Disgusting racists

Pretty much every nation has a law that says if a citizen of that nation marries a foreign national, the foreign national can get a visa to live in the home country and can eventually get citizenship. So, what would you say about a law that said you could marry anybody you wanted to marry and bring them home to live as long as the person you want to marry isn't a Jew? You'd be outraged at such a racist law, I hope, and make comparisons to Hitler and maybe even mention that Hitler's propaganda referred to Jews as "cockroaches" and thus Nazi Germany outlawed marriages between "Aryans" and Jews because, really, who marries a cockroach?

But this is just a theoretical question, you say, because surely no modern nation would pass some racist law that singled out a single ethnicity for special discriminatory treatment. The international outcry would be deafening. Uhm, except a supposedly modern nation did pass such a law. I'm still waiting for the outcry, though, because the nation is Israel, and the ethnicity being discriminated against is Palestinians. Yeppers, if you're an Israeli citizen and marry an Italian, you can bring your spouse home. But if you're an Israeli citizen and marry a Palestinian... forgetaboutit!

So waiting for the international outrage in... oh wait. I forgot. Condemning racism means you're anti-Semitic. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Newt and the Israelis

There's been a predictable uproar on the left about Newt Gingrich's statement that there's no such thing as a Palestinian. The problem is, to a certain extent, he's right.

See, here's the thing. We're Americans. In America, nationality is what nation you live in. But it is only here in America that lines on a map determine nationality. In most of the world, people identify their nationality by language, culture, and ethnicity. If you speak German, are culturally German, and are descended from Germans, you are German whether you live in Poland, the Czech Republic, or in Germany proper. Your forefathers can have lived on a plot of land in the Czech Republic for 100 years, you can be the 3rd generation born in the Czech Republic, and you are still German as far as everybody in Germany and the Czech Republic are concerned. Similarly if you speak Mandarin, are ethnically Han Chinese, and are culturally Chinese, then you are Chinese whether you live in China, Vietnam, or Indonesia. That is, the nation you live in doesn't define your nationality in most of the world, rather, your language, culture, and ethnicity does. And from that perspective, there isn't a Palestinian people -- there are merely Arabs, who speak the same language as all other Arabs, who have the same culture as all other Arabs, who are genetically identical to all other Arabs.

Now, back to Gingrich's statement. Gingrich was merely paraphrasing Israel PM Golda Meir's statements from the early 1970's. Golda Meir was one of the founders of the modern state of Israel and her statement was typical of the attitude of the founders of Israel. Remember, the founders of Israel were European. From their perspective, there was no such thing as a Palestinian people because there is no distinct Palestinian language, culture, and ethnicity. From their perspective there were Arabs who happened to be citizens of a pseudo-state called "Palestine" that did not exist prior to 1920, a pseudo-state set up by Britain as part of the division of the Ottoman province of Trans-Jordan at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a pseudo-state populated by people who were no different culturally, ethnically, or genetically from any other Arab, who had a dozen other Arab states similarly created from thin air after the fall of the Ottoman Empire to go to. From their perspective, the "Palestinian Problem" was a problem caused by Arab rulers refusing to take in their Arab brothers as citizens, and had nothing to do with Israel.

From that perspective, what Gingrich said made sense. Gingrich's problem is that the facts on the ground are different than in 1973. Israel agreed to create a Palestinian nationality (which is still not a Palestinian people from their POV, just another fake nationality created by Europeans), and set up a Bantustan-style "Palestinian Authority" on the Gaza Strip and West Bank as part of their peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. In exchange Egypt and Jordan gave up their territorial claims on the Gaza Strip and West Bank and Yasser Arafat agreed to lead said Bantustan in exchange for stopping attacks on Israel. Gingrich's view is still held by the vast majority of Israelis, who do not view Palestinians as a people, just as a fake nationality created by Europeans as part of their division of the Arab people after WW1, but Israel is not living up to their half of the agreements that they agreed to, which do not allow "settlers" on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That, and not Gingrich's statements (which to a certain extent are factually true from the point of view of most of the world), are the real issue here.

Note that my explanation of what Israelis think does not mean that I condone or encourage such thinking. Long-term it's a recipe for utter disaster for reasons adequately explained elsewhere. I'm just telling you things you probably don't know because you won't hear them in the left-wing echo chamber -- indeed, that you're unlikely to hear anywhere outside of Israel, unless you are talking to actual Israelis.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Israel faced with housing crisis

Young Israelis riot demanding housing.

The core problem is that the Palestinians built most of the modern infrastructure of the Middle East, including most of Israel's current housing. Palestinians are to construction in the Middle East what Mexicans are to farm work here in the United States -- they dominate the field. When the Israelis let a few Palestinian terrorists stampede them into shutting out the local Palestinians behind "security fences" that look an awful lot like concentration camp fences, they not only did not make Israel appreciably safer, they also shut out their main construction force. The result for the Israeli construction industry was pretty much like if you deported all the Mexicans from the American fields -- the amount of work they're capable of doing basically collapsed, because the supply of non-Palestinians experienced in construction was minuscule by comparison.

My take: If these young Israelis want housing, they best quit with all that university BS and study carpentry and masonry and roofing and other construction fields, because the internment of the Palestinians behind concentration camp fences and the resulting radicalization of Palestinians who were the previous construction work force means there ain't gonna be much buildin' going on otherwise. But wait, these are the same young people who whine and evade the draft because they might have to get dirty... hmm. Yeah, like they're going to get their lilly-white hands dirty in Israeli soil by doing something MENIAL like construction work? Puh-LEEZE!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

And they call it....

ethnic cleansing. That's Mike "Huckleberry" Huckabee's solution to the "Palestinian problem" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- kick'em all out to some Arab country. Israel needs some lebensraum, yo. (Hmm, what other nation had that idea? I forget :).

