who want to murder other human beings and quote scripture verses justifying such. And according to one of my Israeli correspondents, the radical Jewish right-wingers pop out babies with all the same zeal as the radical Hamas types. The only real difference appears to be that one group is Muslims, and one group is Jewish. Well, that, and one group has access to 21st-century weaponry while the other group doesn't.
Note that in the world's largest Jewish state, the nation that has more Jews than any other nation on the planet, the Jewish population is overwhelmingly opposed to the radical agenda of Israel's radical religious right. I am talking about, of course, the United States of America, which has a larger Jewish population than Israel and where the overwhelming majority of Jews disagree with the agenda of Israel's religious right. So criticizing this agenda doesn't make you anti-semitic, no matter how much these right-wing thugs try to say so. Unless the majority of the world's Jews are "self-hating Jews". Which, of course, these right-wing thugs have no trouble saying, but anybody with any sense calls "bullshit" at that point. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
(*) The only thing Israel has ever done for the United States is kill or injure a lot of Americans. That, and steal U.S. nuclear secrets. Otherwise Israel has contributed no troops to U.S. peacekeeping efforts, does not allow any U.S. forces to be based in Israel, and otherwise does nothing -- nada, zilch, zero -- to help the United States. Some "ally".
"(*) The only thing Israel has ever done for the United States is kill or injure a lot of Americans. That, and steal U.S. nuclear secrets. Otherwise Israel has contributed no troops to U.S. peacekeeping efforts, does not allow any U.S. forces to be based in Israel, and otherwise does nothing -- nada, zilch, zero -- to help the United States. Some "ally"."
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, the arrogant Israeli officers who speak Hebrew to their pals on board have no trouble switching to English when a US sailor (on his own ship) needs to be ordered to do something for said officer.
AND they don't mind if we get blamed for shit that they did:
ReplyDeleteMarch 25, 2009 3:04 PM
U.S. Accused Of Killing 39 In Sudan Strike
Posted by Dan Raviv | 10
And they don't mind being terrorists, and using children as human shields, and firing on rescue workers and ambulances.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I like the tone of these posts. NOT.
ReplyDeleteFolks, do yourself a favour and do not quite drop to the level of "these people" we all so rightly criticise , the rightwingnuts.
Re what has your (and my country´s (Germany´s) ally Israel done for us:
Do not expect to read that in the paper. There has been military cooperation between the Medinot Israyel and the Federal Republic of Germany for longer than there are diplomatic relations, but it´s mostly hush-hush. But it´s there. And there is LOTS of it.
And why are there no Tsahal personnel on UN peace-keeping missions?
Well, just imagine what kind of oh so rightful indignation a foreign deployment of Israeli troops for whatever reason will cause. Nuff said.
Israel at least once sent military and civilian personnel to Turkey (another ally, mind you) to assist in Earthquake relief (due to the number of attacks on civilians, Israel has large staff of personnel trained to rescue people from, say, blasted buildings, and they had a lot of practice.) Yet this was kept under the covers for the same reasons.
And if the intelligence community spoke up, they would give you a resolute answer about what they think of Israel as an ally and intelligence relay and cooperator.
And finally, yes, Israel has appropriated secrets from the US. They spied on you.
Do not get your panties in a twist about that one, either. You might find out the sad truth: in that sort of accusation, the United States is in no position at all to fault their allies re intelligence. Why? Because US "services" engage in most intensive "information gathering", military and otherwise, and they don´t mind whence it cometh.
Mr Pot, this is Mr Kettle. You are sooooo black.
Folks, what sets us apart from wignuts is the ability to maintain objectivity and self criticism. To fail that would mean to become just another voice in the quagmire of conceit and partisanship that we like to criticise in our oft-mentioned opponents.
Keep a free mind, and God bless
Ducki
Ah yes, that famous "military cooperation" between the US and Israel. The cooperation that got a half dozen U.S. airmen killed over Lebanon in the early 80's because Israel had cracked the code of the Syrian air defenses (i.e., come up with a viable way of jamming their radars), but refused to tell the U.S. how to do it.
