Letters to the Editor
aVulcan
Published Letters: 161
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Democrats Need to Understand the Republican Strategy
[Read the article: Democrats strike up the show]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Given that fear is one of the most powerful human emotions, and given that Rudy Giuliani, and likely other republican contenders, plan on exploiting it to the maximum possible extent http://counterpunch.com/lamb04262007.html, the Democrats will face a difficult race to the White House.
Democrats need to articulate a vision based on hope and on exposing the kind of extreme fear mongering the Republicans are engaging in. They also need to break out of the control the Israel Lobby and have a made-in-America Middle East policy (easier said than done).
"The fact that AIPAC, which is ranked as the second-most powerful lobby in the country (trailing only AARP, but ahead of the NRA) virtually dictates U.S. policy in the Mideast has long been one of those surreal facts of Washington life that politicians discuss only when they get near retirement -- if then. In 2004, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings had the bad taste to reveal this inconvenient truth when he said, "You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here." Michael Massing, who has done exemplary reporting on AIPAC for the New York Review of Books, quoted a congressional staffer as saying, "We can count on well over half the House -- 250 to 300 members -- to do reflexively whatever AIPAC wants." In unguarded moments, even top AIPAC figures have confirmed such claims. The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg quoted Steven Rosen, AIPAC's former foreign-policy director who is now awaiting trial on charges of passing top-secret Pentagon information to Israel, as saying, "You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.""
- Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/03/20/aipac/index.html
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Realname, typical Zionist Response...
[Read the article: The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lots of hot air, insinuations and attempts to smear (using the tired anti-Semitism charge) any one who criticizes the brutality of Israel toward the Palestinians.
Rather than responding to your silly charges and attempts to change the subject, I have these questions for you:
1) Did Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their towns and villages to make room for European Jews? (hint: most of Israel's founders said this. I have plenty of quotes for you if you are interested)
2) Does Israel impose a total closure (i.e. completely prevent millions of Palestinians from moving between their enclaves which are surrounded by "for-Jews-only" roads) whenever Israelis have a holiday?
You know - even though you may not admit it - that the answer to both questions is yes. If so, I don't think you should be pround of Israel until it faces up to what it did - and still doing - to the Palestinians like South Africa had to do.
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Realname a Judenrein Palestine is not the Answer...
[Read the article: The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That would be racist and anti-Semitic. In any case, it is no longer feasible because the Israeli settlement colonies are all over the West Bank and cannot be rolled back. These colonies, as former president Carter pointed out, are connected by "for-jews-only" roads that Palestinians are not allowed to use or even cross, effectively trapping them in disconnected enclaves (read prisons).
You defend these Israeli policies and accuse anyone who opposes them of being an anti-Semite or a terrorist! What does that make you?
The solution is for Israel to give the Palestinians full citizenship rights including the basic human right to freedom of movement (including the right to use the "for jews-only" roads) and the right to vote. If this makes me an anti-Semite in your eyes then that is your problem!
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Riverbend , I don't know what to say...
[Read the article: Goodbye, Baghdad]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I cannot help but cry when I think of your perilous journey. May God watch over you and your family.
May the monsters who brought your people this war rot in hell!
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The problem with Giuliani's Analysis
[Read the article: A new low for Giuliani]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem with Giuliani and the Republicans is that they simply don't have even the most basic understanding of the history and politics of the Middle East. This ignorance, combined with the obvious vote-getting power of fear mongering, have made them buy wholeheartedly into the discredited world view of the neocons and the Israel Lobby. According to this world view, Israel's adversaries (Saddam Hussein, PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) should be linked to 9/11 and lumped together with Alqaida.
Alqaida is a violent extremists group on the fringes of Wahabist Islam, an orthodox form of Islam which is dominant in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and now, thanks to the Iraq war, in Western Iraq. The invasion of Iraq, rather than weakening Alqaida, has greatly strengthened it because it it created the kind of chaos that extremist movements strive on. It also turned America into a reckless aggressor in the eyes of many in the Arab and Muslim world.
"Giuliani also charged that America had been naive about terrorism in the past and had missed obvious signals. "They were at war with us before we realized it, going back to '90s with all the Americans killed by the PLO and Hezbollah and Hamas," he said. "They came here and killed us in 1993 [with the first attack on New York's World Trade Center, in which six people died], and we didn't get it. We didn't get it that this was a war. Then Sept. 11, 2001, happened, and we got it." The crowd cheered wildly.
Giuliani was not about to reveal to his audience that none of these groups had anything to do with 9/11. Or that right after the attack one of the first to condemn it in very strong language was Hezbollah's Secretary General Hasan Nassrallah, an adversary of Osama bin Laden who claims Shia Hezbollah are not even Muslims...."
- http://counterpunch.com/lamb04262007.html