- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
as so many of the writers went ice-skating. The grisly Guantanamo manifestation of American "justice" is a suppurating sore but people want to play word-games about Existentialism - and I refuse to call it Gitmo as that's what it's called by your security services.
It is an American problem but, from what I read on this thread, Americans don't want to deal with it. Obama is trying to hide this malignancy somewhere in Europe - it doesn't seem to matter where once it's out of sight. If those due for release are no threat to America's security, there's no convinving reason to refuse them re-location to the American mainland. They didn't seek to go to a Caribbean island thousands of miles away any more than the African slaves brought into the colonies of British North America. If they are perceived as a threat why wouldn't they be a theat in Europe where both the Madrid and London transport systems have already been attacked by bombers? I waited to see if any solution was being offered by AMERICANS but shoes and Sartre don't really cut it.
Alan Dershowitz was on BBC 2 last evening trying to convince a British audience that Israel's continuing and monstrous attack on Gaza is perfectly valid; he knows about "human shields" being used by Hamas etc. etc. and it was almost word for word in the casuistry of the extreme Zionists who've been trying to brow-beat Glenn Greenwald on the inferno that's now the Gaza Ghetto. British Jews, many of them very eminent, have deplored the blitzkreig in Gaza and are not on the raucous scale of American Zionists. Dershowitz is a lying toad, an ugly man in every aspect but had gone on British television to persuade an audience of the superiority of his views. I first became aware of this man's existence during the OJ Simpson trial. I didn't like him then and I despise him now. Of course, he's never been to Gaza any more than Condoleeza Rice or Tony Blair have been but Dershowitz believes he can speak with absolute authority on the matter as he is arrogance on legs.
Will Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East be different from Bush's? The opinion of those who should know, such as a former British ambassadoe to Washington, is that there will be a change in style but not in substance; the view of an Oxford professor of Jewish history, and a former member of the IDF, is that nothing will change until the American public will demand a more equable approach. This elderly professor was deeply upset about what Israel is doing in Gaza and fears the consequences. Maybe he uses the London Underground (subway).
Oxford/Cambridge professors aren't regarded with the same dererence as people of similar rank in Aamerica, there's far less fawning and the salary is not so high. It somehow seems appropriate that peasant is on the menu for the inauguration ball. Of course, the peasants are revolting but maybe not as revolting as a game bird that is hung for some days or weeks until it's sufficently "ripe" before being cooked. All those lamenting the fate of the moose might now take pity on the pheasant but I really don't expect that to happen. The target was bigger.
At a time when bubonic plague was ravaging Europe, the Venetians organised masked balls, the so-called "danse macabre" so that the inauguration ball in Washington D.C will have historical resonance.
