In Search for Truth

We Germans and Our Collective Vicarious Guilt-complex

2007-03-28T19:30:00.002+02:00

Last year the Iranian president Mahmood Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to our chancellor Ms Merkel. He wrote that the German people should regain their national pride and no longer allow others to make them feel guilty for something that happened more than 60 years ago.
Many Americans tell us Germans, when we mention the historical obligations being put on us because of the "Holocaust", that we should get over this collective guilt feeling.

The Iranian president and everybody else who tries to help us to overcome our
"guilt-feelings" does not understand our collective German soul.
Not at all.

We revel in our "Holocaust-guilt". We enjoy it, we love it. It´s our shield and our protection.

Because you see, our "Holocaust-guilt-feelings" are no real guilt-feelings at all.
We do not feel guilty. How can we? The events occurred more than 60 years ago.
It´s a vicarious guilt-complex.

By taking upon us the "Holocaust-guilt", we just point the finger at our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
And now we can freely feel good about ourselves.

We are righteous, because now support the state of Israel, Jewish state, unconditionally, even with nuclear capable submarines.
When Israelis commits war-crimes against Palestinians, Egyptians and Lebanese, while we partly finance and arm them, we do not have to feel guilty, because our "Holocaust-guilt" gives us historical obligations.

When we reprint cartoons demonizing all Muslims as terrorists and denigrating their religion all over the German media-landscape, we do not have to feel guilty, because we do not demonize Jews as the Nazi propaganda paper "der Stürmer" did.
When we print day, after day, after day anti-Muslim articles or show anti-Muslim news-coverage, we do not have to feel guilty, a little bit of racism is nothing to worry about, as long as the desecrated victims are not Jewish.

When we ban religious Muslimas to work as teachers in Germany and some parts even ban them from working in any public offices, we are still very good and ethical people, because we are no anti-Semites.
Those Muslimas, we say, would give their students or the public they come in contact with, a bad example.
And yes, how dare a Muslima pursuit a higher education and get a desk job or even become a teacher. What a bad example for Muslim girls.
We Germans need those Muslimas to scrub the floors of the schools, vacuum the carpets in public offices and scrub the toilets. Hijab is in Germany the common uniform for the cleaning brigades.

We have nothing against a small, tiny nuclear attack on Iran.
Evaporating a few thousands and burning some hundred thousands alive, because we don´t like their government, we don´t see as a problem, for we are so morally upstanding people, that we throw "Holocaust-deniers" in jail for years.

Right after WWII, what happened during this war, was more or less a taboo-subject for most Germans. It was not before the post-war generation had come to maturity and some of them into powerful positions and we could point our fingers at an earlier generation, that the "Holocaust" became a public matter of attention.

The money we pay now in cpmpensations is sctually small change for the pay-offs we derrive from this pseudo-"collective guilt-trip".

Now the past, we cannot really feel guilty about, is our shield against what we actually should feel guilty about in the present.
"The Holocaust" is for us present-day Germans such a convenient excuse for our own moral and ethical cowardice and a cover-up for our modern-day racism, that if it hadn´t happened, it would have needed to be invented.

Peak Oil, an Imperial Hoax

2007-02-07T05:05:00.000+01:00

From the very beginning the 9/11 truth movement has been infiltrated by "Peak Oil" ideologists (or desinformers). They claim, that the false-flag attack of 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanisthan, Iraq and the possibly upcoming one in Iran, are the natural consequences of a world running out of oil.

"Peak Oilers" do not offer any hope in alternative energy sources,for as Michael Ruppert claims in "From the Wilderness":
"there is no effective replacement for what hydrocarbon energy provides today."

Instead they paint bleak doomsday scenarios of the future like, when Colin Campbell writes that the consequences of oil depletion will be:

"war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens."

The implication of this is, that if we, the West, want to survive, we need to secure the Middle Eastern oil-reserves for ourselves, otherwise the Chinese or the Indians will get them.
It´s either us or they who will starve.

But once again we have fallen for a "Big Lie".

Read more

Operation Gladio on the Internet?

2007-01-30T22:51:00.000+01:00

A few years back the German government tried through a court decision to ban the party of the ultra-right nationalists NPD for unconstitutional behavior and terroristic acts committed by party-members.

The court was very thorough, probably a bit too thorough for the taste of the government.
For the court found out, that they just couldn´t ban the NPD, because no less than half of the leadership of the party was on the pay-roll of the Verfassungsschutz (which has similar functions as the undercover units of the FBI).
So the court said, that they could not be sure wich crimes were committed spontaneously and which were instigated by possible agent provocateurs.

You might have heard about "operation gladio". Operation Gladio was some originally kind of left-behind project organized by the CIA. It´s suposed purpose was to function as a sabotage team in case the Soviets would take over western Europe.
Later on however it became a project for false-flag terrorism, whereby those terror acts were blamed on radical left-wing groups.
In Italy this covert CIA project financed in part the ultra-left Red Brigades in terror activities. Sometimes, as in the Bologna train station bombing, they also resorted to right-wing Masonic organisations like the P2 and just build up the Red Brigades as patsies.
In Italy the man organizing these murders was Michael Ledeen.

In Germany the equivalent of the Red Brigades was the Baader Meinhof group, which called itself RAF.

Former Minister Andreas von Bülow wrote, that at least the third generation of the RAF did never exist and the murders of politicians and economic leaders who were opposed to the whole sale slaughter of the east-German economy after the fall of the wall was really a covert ploy by rogue intelligence units.

But some informed people consider even the first generation of the RAF being infiltrated by intelligence units amd agemt provocateurs.
After the leadership was imprisoned, inspite of their solitary confinement, they all commited simultanious suicide - all except one.
He, Horst Mahler, like the others guilty of murder and terrorist acts, sat in for only 8 years.
When he left prison he turned to the ultra-right-wing.
Right now he is busy discrediting the 9/11 truth-movement and holocaust revisionism.
He turns up at 9/11 conferences and whenever anybody of the researchers explains his point, an interview with Horst Mahler is put next to the interview with the researcher, making the point that any 9/11 researcher is best friend and on the same political line as Horst Mahler.

He also shows up at the revisionist Ernst Zündel trial publishing hate-spewing letters against the German republic and the justice system, indirectly even threatening them with mass-murder.

I could be wrong about the connections, but I´m a conspiracy-theorist after all, and therefore I theorize.

The PNAC papers named the internet as one of the battle fields for American "full spectrum domination".
The famous investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has heard about Pentagon plans to fill the internet with false and misleading information.

I made quite a few strange experiences, when I used to post on German message boards just around the time before the beginning of the Iraq war. Although 85% of the German population was totally against this war, just as most other Europeans, the German internet message boards seemed to be filled with pro-war people.
Some of them pretended to be Germans, while their argumentation did not sound like anything we had heard other Germans us before. Others admitted to being American. Some coudl speak little German others could quote German politicians, from 30 or 40 years ago, better than any German I have heard doing, as if they had a big file of quotes. Some of them were extremely rude and aggressiv and ohters ðlayed strange mind-games. They just didn´t act like normal people just sharing their opinion. And they seemed to be online 24/7. It all had a eery feeling to it.
One guy, who had harrassed a highly frequented German message board, after one of his usually rants and personal attacks against any anti-war people, he told us a bit about himself.
True or not true, I don´t know.
He said, he had worked all over the world, was now in Germany tending the graves of American soldiers from WWII.
And he used to work as a plumber.

Well.... maybe he thought, Germans would not understand this kind of inside joke. Or maybe he just liked bragging.
Anyway, even while I was still politically very naive at that time, I had heard about the "plumbers".

So I guess retired "plumbers" now get jobs at monitoring the WWW.

Let´s come to Israel and the Zionists.
As I stated in another post, I think, they have lost the war for the public opinion.
The paper on the Lobby and Carter´s book are only two of the coffin nails. There are many.
However, they don´t think they have lost, but they sure are getting desperate.

Zionist Israel is not only protected by its military might.
Without its defense-wall of propaganda, it could not support this military.

Israel has the economy of maybe Belgium or Denmark. There is no way such an economy could support the fourth biggest military machine in the world.
Without the money from America and Germany, Israel would have been broke a long time ago.
When the propaganda wall is broken, the money-floods will dry out.

So it is not beyond imagination that some sites, with have a readership of a few thousands or a few hundred thousands might be targeted by damage control people.

In Germany American intelligence has definitely employed a crew of them.

What would be the most efficient way to discredit the anti-Zionist movement?

Let´s see, what about unpacking an old Nazi ideology from the trash-chambers of history and attaching it to the anti-Zionist movement?

How to do it best?
Well, one could of course agree with everything the anti-Zionists say about the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians and the instigation of wars against other Muslim nations by the Israel first Neocons.
And then one could blame all those war-crimes and the treason against America on the genetic make-up of the Jewish people.
And yes, I have heard this kind of argumantation quite a lot recently, and it made me think.