Of course, the big problem with that "solution" is, where do you put'em? Every current Arab country has more people than they have water. Ain't no room in that hotel, yo. The closest would probably be Egypt, but Egypt doesn't want those poor sods any more than anybody else in the region does...

But that's okay. There's always the final solution, if you can't find a country willing to take the brown-skinned folk you're trying to ethnically cleanse from "your" land, right? Right?!

-- Badtux the "Nothing like a spot of ethnic cleansing in the morning!" Penguin

What's the matter with Israel?

73% of Israelis basically endorse genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, or at least a state-sanctioned apartheid that basically keeps Palestinians dependent upon what meager rations that Israel deems to dole out to them. Gaza, apparently, is going to be treated like a late 1890's U.S. Indian reservation, where the natives are exiled and systematically starved to death.

Israel is clearly a nation that has gone off of its moral tethers. Even in the United States, one of the most violent nations on the planet, support for genocide has declined since the 1890's to the point where it never cracks the crazification factor of around 27%. What in the world has happened to Israel, to have such a blithe disregard for other people's fundamental human rights?

The Stormfront crowd, of course, would claim that this is because the Jewish faith is inherently racist and Jews are inherently greedy people who just want to steal everybody else's land and money. But this is clearly contraindicated by, well, facts. Jewish intellectuals and philanthropists were prime movers of the American Civil Rights movement that freed America's minority populations from state-sanctioned apartheid, and provided much of the funding that allowed the NAACP to challenge apartheid before the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1950's.

So clearly the notion that Jews are inherently greedy racists doesn't pass the laugh and giggle test. Furthermore, while Israel's founders were, by the accounts of their own historians, not at all loathe to engage in massive acts of ethnic cleansing in order to free up space for Jews in Palestine, there is no indication that they were actively hostile to the Arabs they were pushing off the land... rather, they needed a place to go from Hitler's concentration camps where they were still interned in 1947 (except relabeled "relocation camps" and with the guns turned outwards to protect them from the Europeans who wanted to finish the job Hitler started), they had nowhere else to go, so they were going to make a place for themselves, period. Too bad about the Arabs pushed off the land, but there just wasn't any good alternative for them, given widespread discrimination against Jews at the time such that no other nation would take them. But racism? Not really, indeed many of those first Israelis spoke Arabic, and there was serious talk about making Arabic the second official language of Israel.

So what happened? I have no way of knowing, but I can speculate. First, that generation of Israelis is now either dead or so elderly as to be close to death. For someone who survived Buchenwald, some Arab asshole blowing himself up in the middle of a bus is, like, "eh, so what." When you've seen your fellow Jews piled up like cordwood in piles of the dead, a spot of terrorism doesn't cause fear... you've seen the real thing, and it just makes the asshole look like an asshole, not like someone you should be afraid of. But today's generation of Israelis were raised in a time of peace and prosperity -- the last time anybody ever threatened the existence of Israel was 1973, almost 40 years ago, and the younger generation of Israelis have never known any war that Israel itself did not start -- and, lacking that personal first-hand knowledge of real existential threats, they freak out when some asshole fires an unguided overgrown bottle rocket out of Gaza City at an empty field somewhere, especially if the overgrown unguided bottle rocket misses the empty field and manages to hit a school or something. In other words, the younger generation of Israel is a generation of pussies -- not much different from the Baby Boomers here in the U.S., now that I think about it.

Second... the Russian influence. Russia has never been a warm and welcoming place. Death is always around the corner in Russia, either from the bitter climate, or from the series of incompetent and/or brutal governments that have run the place over the years. Russians are xenophobic to a fault, the "Putin Youth" in Moscow today make the Hitler Youth look downright multicultural, if you're a black man be prepared for the fact that many restaurants in Moscow simply will not serve you or, indeed, even allow you through the door. Russians also, because of their history, don't attach much value to human life. Human life is cheap in Russia... if the government doesn't get you, the weather or the vodka will.

Some estimates I've seen is that 40% of today's Israeli "Jewish" population is ethnically Russian. The exact percentage is unknown, since the demographics of Israel are classified as a state secret. These people fled the former Soviet Union largely by finding an official to bribe to produce a fake birth certificate for a parent claiming a Yid granny, and Israel turned a blind eye to the widespread document forgery because of the fear of being demographically overwhelmed by the birthrate of their own (non-ethnically-cleansed) Arab population. The Russians, they felt, were at least white Europeans, and maybe if they pretended hard enough to be Jewish, they'd be close enough to the real thing to outweigh the Arab influences. Thing is, these Russians by and large were neither culturally nor ethnically Jewish, and brought their own cultural values with them, amongst which are xenophobia and brutality. Thus the hilarious stories of "Jewish" neo-Nazis in Israel. That's what happens when you try to pretend that Russian thugs are actually Jews... eventually the thug comes out. Anyhow, nobody gets elected to higher office in Israel today without the support of the Russians -- which invariably requires promising to be evenb more brutal and xenophobic than the opposition.

So what now? I have no idea. Clearly the majority of people in today's modern State of Israel are, to put it blankly, racist thugs. But what to do about it? Well... I suppose for a start, quit enabling them. Israel gets over $4B/year in aid from the US, granted, mostly in the form of assistance for buying U.S. military gear, but that's money they don't have to spend out of their own defense budget for bombs and bullets to kill women and children at the beach with. Beyond that, I don't think it's anything for America and Americans to get involved with. Israel has no -- zero -- strategic value to the United States, and if Israel disappeared tomorrow -- or if Israel successfully managed to finish their ethnic cleansing against their Arab population by exterminating the Palestinians -- it would make no -- zero -- difference to America's strategic interests. That's blunt, but true. The United States is not the world's policeman, indeed is well on the way to being a third-world nation itself, and the world will just have to make do without the U.S. around as their mercenaries for hire.

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

The Israeli embargo: What's it for?

