Bruce with a Canon: "Care to fill us in on WHY Obama 3wants to sell F16 state if the art jets to MUSLIM RADICALS in Egypt? BILLIONS of US taxpayer dollars to people that want the destruction of Israel?"
He writes this with a note of triumph; he has now really told off one of the "libs." The comment astonished me, because the US has an annual commitment of military aid to two nations in the aftermath of the Camp David Accords of 1978. Israel was to receive $3 billion annually, and Egypt $1 billion. The money has flowed as promised to Egypt, but in far greater excess to Israel, for while Egypt receives its annual dole, Israel averages more than three times that much every year on various supplemental pretexts, such as funding for counter-terrorism and whatever else Congress can justify.
I therefore decided to look into the matter. It should come as no surprise that the noxious shadow of Fixed News emerged. The April 11, 2013 edition of FixedNews.com did what so many of their stories do; they deceive. In this story the deception is done through selective use of quotes juxtaposed against the voice of the anonymous writer. The military agreement between the US and Egypt is treated as questionable, because it is communicated in a quote from a State Department official, not as a narrated statement of fact. The purpose of this is to lead the reader to concluce that since Fixed News is always exposing the Obama administration for its lies, this is probably another executive official lying. There is no confirmation from the writer that indeed, via the supplemental agreements to Camp David, the US had indeed undertaken exactly this kind of aid to Egypt.
The very next statement after the quote from the State Department official is But some security experts say that aid to Egypt will simply prop up a bad regime... The he said, she said tactic achieves enough misdirection to suggest that a 35 year old military aid commitment to Egypt is a new initiative under Obama. In fact, Obama, the business as usual president, painted as a leftist radical by right wing news services, is faithfully assuring that Israel retains vast military superiority over the combined power of all its potential adversaries. Inadvertently, as most liars and deceivers do, Fixed News tells on itself by disclosing that the military shipments included Abrams M1A1 man battle tanks. The current update is the M1A2, the kind the US Army and the IDF have. It is abundantly obvious that Bruce with a Canon has fallen for the propaganda, and without doubt so have a vast majority of others, whose exclusive source of information is Fixed News and Rush Limbaugh.
Another important point about Bruces post is unexamined abhorrence at the thought is destroying Israel. Assistance to Israel is axiomatic for government officials, because AIPAC -thats American Israeli Political Action Committee, Bruce- ends the political careers of those who question Israeli conduct. That is what happened to George Bush I in the summer of 1992, when he suspended a $10 billion guaranteed loan (read gift, as in Lend/Lease) to Israel because the Chosen People were busily and illegally building Jewish settlements on land stolen from West Bank Palestinians. The media informed us that Bush, who had been a brilliant campaigner during his first tilt at the presidency, was now out of touch. As election day loomed nearer, Bush did what all successful politicians do; he caved in to the lawless demands of Israel by allowing the loans to go through unqualified. Suddenly he became a brilliant campaigner again and made up a huge deficit, but not enough to beat Bill Clinton. Losing an election after being hailed as the heroic victor of the First Gulf War was a first of its kind achievement for a US chief executive; an achievement which was greatly abetted by his attempt to force Israel to respect an iota of Palestinian rights. Note that Bush was not demanding the return of stolen lands; only that no additional lands are stolen.
The strategic and moral alliance with Israel is solely based on blackmailing of American politicians to support the most violently colonial and oppressive nation still in existence. The US gains absolutely nothing strategically, economically, or morally from supporting Israel, but violates major aspects of international law, and jeopardizes its relationship with key Middle East oil nations. Israel was founded on abject dispossession of the natives by a foreign invader and expanded on additional disregard for international law. Its oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians is the most flagrant of its kind in the world since the demise of the apartheid system in South Africa.
When UN Resolution 181 created Israel the Jews were a minority even on the sector reserved for them. This violates just about all the democratic principles of international law, including the major principles of the Fourteen Points, the UN Charter, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, including self determination, popular sovereignty, and the right of a people of a language and culture to live under a government run by their own people, as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention. The fundamental question about Israel is by what right did the US bully and bribe most of the 53 members of the UN into creating a minority-rule racist Jewish state over an Islamic majority? Israeli existence as a Jewish state has no legitimate basis in law; it exists solely as fait accompli.
The Jewish majority was created through deliberate ethnic cleansing policies ordered by David Ben Gurion. Israel denied this throughout its existence with the absurd insistence that the 750,000 Arabs who fled from their homes did so to create a free fire zone for invading Arab armies during the 1948 War of Independence, but in the last two decades Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris, working with available sources from the period, have proved beyond doubt that ethnic cleansing was a deliberate policy by which to create a Jewish majority in Israel. The tactics were as deplorable in execution as they are in principle. Gangs of Israeli terrorist thugs simply machine gunned the defenseless civilian population of several communities, such as Deir Yassin, and warned the others that they would suffer the same fate if they did not evacuate.
After the War UN Resolution 194 decreed that the refugees were to be either readmitted to their homes or justly compensated. Israel flatly refused to do this, even though compliance with UN directives was a condition for its membership in the world organization. Instead, with the Vacant Property laws stole all of the lands from which it had driven off the rightful owners. At the same time, however, Israel also passed a Right to Return law, but it perplexingly applied to Jews from anywhere in the world, not to those who had been brutally driven from their property. Thus, in Israel the rightful owners and natives could not return, while people from continents away who had never lived on the land and whose distant ancestors had not lived in the Levant for almost 2,000 years, could return.