Of course, this Nazi ideology, that Jews are genetically doomed to be a parasite people, will scare the heck out of anybody who comes from a Jewish family.
And if this argumentation is used widely in anti-Zionist circles it would prove the Zionists right, that anti-Zionism is just a thin disguise for anti-semitism which is the believe that Jews are bad by nature and need to be contained and isolated, possibly even murdered.

I allways saw it as a bad move to call others names and imply foul play, because even if I think somebodies views are totally wrong, this person might still be sincere in his or her belief.

The trouble however is, that while I might be slightly paranoid here, many Jewish people in Israel and many outside of Israel are far more paranoid than I am.

As many Israeli and other writers with Jewish background have stated: Fear of being physically targeted for mass-murder or even extermination is deeply ingrained in Jewish culture.
This is the reason for Israel´s "Samson option". They actually believe that if
Zionist Israel falls, they as Jews will have no way of survival, so they might as well take the rest of the world with them into oblivion.

So in order to lower this fear, one has to make clear, that there is survival of Jews as individuals and even as Jewish people beyond Zionism.
And not only this, one has to make clear that Zionism per se is actually a danger to Jewish survival as individuals and as a people.

Every person of Jewish background needs to see an open door through wich he or she can leave Zionism into the safe home of the rest of humanity.

When Zionist behavior is made equivalent with Jewish genes, the door is closed.
And we´ve got the Samson option on the table.
Do we really want that?
While between 200 and 600 Israeli nukes, some of them on German gift-wrapped sub-marines, might not kill us all, they sure can give it a good try.

The Israeli leadership is insane.
The financial elitist leadership of world Zionism doesn't care one way or the other as long as the nukes won't hit them personally. They never cared for the well-being of ordinary Jews in the first place ( just look at the behavior of the world Zionist organisations during WWII), or of gentiles for that matter.
It´s all just a game for them.

We really do not need to increase insanity and paranoia at the moment by aiding a few Nazi oildrops into the explosive mixture.

We need some sanity to regain power again, even in Israel.
Yes the sane people there are a minority right now, but they are the most informed and intelligent Jewish Israelis. They might have a chance.

And in America, they do not need some extra racist craziness either. There the 9/11 truth-seekers and the anti-Zionists are the most informed and intelligent minority.
They constitute between 10 and 30 percent of the American nation and have very little political power, but they are the best shot we have for sanity to stop the mad drive into catastrophy for the whole world.

Why Racism is Self-Defeating

2007-01-30T22:01:00.000+01:00

Zionism is a racist ideology that presupposes that Jews cannot live in peace with Gentiles.

Zionism also presupposes that the Jewish people need their own state in wich to live either all alone or have at least different laws, for the Jewish and the gentile population, i.e., the Palestinians.

Neverthelss, despite its racist underpinnings, we should never counter Zionist racism with racist anti-Jewish arguments, that blame the behavior of Zionists on Jewish genes.

Any and all racism is always anti-humanistic and it is also self-defeating in the long run and there are several reasons why:

FIRST: You deprive yourself of allies.

If you insist that your opponent is the way he is because of the genes of his collective group, then you cannot hope for dissidents or whistle-blowers from this group to work with you. Since any dissidents from the same group will have the same genes, they will therefore feel threatened by you.

Similarly, members of other groups will be very wary of you. They can´t be confident that one day you will not also turn on them, for having the wrong kind of genes.

SECOND: Racism against this group will strengthen group cohesion.

People will be too afraid to leave the group and leaving behind the only protection they might have (or at least they think they have) against violent racist attacks from others who might think like you do.

THIRD: Your racism can be used by your opponents as a convenient cover for false flag attacks and hoaxes.

Let´s take France.

After Ariel Sharon called on the French Jews to move to Israel because of a "terrible rise in anti-semitic attacks". Some highly publicized "anti-semitic" attacks happened. In many cases the culprits could not be aprehended, so nobody actually knew who was resposible. In a few cases, however, the police could prove the attacks were self-inflicted, in other words hoaxes.

Another example - in Iraq the Israeli Mossad attacked Jewish synagogues, while at the same time pamphlets with anti-jewish slogans were printed. This stampeded Iraqi Jews into Israel.

FOURTH: Racism can be made into a tool to divide and conquer.

In Rwanda the western Imperialist created an upper class of Africans on "racial" criterias, like a lighter color of skin and more caucasian facial features. This artificial "upper class", the Tutsis, was then used to rule the rest of the indigenous people, the Hutus.

After the end of the colonial rule this Tutsi upper class believed in their own superiority and did not want any democratic rule by the majority Hutu population. The civil war out of this, heavily subsidized by the CIA, resulted in the well known Rwandan genocide, with a million or more victims, both Hutu and Tutsi.

Racism can also divide anti-imperialism movements.

Arguments based on racism will discredit all other arguments made, since they now seem just a thin disguise for replacing one supremacism with another.

There is another aspect worth considering:

While it seems to some people that their racism might be based on sound scientific or historic facts, it is in reality far more based on a very selective reading of facts.

Let´s take the mutilation of womens´breast as war-crimes. They were documented in a book of Soviet atrocoties against the Germans, who were to be driven out of Eastern Europe.

One commentator on this site states that similar atrocities have been committed in ancient history by a "turanic" tribe who might have been distantly related to the Jewish commanders of the Soviet soldiers who commited those crimes.

But are those crimes therefore symptomatic for some genetic trait?

If the author of the book documenting these atrocities was not just the German equivalent of Ilya Ehrenburg (a skilled Soviet propagandist), then it is certainly a fact that terrible war-crimes have been committed against German women.

However, those crimes were not unprecedented and they were not only commited by other "turanic" tribes.

The mutilation and mass-rape of women is a tactic which has been used many times in history in order to terrorize the civilian population in the area which was conquered by invading colonialists to get the population to succumb to the invaders.

Reports from human rights activists who came to villages in Nicaragua after the American trained and financed Contras had attacked them, show very similar accounts of atrocities: Womens´ breasts had been cut off and the bellies especially of pregnant women had been slashed open.

Similar atrocities have been committed by American financed death-squads in El Salvador against local women and against female foreign aid workers.
There was a report about 4 American church women, who had been raped, mutilated and their underwear stuffed into their mouths.

Contra- and other death-squad-commanders have been trained in the "School of the Americas," where they were 'schooled' in the "art" of state-terrorism.

America has become an economic invader into many developing countries in the last century, often accompamied by either covert military acts (death-squads) or open ones, (the army, navy, air-force or the marines)

Fear is the most effective tool that can be used to keep a population from rising up against oppression and injustice.

Deception, like false flag attacks and demonisation of the opponent, is another one.

But one does not have to do the mutilating at close range with a knife.

Nowadays you just drop a bomb or shoot a missile into a civilian area and body parts get detached from women and children, all alive at the moment they are being bombed, some of them even afterwards suffering terrible agony and pain before they finally succumb to their wounds.

This tactic of utmost cruelty towards defenseless victims is NOT unique to a single tribe, nation, ethnicity or group.

Cruelty derives from a cruel philosophy: from the notion that some have the inborn right to dominate others,

Either they think they are better than those others because of their collective genes - a better more deserving race -

Or they think they are individually stronger or more intelligent- a social-darwinist view -

Or they believe that they are even spiritually more deserving - an esoteric view -

But the dehumanisation of others as belonging to a less worth-while ethnic, social or spiritual group as oneself, is what makes these atrocities possible.

These atrocities have happened in history many times before and they are happening right now - and they must be stopped before they kill every last one of us in the process

American Paranoia and the Myth of Invincibility

2007-01-30T21:36:00.000+01:00

Armageddon around the corner, alien abductions, rays from space, shape-shifting reptile like illuminati ruling the world for thousands of years....where did this come from and why is the belief in these strange theories so much a nearly exclusive American phenomena?

There has been the science-fiction craze in popular culture, in books, movies and TV-series.

This culture has been exported to all western countries and even to other parts of the world as well.

But only in America are there a considerable number of people who cannot see the difference between science-fiction fantasy and every day reality.

One reason might also be the psychotherapy craze in America.
People who have lost faith in God, needed some other kind of guidance.
The practices in many psychotherapy sessions are often close to hypnosis or self-induced trance combined with suggestive questioning, which then breaks down the barrier between memories and fantasy.

Psychotherapy is nowhere as wide-spread as in America, but it is still somewhat common in other countries as well. So why the difference?

What comes out of psychotherapy is mostly the belief system that the patient and especially the therapist have put in it in the first place.

So how did these beliefs start?

In all likelihood and with the exception of the Christian Zionist rapture movement, they were not a deliberately created disinformation campaign, as some suggest, rather they are a consequence of the schizophrenic national security politics.

It probably started with the Manhattan Project. After WWII the secrecy and deceptions of it was taken over into other, now cold war, projects.

Military experiments and new technology was now routinely covered up and made into some top secret national security matter. This lead to the first sightings of "UFOs".

When John F. Kennedy was murdered and during the subsequent cover-up by the media, the military deceptions entered into the stage of political schizophrenia. Every informed person was pressured into believing the unbelievable.

