Picket Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlors on April 12th to protest their involvement in Israeli apartheid

I have great respect for the Vermont antiwar movement since as long as I can remember they always brought busloads of well-organized contingents to every march. Now the Vermont BDS group is calling for picket signs at Ben & Jerry’s free cone day on April 12th.

Doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy; just a handmade sign calling out the company for profiting from Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing.

Anyone interested in McAllen, let me know. There are two stores to hit.

http://www.vtjp.org/FCD/

There’s just something so smarmy about George Clooney. While many may rate him high in sex-appeal, his war-mongering & friendship with John Prendergast (called a human rights activist but more likely a CIA operative in Africa) eviscerate his scant charms.

So now we learn, quite belatedly, that our man is a board member & “brand ambassador” (corporate-speak for TV shill) for Nespresso, a Nestle subsidiary–& has been for several years. Nestle was the subject of a boycott for discouraging breast feeding to sell baby formula that caused infant malnutrition, illness, & death in poor communities; Nestle campaigns to get access to water changed from a right to a need; Nestle is implicated in widespread child labor & slave labor; Nestle is involved in price fixing, false claims, & contaminated products.

Clooney’s smarm goes all the way to the bones & smarm is incompatible with human rights. That’s why he supports Hillary Clinton.

Origins of “Danny Boy” explained by DNA linking Irish to Israeli tribe of Dan

Woman farmer from Ireland 5000 BCS (Daniel Bradley, Trinity College Dublin) Apr 4 2016

Irish scientists have just completed sequencing the genomes of a 5,200-year-old female farmer from the Neolithic period & three 4,000-year-old males from the Bronze Age. Her bones were excavated near Belfast & the men in Country Antrim. DNA evidence indicates their origin is the Fertile Crescent which includes Palestine. Bones don’t lie–unlike Israeli historians & myth-makers.

If this is true, the Irish & their ancestors dispersed all over Kingdom Come have a claim to Palestine which predates the Zionist’s nonsensical claims. Here we thought Irish claims to the Rhineland were invalid though their ancestors came from there 3,000 years ago, plus or minus a few centuries.

Israeli immigration policy is skating on thin ice since it’s based on a few stanzas in the Old Testament & a considerable library of folklore & mythology. But as it goes, the patriarch Jacob fathered 12 sons who became progenitors of the 12 tribes of Israel. The narratives are necessarily short on dates & details but somewhere around 722 BCE, ten of the tribes were deported by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (whoever the hell they are). Israel has immigration officials out scouting the planet for the descendants of these lost tribes to patriate them as Israeli settlers.

One of the ten lost tribes is the tribe of Dan who are known among some scholars/myth-makers as seafaring people who colonized Ireland in the 7th century BCE under the name Tuatha Dé Danann. Hence the ancient tune “Danny Boy” written in 1910 to honor that lineage.

The Dan clan must have been quite a promiscuous one that let no continents stand in their way because Ethiopian Jews admitted as Israeli citizens in 1979-1990 under the Law of Return were deemed the lost tribe of Dan by rabbinical decrees, contrary to DNA evidence.

There are also Scandinavian peoples from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, & Norway who claim ancestry from the tribe of Dan. Had that clan no shame? There are certainly plenty of Old Testament stanzas that would damn such profligate behavior. No wonder some claim the Antichrist will come from the tribe of Dan.

One less than compelling piece of evidence presented to support the Dan ancestry for Ireland is the harp, a symbol of Ireland which also plays a role in Jewish history as the musical instrument of King David who reportedly lived from 1040 to 970 BCE. Less than compelling we say since the harp has a history that goes back at least to 3,500 BCE in Asia, Africa, & the Middle East. Grasping at straws makes a fool of even the most credentialed academic.

There are others booking claim as the lost tribes, including Pashtuns from Afghanistan & Pakistan; Igbo people from Nigeria; indigenous people from the Indian states of Mizoran & Manipur; indigenous peoples from Peru. The one thing they share in common, since they all fail DNA tests, is long-time exposure to Christian Evangelical missionaries with a vested interest in messianic nonsense about those lost tribes.

Even if those bones do derive from ancestors in Palestine, no one has a claim to Palestinian land based on DNA, the Old Testament, apocryphal gospels, or rabbinical decree except the people of Palestine.

(Photo is female farmer from the Neolithic Period by Daniel Bradley, Trinity College, Dublin)

Barbarisms of the Israeli occupation

Palestinian at Beit Hanoun checkpoint (Abed Al Hashlamoun:EPA) Apr 4 2016

The Guardian-UK caption to this photo read, “Hebron, West Bank: Israeli border police with an arrested Palestinian at a checkpoint in Beit Hanoun.”