The current problems with the occupied territories have to do with blatant Israeli violation of UN Resolution 242 of 1967 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which enjoin Israel and all other nations to vacate territories taken by force. The US is a signatory to UN Resolutions 181, 194, and 242, as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention, but since 1967 has supported lawless Israeli foreign policy with at least $100 billion and all the diplomatic and political clout available. The US has made Israel one of the greatest military powers of the world, subsidized construction of over half a million Jewish settlements on the meager 22% of former Palestinian lands that remained in the rightful owners hands after 1967, and held the rest of the world at bay by using its veto power in the Security Council of the UN 53 times when the rest of the world demanded some sort of fairness for the Palestinians.
The result of having such a powerful patron is a free hand for Israeli foreign policy to be dictated not by any legal principles, but by virtue of its power. In 1981 Israel illegally annexed the Golan Heights it had taken from Syria. In a drive to recreate Eretz Yisrael, the greatest extent of Hebrew hegemony, Israel has been hammering away piece meal on the West Bank, determined to recover control over any area where for however brief a period of time, either of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms ever had political away. Besides the 500,000 Jewish settlers on Arab lands, two successive long-term mayors of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, and Ehud Olmert, cleaned East Jerusalem of its Arab majority. The tactics were refusal to grant permits for any necessary maintenance or expansion on any Arab structures, followed by vicious demolition of those that had been illegally altered.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a clinic in oppression and dispossession. Home demolitions are common. So are detentions without any due process. The offenses vary from actual terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens to throwing stones at Israeli armored vehicles, to nothing at all, to trying to assist a Palestinian shot by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). At any moment no fewer than 10,000 Arabs are held in Israeli prisons without any due process, including use of evidence, or even formal charges. Torture is common. Israel also has assured the Bantustanesque fragmentation of Palestinian lands to the point that precludes formation of a viable state or a healthy economy. The West Bank is dissected by Jews only access roads to the illegal settlements that cripple Palestinian transportation. Additionally, internal checkpoints squat far from the Israeli border, where instead of serving a security purpose, they harass and impoverish the Palestinians. All passengers and cargo are unloaded as Israeli soldiers supervise. The lines are miles long and the time it takes to get through them runs into hours going and coming from most destinations. If one of the vehicles is an ambulance carrying a critically ill or injured person; too bad. They just get to die, instead of being allowed through, depending on the whim of the soldiers that day. Israel also maintains a constant blockade that prevents many Palestinians from having necessary food and medicine, and usually bombs the Palestinian power plants during the 100 degree heat of August. As a result large numbers die unecesarily.
In the United States it is rare for mainstream media to treat the Middle East violence as one of dual responsibility. The reported narrative is always the tale of Palestinian terrorist strikes followed by Israeli retaliation, and the hand wringing refrain repeated constantly by politicians and pundits alike, that Israel has the right to defend itself. The pattern is transparently deceptive, at best. The mortality rates from ordnance are no lower than five Palestinians to one Israeli. Moreover, the official figures do not count the far more Palestinians killed by other Israeli policies, such as bombing of Palestinian power plants, and the blockade depriving people of necessary nutrition and medicine. If the Israeli officials really knew within an hour who was responsible for every act of terrorism against them, then why didnt they arrest the senior terrorist they always identify as the culprit? Instead they conduct a targeted killing, which is actually a sloppy Mafia style assassination of an accused man and collateral murder of half the neighborhood. Since Israel already holds without due process no fewer than 10,000 Arabs, why doesnt this light unto nations arrest the accused and present the evidence against him for all the world to see? In most cases it is because there is no evidence of anything other than targeted killings that are not so surgical administration of collective punishment, which is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In fact, there is no qualitative equality between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli institutional terrorism. The relatively ineffectual Palestinian strikes are but a feeble retaliatory and defensive attempt to drive up the cost of occupation, and almost always provoked by targeted killings and other Israeli atrocities that preceded it, but went unreported in the American media. The Israeli targeted killings are often nothing but an opportunity to wipe out the most dangerous senior terrorist, a Palestinian Martin Luther King, and retaliatory collective punishment in flagrant disregard of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In fact, the very existence of Israel in its present form is an act of neocolonial violence against the Palestinian people, and so is the continued illegal occupation of the West Bank and military dominance of Gaza.
The destruction of Israel is a near mantra criticism for what the Arabs want; proverbially to throw them back into the sea. This is hyperbole that prevents a rational solution to the existence of the most irrational state in existence. South Africa did not have to kill its oppressive white minority to end apartheid, and no Jews have to be killed to end the Israeli Apartheid that keeps its millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories like so many modern day Helots. Israel must be reconstituted, just like South Africa was. There can be no two-state solution, because Israel has gobbled up too much land, irreparably disrupted, and otherwise hamstrung the sector that would be Palestine. With the access roads, the settlements, the security fence and constant Israeli violation of Palestinian air space there can be no viable Palestinian state. It is time to recognize that Israel has created a single political entity out of the former Palestine excluding Jordan, but that the 1.75 million residents of the West Bank and the 1.65 million people of Gaza are as stateless as were the Helot residents of ancient Sparta, while the 1.35 million Israeli Muslims are second class citizens. The entirety should be recognized as single country with full political and religious rights for all its citizens, whether they are of European white ancestry or Arabs, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. The new Israel cannot be a Jewish state, but a state for all its citizens.
Bruce with a Canon: "Care to fill us in on WH... (
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