Truth had become so twisted, that it seemed no longer to matter at all. It had become totally relative to what the "powers that be" wanted you to believe.

Now combine the culture of deception with the "duck and cover" mentality created in the 60s to enforce paranoid fear of the Soviet Union and then you get, what we have now, a paranoid fear of things that don´t exist and a near inability to confront the real problems and seek reasonable solutions.

Sure there are financial elites with agendas opposed to the common good of most nations. But those elites are neither aliens, nor are they all powerful.

They do have influence within governments and parliaments, bribing and blackmailing everyone they can.

But then, not everybody can be bribed.

They own a lot of media and can influence, hire and fire editors for their compliance or non-compliance.

But still, truth has a habit of coming out through the cracks.

National intelligence organisations are said to be instruments of the ruling financial elites.

And yes they are.

But there are still dissidents, whistle blowers and defectors, who have come forth and become agents of truth and justice.

While the paranoid American mind-set was not deliberatly created by the financial elites, it sure is now used by their agents to spread disinformation and unproven rumors in order to introduce a learned helplessness into the population.

This particualar learned helplessness tells you that whatever powers there are behind the scenes of big politic, they are invincible.

And this is the most egregious deception of them all, a myth created for the mildly paranoid, by the intensely paranoid, to keep the former distracted and helpless against the latter.

Jimmy Carter and Uncle Tom´s Cabin

2007-01-05T23:05:00.000+01:00

I really do like the informed comments of blogger "Xymphora", when he is not busy taking aim at Christians, who he once believed were the main culprits in the sorry state of the world.
In his newest post he explains how extraordinary it is, that the mainline media discusses Jimmy Carter´s book.

Harriet Beecher Carter

The fact that Jimmy Carter is allowed to appear on the mainstream media and mention Israel and apartheid in the same sentence is something of a miracle, and represents a sea change in the representation of Israel in the United States (of course, as I’ve mentioned before, this comparison is unfair . . . to the white South Africans).

Until recently, you’d be more likely to see hard-core porn on the American mainstream media than you would be able to obtain a smidgeon of truth about Israel. Now that the American Establishment – you know, the guys Noam says rule the world – have belatedly awakened to the fact that they are on the verge of losing trillions of dollars due to American official support for the racist tribal policies of the Zionists who run Israel and have taken over the American government, the taboo on truth about Israel has been ordered to be at least partially lifted.

Will Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, become the “Uncle Tom's Cabin” of the Palestinian people? It is commonly acknowledged now that the American Civil War was fought primarily for economic reasons, while justified on the moral grounds of eliminating slavery.

Of course Harriet Beecher Stowe´s book was a romanticized version of the ugly reality of slavery. Black civil right movements today are not overly fond of it.
In the same way is Carter´s book a sanitized version of the reality in Palestine. He expressedly denies, that Israel practices Apartheid even in Israel proper, although we know, that there are several laws discriminating Israeli Arabs besides the institutional discrimination, which exists and is not put into law.

Popular uprisings in the Middle East, caused largely by the control of the American government by Zionists (culminating in the ZOG comprising Bush and the Zionist-controlled Democrats), will cost the American Establishment much of its wealth, making it necessary to solve the Zionist problem by putting Israel in its (small) place and finally granting the Palestinians a state in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip (a square inch less won’t solve the problem).

Justifying the protection of the contents of your wallet by doing the ‘right thing’ will require a new emphasis on the injustice that racist tribal Zionism is doing to the Palestinians, and to Arabs and Muslims generally.

Now you are called a ‘racist’ if you even dare to mention the obvious facts about the ZOG and its horrible effects on Arabs and Muslims around the world (in my view, criticizing anti-Zionists as racists for complaining about Israel and its American supporters is like calling critics of Nazi Germany anti-Aryan; in the long run the true anti-racists will be acknowledged as such, and the casters of aspersions which serve to protect oppressors will be known as the real racists).

It will be interesting to see whether criticisms of Zionism and Israel suddenly become fashionable in American life.

When Zionism is being recognized as what it is, a racist ethnic centric movement, coming from the same roots as the Nazi ideology - and b.t.w even from the same country,Austria - not only Palestine, but also the rest of the world will become a more peaceful place.
Of course it will be only a first step. Other anti-human ideologies must be overcome as well, for a lasting peace among the peoples of the world.

Al Sadr and the Sunni Resistance

2007-01-05T23:04:00.000+01:00

Here is an excerpt from an interesting article from yesterday´s Tehran Times:

New approach toward Al-Sadr Bloc

"The Al-Sadr Bloc, which holds 30 of the 128 UIA seats in the legislature, has boycotted parliamentary sessions in protest at a meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Amman last November. Six ministers from the Al-Sadr Bloc have also refused to attend cabinet sessions.
The Al-Sadr Bloc’s boycott of parliament and cabinet sessions has not helped resolve Iraq’s problems and has even encouraged the Shias’ rivals, led by Hareth al-Zari, Adnan al-Dulaimi, and Saleh al-Mutlak, to gravitate toward the Al-Sadr Bloc in a strategic move meant to divide the UIA.

The fact that the Al-Sadr Bloc and the leaders of the Sunni minority are in consensus that a timetable should be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops put the two camps in a tactical alliance, but the veteran political leaders of the Shia majority repeatedly expressed concern over this unusual relationship.

In order to prevent the Shia majority from forming a government and taking steps toward democracy, some Iraqi Sunni leaders have taken a number of measures, such as organizing a conference in Istanbul to support Iraqi Sunnis and the fatwas on killing Shias issued by 38 Wahhabi leaders.

Thus, the meeting between the seven Shia political parties and Moqtada Sadr was an effective way to help balance the stances of this young Shia cleric, who is also the leader of the Mahdi Army.

Moqtada Sadr, who has a good understanding of the current political situation and the organized plots hatched by certain elements, has said that his supporters will return to parliament and cabinet sessions if a timetable is set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

He also totally rejected the proposals to merge the Mahdi Army with Iraq’s armed forces, saying that would only be possible after the withdrawal of U.S. troops."

So Sadr had a quasi alliance with Sunni resistance leaders and needed to be pressured to get back into the fold of the Shia union. This makes it highly unlikely, that his Mahdi army was involved in the mass-murders of Sunnis.

Sadr still refuses to merge his militia with the Iraqi army, which means his people will not be fighting the Sunni resistance.

Also, interesting is that it was exclusively Wahhabi leaders who wrote those anti-Shia fatwas. Wahhabism is a Saudi-Arabian sect which originally was sponsered by British Colonialism.

Through CIA sponsered religous schools in Pakistan it was exported to Afghanistan. There also was a tiny extremist Wahhabi group in Kurdish Iraq under the leadership of the now deceased Zarqawi. They were in constant bloody conflict with the other Kurds and their facilities were destroyed at the beginning of the American invasion.

While the Afghanistan Wahhabis, the Taliban, are fighting the Americans, some of the Saudi Arabian ones under the Saudi princes are still under American control.

Some might think, that the Saudi princes with their lavish un-islamic life-style have no connection to their country´s state religion. But there is evidence to the contrary.

Wayne Madsen writes in his report from January 3, 2007

about the Saudi drug-smuggling connected to Italian intelligence and Russian oligarchs and the Bush crime family and about one of the main-actors Prince Nayif al Saud:

"According to the DEA Report, Nayif, asked by a DEA informant why he sold drugs, responded that "the world is already doomed and that he has been authorized by God to sell drugs."

In a press interview
(quoted by Rasputin on GNN in "The left Gatekeepers")
another Saudi, Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz,

remembers young Osama floundering when guests questioned him about the interpretation of religious texts.

“Finally, I had to signal with my hands for them to stop it[.]”

So here we have it: Osama bin Laden is an "amateur" in interpreting religious texts, the American allied Saudis are "experts" and according to Prince Nayif, what they believe in are endtime prophesies.

This ties them in quite fine with Christian Zionists, Jewish extremists and some esoteric nut-case religions.

This also ties Wahhabism in with the Straussian neocons, who are themselves secular, but believe that religions are instruments for control used by the rulers ("the wise men") to pit one group against another.

For the Straussians believe that humans are violent by nature and can only be controlled and united when they fight other groups, nations or religions.

How to Start a Civil War

2007-01-05T19:28:00.000+01:00

Few westerners know that about 20% of Iraqi marriages are Sunni-Shia unions.

Just as few know that Saddam´s Baath party had a large membership of Shia as well as Sunnis and even Christians, like the vice minister.

When Saddam distributed weapons to civilians before the war, he gave them to Sunnis and Shia alike.

I watched a documentary on German TV, where a Shia woman from a poor neighbourhood in Bagdad was interviewed. She, a school teacher, wore traditional Shia clothing and in her free time she trained other religious Shia women in the use of fire arms.

At the beginning of the American occupation of Iraq, right after Bush´s "Mission accomplished", I read articles on Moqtada Sadr and his militia, and how admired he was in the poor areas of Iraq across any sectarian borders.