I feel like I'm in a fucking history class right now. First, Israel attempts to re-enact the Warsaw Ghetto with the Palestinians in the starring role, and then the Palestinians attempt to re-enact the Exodus 1947 except with Israel substituting for the British. Successfully, I might add. They baited the Israelis into doing exactly what they wanted the Israelis to do -- re-enact the Exodus 1947 situation exactly, except with Palestinians in place of the Jews and Israelis in place of the British. And thing is, the Israels *knew* this is what the activists wanted. Fuck, the activists even *told* them so, *dared* the Israelis to do what they did. And the Israelis took the bait anyhow.

So anyhow, the next thing I get from Israeli apologists is, "well, the embargo is necessary to keep military weapons out of Gaza." Really? Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, let's look at some of the military weapons that Israel is embargoing at the moment...

OMG! F33R the Coriander of Mass Destruction! Flee the Chicken Bombs of Biological Warfare! Beware the Canned Fruit of Genocide!

Uhm, honey, if you're gonna claim that the embargo is about keeping military weapons out of Gaza, how about restricting it to things that, like, are usable as military weapons?

But of course the embargo isn't about keeping military weapons out of Gaza. It's about keeping the Palestinians as impoverished and embittered as possible so that they will remain enemies of Israel. See, Israel's politics requires that Israel have enemies. Israel's current leaders came to power because they rant that Israel is under seige, Israel is threatened by enemies on all sides, and only they are qualified to protect Israel. If there was a viable and thriving Palestinian state, the fact that Israel has no real enemies anymore would be embarrassingly clear, and their whole political situation would become unviable. As I have pointed out in the past, Israel no longer has any external threats to its existence, so Israel's toxic politics requires that they manufacture one -- and what better one than those poor schlobs the Palestinians, who lack any ability to be a real threat and thus are safe to turn into enemies?

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

In which I taunt the cryers of "criticism is anti-Semitism!" again

Okay, so Israel just managed to blow away a buncha folks who were trying to haul food and supplies to the Gaza Strip Concentration Camp, thereby keeping intact the blockade they've had in place for the past three years and, incidentally, risking war with their now-former ally, Turkey. And of course the usual suspects start whining, "we're just defending ourselves from Hamas, what do you want us to do?"

What do we want you to do? Uhm, you really, really want to know that, or you just bullshittin' me? 'Cause it's pretty goddamn simple, actually:

1. Quit bein' a buncha racist fucks. I mean, dude. This used to not be a problem, young Jewish intellectuals were one of the prime driving forces of the Civil Rights movement here in the South that ended state-sanctioned apartheid here, but I swear that every time I interact with an Israeli or one of their apologists nowdays I get the impression that they're channeling General Phil Sheridan when ole' Sheridan said "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." Except substitute "Arab" for "Indian", of course. Shoving the Palestinians onto reservations, killing as many as necessary to get'em to stay in their reservation, and not bothering much with how much food and medical supplies and shit gets in there... dude. That's Sheridan's playbook, we know how this shit works.
2. Quit whining about how persecuted you were back 500 years ago or some shit. Dude. That just makes you sound like a bunch of whiney-ass titty-babies nowdays. Most folks on this planet today weren't even *born* the last time somebody tried genociding Jews, in the meantime we got genocides like, all over fucking Africa and shit, what makes Jews so much more special than the Ibo, or the folks in Darfur, or anybody else who's being genocided, like, *now*? Get over yourself, sheesh. There's 5 billion people on this planet, each and every one of whom thinks they're just as special as you are, and whining about how some folks back before they were even *born* were mean to you is, like, the lamest whiny-ass titty baby shit like, EVAH! Realize that most people don't give a shit that you're a Jew. Playing professional victim might make you feel good, but there ain't a nation outside the Middle East that has any sort of routine discrimination against Jews anymore, and if you don't make a point of being obnoxious about your Jewishness, most people just don't give a shit. This ain't 1937 or some shit, this is the fucking TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. People got better things to worry about now, other than a few sad sick fucks at Stormfront but who the fuck cares what they think?
3. Quit trying to re-enact the Warsaw Ghetto in Gaza, except with Palestinians playing the starring role. Dude. That's, like, seriously unrighteous, and makes you look like a buncha hypocrits.
4. And while we're at it, quit vaporizing a buncha women and children and regular ole' civilians every time some sick asshole sends a rocket your way. I mean, c'mon. The way to deal with criminals is to kill the criminals, not just some random folks who, like, didn't have shit to do with whatever the criminal done! It's as if the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we started killing all the Japanese-Americans in retaliation, that's some sick shit, yo! Look, the criminals *want* you to kill civilians. It makes their job of recruiting more criminals easier. Quit giving them what they want, dudes!
5. Uhm, and look. When you sign a treaty, like that Oslo one turning over the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, would it hurt even a teensy little bit if you, like, actually did what you agreed to do rather than go ahead and send in "settlers" and armed troops to, like, trample all over your word? I mean, crap. That makes you look like two-face lying bastards, yo. That's no way to make friends and influence people. Just sayin'.
6. And finally... quit accusing anybody who criticizes Israel doing obnoxious shit of being "anti-semite" and wanting to exterminate Jews and shit. That just makes you look like the biggest flaming asswipes on the planet. Dude. Get over yourself. Most of us just don't give a fuck about what religion you are, we just don't like assholes, and if we tell you that you're acting like the biggest flaming asshole on the whole fucking planet it ain't got shit to do with your religion or ethnicity or some shit like that, and everything to do with the fact that, like, you're acting like the biggest fucking asshole on the whole fucking planet, yo.

So let's recap: 1) Quit being racist, 2) Quit whining, 3) Quit with this Palestinian ghetto shit, 4) Quit killing civilians, 5) keep your word, 6) Quit calling anybody who points out you're being an asshole of being an anti-Semite (you just prove the point when you pull that shit, yo).

Or, to make it even simpler: Don't Be An Asshole!

