Judith Butlerizing racism

The discussions about Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP official in Spokane passing herself as ethnically Black despite white biological parents, are quite frankly surreal. Not only are many using it as another pretext to go after “identity politics” (however each defines that) but they’re now Judith Butlerizing the discussion so that gender & ethnicity (race is not a concept I accept) are both performative.

Philosophically what’s going on here is a retreat to idealism. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave & theory of forms is entirely apropos. When you deny lived political reality, you end up chasing shadows. Tell an unarmed Black teen who’s shot in the back or is wrestled to the ground in a choke hold that their ethnicity is just performative. Tell a woman who’s been raped or assaulted that her gender is just performative or that her sweatshop wages are just performative.

When women, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans stand up against our oppression for just being who we are, we’re told our politics are lowbrow & divisive. My ass! What’s divisive is those who think we should stand with white men as our leaders while they pinch our butts, talk to us like we’re idiots, & make us try to follow them like guppies.

The greatest indignities I’ve faced as a working class woman are as a working class woman–not as some kind of abstract proletarian. And a good share of the crap came from my so-called brothers. It isn’t Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans & women who have to defer to supremacy. Supremacists have to smarten the hell up, stop treating us like inferiors, & move the hell over because there’s a new day dawning.

Right-wing generals wined & dined by Israel agree that Israel is a peaceful nation

Gaza after Op Ethnic Cleansng 2014 (from Independent.cco.uk) June 14 2015

Most countries who want to prove their peaceful nature don’t call on testimony from military generals whose expertise is war. They especially don’t appeal to generals from US-NATO because those 14 years of barbarism in Afghanistan are something of an impediment to credibility. But Israel is sweating bullets over a possible UN criticism for war crimes in Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer & is stooping to political burlesque.

They induced a group of retired generals & politicians, including the head of the NATO Military Committee, to come to Israel for a week to work up a report to the UN testifying that Israel used extreme precautions to “adhere to the laws of war & to protect Palestinian civilians” during 51 days of bombing.

The expenditures in booze & prostitutes would have cost Israel a bundle but the whole burlesque was bankrolled by the Friends of Israel Initiative (FOII), a Zionist group which is openly Islamophobic. The group was founded in 2010 & is led by former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, a real prize package politically with long family roots in Spanish fascism which he continues to water. Both father & grandfather served in the Franco regime; his regime posthumously awarded an honorific to a torturer & head of the secret police under Franco.
Aznar spent millions of public funds for a US law firm to lobby for a Congressional medal for himself. We can let such venalities pass. We can even overlook his rejection of anthropogenic climate change–even though he believes those who accept it are “enemies of freedom.” He isn’t the only politician to talk through his butt about that. But we cannot ignore his support for the 2010 assault on the ship Mavi Marmara by Israeli commandoes. The Mavi Marmara was part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade. Nine Palestinian supporters were killed & many injured.

Enough with the burlesque! The rubbish about extreme precautions for civilians is completely belied by hundreds of photos from Operation Ethnic Cleansing & by testimony from Israeli soldiers & veterans in the group Breaking the Silence.

It isn’t that Israel is stooping low in allying with generals & right-wingers associated with fascism; it’s that kind of crowd where Zionism finds affinity. That is certainly not the vision of freedom from persecution held by most Jews.

Building the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel is not just to support Palestinians in breaking the shackles of Israeli apartheid. It has the potential to free Israelis from the shackles of Zionist social hatred.

(Photo of Gaza after Operation Ethnic Cleansing from the Independent)

Where goeth Paul Craig Roberts?

A simple question: how does a guy like Paul Craig Roberts get accepted as a radical social critic in publications like Global Research & Counterpunch if he is completely conservative, establishment, & more frequently appears in journals with deranged commentators like Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, & Newt Gingrich? Does that help explain some of Global Research’s political problems?

Israel is sweating condemnation for war crimes so resorts to farce

Children in Gaza (AFP:Getty Images) June 13 2015

Israel is now introducing farce into its defense of Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer. The IDF looked around the world for “legal experts” with impeccable credentials as legal scholars, Zionists, & halfwits. They dug up a schnook named Willy Stern at Vanderbilt Law School, Michael N. Schmitt at the US Naval War College (that was a tough one), & Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, at European University in Frankfurt. What an impressive array of dumbbells. But there are probably fewer & fewer these days willing to make public jackasses of themselves in defense of carpet bombing & they probably have to pay them big bucks, like they do performers.

Our man Willy led the charade with claims the IDF went “beyond any mandates that international law requires to avoid civilian casualties” when bombing “confirmed terror targets.” Like the refugee centers, the hospitals, & the apartment buildings?