His people were doing the social work and ran clinics. His organisation was seen as non-corrupt similar to Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Even Sunnis had his picture on the wall, especially after he offered to join the resistance in Fallujah.

When the Shia mosque was bombed, it was Sadr who blamed the Americans for it.

It would be very much out of character if it really were Sadr´s militias who were indiscriminately mass-murdering their Sunni neighbours.

According to many Iraqis, while there was a division between Kurds and Arabs in the north of Iraq, there never was a division between Sunnis and Shia before the war.

And although now, the Sadr militias are blamed for the sectarian violence, a few months back there came reports out of Iraq that the violence originated from some Badr brigade units, connected to Ahmed Chalabi, the ex-CIA assassin and neo-con agent responsible for the WMD lies.

In "Crime fighting or Crime Cover-up", the German blogger "Freace" asks if the bombing of the Basra police station really was what we were told in the mainline media.

According to BBC reports, it was apparently the same police building in which last year 2 special unit Brits wearing Arab clothes and driving a car full of explosives had been detained and arrested after they had shot several policemen. The building was then stormed by British troops to free those obviously false flaggers.

This time around, more than a 1000 Brits attacked this one building with only "very few police officers" in it. Then out came those contradicting accounts on the number of prisoners supposedly freed, from 178 to 127 to 76.

Nothing was mentioned as to where the supposedly tortured prisoners were hospitalized, and instead of using the building for other purposes, like a different police unit, it just was blown up.

Could it be that this supposedly rogue police unit was not so rogue after all, but just doing its job in finding evidence and witnesses as to who really is behind the "sectarian violence"?

Whatever the truth is about the Sunni-Shia divide, and the sectarian violence, the only parties profiting from a civil war, are Israel and her Zionist supporters in the west.

The plan to divide Iraq and all the other surrounding countries along sectarian and ethnic lines has been a Zionist dream stated in several policy papers for decades now.

I totally agree with the following editorial from the Institute for Islamic Services:

Execution Video Meant to Cause Shia-Sunni Conflict
"The leaking of the videotape of hanging of Saddam and the dialogue that was exchanged between Saddam’s executioners, handpicked by Americans, and the subsequent planting of stories in mainstream media that Saddam's hanging will be seen by Shia's as a welcome sacrifice on one of the Holiest days of Islam was a deliberate act meant to create a backlash amongst Muslims and a Shia-Sunni conflict in the Muslim world.
Americans have perfected the art of movies in which actors act out the pre-scripted scenarios and dialogues. Scenarios and dialogues which will have a certain impact on the minds of the audience.
Saddam was in American custody from the moment he was caught, his trial was an American trial, and his execution was carried out under American supervision. The puppet Maliki government had no say at all in this and as all puppets do, he had to go along with whatever was dictated by the Americans
The selection of the day of Eid-ul-Adha for hanging, the videoing, the pre-scripted “taunts” by hired hangmen, and the release of the video had the goal of creating a division between Shia and Sunni, and angering the Muslim youth in Europe and elsewhere.
Americans want to get rid of Moqtada Sadr, who stands in their way of delivering Iraq’s oil to the American oil companies, and what a better way to do that then to get the Sunni resistance in Iraq to turn their guns on Moqtada Sadr, rather than fight the Americans. The actors who were given the script to shout “Moqtada, Moqtada” to Saddam during his hanging was to incite Sunni feelings against the Shia. To show that the hanging was an act of Shia vengeance against the Sunni Saddam.
The second reaction that they wanted to achieve was for Muslim youth in Europe and elsewhere to resort to acts of terror. Americans know that Muslim youth is angry and many of them will be outraged and chatter about revenge, which is exactly what the Americans need in their “war on terror”, and to keep Europeans and Americans united in the Crusade against Islam and Muslims.
Muslims must not be stupid and fall into this trap of sectarian violence and acts of revenge."

Israel Refuses Syrian Offer for Peace

2006-12-20T23:15:00.000+01:00

Amoz Oz asks in his commentary in Times online "Why won't the Israelis give peace a chance?". His conclusion is, that Israel is doing America´s bidding in contrast to her own security needs.
Amoz Oz is the same Israeli intellectual, who inspite of being considered by some "the Israeli peace camp incorporated" fully supported the last Israeli war against Lebanon.
Only when it was clear that Israel was loosing, did he start to oppose it.
But Amos Oz is not much different from Uri Avnery, who opposed the war from the start, in his opinion that Israel is only doing the bidding of the United States and not the other way around.
My guess is, that both Oz and Avnery, and Noam Chomsky for that matter, sincerely believe this.

To accept that the Israeli government, not the US government, is deliberatly sacrificing the safety of their the Israeli Jewish population, would end their last remnant of trust in Zionism.

But historic documents, like the diarys of earlier Israeli presidents, prove that the real powers within Israel never were interested in a negotiated peace with their neighbours. They also prove, that those leaders deliberately provoked violence from Palestinians and other Arab neighbours against their own population to keep the Israeli society a militaristic one.

The real reason, why most Israelis and Diaspora Jews close their eyes befor these facts, might be the traditional unconditional loyality Jewish people show towards their community and their leaders.
Christians and Muslims, as members of universalist religions, have been taught that loyality must be formost towards God and righteous (divine) principles, loyality must be earned, it should never be given blindly no matter what.

Jews as members of a tribal religion have been taught that loyality towards ones own community transcends any principles. While criticism inside - of leaders and members of the community - is allowed, every one of them must be defended against the outside world, no matter what. And while community members might make "mistakes", they are still of more value than any outsiders.
And when the "mistakes" become so big that they become undeniable and must be admitted towards the outside world, then those admissions must be coupled with blaming outside forces.
And in spite of loosing the religious justification, secular Zionist Jews still cling to this loyality tradition, not realizing that this blind loyality might be in part to blame for historic anti-Jewish persecution.
If one doesn´t distance oneself from thugs one is identified with them.

Some Jewish communities and individuals in the tradition of Moses Mendelsson, (a German-Jewish reformer, a friend of the German playright and philosopher Lessing and the model for Lessings "Nathan, the Wise") strive to embody universal principles in their religious believes.
Those Jews oppose Zionism and support fully the rights of the Palestinians and the neighbouring countries.
But as for now, those reformers are still a minority

Iraq: Civil War or Divide and Conquer

2006-12-01T19:17:00.000+01:00

by
SAVE THE USA

Everyday the US Corporate Media bombards America with the “huge spike in violence” that inevitably means that Iraq is descending into civil war. We’re told there are two choices, it’s a civil war, or its “al Qaeda” - but there is a third option the corporate media refuses to utter.

Read more

War on Iran: Unleashing Armageddon in the Middle East

2006-11-20T08:02:00.000+01:00

Pravda.ru

by
Dr. Elias Akleh
USA

The American “power elite” had drawn a “Grand Plan” to control and to monopolize global oil and nuclear energy resources to assure American global hegemony. The collapse of the Soviet Union had created a power vacuum the American administration is trying to fill up.

Read more

Palestinians are the Priority

2006-11-18T21:00:00.000+01:00

an open statement of commitment to the Palestinian Solidarity Cause

There are individuals within the Palestinian solidarity movement seeking to create divisions by:

Read more

The Truth about Global Warming

2006-11-16T09:23:00.000+01:00

it's the Sun that's to blame

By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
(Filed: 18/07/2004)
Telegraph.co.uk

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

Read more

The Coming Collapse of Zionism

2006-10-17T12:26:00.000+02:00

The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea

By
KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst

published by
Counterpunch

Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

Read more

Message of an Ex-Marine to the Anti-War Movement

2006-10-09T19:43:00.000+02:00

by Sam Lwin

October 9, 2006
Veterans for 9/11 Truth

9/11, Our Satyagraha; Message to the Anti-war Movement

I am Sam Lwin, an ex-Marine, a conscientious objector and an anti-war activist from the first Gulf war. I would like to say a few words about the connection between 9/11 and war.

Read more

The Truth about the Sword

2006-10-04T02:31:00.000+02:00

By Chandra Muzaffar
Tehran Times
October 4, 2006

It was Albert Einstein who once noted that it is easier to split the atom than to crack a prejudice.

One such prejudice that is deeply entrenched in the Western psyche relates to Islam and violence. At the root of this prejudice is the erroneous belief that Islam had spread through the sword.

Read more

Education or Mind Infection?

2006-10-01T13:51:00.000+02:00

By
Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Speech given at Connecticut College, New London, CT 09/27/06
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/

I would like to dedicate these words
to all the Palestinian boys and girls,
and to all the Lebanese boys and girls,
and to all the Iraqi boys and girls
who have been massacred
by mind-infected Israeli and American soldier boys,
and who have recently joined my own little girl
in the underground kingdom of dead children,
which is growing under our feet as I speak.

Read more

The Pope's speech to the representatives from the Muslim Community

2006-09-27T21:28:00.000+02:00

Ambassadors to the Holy See from predominantly Muslim countries and representatives of Italy's Muslim Community.