Sounds simple enough. Well, except the question of what to do with those sad sick fucks the Palestinians if you aren't gonna put them into apartheid-style Bantustans or Warsaw-style ghettos, but hey, I never claimed to have the answers for everything...

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

The question of Israel

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic asks, "One question that should always be asked of an ally: what is that ally doing for the US? Since the end of the Cold War, that question has been increasingly hard to answer with respect to Israel."

Actually that question was hard to answer even during the Cold War. No U.S. troops were ever stationed in Israel, no U.S. fighter jets were ever stationed in Israel, no U.S. ships were ever based in Israel. About all that Israel contributed to U.S. efforts in the Cold War was the occasional attack on a U.S. ship and let's not forget the U.S. jets shot down over Lebanon by Syrian SAM's during the early 80's because Israel refused to give the U.S. the information needed to jam those SAM's. Frankly, Israel has never been a supporter of the U.S. in any way, Cold War or not. Turkey was a bigger supporter of the U.S. Cold War effort than Israel.

But of course that's not why the U.S. supports Israel, and I've already alluded to those reasons in prior messages:

1. It helps assuage U.S. guilt for U.S. participation in Hitler's "Final Solution" (hint: If gas chambers were the FINAL solution, what other solutions were tried? Hint#2: The U.S. would *NOT* take the Jews that Hitler didn't want, thus leaving Hitler with only one "final" solution left to the problem of, "what do we do with all of Europe's Jews?").
2. If the U.S. quit supporting Israel than Israel would likely collapse, since it is one giant welfare state. Because of #1, the U.S. would feel obligated to give refuge to the Jews fleeing Israel. Thus U.S. support of Israel keeps all those Jews over there in the Middle East, instead of over here in the USA. Important voting populations really prefer the Jews to be over there rather than over here. Ever wonder why the rabid Christianists are such fervent supporters of Israel, even though they regularly preach from their pulpits that the Jews killed Christ? Guess.

In other words, U.S. support of Israel allows the majority of Americans to be anti-Semitic without *feeling* anti-Semitic, since surely they couldn't be a bunch of Jew-haters if they support Israel, right? Right?! And that's what U.S. support of Israel accomplishes. It's a small thing, but guilt and racism are powerful forces, eh?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Israel is a "trusted ally"?

Really? Can anybody name a single thing that Israel has *ever* done for the United States? C'mon, surely Israel has contributed at least ONE soldier to some U.S.-led peacekeeping operation, right? And basing rights... surely there is at least ONE U.S. base in Israel, right? Can anybody name it?

I mean, c'mon. "Ally" implies that Israel does something for the US in exchange for the US doing lots of things for Israel (over $4 billion lots of things a year, to start with). So what is it that the US gets for its $4 billion lots of things a year that it does for Israel? Other than a lot of headaches from Arabs upset about it? Anybody?

-- Badtux the Ally Penguin

Israel: We're the only ones allowed nukes in the Middle East

Prime Minister Voldemort of Israel says there will be no talking with the Palestinians until Iran is wiped from the map. At least, that's how it would be translated from the original Hebrew if the AEI was an Iranian organization rather than an Israeli organization and did the translation. In reality, of course, he basically said "we aren't going to talk to the Palestinians until Iran has no nuclear program", i.e., until U.S. bombs turn every piece of industrial infrastructure in Iran into moldering ruins (since that's the only way to stop the Iranian nuclear program -- just as it worked for stopping Iraq's nuclear program in 1992).

Prime Minister Voldemort justifies this by saying Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map, even though there is no such idiom in the Persian language. The reality is that the armed forces in Iran are led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who in turn serves at the pleasure of a council of senior ayatollahs in Iran, and this corrupt gerontocracy of ayatollahs has one and only one desire -- to be able to continue ruling Iran and enrich themselves from its assets. Maybe thirty years ago when they had fire in their belly they might have considered attacking Israel with their ballistic missiles. But today, their sole purpose for having a military -- or a nuclear program -- is to keep outsiders from invading Iran and toppling them from power, not because they have any desire to invade anybody at all.

The reality is that after the Safavid rule of Persia, Iran has not attacked any other nation. None. Zero. Nada. That's over 300 years since the last time Iran invaded any other nation, and as far as the ayatollahs are concerned, another 300 years would be just fine with them, for the same reason it was fine with their predecessors -- because they have a comfortable life on top, and war would interere with that. Furthermore, Iran in the past has had no problems dealing with Israel. For example, in the early 1980's, Ayatollah Khomenei (the person whose speech was first mis-translated as "wiping Israel off the map") was selling oil to Israel and buying weapons from Israel at the same time he was making those speeches. Maintaining power trumps all, for the corrupt Iranian ayatollahs, and attacking Israel... well. Even if it were possible (which it isn't, there's a couple of countries between Iran and Israel in case you haven't looked at the map of the Middle East lately), Iran has to be under no delusion that a nuclear attack on Israel would turn Iran into radioactive dust. Not exactly conducive to being a corrupt oligarch looting the nation for your own benefit, eh?

The reality is that all this sabre-rattling is for internal Israeli consumption as part of internal Israeli politics of fear, and is about as realistic as Condi Rice's "we must invade Iraq to prevent New York City from being blown up by an Iraqi nuke" rhetoric. I.e., it's just sabre-rattling by Likkud intended to scare people into supporting them, much as the Iraqi nuke nonsense was just lies spread by the Busheviks to scare people into supporting them. In the end, the biggest threat to peace in the Middle East is not in Tehran. You'll need to look a bit west for that.

- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin

Radical right setting up coup

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".

War crimes

Israel prepares to defend its soldiers from war crimes tribunals. I have a better way for Israel to defend its soldiers from war crimes: Simply quit ordering their soldiers to commit war crimes. But that'd be too simple, I guess.

I hear two big talking points from Israeli apologists:

1. The U.S. and Israel have a unique relationship that explains why the U.S. has such lockstep support for Israel.
2. Where was the world when Hamas goons were firing rockets at Israel?