Not content to leave bad enough alone, Micky Schmitt claimed IDF warnings like dropping leaflets, calling or texting residents minutes before bombing was not only beyond what law requires but creates a dangerous precedent that could harm “the West” in fighting terrorism. If this isn’t stopped, next thing you know, the US will be texting ISIS?

Wolff & Stern agreed the IDF was not just over-sensitive but “outstandingly sensitive” & takes many more precautions to avoid civilian deaths than required. Once again they’re concerned this will set “an unreasonable precedent for other democratic countries of the world who may also be fighting in asymmetric wars against brutal non-state actors who abuse these laws.” Like the US in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Saudi Arabia in Yemen?

Some of the precautions they claim employed by the IDF include sophisticated surveillance cameras overhead to make sure civilians have vacated. Like the ones that bombed the four boys on the Gaza beach & claimed they were Hamas naval commandos? They also say the IDF uses a precise weapon system that will destroy “only the weapons cache (or other terror targets) but not surrounding rooms.” Like the ones that took out entire residential neighborhoods & left mountains of cement rubble? These experts might want to shut the hell up because if Israel has those weapons & still bombs children, refugee centers, hospitals, & apartment buildings, that would be evidence of war crimes.

Stern, whose elevator may not go all the way to the top, actually cited a report from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) which reviewed Israel’s conduct in Operation Ethnic Cleansing & ruled it unprecedented in its precautions against civilian deaths. JINSA is a flagrantly Zionist think tank (using the term lightly) with an advisory board that includes Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, & other scuzzy creatures from the Zionist dark side.

The JINSA report concluded that “Israel’s military restraint unintentionally empowered Hamas to distort both the law & facts for their own purposes to the ultimate detriment of civilians’ safety, for which Hamas bears sole responsibility.” And they go on to criticize Hamas’ use of children as human shields. “Hamas’s playbook calls for helping to kill its own civilians, while the IDF’s playbook goes to extreme–some say inappropriate–lengths to protect innocent life in war.” But what about the charges made by IDF soldiers & veterans in Breaking the Silence claiming the IDF were indiscriminate in going after civilians? Don’t their testimonies from the front make horse manure out of JINSA’s claims?

Israel is scraping the bottom of the barrel here. One would have to be completely stupid or marinated in Zionist crazy-think to buy this kind of defense for genocide. One thing it’s showing is that Israel is on the run. They’re threatened by the growing Palestinian solidarity movement & by BDS. That means we need to continue building BDS with the spirit of evangelists.

This photo is children in Gaza at the funeral of the four boys killed on the beach in July 2014. You can see how reassured they are by the “outstandingly sensitive” treatment of Israeli bombers.

(Photo from AFP/Getty Images)

Israeli military clears itself of war crimes; doesn’t see sarcasm of that

Gaza boys on beach 7:16:2014 (Trevor Hogan:Twitter) June 13 2015

In what has to be the mother of all kangaroo courts, the Israeli military cleared its bombers of all criminal charges in missile strikes last summer that killed four small boys playing on the beach in Gaza. One media report says the IDF claims an Israeli gunboat thought they were targeting militants from the Hamas navy & that “the figures were not identified at any point during the incident as children.” Another report says the Israeli air force bombed believing the children were “gunmen” running in an area “utilized exclusively by militants.” They ought to be able to get the story straight. Were the kids killed by gunboats & by airstrikes?

The children were bombed playing soccer in the Gaza City harbor. So much for high-tech warfare & precision bombing when genocide is the agenda! And to think the IDF never once brought up the charge the Palestinian navy was using children as human shields.
To fend off the naughty finger from the UN, the Israeli military has been conducting internal investigations of 105 cases of alleged military misconduct during Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer & cleared themselves of several charges including the bombings of a cafe, medical facility, & an entire residential area, along with allegations of abusing a Palestinian detainee.

This is where the testimony of IDF soldiers & veterans in the group Breaking the Silence is so powerful. In a report they issued last May they documented that the IDF directly targeted civilians in Gaza. While Israel makes the insane claim that their military is the most moral in the world, their own soldiers & veterans prove them to be engaged in genocide.

The entire Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer was nothing but war crimes. The UN & International Criminal Court in the Hague can parse each individual incident for possible war crimes but Israel is indicted in the court of public opinion for its continuing blockade of Gaza & its repeated bombing assaults on a civilian population.
This is a twitter image of three of the boys running for shelter before being killed so we can judge for ourselves the immensity of Israeli war crimes.

Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS).