ReplyDeletePlease note that Germany is not the US, and Turkey is not the US. While it's nice that Israel cooperates with the Germans and Turks (and yes I was aware of their cooperation with the Turks, they have an agreement to use Turkish airspace for their training for cryin' out loud), the only time they've cooperated at all with the US is when their own interests are involved, such as their assistance in analyzing satellite photography of Iraq in the mid-90's to find suspected weapons sites. And while everybody steals secrets from everybody, I was specifically talking about nuclear secrets. Which are a bit more, err, deadly, than the run-of-the-mill secrets that everybody steals from each other...
Regarding the tone of my commenters, Nunya has had first-hand experience with US-Israeli military "cooperation" from the US military side and doesn't have a good opinion of it. Grandpa Eddie's comment was perhaps overstated, but recent Israeli actions in Lebanon and Gaza do seem to lend it more credence than I like in a supposed "ally".
So anyhow, calling Israel an "ally" of the United States is utter nonsense. They're not. About the only thing they provide the United States is a lot of organized crime thanks to the Israeli Mafia (formerly the Russian Mafia, but they purchased birth certificates from corrupt officials in the former Soviet Union claiming a Yid grannie, claimed Israeli citizenship under Israel's "Right of Return" law, and have been using relatively-free travel between Israel and the US to become entrenched in most major East Coast cities especially in the identity theft, pornography, and prostitution industries, and when I say pornography and prostitution I'm not talking about Playboy and street walkers, I'm talking about *child* pornography and prostitution). And the big problem that local law enforcement has with these people is that they jump bail and flee back to Israel, and unless it was a murder or something the U.S. State Department basically intervenes and tells local judges, "you will *not* seek extradition of this person because it would be a diplomatic incident and you would be accused of anti-semitism and the JDL will hold protests outside your courtroom accusing you of being a Nazi, and we *will* bring in a federal judge to over-rule you if you attempt to do so."
And oh, the notion that a local judge should not grant bail to a foreign national because a foreign national is automatically a flight risk... well, you're right. Unless the foreign national is an Israeli. In which case he calls his embassy, his embassy calls the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department calls the judge with the threats mentioned above, and the FBI has even been called in to remove Israeli citizens from local custody and place them on a jet to Israel when particularly stubborn local judges refused to grant bail. The right-wing militias' claims that the U.S. Government is the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) are ridiculous, but the way that the U.S. State Department covers up the raging organized crime committed by Israeli citizens on the East Coast certainly lends fodder to the militias' paranoia.
So that's the basics of how the U.S. interacts with its "ally" Israel. It's a good deal -- for the Israelis. Not so much for the United States, which gets nothing but crime and a bad reputation out of the deal.
Sorry, Tux, are you saying the Russian Mafia is an agent of the Israeli government or acts with their mandate?
ReplyDeleteAnd honestly, if I were to judge by the behaviour of allies to my face, I´d rather not tell anybody what opinion I should then have about some people in US National service I have witnessed in my home country over the last 40 years, including in offical capacity (used to work with a certain organisation... well, let´s say their company car policy included loading class 60 ton vehicles in rather subdued colours.) But I´d rather choose to treat that on a per-person or per-case basis and not derive how much it says over the overall relationship to that allied nation and/or to its peoples.
Have a nice week, all!
Ducki
No, I'm saying that the Israeli government has been decidedly unhelpful at dealing with the problem of the Israeli (former Russian) Mafia, insisting that there is no such thing and that local U.S. law enforcement officials who arrest members of such are just being anti-Semitic. I suspect this is because of internal Israeli politics -- if they admitted that many of the Russians who came in during the fall of the Soviet Union were actually criminals with forged papers creating a yid granny, they might actually have to examine the papers of all the Russians who emigrated to Israel around that time -- and it's well known that the majority of those "Russian Jews" probably are about as Jewish as Josef Stalin was. But demographics trump everything in Israel, if it wasn't for the 1.5 million Russians and their offspring, Israel would be precariously close to being a majority-Arab state right now...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Crime Penguin