The White House Objects

Angry at having to make
his own lunch, Florida man
pistol whips his father.

Israel has announced it will build 700 new apartments in East Jerusalem. The White House objects. Get that, the White House objects (hahahahahaha). So who cares if the White House objects? Certainly not the Israelis, who always do as they please, while the U.S. meekly goes along with whatever it is they wish. The Israelis are also in the process of seizing more Palestinian land in the West Bank to build a sewage facility for a village that was illegally constructed in the first place. And, if I understand it correctly, they have also recently budgeted more money for more illegal settlements elsewhere. They are also suspected of authoring a forged documents accusing Iran of experimenting with some kind of nuclear process related to bomb making. Of course they have been lobbying for months, maybe years, for the U.S. to attack Iran for them.

You see, there are special rules for Israel. Unlike most other nations they are not required to pay any attention whatsoever to U.N. sanctions, rules, laws, or whatever. Israel has ignored and broken more U.N. strictures than probably all other nations on earth put together, and no one, absolutely no one, does anything about it. How does a little country like Israel get away with so many things like murder, kidnappings, assassinations, assorted war crimes, and other repeated violations of international law (to say nothing of morality and common decency)? It is entirely because they can count on the backing of the U.S. no matter how flagrant the violations or murderous the intent. The truth of the matter is, on the international scene, Israel and the U.S. are the true rogue nations. The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is shameful beyond belief, and the U.S. involvement is even more shameless by being so hypocritical. Any recent U.S. President could have rectified this terrible situation, but none have chosen to do so, and it appears that Obama is not going to be an exception.

Israel has herded somewhere around a million and a half Palestinians into the tiny Gaza strip where they are being systematically denied supplies of most kinds and are slowly being killed by Israeli assassinations, bombings, hunger and disease. The only life line the people of Hamas have are tunnels that allow things to be smuggled in from Egypt, tunnels that are destroyed by the Israelis whenever they find one. Now Egypt is building a wall (with U.S. funding), with a foundation fifty feet into the ground, to prevent even these supplies from entering. A large contingent of Palestinian sympathizers composed of people from all over the world have been trying to march into Gaza in support of those trapped there and abused, Egyptian forces are preventing them from doing so, no doubt at the behest of Israel and the U.S. What “crimes” did these Palestinians commit to bring on this punishment? They voted for and supported Hamas, the legally elected government of the Palestinians. Surely you remember the democratic elections we forced on the Palestinians, the one in which Hamas surprisingly won fair and square, contrary to Israeli and U.S. wishes, and then were refused any further aid and ignored in favor of Fatah, the side we wished had won, so much for democracy, American and Israeli style. Of course some of the more militant citizens of Gaza occasionally lob homemade rockets into Israel that are mostly harmless, and Israel responds with totally asymmetrical violence. Virtually nothing in the way of supplies are permitted to enter Gaza, either by land or by sea even though the world is aware of the suffering of the people being held there. Would Israel be able to get away with this slow genocide without the aid of the U.S.? I doubt it. Most of the news of this atrocity does not appear in the MSM, who favor news about Sarah Palin and disgraced beauty queens, car chases, sex scandals, and anything else that will help keep us from hearing about the terrible things being done in our name around the world.

There is a new report out, prepared for General Petraeus, that points out that an Afghan army and police force that can take over and manage Afghanistan is not even close to being realized and won’t be probably for several years. As this is supposedly our main objective now in that war-torn land, it would seem we are doomed to fail. I don’t want to claim any particular expertise on this matter but I have been saying this for a long time, and anyone with half a brain would have known this was not going to be a success. This idea was a no-brainer from the beginning, just another old-fashioned colonial attempt to force our ways on others who neither want nor need them. In its simplest form this is like invading a society and demanding to be taken to their chiefs, not believing there could be a society without chiefs, and then, learning there are none, arbitrarily appointing chiefs and expecting people to accept them as their leaders. Afghanistan is a tribal and clan-based society. People do not feel allegiance to the nation, but to their own clan or tribe. If soldiers and policemen can be trained at all (they are mostly illiterate to begin with) they are not going to police or fight against their own. They will do precisely what the Afghans are doing, joining together to fight outsiders, when the outsiders leave they will go back to feuding with each other, forming alliances and changing enemies as needed. They do not understand democracy, didn’t ask for it, don’t want it, and will not have it imposed on them by outsiders. It is really quite simple, just look at how widely Karzai is accepted by the people of Afghanistan. Hundreds of years of colonial adventures have taught us nothing.

The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the Regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

From Rudyard Kipling