(Image by Trevor Hogan/Twitter)

Parkour and breakdance in Gaza: a metaphor for political resistance to apartheid

Parkour in Gaza (Christopher Furlong:Getty Images) June 13 2015

There are many things you could say about this photo of a young guy in Gaza exhibiting parkour skills to kids at the Gaza breakdance crew headquarters in Gaza City: there’s the wondrous ways of cultural fusion with breakdance & parkour; the athletic prowess involved; the history & popularity of parkour & breakdance among Gaza’s young; the phenomenon of doing parkour against a backdrop of Israeli bombs & bombed out buildings. You could even just say the photo shows kids around the world are just plain nuts with all that daring–even in conditions of ethnic cleansing.

The Guardian-UK chose to approach this photo quite differently: as Israeli war propaganda. It said “The devastation across Gaza can still be seen nearly a year on from the 2014 conflict between Israel & Palestinian militants.” The Guardian isn’t being demur with the truth. On the contrary! They’re lying & choosing to cover for Israeli carpet bombing. Israeli bombing took out entire neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, refugee centers; the murderous bombers targeted children. Deceit is the character of propaganda & still the truth was out & over a million people protested genocide in Gaza in that “2014 conflict.”

What is extremely interesting is the cultural fusion of New York Black & Latino street dance & hip hop & the obstacle course training of parkour with Palestinians in Gaza beginning around 2005, just a couple years before Israel imposed the blockade of Gaza. Part of it is surely the international appeal of hip hop; but it also appears to be rooted in resistance, defiance, determination against extermination.
Comments by the founders of parkour & breakdance in Gaza are quite telling. One group describes their mission as “The power to break the siege by dancing, dreaming, & teaching humanity!!”

Another said, “We are not just dance…We are telling people about our situation & our lives. We mix drama into the shows to tell people about the suffering in Gaza.” And another said, “Parkour makes us feel free…it gives us hope in this difficult situation in Gaza.”

Our fullest solidarity with the crazy-assed youth of Gaza. Please don’t break your necks.

(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Syrians surging at Turkish border while Turkey schemes to keep them out

Syrians at Turkish border (Bulent Kilic:AFP:Getty Images) June 12 2015

The tsunami of immigration around the globe–from the US southern border to Australia to the Mediterranean & Andaman Seas–highlights the importance of photojournalists. Their pictures show us the humanity of those depicted by regimes as grubbing hordes. Once we see their humanity it becomes harder to turn our backs on them. The photos create an opportunity for immigration & human rights activists to counter the racist, xenophobic rubbish promoted by nationalists.

These are Syrian refugees surging with thousands of others on the Turkish border near Akcakale, Turkey. There are all sorts of people in this photo from young to old, all fleeing war. It must be hotter than hell there; they must be traumatized & exhausted, thirsty & hungry. And very scared.

They’re being held off by barb wire fences & water cannons while Turkey takes measures to limit the number allowed to enter the country–& it should be added, in violation of international law. It’s beyond dispute that millions of refugees are too much for one country to cope with. Especially when, like Turkey, they’re under the whip of IMF austerity policies & militarized to the nth degree by participation in NATO.

It is the duty, not just under international law which is flagrantly ignored but according to ancient humane practices, to give refuge to those fleeing war & starvation. If the UN was up to snuff, it would be demanding other countries open the borders to give sanctuary. But then if the UN was up to snuff, it would be protesting the wars, occupations, & plunder causing the diasporas in the first place.

If neoliberal regimes can’t do that because they’re imposing austerity on their own citizens, then we need to rethink the continuing existence of neoliberal rule, the barbaric phase of capitalism. Human life is the first priority & no human being is illegal.

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Hats off to the Filipino antiwar movement!

Philippine antiwar protest (Francis R. Malasig:EPA) June 12 2015

It’s not certain how large the Filipino antiwar movement is but it is certainly one of the most active in the world. Every cavalcade of US politicians is met by protesters because they’re primarily visiting to strengthen military bonds between the two regimes.

They’ve been protesting the buildup of US military might in the South China Sea ostensibly over competing claims with China to islands that belong to neither country–but really over competing claims for domination of the region. The US buildup includes a new military base in Australia, new naval bases in the Philippines, & joint military exercises with several armies in the region, including the Philippines.

This recent protest in Manila at the US embassy was confronted by riot cops–now called “anti-riot police” by those who change language to change perception of reality. It’s of the same genre as “collateral damage” & just as odious.

Our deepest respect for the Filipino antiwar movement. Perhaps when the US antiwar movement is rebuilt we’ll be able to invite speakers here in solidarity. (And it won’t be an embarrassment for one of us to speak there,)

(Photo by Francis R. Malasig/EPA)