The problem is that Hebron in the West Bank is about 65 km/40 miles from Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip. Beit Hanoun is the town a few miles from the apartheid barrier across from the Israeli town of Sderot. In the 2014 carpet bombing of Gaza, Sderot gained international ignominy when townspeople pulled up easy chairs to wave the Israeli flag & cheer on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Beit Hanoun is where in July 2014, Israeli bombers took out a schoolhouse used by the UN as a refugee center for families. At least 16 people died & small children were treated for massive shrapnel injuries.

This photo is probably not Beit Hanoun but Hebron where just two weeks ago an Israeli soldier cocked his gun & shot 21-year-old Palestinian Abed al-Fatah al-Sharif in the head when he had already been shot & was lying on the ground incapacitated. The Israeli occupying army alleges he stabbed an Israeli soldier but that can be dismissed with no further ado as propaganda to justify summary execution.

Photos like this–where unarmed Palestinians are surrounded by Gestapo-like military force ready to execute on the spot–show exactly what Palestinian Intifada is up against. Now we know exactly what kind of political pressure must be mobilized in defense of Intifada.

Build & honor the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel; check every damn thing you buy & buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

Long live Palestinian Intifada!

(Photo by Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA)

Electoral politics: a funereal task

Indian voters in line ( Biju Boro:AFP:Getty Images) Apr 4 2016

These are voters queuing up with their identity cards in Diphu, India to vote in state assembly elections. They have their lesser evils; we have ours. They have their Modi-types; we have Clinton & Drumpf. That’s what makes the electoral process so funereal in most countries–even in countries with nominal democracy & when there are more than two deadbeats competing.

Is this what those great democratic revolutions against feudalism have come to!? The very burlesque of democratic decision-making?

(Photo by Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

What’s to say about the Charlie Hebdo editorial titled “How did we end up here?” which elaborates their petty-assed racism & Islamophobia?

It lays out in nearly unreadable gibberish what most of us accused them of–save for the minstrel-savants who got a chuckle out of the stuff. It confirms that Islamophobia is petulant, greasy-kid-stuff, drawing on cesspools of ignorance & prejudice, & obsessed with women wearing the veil.

Their apparent lack of facility with language & concepts has to do with finding acceptable expression for their stupidity & bigotry–something they can fly past those minstrel-savants as progressive, cutting-edge social criticism.

If you read their other editorials about religion, the political crisis of the left, the political crises in France, it’s evident that elementary thinking & research skills elude them & they operate viscerally, wallowing in cynicism, unhinged & unmoored from the lives of working people but with their heads stuck up the ass of the ruling elite.

Social critics & satirists don’t have to have all the answers; their job is to ask the questions. Charlie Hebdo doesn’t have enough intellectual depth to do that. We’d suggest they stick to cartooning, since racism & misogyny have regrettably become integral to the genre, often defended by progressives as social criticism. But in an era when the lives of millions of people are disrupted by bombing, plunder, genocide, it’s more appropriate to expose their sarcasms for what they are: small-minded idiocy & bigotry.

Ben & Jerry’s links to Israeli apartheid

Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield, the two owners of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (based in Vermont), were in NYC on Thursday & Friday handing out free samples of their new flavor named “Bernie’s Yearning” to those attending Sanders’ support rallies.

Cute story done in the cute style Cohen & Greenfield like to use as a marketing endearment. Except that since 2011, Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (VTJP) have been negotiating with Ben & Jerry’s to end its long-standing contractual relationship with an Israeli franchise that manufactures the ice cream & sells it in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank & East Jerusalem.

As VTJP pointed out, during Israel’s military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, Gaza’s morgues were overwhelmed with bodies of children killed in the bombing & they had to be stacked in ice cream freezers till burial. Meanwhile Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was “passing through Israeli checkpoints, being transported on Jewish-only roads, & being sold to supermarkets & at catered events in those Jewish-only settlements.”

Thousands of individuals & about 250 organizations have urged the company to end its franchise relationship & involvement in Israel’s occupation & settlements but it continues to refuse.

Because the company has no moral qualms about doing business with Israeli apartheid, supporting the military occupation, & promoting the illegal settlements & refuses to end its franchise, in April 2015, VTJP called for an international boycott of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

Please join the boycott of Ben & Jerry’s & like & share this FB wall put up by VTJP appealing to Ben & Jerry’s to get out of the apartheid business.

https://www.facebook.com/BenJerrysOutOfPalestine/

Eisenhower: architect of Cold War, NATO, & CIA

Eisenhower

FB is inundated with articles & memes favorably quoting US president Dwight Eisenhower who one source said, “while not a perfect president, gave us a stern warning about the military industrial complex” in his valedictory address leaving office in 1961. They make “Ike” appear not just prescient but politically avant-garde. It’s another case of, if you don’t study history, it’ll make fools of us all.