Dear Cardinal Poupard,
Your Excellencies,
Dear Muslim Friends,

I am pleased to welcome you to this gathering that I wanted to arrange in order to strengthen the bonds of friendship and solidarity between the Holy See and Muslim communities throughout the world. I thank Cardinal Poupard, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, for the words that he has just addressed to me, and I thank all of you for responding to my invitation.

Read more

God and Reason: about the lecture Pope Benedict gave at the University of Regensburg

2006-09-26T16:35:00.000+02:00

To be quite sure, the quote of the 14.Century Emperor, which Pope Benedict used to explain his point that God works through reason was tactically not well chosen.
And yes it could lead to misunderstandings.
But if one reads the whole lecture one can be assured that it was in no way meant as a part of a "clash of civilizations".
One also has to realize in what context the lecture stood and who the audience were.
It was meant for university students and professors, most of them non-religious people in a place were reason is of the utmost importance. Many of them were probably people, who could not conceive that reason and religion could have some common ground.
Pope Benedict used to be a Professor of Theology and when he held the lecture he fell back into this role. For an academic in theology or philosophy words and quotes are not used in a tactical manner but as an invitation to analysis and dialogue.
This invitation to dialogue is what Pope Benedict mentioned in his apology towards the Muslim people. And there were Muslim theologians who understood it in exactly this way.
The whole lecture was meant as reasoning that faith in God was NOT unreasonable.
The Pope compares the early theology of the Church which was influenced by Hellenistic reason to the teachings of a certain Islamic theologian.
The New Testament written in a Greek environment was influenced in its wording by this environment, like the beginning of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and God was the Word." The Greek word "logos" or "word" has also the meaning of "reason" and "logic".
So the early Church believed that God worked through reason, but according to the French scholar of Islamic religion R. Arnaldez the Islamic theologian Ibn Hazm believed that God transcends even reason and logic.
So this 13.century Emperor declared that the use of violence to spread faith was against God's reason.
And then Pope Benedict explains that in the middle ages Christian theology have strayed from these believes of reason and had become very close to the opinions of Ibn Hazm, believing that we would only know the ordained will of God, and beyond this was God's freedom where he could have done exactly the opposite of what He has done. But mostly the Church has kept to the belief that there is an analogy between the Spirit of the Creator and created reason.
The Pope explains that Christian theology and the Greek philosophies of reason did approach each other once and this is also a challenge for us today.
Then the Pope explains three phases of de-Hellenisation within Christianity. First the Reformation which strived to simplify Christian theology and cut it from its philosophical roots, then the Enlightenment, where faith and reason were put into two different compartments and then modern liberal theology which reduces itself to the simple message, denying the philosophical and mystical parts of belief in the Divinity of Christ and the Trinity.
Behind this third phase stands the modern form of seeing reason purely in a materialistic way, the matter in a mathematical structure.
The Pope argues that western society has put reason into a purely positivistic frame work which excludes other wider forms of reason.
And this, he argues might be dangerous even lead to pathologies, which necessarily break out, when reason is shortened in such a way, that it excludes the questions of religion and ethics. Ethical rules reasoned through evolution, psychology and sociology are just not sufficient.
And the Pope concludes that reason which is deaf to the Divine and thrusts religion into the area of subcultures is unable to a real dialogue of cultures.

The whole lecture was highly philosophical and read in context there is no way that it could have been intended in any way as a provocation towards the Muslim world.

The question is why the New York Times together with other media outlets which have done its own important share in the "clash of civilization" rhetoric chooses now to paint the Pope into a new Crusader?
Could it be that in publicizing the incidence in such a way they just want to stoke up the fires of intolerance and show the Muslim world that the Catholic Church has taken sides against Islam?
For one thing is absolutely sure: from the time of the first Gulf War the Vatican has strongly opposed wars in the Middle East and else where.
With the Vatican envoy in Palestine the Catholic Church has joined other Christian churches in calling Christian Zionism a heresy. Since Christian Zionist churches are the strongest non-Jewish support groups for Israel this comes rather close to denouncing Zionism itself.
It also seems as if the Vatican has been an outspoken critic of Israeli aggression against Lebanon and Gaza recently, although many people think he should do more.

While the Pope is definitely interested in a religious and cultural dialogue, in the building of bridges towards and a peaceful coexistence with Islam, there are powerful forces who are totally opposed to this.
I hope and pray that we Christians and Muslims together with wise clerics and theologians will not fall into the trap of hatred leading to violence and war, a trap which has been set by people who have neither faith nor even secular humanistic ethics.

The Trace from Damascus leads to Mossad

2006-09-16T00:51:00.000+02:00

Was Israel involved in the terror attack against the US embassy in Syria?

The German left-wing newspaper „Junge Welt“ on September 14, quotes the Syrian news-agency SANA stating that the 4 „Takfiri“ fighters belonged to the group of „Jund Al Sham“ . It is unclear who is behind this obscure organisation.
„Takfiri“ in Arabic means islamic extremists who fight against ordinary Muslims. „Jund Al Sham“ means something like „soldiers of Syria“ or „soldiers of the Levante“. When this group was founded in Afghanisthan it was said to have some loose connections to Al Qaida. After Afghanistan was conquered by the US army in fall 2001 not much more was heard about this group.
But 3 years ago on August 2003 a leading member of the Lebanese Hisbollah, Ali Hussein Saleh, was blown to pieces when he started his car. Saleh was responsible for connections between Hisbollah and armed Palestinian organisations. „Jund Al Sham“ claimed responsibility for the killing. Several other Palestinian and Shia Hisbollah leaders were killed after that.
On July 21, 2004 Ghaleb Awali was killed in the same way as his predecessor Saleh. Again „Jund Al Sham“ claimed responsibility.
Shortly before the Israeli war against Lebanon this summer, however, the Lebanese security service arrested a group of Mossad agents which was definitely responsible for the murder of Ali Saleh and Ghaleb Awali and for the murder of several Palestinians living in Lebanon. For all those murders „Jund Al Sham“ had claimed responsibility.

The supposedly Islamist group has a surprising lot of common interest with Israel.

Nazism, Zionism and Insanity

2006-08-18T22:04:00.000+02:00

updated: January 2007

When a nation can no longer recognize universally accepted values as relevant for its own conduct,because it feels too powerful, this is a sure sign of a collective national delusion.

Mental blocks are something we all have.
We all see our world slightly biased and it takes time to realize that other points of views can be as valid as our own.
But even with these mental blocks there are still certain values of "right and wrong" which are more or less universal.

When you believe in 2 totally contradictive concepts at the same time, this is called cognitive dissonance, another form of delusion.
An article by Shulamit Aloni Indeed there is Apartheid in Israel: shows, how far this goes in Israel.

Here is an excerpt:

By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night – all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order – this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”

Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved ‘for Jews only’, on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal”.

Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either

Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger.

Watching the war in Lebanon and the destruction of Gaza in the news most ordinary western people looking at the pictures agreed that Israel was acting at least disproportional. More and more ordinary people even went farther and sided with the people of Lebanon and Gaza.

The only people who could not see how ethically wrong these wars were, were Zionists around the world and also the vast, vast majority of Israelis including the majority of the Israeli peace-camp:
Ran Ha Cohen, as one of the few Israeli war opponents, writes in his article: Israeli Intellectuals Love the War:

All generalizations are wrong, except this one: Israeli liberal intellectuals are against war. They have always been against it, and they even suffered greatly for their critical views, as they stress proudly. They were against the previous war, they will be against the next war, they are against all wars. There is just one minor exception, though: the present war, every present war, which they always support. Because the present war – well, that's something totally different from all those other wars! How can you even compare?! The present war is always inevitable, and necessary, and just, and worthy of support.

Then he goes on to a collection of statements by supposedly Israeli "peacenics". One of those "peacenics" is them Amos Oz, a man I have quoted myself, and just like Ran Ha Cohen I had considered him to be:

.. "the Zionist peace camp incarnate".
Having supported PM Ehud Barak long after he started the murderous crushing of the Intifada, Oz now counts on his readers' short memory when he writes, under the Orwellian title

"Why Israeli missiles strike for peace":
"Many times in the past the Israeli peace movement criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. […] This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself[…]. The Israeli peace movement should support Israel's attempt at self-defense, pure and simple, as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians." (Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2006)

There are, of course, voices in the Zionist camp,which are even far worse than that like

Writer A. B. Yehoshua, the self-designated "man of peace," says it all in his typical, more primitive manner:

"At last we've got a just war, so we shouldn't gnaw at it too much till it becomes unjust."
Yehoshua frankly: the old "peacenik" had indeed been yearning for war for a long time. Israeli fascist leader Affe Eitam once admitted that the one thing that thrills him is "the sight of men going to war"; for Yehoshua, purification is the desired effect. Two years ago, he was dreaming of bloody Israeli operations in Gaza; his dream has now come true, though it hardly gets to the media thanks to the events in Lebanon:
"After we take out the settlements … we would use force against an entire population, use force in a total manner. … We would cut off the electricity in Gaza. We would cut off communications in Gaza. We would stop fuel supply to Gaza…. It won't be a desirable war, but definitely a purifying one."

