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A Letter To Janet About Sabra-Shatilla
By Franklin Lamb
Dr. Franklin Lamb is an American who has dedicated the best years of his life and more to the service of Palestinians. This is a letter to his wife Janet, that was published in Counterpunch, on the anniversary of the Sabra & Shatila Massacre, on Sept. 14, 2007 Today is the anniversary of the US Embassy Bombing in Beirut.. A very sad day for Mr. Lamb. Please let him know that you have read his story. fplamb@gmail.com .
Dearest Janet,
It's a very beautiful fall day here in Beirut today. Twenty-five years ago this week since the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra-Shatilla. Bright blue sky and a fall breeze. It actually rained last night. Enough to clean out some of the humidity and dust. Fortunately not enough to make the usual rain created swamp of sewage and filth on Rue Sabra, or flood the grassless burial ground of the mass grave (the camp residents named it Martyrs Square, one of several so named memorials now in Lebanon) where you once told me that on Sunday September 19, 1982, you watched, sickened, as families and Red Crescent workers created a subterranean mountain of butchered and bullet-riddled victims from those 48 hours of slaughter. Some of the bodies had limbs and heads chopped off, some boys castrated, Christian crosses carved into some of the bodies.
SYMBOLIC IDENTIFIERS AND JEWISH STEREOTYPES
BY GILAD ATZMON
Jews are usually proud to define themselves as Jews. Some Jews may, for instance, proudly carry the Jewish banner (Jews for Peace, Jews for Justice, Jews for Jesus and so on) as if they believe that the ‘J’ word contains special righteous attributions. However, they also will be gravely offended if they are called a ‘Jew’ by others. Suggesting to a Jew that “he is a Jew” or “behaves like a Jew” can be regarded as a serious ‘racist’ offence.
It is linguistically noticeable that the symbolic identifier ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ operates as both noun and as an adjective. As much as the term points to a ‘thing’ it is also descriptive. However, I assume that symbolic identifiers associated with ideological and identity politics tend to function in a dual grammatical mode. The words ‘feminist’, ‘socialist’, ‘Nazi’ and ‘white supremacist’ can point to a human subject but they can also be descriptive. I guess, for instance, that a feminist who proudly carries the feminist flag may also accept that being called ‘a feminist’ will also assign some particular characteristics and ideological beliefs. Crucially, we also accept that being a feminist, a socialist, a Nazi or a white supremacist are matters of political choice. People are not bornfeminists or as socialists. They adopt those ideologies or identities later in life.
Numerian: The Goldman Sachs Credo - So What if We Lie? It's Nothing Personal, It's Just Business
by Numerian posted by Michael Collins
Reading the SEC allegations against Goldman Sachs and Co., you get the impression the agency would prefer a simple world where you could charge a company with lying and be done with it. Lying to one’s clients is at the core of the suit against Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately there is apparently no law against lying in phone conversations and meetings, but there are laws against fraudulent written representations, and this is the legal foundation on which the SEC is basing its suit.
The meaty stuff in the SEC complaint is to be found in the behavior of Goldman Sachs and its employee who structured the transaction known as ABACUS 2007-AC1. Fabrice Tourre, now age 31, was a vice president on the structured product correlation trading desk. He put together the ABACUS deals and is said in the complaint to have left out pertinent information, or lied altogether, to the firm that helped set up the ABACUS deal and make it sellable to investors. No other Goldman Sachs employee is identified in the suit, and the management on the trading desk or in his department are described only in shadowy terms.
Goldman’s response this week to the suit says that they will defend themselves vigorously (and no doubt with many millions of dollars of legal expense), so they are not throwing Mr. Tourre to the wolves as some rogue trader. This would have been the logical thing to do since the allegations against Mr. Tourre are especially damaging. By embracing and defending him so readily, we therefore have to assume Mr. Tourre’s behavior is emblematic of the Goldman Sachs culture, and how he comported himself is how many others behaved at the firm. This in itself is very revealing about Goldman Sachs and its management.
Global Peace and Justice Groups Threaten Israel's Legitimacy
by Stephen Lendman
Working pro bono for Israeli government agencies, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute (RI) provides "real-time strategic decision-making" support in areas of national security and socioeconomic policy.
Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried.
The Right Wing is 'Trawling for Assassins'!
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Radical right wingers --tea baggers et al --are accused of 'trawling for assassins. It's but one of several outrages now associated with the disingenuous, bigoted 'tea bagger movement'. The idea of 'assassinating' a President because he is both black and Democratic threatens to finish off America as a nation of noble ideals. Earlier the self-absorbed right wing --thinking themselves rich --allowed themselves to be used by a GOP party machine. They were fooled. To them, I say that like the rest of us, you have awakened as a cockroach unless you were one already. A nation in which about one half of the population openly pines for the murder of the only fairly elected president in some 9 years may be finished. It's hard to see any redemption following from that crooked, malevolent mentality. The writing is on the wall. The American ideals most us grew up with are on life-support! It was all by design and began with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan about whom GOP-types swooned: "He made us feel good about ourselves!"
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Not only have the Wall Street Journal and the hosts of Fox News been issuing their usual dark mutterings, but a new slogan has began appearing on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and even teddy bears: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."That psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."Maddow seemed mainly amused by the teddy bears, but when she turned for comment to former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, he emphasized that in a religious context "it means something more threatening.""The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now," Schaeffer explained, "is that you have a ramping up of biblical language ... and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama ... as 'not us.' ... Now he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel ... who should be slaughtered, if not by God then by just men."--Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’
Israel’s stooges battle for British votes
Stuart Littlewood
We can already see how disastrously the US election turned out, not just for Americans but the rest of us also. “The US president is simply the voice of the Zionist parasite,” writes a friend in Norway. “It is sickening and frightening that Obama is seen toeing the Zionist line.
“Zionism has the US administration and other western governments by the balls.”
Well, that’s certainly the way it looks. Last month Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu slapped America in the face by approving more illegal settlements during vice-president Joe Biden’s visit. What did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do? She repeated the pathetic mantra: “We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people”.
The Anatomy of Authentic Leadership
Written by Frederick Alexander Meade
In recent weeks, considerable turmoil has emerged among some elite members of the Civil Rights community.
Publicly aired expressions germinating from PBS’s Tavis Smiley and the National Action Network’s President Rev. Al Sharpton, in which both parties have accused the other of working against the interests of the African-American community in an effort to garner favor from members of the political class - Former President Bill Clinton in relation to Smiley and the current Head of State Barack Obama with respect to Sharpton - have created a stir within many African-American quarters.
Deja Vu: Vanunu, Kamm, Blau and the Fragility of Freedom
eileen fleming
On April 14, 2010, Mordechai Vanunu reported from occupied east Jerusalem, "The restrictions, not to leave the country for one more year renewed. Now 7 years since my release AFTER 18 YEARS in Israel PRISON."
Twenty-four years after the Mossad kidnapped Mordechai Vanunu from Rome after luring him from London, they have returned to track down another who followed his conscience but has been labeled a traitor by the state and a public who view truth tellers as a threat to their sense of security.
Accelerating Fascism in Israel
by Stephen Lendman
Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arabs never had rights in a state affording them solely to Jews. Now even they're at risk as democratic freedoms fast erode on their way to extinction; to wit, free expression, a right without which all others are endangered. It includes free speech, a free press, freedom of thought, culture, intellectual inquiry, and the right to challenge government authority peacefully, especially in times of war and cases of injustice, lawlessness, incompetence, and abuses of power. Israel has no constitution or specific laws guaranteeing equality or free expression. Yet its Basic Laws protect human dignity and liberty as fundamental democratic values, more rhetoric than fact given its persecution of journalist Anat Kam and Haaretz's national security reporter Uri Blau.
PHILIPPINES: Arrests, Torture and the Presidential Election
James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya
The run-up to presidential elections is a time of heightened state-sponsored repression as Asia’s foremost ‘death squad democracy’ wages war on its progressive rural medical workers.
The notoriously violent and corrupt elections in the Philippines stand in sharp contrast with those in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, where the ruling elites have secured their hegemony via economic prosperity, rising salaries, increased employment and extensive social services for their citizens. In these countries, the elite can abide by the results of a relatively ‘open’ election, whereas in the Philippines, any challenge to the closed, family-based ruling class is met with relentless terror.
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