Our man was a five-star general in WWII, designated the Supreme Allied Commander; he was one of the architects of the Cold War & presided over the rise of NATO & the use of the CIA. His vice-president was Richard Nixon & his secretary of state was John Foster Dulles, both cold warriors of the first magnitude. Schooled in the Eisenhower regime, Nixon went on to incorporate Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. The Cold War, under the guise of fighting communism, involved the US, especially the CIA, in coups & counterrevolutionary campaigns in Latin America, Central America, the Middle East, Asia, & Africa. Kissinger was a logical continuation of all that treachery.

In the US under Eisenhower, the Cold War led to massive repression of civil liberties & flouting of the Bill of Rights. Thousands of people, including teachers, factory workers, screenwriters, were hounded or forced out of their jobs just for being liberal, socialist, or suspected “pinkos.” The political hold of the Cold War was only broken by the anti-Vietnam War movement & by the US civil rights movement.

Just the briefest summary of Ike’s contributions to US militarism: he threatened to use nuclear weapons to end the Korean War; authorized the 1953 CIA & British coup in Iran to install the murderous Shah; authorized the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala; refused ground troops to aid the French in Vietnam but provided bombers, napalm, & CIA pilots; formulated the Eisenhower Doctrine sanctioning military intervention in the Middle East; sent US Marines to Lebanon in 1958 to buttress a reactionary regime.

It is not that Eisenhower was “not a perfect president” but that he represented the interests of banks & corporations who run this country & he did so admirably–from their point of view. But his policies were violent & undemocratic, strengthening NATO militarism & expanding the secret role of the CIA.

There’s nothing to admire about the guy. The military-industrial meme was a brief moment in a life of international crime & treachery.

(Photo is screen shot of Eisenhower from 1961 valedictory speech)

Slouching toward Armaggeddon

This poem by Irish poet W. B. Yeats was written in 1919 using Christian Apocalypse imagery as an allegory for post-WWI Europe. It resonates powerfully today.
*********

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Refugee debacle continues in Greece

Afghan immigrants in Greece (REUTERS:Alkis Konstantinidis) Apr 1 2016

This woman with her infant is an Afghan refugee at a protest in Athens, Greece against the closures of borders across the Balkans. Afghans make up over 20 percent of refugees on the Turkey to Greece route but in an arbitrary decision the EU is excluding them from asylum. The EU is improvising its treacheries as it goes along, with Merkel & other officials running around like chickens without their heads, bribing, cajoling, threatening.

The EU uses the false distinction between war refugees & economic refugees to deny tens of thousand asylum. Since Afghans have been subject to war & foreign occupation for 40 years there is no legitimacy, even by EU illegal & immoral standards, to denying them asylum.

Of course, at this time, the borders are sealed up tighter than a drum to all refugees & they are being subjected to inhumane living conditions in Greece. Afghans are put in concentration camp conditions so squalid that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) withdrew so as not to be implicated in the barbarism. The UN refugee agency also withdrew mostly so they can turn a blind eye to what the EU is doing.

Greece has long had an active immigration rights coalition that monitors anti-immigrant violence & legislation. Some of the activists are at this protest in Athens. But the frequent protests both in Athens & at Idomeni near the Macedonian border appear to be driven largely by refugees themselves demanding “We are humans & we have rights. This is why we are here today & we will keep protesting until the borders open.”

A video from media showed an aggressive confrontation between riot police & refugees at the border & said some refugees stepped in to to protect the police from angry protesters. Let’s get real. They stepped in to make sure the unarmed, hungry, exhausted, frantic refugees didn’t get their asses kicked by well-fed soldiers in battle gear.

The EU & Greece will soon attempt to forcibly remove refugees & given the deplorable level of organization for processing, will likely skip the civilities of international law & herd them like cattle for transport back to Turkey.

There needs to be massive international political work done in solidarity–from forums to protest rallies at embassies. Refugees have become scapegoats, with officials drawing from the cesspools of Islamophobia for justification. That is the historic role refugees have been consigned under capitalism which has led to the most backward & racist policies in all countries affected. One example in the US is the reactionary drug laws which target primarily Black youth. They were formulated as a form of social control almost entirely in campaigns against Mexican & Chinese immigrants as well as against Blacks immigrating from US southern states to the north. If we do not actively stand with them, we’re all going down together.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

(Photo by Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)