Okay, on #1: Yeah, Israel is Unique alright. It is Unique in that it is the only U.S. “ally” that a) has attacked and killed U.S. military personnel in a U.S. ship flying the U.S. flag, b) refuses to allow the U.S. to have basing rights, c) refuses to share intelligence with the United States even though the U.S. shares intelligence with Israel (thereby causing the deaths of several U.S. airmen over Lebanon in the early 1980's), and d) brags about controlling U.S. foreign policy for the Middle East.

On #2: The world was decrying the fact that Hamas goons were firing rockets at Israel, that's where the world was. Nobody is shedding a tear for any Hamas criminals killed in this recent action. If the IDF had gone after the Hamas goons firing rockets, there would be no outcry. Instead, they apparently decided that Hamas goons firing rockets were too hard a target, and started bombing and shelling civilian and U.N. facilities such as hospitals, schools, and U.N. food warehouses, under the belief that killing people who were NOT criminals would somehow make the criminals stop being, err, criminals. Which is utter bullshit. Criminals don’t give a shit about civilians, and killing civilians never stops criminals, whether said criminals are Hamas criminals or otherwise.

There is one rule that civilized nations use when criminals are hiding behind civilian hostages, and that one rule is, DON’T KILL THE HOSTAGES. The IDF willingly violated that rule and thereby proved that Israel is not a civilized nation. There is no (zero) excuse for deliberately targetting civilian and U.N. facilities, even if there were criminals hiding in the vicinity. That’s called a HOSTAGE SITUATION, and civilized nations (as vs. Israel) know what to do there — surround the criminals and their hostages, make sure the criminals know they’re outnumbered, outgunned, and not going to get away, and NEGOTIATE with the criminals to get their surrender peacefully, while preparing to rush and kill the criminals if they start killing the hostages. And try to get your own snipers into position to take out the criminals without loss of hostage life if possible, but if you can’t, so be it.

But that’s what happens in civilized nations, which Israel has proven it is not. So it goes. As thou sow, thus shalt thou reap.

-- Badtux the Old School penguin

What a waste...

Israel pulls out of Gaza. After killing 1,200 people, of which less than a dozen were criminals responsible for firing rockets at Israel, Israel declares victory and goes home.

Hamas declares victory. As if having over 1,100 innocent people killed because of the actions of a few hundred Hamas criminals were a victory. But I suppose it is a victory, if you're a Hamas criminal -- Israel killed a lot of school teachers and postmen and street cops and random women, children, and U.N. workers, but hardly any Hamas criminals responsible for firing rockets at Israel.

In actuality, of course, this was all a stunt for internal Israeli political purposes to enhance or degrade the electoral chances of one party or another, and had nothing to do with Hamas criminals, so pretty much everybody can declare victory here. The Israelis involved got their electoral chances improved, Hamas's criminals are still running around free in the Gaza strip, and oh, don't mind those 1,100 innocent people whose bodies are lying all around, they don't matter anyhow, do they? The War Nerd predicted that the Israelis would stop before Inauguration Day, and was right. Again. Alas.

-- Badtux the "What's the point?" Penguin

Friday war criminal blogging

The Jerusalem Post(1) reports on Israeli president (and war criminal) Shimon Peres's speech at an AIPAC convention: "Israel's aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel."

Well, that'd be nice, I suppose, if there was such a thing as "the people of Gaza" who are/were shooting at Israel. There is not. There is a few hundred, a few thousand at most, Hamas militants engaged in doing so. The rest of the people of Gaza *already* had no appetite for shooting at Israel, and all that being bombed and killed does to them is make their survivors have an *increased* appetite for shooting at Israel.

The way to deal with criminals is to take out the criminals. Not some random CARE worker and his six children. Not some U.N. compound full of women and children. All that happens when you take out non-criminals is that it motivates the survivors to decide that you're evil and need to yourself be taken out. That's not only common sense, that's what Israel's entire history demonstrates -- every time Israel has decided to do "collective punishment" of entire populations, what has happened is the radicalization of those populations. Where once there were only hundreds of criminals, suddenly there are thousands willing to take up arms against what they view as evil incarnate.

Killing innocents never turns out well. Given that IDF's current statistics indicate that over 90% of the Palestinians killed by Israeli action have no connection to Hamas, it seems clear that the end result of the action in Gaza will be to create nine new terrorists for every terrorist killed -- the nine new terrorists being the survivors of innocent people killed by Israel. But hey, Ehud Barack gets a big boost in the race for Israeli Prime Minister, so that's all that counts, eh?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

(1) 'Solidarity during war is Israel's finest hour' Jan. 14, 2009 Greer Fay Cashman , THE JERUSALEM POST

War crimes

Israeli apologists say "if the Palestinians don't want to be slaughtered, they should expel Hamas."

And if the hostages at a bank robbery don't want to be slaughtered by the cops when the cops open fire on the bank robbers, they should, err, expel the bank robbers? Even though the bank robbers have guns and, err, they don't?

The average Palestinian doesn't give a shit for any of this. They just want to live their life in peace. A CARE worker and his six children sleeping on the street because they'd rather be blown to pink mist by a bomb than die a slow and miserable death under the ruins of their home is a typical Palestinian. What is this guy, a CARE worker who specializes in running women's programs, supposed to do? Go up to the Hamas compound, which is guarded by a bunch of people with AK-47's and RPG's, and do *what*? Blaming him and his children for their own brutal death at the hands of an Israeli bomb is an atrocity. They are hostages to Hamas as much as the bank customers in my example above are hostages to bank robbers. If Israel's beef is with Hamas, they should send in soldiers to homes where Hamas leaders are and execute the Hamas leaders. Expecting unarmed women and children and CARE workers to do something Israel's own soldiers are apparently too gutless and cowardly to do is just *wrong*.