And then we´ve got the American Zionists likeRalph Peters. He, of course, never pretended to be a "peacenic".
Mr Peters believes, that the IDF after destroying big parts of Lebanon was still not brutal enough to win the war:

Israel tried to fight humanely. Hezbollah was out to win at any cost. The result was inevitable.
On the ground in southern Lebanon, the IDF was able to muster a ten-to-one advantage around contested villages. But its leaders lacked the guts to do what needed to be done. And Hezbollah's frontline fighters survived.
Israel's politicians turned out to be even more profoundly out of touch with their people than the pols in Washington. Israelis were willing to fight. They wanted to win. The rank and file of the IDF would have done what needed to be done. And their leaders failed them.......
There will be consequences. Iran's convinced it's on a winning course. Syria got away with murder (literally). And Hezbollah will come back more determined than ever.
And the world is going to let Iran build nuclear weapons.
Get ready for Round Two.

Mr Peters is a hardline Zionist, his newest book is called "Never Quit the Fight."
Why does this remind me so much of a similar titled book in German: "Mein Kampf"?

I don´t think this purely coincidental.

I do see close similarities between the Nazi ideology and Zionism.
They are both rooted in the 19. Century romantic Nationalism movement.

Both ideologies put an emphasis on "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil)and they are both racist.

Ralph Schoenmann quotes in his "The Hidden History of Zionism the founder of Revisionist Zionism:

Jabotinsky spelled this out in his Letter on Autonomy:
It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.

Both Nazism and Zionism are supremacist ideologies,emphasising physical strength:

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:
The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.

Just like Hitler was sacrificing German´s young men on the eastern front and made German children targets for allied bombing,so little did Zionist leaders care for the life and well being of their own people:

Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."

Nazism and Zionism are both hyper-militaristic, they have both a total disregard towards the rights and the dignity of "the other",not belonging to the priviliged race, and like Hitler, the Zionist leaders of Israel believe that a people can reach its highest potential only when it is engaged in constant military battle:

Here an excerpt from Israel´s Sacred Terrorism:

We do not need (former Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there....

I do not think, that Israel’s behavior of, throwing a million cluster bomblets just before leaving Lebanon, was unprecedented as Gilad Atzmon thinks.
Instead the action of the IDF simulated the "burnt earth policies" of the German army in Eastern Europe during WWII.
The Nazi ideology like Zionism was expansionistic, trying to gain as much "Lebensraum" for the Germanic "super-race" as possible.
Like the IDF, in spicing Lebanon with cluster bombs, the German army tried, after invading and expelling their neighbours, to make it hard or impossible for the natives to come back to their lands, by burning their houses abd fields.

If you read articles by Peters or other ultra-Zionist, or if you read those above mentioned quotes from the Israeli "peace-camp", you can feel that the mentality of Zionists is totally out of touch with both reality and with the ethical principles, which most of the world accepts, even while those principles are not allways acted upon.

While other aggressors try to hide their most immoral acts from their populations, Zionists seem to be proud to have killed a thousand people in retaliation for a few killed and captured soldiers.
They use cluster bombs with a million bomblets, so the dying would not stop after the war. And when there is criticism to this heinous act of war-crimes, they call the critic anti-semite, not even realizing hat by this they are make "anti-semitism" into a moral act.
And they create unmarked "Jews only" roads and areas with non-existent signs Palestinians have to respect, while Israelis have to pretend they don´t exist and the rest of the world has to pretend not to notice.

To be incapapable of reality checking and or even recognizing other viewpoints as possible is a kind of insanity. And it is a progressing illness.

All opinion polls say that Israeli Jews are becoming more aggressively racist every year.
More and more Israelis support ever more violent measure against and finally transfer of all Palestinians from Palestine. They support wars of destruction against neighbouring countries, even the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. And they feel a ever more hatred towards those they victimize.

Something like:

"Since I mistreat you, you must have deserved it. And since you are so evil that you deserve this kind of treatment, I hate you."

This is crazy of course, but then ethics are so central to human sanity, that loosing them will drive you insane.

The leaders get effected worse by this mental illness.

Look what happened in Germany:

As disaster came closer, Hitler buried himself in the unreal world of the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, clutching at fantastic hopes that his 'secret weapons', the V-1 and V-2 rockets, would yet turn the tide of war. He gestured wildly over maps, planned and directed attacks with non-existent armies and indulged in endless, night- long monologues which reflected his growing senility, misanthropy and contempt for the 'cowardly failure' of the German people.

As the Red Army approached Berlin and the Anglo-Americans reached the Elbe, on 19 March 1945 Hitler ordered the destruction of what remained of German industry, communications and transport systems. He was resolved that, if he did not survive, Germany too should be destroyed.

Like Hitler, Zionists have many times turned on the people they supposedly loved so much.
They have sacrificed them for political purposes and endangered them unnecessarily to make them into what the Zionist perceived as a perfect people.
And the Jewish people in Israel and big parts of the Diaspora are still following suit.
However, there again we can compare Nazism in its last phase with Zionism.
In spite of all the suffering the Nazis had brought on the German people, many ordinary Germans became more crazy, ideological and deluded in the last years of the war.
Part of the reason for this was the constant barrage of propaganda, and part of it, was psychological: it was just too hard to accept that all the suffering had been in vain and for a totally false cause. So many Germans desperately held on to something, which many others already deep down recognized as being a straw.

While I don’t think it’s helpful to compete in what ideology produced the greater villains, the comparison, however, might still be good in realizing that there is no culture beyond hope of change.

German culture overcame the Nazi ideology, recognizing guilt and feeling deep shame, the Jewish people need to do the same with Zionism.

And actually, I do see a few signs of hope and change.
Recently I have read articles in German written by some people who are still rooted in the Jewish communities,people, who before had fully supported Israel. In those articles they totally and strongly condemn Israel in its aggression against Lebanon and against the Palestinians. All the facts anti-Zionists have publicized, you now can find in the accusations of former pro-Zionist Jews of the Diaspora.
And the interesting thing about it is, that those writers explain, that their attitude is rather typical for their community. However, the other members do not yet dare to speak up out of fear to be targeted for ridicule by the self-proclaimed leaders of the Jewish people.

Sure their is a difference between the attitude of Diaspora Jews in Europe and Israeli or American Jews. But like in Europe, in America and Israel there are also campaigns of Jewish people who have become more and more opposed to Zionism and Israel, a sign of growing sanity.

Of course, you never know, how long it takes for sanity to be strengthened enough to reign in the insanity.

The Israeli political class still does not want to give up its expansionist politics, is still not ready to negotiate with her Islamic neighbours, seeing itself as above them.
Most Israelis are therefore still paranoidly scared of their neighbours, but do not really trust anybody else either.
And mainly for those reasons preperations for WWIII are still on track and that is definitely scary for all of us.

The Seeds of Defeat

2006-07-24T22:26:00.000+02:00

Racism was the dominationg attitude of the people of European descent in the 18., 19. and 20. century.
With the beginning of the Enlightenment movement, religion lost part of its quality in uniting people. With the arrival of a - partly rather naive - faith in the infallability of science, now genetics became, besides language and culture, the unifying bond between people.
This faith in the pseudo-scientific arguments of genetics could then be exploited not only in nation building but also in colonial enterprises.
Racism became one of the pillars of justification for expansionist, sometimes even genocidal, colonialism and the exploitation of non-western people.
The whole thing culminated into WW II and the violent death of more than 50 million people all over the world.
After this catastrophy which took its toll on European life as it did on non-Europeans, racism and colonialism was not yet dead and buried, but it came into decline in the western intellectual community. And with the end of the majority of European colonial enterprises, with the growth of liberation movements in developing countries and the growth of civil right movements in industrial countries, ultra-racist attitudes declined further.
Racial tolerance and equal respect for people of other cultures or skin-colors grew not only in intellectual circles, but it spread more and more into the general population of western countries.
The process is by far not yet finished and still has a very long way to go, but if you compare the attitudes shown in western media publications only a few decades back and compare it to how similar themes are treated today, you can see and feel progress.
And like colonialism, open supremacist racism is on the way of becoming an anachronism.
Any ideology based on anachronistic ideas has in itself and in everything which is built on it already the seeds of defeat from its inception.

In his post "Feldman and Dershowitz: Mass Murder Apologists" Kurt Nimmo of "Another day in the Empire" quotes those two media pundits and their absolutely indefensible views towards those Israeli war-crimes in Lebanon and Palestine.

Both Zionist intellectual try to make the point in a elaborate and indirect way, that Arab civilians are less worth of the protection from harm than Jewish Israeli civilians. Lebanese children can be killed with impunity because their parents allowed the Hizbollah militia to grow in their midst. Gazan children can be targeted because their parents voted for Hamas.

The interesting thing about those arguments is, how ridiculously they sound to just anybody who is not a Zionist.