And before someone accuses me of having a double standard, I feel the same way about the Busheviks and their war crimes in Iraq such as the rape of Fallujah (*twice*). The whole lot of them -- the Busheviks, Hamas's leadership, Israel's leadership who violated the cease-fire on November 4 and incited the war to time with the U.S. holidays and the end of the Bush regime -- should get a fair trial for war crimes, then hung by the neck to die, just like the Japanese and Nazi war criminals at the end of WWII. They're all war criminals, in the end. Sad to say, they'll all die of old age, instead of swinging at the end of a rope like they deserve. So it goes.

- Badtux the War Crimes Penguin

A scenario

A bank robber just gunned down a bank teller and grabbed some money that he stuffed in a satchel that he slung over his shoulder. Then he grabbed one of the customers of the bank and is now standing outside the bank with his gun held to the head of the customer.

You are a police officer. You have a 9mm handgun in your hand. Unfortunately, this customer, an innocent bystander, is being held hostage between you and a vicious criminal. What do you do?

1. Take cover, and call for a hostage negotiation team and SWAT team. While waiting for the hostage negotiation team, attempt to negotiate with the criminal for his peaceful surrender, but don't unduly endanger yourself or the hostage while doing so. Rely on the hostage negotiation team and/or the SWAT sniper to take out the criminal without unduly endangering the hostage's life.
2. Stand where you are and point your gun at the tiny piece of the criminal's head showing from behind the hostage in case he decides to point his gun towards you rather than towards the hostage. If he does so, attempt to shoot him with your 9mm handgun, despite the fact that, as a typical police officer, you can barely hit the side of a barn with your service weapon from 100 yards. If your first shot gets the hostage rather than the bad guy, oh well, that's the breaks. At least your second shot got the bad guy, which is all that counts, right?
3. Shoot the hostage, then when the hostage falls, shoot the vicious criminal bank robber. When charged with murder for shooting the hostage, shrug and say "I'm not the one responsible for killing the hostage, the vicious criminal bank robber is."

Civilized nations, civilized police officers, adopt #1. If #2 happens, the police officer's career is over because he violated policy, which is to a) protect the hostage, b) protect himself, and c) wait for backup and more pin-point weapons to arrive in order to negotiate the surrender of or take out the bad guy.

#3 doesn't happen in civilized nations. But that's the excuse that Israel is giving for civilian casualties in Gaza, that and both Israel and Hamas using an over-broad definition of "combatant" that makes every Israeli over the age of 18 a combatant (since every Israeli must serve in the military or associated organizations) despite the fact that traffic cops, teachers, social workers, nurses, and university professors don't fit any civilized person's definition of "combatants". But nevermind that, let's talk about the bloodied children whose photos are all over the civilized world (except here in the United States). "The bad guys are hiding amongst civilians and using civilians as hostages!" the Israel apologists exclaim. Uhm, okay. But we have procedures for that which don't require shooting the hostages or endangering the hostages in order to get the bad guy. It's called police work. Which is utterly the opposite of "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." It may seem surprising to some people that Israel is channeling the words of a Catholic magistrate, given the complicity of the Catholic Church when it came to the genocide of the Holocaust. But apparently Israel as a nation has decided that the best way to avoid being a victim again is to become the people who they hate. Hmm....

So anyhow: What is happening in Gaza right now is the militarization of what is, essentially, a police problem. There are probably less than 500 Hamas fighters and top Hamas leaders involved in the war crime of shooting rockets at Israel. Israel has now already killed more then 500 Palestinians who were *not* Hamas fighters and leaders. This is as if the cops surrounded a bank robbery in progress and, rather than handle the hostage situation, decided to just open fire on the whole bank with automatic weapons and let God sort it out. Yeah, you might have killed the three bank robbers, but killing the thirty customers who were standing in line at the time of the bank robbery would kinda be frowned upon here in civilization...

-- Badtux the Police Penguin

A scenario

Someone, let's call him Sam Goldberg, fires a bullet that kills my daughter. So here is the question: Who is responsible for the death of my daughter?

1. Me, for not protecting her from Sam.
2. Me, for not doing anything to reduce crime in my apartment complex.
3. Me, for living in the same apartment complex as criminals, one of whom shot at Sam last week and now Sam is trying to get his revenge on the criminals by shooting through the windows of what he thinks is the criminals' apartment.
4. Sam Goldberg.

Hint: It isn't me that the cops will haul off for the death of my daughter. It is Sam Goldberg.

Unless, of course, Sam Goldberg is an IDF soldier, in which case he's just a patriotic citizen and I'm to blame for my daughter's death. Because Israel works via Israeli rules, not the rules of civilization. In civilization rules it is the person who fires the bullet (and anyone who orders the bullet fired) who is responsible for the death caused by that bullet. In Israeli rules, it's the dead child's parents' fault.

Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Israeli invasion of Gaza

It was inevitable. The leadership of Israel apparently has gone stark naked mad insane crazy stupid, and forgot this one little fact of human nature:

If someone is dropping bombs on you, you blame the person dropping the bombs on you, not someone else altogether.

The leaders of Israel forgot this fact when they started bombing Lebanon, hoping that Lebanese would blame Hezbollah. That was stupid. Hezbollah wasn't dropping bombs on them. Israel was. Blaming someone who isn't dropping bombs on you is like attacking Mexico in retaliation for Japan's attack upon Pearl Harbor. Only an idiot would do that, and while Lebanese may be Arab, that doesn't make them idiots, no matter how racist and bigoted the average Israeli is about Arabs (let's just say that the average Israeli views Arabs in much the same way that Lou Dobbs and his "Minutemen" view Mexicans or George W. Bush and his Reich Wingers view Iraqis, i.e., as untermenschen, unseemly mud people, not real people like you and me). If someone dropped a bomb on my family, I wouldn't blame George W. Bush for running a racist and violent foreign policy that has killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans. I would blame whoever dropped the goddamned bomb on me, just like I blame Osama bin Laden for attacking the WTC towers, not the violent and racist U.S. foreign policy that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the 1990's. You're not going to get me pissed at the U.S. government by dropping bombs on me. Fuck, I'm already pissed at the U.S. government. You're going to get me pissed at *you*, the person dropping motherfucking bombs on my goddamned head. Shit, this isn't brain surgery, folks. This is basic fundamental human fucking nature, I don't give a shit whether you're Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, American, or Swiss, it's all the same biological hardwiring at work here.

So anyhow, that was Lebanon, two years ago. Perfect proof that if you want to stop people from shooting rockets at you, dropping bombs on people not shooting rockets at you accomplishes nothing except getting a lot of folks pissed at you. So what does Israel do when some elements of Hamas (maybe) start shooting rockets at them. Well... the SAME GODDAMNED THING THAT DIDN'T WORK THE FIRST TIME. I.e., start dropping bombs on people not shooting rockets on them, in hopes that the Palestinians will blame, well, the people (Hamas) not dropping bombs on them for the bombs falling on their heads. GAH! THE STUPIDITY! IT BURNS, IT BURNS!

So anyhow, it didn't work. Duh. If you drop a bomb on someone's head, they blame you, not someone else. So the Palestinians blame Israel for dropping bombs on their heads, not someone else who, like, didn't drop bombs on their heads (duh). Perfectly 100% predictable. Thus the invasion. Which won't work either, unless it's a permanent occupation followed up with extensive police / intelligence work to find and prosecute-and-or-kill the people who are firing off rockets at Israel. Which, BTW, is *not* Hamas proper, the majority of which is a social services organization, but, rather, a small military wing of Hamas which has maybe 500 members total. Find them, arrest or kill them, and problem is solved.

Right now, it seems to me that the only "solution" to Gaza that doesn't result in permanent Israeli occupation is to cede the whole fuggin' mess back to the Egyptians. Screw it, let the Egyptians handle the situation, have the Egyptian consul walk around Gaza with Egyptian passports and say "Hi, you're an Egyptian!" and send in the Egyptian army to keep order. End of problem. The only question is, who's going to pay for it? Egypt certainly won't. They have enough problems of their own. But that's a story for another post...

-- Badtux the Stupidity-recognizin' Penguin

Is anti-semitism inherent in the Middle East?

My answer is "no".

Historically, anti-semitism was not an issue in the Muslim world. When the European barbarians invaded Palestine in 1099 and conquered Jerusalem, they found not only a large Muslim population, but also a thriving Jewish population. Which, of course, they slaughtered to the last man. If you are looking for the root causes of anti-semitism in the Middle East, you have to look to the Zionist movement and the frictions between Jewish settlers and Muslim settlers in Palestine in the period of British rule.

Let's start with 1900. At the turn of the 20th century the percentage of practicing Jews had fell to under 10% of the population of Palestine, mostly because it was advantageous from a tax point of view to convert to Islam under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, not because of any pograms against Jews. It is ironic, in the context of the current problems between Palestinians and Israelis, that most of the Palestinians in actuality are ethnically identical to the Israelis who they are fighting -- i.e., they're both ethnically Jewish, it's just that one group converted to Islam, while the other one did not. (Note: This is a *drastic* simplification of the situation but for the purposes of this discussion sufficient).

In any event, the Ottoman Empire fell during WWI and Britain got the Palestinian and Jordanian mandate. Now, first you must remember how Ottoman land management occurred. The Ottoman Empire was the last feudal state, i.e., a state based upon conquest and plunder. One of the things plundered was the land. The owners of the land were stripped of their ownership, and the ownership was transferred to Ottoman Turks instead. Who, as the Empire wound down, gravitated to Istanbul. The former owners of the land then ended up working as tenant farmers for absentee landlords and paying a percentage of their crops as rent to said landlords.

Anyhow, the British made the decision to respect the Turkish land titles rather than redistribute the lands to the people who had been working the lands as tenant farmers for generations. And the Zionist movement had access to capital, while the tenant farmers did not necessarily have such access. What ended up happening was that Jews moved in and bought up lands from the absentee Turkish landlords who needed money far more than they needed some land in what was now a foreign country. As far as the new Jewish owners were concerned, it was simply commerce. The historical question of how those lands ended up titled to those absentee Turkish landlords did not concern them. Where the people went who were evicted off the lands by British courts and escorted off the lands by British law officers was not a concern either, they probably figured that the displaced farmers would just find some other place to go, some other land to rent, the Middle East is a large place after all. The problem is that when you create a large landless unemployed minority, you create a population that is ripe for exploitation by ideologues. And some of those ideologues, as usual, found it advantageous to use anti-Semitism as their tool to get popular support.

Now, I am entering into a sensitive area here, because the above explanation may appear to be blaming the Zionist Movement for causing frictions with the Palestinians that eventually exploded into the current situation. Indeed there was, and has historically been since the beginning, a striking lack of consideration for the sensitivities of those pushed off of their traditional lands as a result of either the pre-1948 activities of the Zionist Movement or the expulsion of a large segment of the Muslim population in the time frame immediately following the foundation of the state of Israel. There was no thought to their fate and no thought to helping them find a new home elsewhere in the region, either by the new Jewish immigrants or by British officials or by any of the post-independence nations in the region. If someone, anyone, over the past seventy years had taken in the displaced population and given them citizenship in some state, any state, there would be no "Palestinian problem". Rather, after a few generations as a full citizen of some other country it would be like the situation of Irish-Americans, who might have a propensity to visit Irish pubs and drink beer on St. Patrick's Day but otherwise are culturally indistinguishable from any other American and no more prone to blowing up the occasional London subway station than any other American.