I sometimes watch news and documentaries on German TV which are called "today 30 years ago" or even 40 or 50 years ago.
What springs in the eyes is how very different the attitude of those German journalists where towards the people of developing countries from how they are these few decades later.

To be sure those journalists tried to be "politically correct" in the way as was considered politically correct at the time.
And they seemed to consider themselves as humanists as most media people today.

However whenever they reported about people of non-Western cultures then, for our modern ear it sounds so patronizing and so offensive and lacking of respect, as if they were talking about some different species living in the wild of the jungles.

When the problems of war-refugee,the victims of famines and epedemics were discussed, most German reporters would not even make an effort to get a translator to talk to the victims themselves. In documentaries they sometimes would not even talk to government officials, but exclusively to white workers of relief organisations.
I even heard one shocking commentor saying, that maybe medical help was not a good thing for Africa because it caused the "population explosion".
Those journalists of 40 years ago were of course left-overs from an earlier time. They had received their education before WW II. And they had not yet been able to overcome those mental blocks implanted in them.
But at that time, the attitude those journalists showed, was still the majority attitude of, not only Germans, but also other western Europeans as well.
The reason why "the Holocaust" was considered such an extraordinary crime was, that Germans had been mass-murdering their own neighbours, Jewish Germans who had been part of German sociey for ages.
Although about 20 million Russians had been killed at the same time, their lives did not count as much in the western mind, being nearly Asians, neither did the mass-murder of North American Indians or the mass-murders during the slave trade times only a hundred years before WWII. And the mass-murder of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian civilians in the 1960s and 70s was still not yet considered as high a crime as the mass-murder of Europeans.

While in practical terms of war things have not yet changed in the actions of corrupt politicians and helpers, and the soldiers they comman, they did change in the minds of most ordinary western people.

30 or 40 years ago the West would consider Palestinian and Lebanese life as less valuable as Israeli life as a matter of fact.
I think it was not before the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, before you could hear any criticism of Israel coming out of Germany. When "der Spiegel" printed an interview with a Phalangist who had taken part in the massacre, the first stirring of a humanist consciences occurred in Germany. The Phalangist showed more compassion to a donkey hurt by bullets during the massacre than to the many women and children he personally murdered.
This attitude was so close to Nazi ideology, that at least some Germans could no longer totally close their eyes. And said Phalangist also revealed that the massacre committed by him and other the Lebanese Maronites, was practically under the direct order and with the the logistic help of the Israeli troops under their commander Ariel Sharon.

This was in 1982, and since then conscience in Europe has grown, maybe not in the upper echelons of politics, but in the lower population.

Nowadays non-humanistic racists like Feldman and Dershowitz have to construe some elaborate round-away arguments to make their point and it still sounds ridiculously for informed people. It might resonate with non-informed people, but even with those, men like Feldman and Dershowitz could not have gotten away with the plain argument that Israeli Jews are actually more worth than Arabs.

A few years back many little informed ordinary people in Europe, when they heard about Israeli aggression in Palestine, they would just say "let them bash in each others heads, its a hopeless case down there."
Nowadays the same ordinary people get angry when hearing about another Israeli aggression, blaming Israel, sympathizing with the Lebanese and more and more with the Palestinians as well.
What has changed is not so much a vaster pool of information, the mainline media is still pro-Israel biased, the change lies in the general attitude towards people of non-western cultures.
The ordinary man or woman has realized that people no matter how differently from us they speak, pray, dress or eat, they are still people, human beings just like us.

Of course we can still be angry at them, be persuaded to go to war against them. Fall for all kinds of propaganda, even to the point where we commit war-crimes. But most everybody in Europe realizes, when innocent people are killed, it is just as bad, if they are Lebanese, Palestinian and Somali or if they were German, American or French. A child in Iran or Iraq is no different from the children who walk around in one´s own home town or city.
Even those who want to separate their ethnic group from other ethnic groups do realize nowadays, that "the others" are just as human as they themselves. They are on the same level, even if you consider them as hostile.
The attitude of the Israeli apologists is anachronistic. And everybody except they themselves knows it. Xenophobia, the fear of strangers, can still be fueled in a European nation, supremacist ideas, however, can no longer be sustained in the general population.

I think that the racists, Dershowitz and Feldman, are hanging themselves with their own ridiculous writings.
I know it looks as, if all the mainline media agrees with them.
It looks, as if the west accepts what Israel is doing.
The reality however is, that media people, politicians and ordinary people feel disgusted by those arguments.
Yes, most are afraid to say it.
But when they overcome the fear of being called anti-Semitic or loosing their job or reputation, it will be like a flood that cannot be stopped.
To be forced to hide your real thoughts and feelings creates deep anger in the people. Even more anger is created when people realize that they have constantly been lied to for a long time. The stifling atmosphere,that did not allow the people to say and write what they thought, an atmosphere created by the paranoid East German government, was what fueled the protest movement there, and in the end brought the wall and the regime down.
On the subject of Israel and Zionism, the atmosphere here in the west has just been as stifling. Informed people know so much of the truth, but have to choke on it.
And now I think at last the dam of lies has gotten too many cracks for the Israeli centered propaganda to succeed in permanent damage control.

The sad thing about it is, however, that what Israel is doing right now to the Palestinians, what it has done to the Lebanese last summer and threatens to do to Syria and Iran, might in the long run lead to a terrible blow-back against the Jewish people.
The only damage control still possible for the Jewish people around the world is distancing themselves from not only Israeli crimes and atrocities but also from Zionist Israel itself. Of course Israeli Jews should do the same.

While it seems as if Israeli racists and their western supporters have all the power necessary to reach their goals like the military power and the influence in western governments and media, they still have already lost in spite of it.

Of course they still can wreck lots and lots of havoc on the world.
But the worse it gets, the worse will be the blowback.
They already have lost, even while they do not realize it.
When Germany invaded Russia in 1942, it already had lost the war, in spite of having won every single battle before that. It was impossible for any army to win the Russians on Russian soil in a Russian winter, Napoleon had learned it the hard way, Hitler would learn it soon.
However the invasion of Russia was necessary for Hitler and the Nazis to fulfill their ideological goal of creating "Lebensraum" (living space) for the "Germanic race of Übermenschen.
The ideology of the Nazis built in itself the seeds of their defeat.
So actually they had lost the war before they started it.

The anachronism of racist-supremacist colonialism of Israel´s state ideology,Zionism contains the same seeds.
Of course ideologists have no way of thinking clearly. Even after the defeat of Stalingrad the Nazis kept on pushing their army from one defeat to the next with terrible blowback consequences for the German people and a terrible blood-toll for the rest of Europe.
History might repeat itself now with even worse consequences for the world.
Or maybe we, humanity, actually have learned something from it and are able to stop the madness.
Maybe.

Informations War

2006-05-31T15:59:00.000+02:00

The headline of the current "Spiegel" the most important weekly political magazine in Germany proclaims, (at least in the TV-ad): "Ahmadinedschad", der Mann, den die Welt fürchtet (the man, the world is afraid of).
A couple of weeks back the Canadian National Post published a deceptive article
claiming that Iran was planning to oblige non-Muslims to wear badges to indicate their ethnicity so that they could be distinguished in public. The article even implied the badges Jews would have to wear would be yellow. The frontpage showed a Jewish couple from Nazi times wearing the yellow "star of David"
This story, although a proven lie, was taken up by American and other media as to present Iran in "the right light".
The "feared" Iranian president is of course just an interpretation by "Spiegel" reporters, but the desired effect is the same.
It´s outright war-propaganda. It´s breaking the "Grundgesetz" (the German constitution), which after the terrible catastrophy of WWII makes "Volksverhetzung" (propaganda in order to instill hatred against groups of people or other nations) a serious crime.
Very few people are actually afraid of the Iranian president, since even those who hate him know quite well, that he has no atomic bombs. And even if he was planning to build some, he would use them only as means of deterrence.
Whoever actually read his address before the UN General Assembly about nuclear weapons and disarmament or the fully (not by by pro-Israeli Memri) translated speechat the anti-Zionism conference or the letter to the US-President, knows that while he is a deeply religious person, he is neither a crazed megalomaniac nor filled with insane hatred against people of other religions or cultures.
Actually a lot of what he says reminds destinctly of the messages of the current and the late Pope of the Catholic Church or of speeches by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President, who sympathizes with Christian Liberation Theology and with Marxist Fidel Castro.
When the Pope and a Catholic Heretic and a Marxist Atheist and an ultra-conservativ Islamic politician are basically on the same line of thought, and if behind them are hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of people with similar thoughts, then those, who fear this Iranian president who does not want to compromise on ethics and what he sees as right and just, are not "the world" but those who want to control the world and shape it according to their unethical image.