However, it can be said that there was little leeway for the new Jewish immigrants to do much beyond what they did. It was more a case of, "we're being persecuted in Europe, we need this land as a refuge, we will do what it takes to obtain this land, and people who already have this land are simply out of luck." All available resources were being used to relocate Jews to Palestine, there simply wasn't anything left over for addressing the fate of the tenant farmers who formerly farmed their new lands, even if the mindset had been there (which arguably it was not -- my conversations with ardent Zionists tend to end with a statement from them along the lines of, "we are the most persecuted people ever, people less persecuted than we have historically been simply have no reason to complain about anything bad that happens to them" -- an attitude not conducive to any sort of diplomacy or smoothing of ruffled feathers). The location of most of Europe's Jews in 1947 should be instructive there -- most of the surviving European Jews in 1947 were in exactly the same concentration camps that Hitler had placed them in, except renamed to "relocation camps" and with the guns facing outward to protect them from Europeans who wished to finish the job Hitler had started rather than inwards.

But back to our story... so anyhow, the point, the point... ah yes. A large population of displaced people. Ideologues like the various Arab dictators in the surrounding states who find it useful to use this large population of displaced people as pretty much slave labor and as a way of distracting their own population from the failures of these dictators. People like Yasir Arafat, who invented the concept of a "Palestinian" and made corrupt deals with said dictators to make sure that his new-found "people" didn't get citizenship and thus assimilated out from under him, then, when that scam started running dry, managed to make a corrupt deal with Israel to set him up a Bantustan-style apartheid state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for "peace" that any sensible person could have seen wouldn't happen because if there was peace, then the corruption of the Arafat regime and its utter lack of empathy for the plight of the population it supposedly ruled would come to the forefront. All of these people found it handy to fan the flames of anti-semitism in the Middle East, and the new European immigrants to Israel didn't help the situation either, refusing to learn the language of the nations that surrounded them and having utterly no interest in engaging with non-Jews in any way. (The percentage of Jewish-faith Israelis who speak Arabic is still astoundingly low, considering that Israel itself still has a large population of Arab citizens). As a result, Israel is now the most dangerous country in the world in which to be a Jew. While violence against Jews in other parts of the world has become almost unknown, it is an almost daily occurrence in Israel.

So now we go back to the question of whether there is any inherent reason for anti-semitism in the Middle East. I would say that any relatively affluent largely-European population pushing a largely-Arab population off of the land of historic Palestine would have been similarly demonized by the surrounding states. That is, that it isn't anything about being Jews that is the root cause of the frictions between Israel and its neighbors, there would be anti-Christianism (is that a word?) if it had been Christians who had instead seen the opportunity of buying cheap lands from absentee Turkish landlords and bought up the place. In short, what we are seeing in the Middle East today may be being expressed as anti-semitism. But what it is, in the end, is whatever happens when a more successful culture collides with a less successful culture -- the people in the former get demonized by the latter.

And there ends my history lesson, and the end of my explanation of why I believe anti-semitism is not inherent in the Middle East.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

The Arab's little illegal immigration problem

Now, the Arabs say about the European Jewish illegal immigrants who came in and founded the state of Israel, "let them go somewhere else." Well, there’s a problem with the “somewhere else” thingy. Before Eichmann came up with his “Final Solution”, he went to every country in the world asking if they’d accept Europe’s Jews. “Here, take our Jews,” he said. “We’ll give’em to ya fer *free*!” Every single country on the planet turned him down. When ya got Jews that ya don’t want around, and ya wanna get rid of them, and nobody wants ta take them… well, we all know how that story ends. And it’s no surprise that Israel’s Jews don’t want to re-live it.

Maybe after Lebanon has been stable for a couple of decades then Israel’s Jewish population can figure out for themselves that acting like, well, Nazis, isn’t necessary for their safety. But right now, with car bombings and assassinations being the order of the day in Lebanon… well. Granted, a lot of that is meddling from Israel and Syria. But the fact that Lebanon can’t come together to deal with that meddling doesn’t bode well for the notion of a multi-cultural Palestine that gives both its Arabs and its Jews equal rights, even if both sides hadn’t spent the last forty years demonizing each other as baby killers and genocidal maniacs.

First thing we did at the behavior intervention center when two of our behavior-disordered kids got at it like that was the geographic cure — remove them from each other’s vicinity. Give’em separate timeout cubicles. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only thing that works when you got crap like this going on… and given that the Israeli Jews have atomic weapons, the notion that anybody is going to get them to go anywhere is pretty laughable. Especially since they still remember the last time, which ended up with Hitler’s “Final Solution”. Which means, well, somebody needs to step up to the plate and give the Palestinian Arabs a real home somewhere far, far removed from Israel. Otherwise there will be no peace. Just how it goes, when you got two punks going after it tooth and nail like that…

Of course, everybody keeps saying "it's someone else's problem" and nothing every happens. So it goes. The problem is not that there's no solution to the Palestinian problem. The problem is that everybody's being a stubborn ass and refusing to consider any such solution. The corrupt "Palestinian Authority" likes the Palestinians right where they are as a buncha ignorant impoverished slobs for them to rule over while they loot the monies given to them for the welfare of the Palestinians, Israel just wants the Pals gone, and nobody else is willing to step up and say "okay, we'll give them citizenship in our nation" because, well, either they hate darkies (the United States and Europe) or because they hate Israel (all of Israel's neighbors). So we get a buncha poor bastards with citizenship in no real state stuck in a Bantustan concentration camp with Israeli guns outside the barbed wire making sure they stay there, and a buncha Israelis who have seriously considered Hitler's "final solution" to the Palestinian problem (who shall be Israel's Eichmann?), and Palestinians figure they got nothing to lose but their chains and end up blowing themselves to bits all over the place, and so it goes. All because a buncha assholes want to be either bigots (Europe and the U.S.) or jerks (the entire goddamned Middle East, Israel included). Bah. Monkeys. Monkeys with bad fur and delusions of grandeur. You can have'em. Seriously.

-- Badtux the Monkey-observing Penguin