And as conspiracy theoretic I connect these two stories of war-propaganda to what the British Sunday Herald reported a few weeks back:

The Pentagon has already signed off $383 million to force through the document’s recommendations by 2009. Military and intelligence sources in the US talk of “a revolution in the concept of warfare”. The report orders three new developments in America’s approach to warfare:

Firstly, the Pentagon says it will wage war against the internet in order to dominate the realm of communications, prevent digital attacks on the US and its allies, and to have the upper hand when launching cyber-attacks against enemies.

Secondly, psychological military operations, known as psyops, will be at the heart of future military action. Psyops involve using any media – from newspapers, books and posters to the internet, music, Blackberrys and personal digital assistants (PDAs) – to put out black propaganda to assist government and military strategy. Psyops involve the dissemination of lies and fake stories and releasing information to wrong-foot the enemy.

Thirdly, the US wants to take control of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, allowing US war planners to dominate mobile phones, PDAs, the web, radio, TV and other forms of modern communication. That could see entire countries denied access to telecommunications at the flick of a switch by America.

Mosque Outrage Also Brings Solidarity

2006-02-26T18:05:00.000+01:00

By
Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed

Inter Press Service
2-25-6

BAGHDAD (IPS) - Widespread sectarian violence generated by the recent bombing of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra has also brought widespread demonstrations of solidarity between Sunnis and Shias across Iraq.

The revered Al-Askariyya Mosque in Samarra, 135 km northwest of Baghdad, is one of four sacred places for Shias in Iraq.

The mosque was bombed at 6:55am Feb. 22 by men who tied up the guards and planted the explosives. This being the third attack on the Shias in as many days, outrage was immediate, violent and widespread.

Bloody retaliatory attacks took the lives of three Sunni Imams and scores of civilians, while over 50 Sunni mosques were attacked.

Yet the violence led also to demonstrations of solidarity after Shia and Sunni leaders called for calm and restraint.

Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani called for "easing things down and not attacking any Sunni mosques and shrines."

Sistani's office was quick to issue a statement: "We call upon believers to express their protest...through peaceful means. The extent of their sorrow and shock should not drag them into taking actions that serve the enemies who have been working to lead Iraq into sectarian strife."

Muqtada Al-Sadr, arguably the second most influential Shia cleric in Iraq told reporters: "It was not the Sunnis who attacked the shrine of Imam Al-Hadi, God's peace be upon him, but rather the occupation (forces) and Ba'athists...God damn them. We should not attack Sunni mosques. I have ordered the Al-Mahdi Army to protect both Shia and Sunni shrines."

Sadr returned promptly from Lebanon and called on the Iraqi parliament to vote the departure of occupation forces from Iraq.

Sunni religious authorities called for peace and asked people to confront those trying to generate a sectarian war.

Many Arab media outlets blamed the floundering Iraqi government for failing to provide the security needed to prevent the attacks. But thousands of people who joined demonstrations blamed American troops for failing to protect the Iraqi people.

Sunnis were quick to demonstrate solidarity with the Shias in Samarra and to condemn the mosque bombings. Demonstrations of solidarity between Sunnis and Shias followed all over Iraq. Some of the bigger demonstrations were held in Basra, Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Kut, and Salah Al-Din.

Much of the Shia anger was directed at U.S. forces. In the primarily Shia city of Kut south of Baghdad, thousands marched through the streets burning U.S. and Israeli flags.

Thousands of Shias marched through Sadr City, the huge Shia slum area of Baghdad, shouting anti-American slogans. Sadr City has almost half the population of Baghdad.

Many large demonstrations were held in Baghdad outside Sadr City.

"Those shrines are very important to all Muslims, not only in Iraq but all over the Islamic world," 40 year-old merchant Ahmed Hassan told IPS at a demonstration in Khadamiyah area of Baghdad Feb. 23. "Every Muslim in Iraq not only criticised and condemned this action, but everyone is against it."

Thousands of Sunnis joined Shia demonstrations in Baghdad despite moves by the Iraqi security forces to seal off Sunni areas.

"This is no more than an Israeli kind of act done by the American troops using some men who were paid," a 54 year-old Shia man told IPS. "It is not the Sunnis who are responsible, because we know the Americans and Israelis want to divide us. The Sunnis would never bomb a Muslim mosque."

A 25-year-old woman among the demonstrators was telling everyone she could that the attack had nothing to do with the Sunni people of Samarra.

"My husband is a Sunni from Samarra who goes to that shrine," said Hashmia Atimim. "Of course we know it was a foreigner who did this horrible act."

Some of the sentiments at the demonstrations found unexpected if partial echoes. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement that those who attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra "have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path."

(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.

Deliberate Acts

2006-02-11T02:08:00.000+01:00

Agreed analogies only go so far.
Calling a person or a group of people "the devil" does make it sound, as if I believed, there are people with no hope of redemption, no way out of damnation.
I believe as long as a person is alive, he or she has a choice.
This is, what with very few exceptions every religion on earth preaches: There is a choice. There is no predestination.

I do not believe that human beings are determined by their biology in their thoughts and in their acts.
Nor do I believe that they are determined by their living conditions, their upbringing or their membership in a class or a group.
Humanity is a very unic species on earth. We are not determined by our instincts or by environmental factors.
While those factors can surely have influence on us and our acts, we have a "manual override" other species don´t.

Our intelligence is this override. It can bring us to acts of "evil" bringing destruction on fellow members of the species or other living beings, no member of any other species ever could, or to acts of "good" sacrificing for the wellbeing of others even until total self-sacrifice.
Our intelligence makes us capable of choice and capable of change.
Everyone has a chance to turn around, change his thinking and his acts, regret, repent, make reparations as far as possible and find redemption.

Reparations in the case of instigating wars based on lies, is of course, first and foremost telling the truth. The dead can´t be brought back to life and and the maimed won´t get back their limbs, but truth can bring back peace.

When I talk about a "human devil", I mean the believe I have come to, that it is not a faceless system, some automatacy, which is responsible for exploitation, oppression, mass-murder and war.
It is people, human beings, who deliberately plan for these results of their politics.
Marxists believe that those results are inevitable results of capitalism and that to overcome those terrible conditions for humanity a Marxist led revolution is necessary.
I see in Marxism a lot of evidence of being a rather intolerant "religious faith". Marxism's "God" of "Dialectic Materialism" does not allow for any alternatives. It is a very jealous and absolutistic "God".
I very much agree with the issues of social injustice, imperialism and permanent war for the enrichment of the few, which are raised by Marxists, but I also believe that the solutions to those problems must be found within the people and culture of single countries and cannot be imposed on all the world by a western ideology. And since humanity contains so many diverse cultures the solution to social problems will be diverse. This in my opinion might actually enrich the human condition.
And while it might make the cooperation between countries a bit more complicated than a one-world system, it could in the long run actually help humanity to overcome the scourges of ethnocentrism and racism. For learning to communicate to other cultures on a equal basis will do this for you in the long run.

Even within the European framework Marxist revolutions could not deliver on the promises of Marxism inspite of the high cost in human lives.
If the people of Eastern Europe had felt some kind of confidence in the justice of their socialist system, they would have defended it against the onslaught of western capitalism. Sure many people in Eastern Europe believe now in hindsight, that what they had then was better than what they have now, but still just as the lesser of two evils.Marxist materialism could not fulfill the human desire for true justice, which is also a spiritual value.
(The only place were socialism actually has worked enough for the people to want to defend it, is Cuba. But if you look closely,even there the system is not doctrinaire Marxist but a mixture respecting cultural values of the Cuban people. And when Castro shook hands with the Pope, the Cuban revolution made peace with the Church.)

But when saying, that the originator of human misery is not an an anonymous "system", but actual people, who use this system and would use any other system as well to serve their advantages and further the goals of their philosophies, then we need to try to identify those people.
I do not think, that they are just one ethnic group, like Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jews or Chinese, although some probably have these ethnic backgrounds.
Nor do I think that their background is from one single religion.
Nor do I think that they are true believing Free Masons or even ritual Satanists, although I did use the "devil" analogy.
These people believe themselves to be ultra-rationalists, so praying to any God, or to the "Architect of the Universe" or even to Lucifer, makes very little sense, except for some kind of perverted fun.
Those strange religion-like groups might be used to trap some politicians with embarrasing photographs, or they might be used for some strange form of male-bonding.
But I´m rather convinced that the actual believe system of the ruling elite is atheist, materialist, nihilist and social-darwinist.
Those are the defining characters of their worldview. This is what drives their political actions.

Kurt Nimmo on his site "Another Day in the Empire" quotes Shadia Drury in the worldview of the Straussian Neocons, who are now the spearhead of the global elite:

"Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united—and they can only be united against other people.” Strauss’ established governance, according to Drury, is made possible through “aggressive, belligerent foreign policy,” and “[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in.” According to Jim Lobe, “Strauss’ neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a ‘national destiny’—as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983—that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a ‘myopic national security.’”

Then he quotes Michael Doliner:

The Straussians “are not, as some think, merely agents of Israel,”
Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs an endless war to supply a “them” against which “we” will do endless battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state.

Deliberate Provocation

2006-02-05T10:12:00.000+01:00

Did they see it then, some 67 years ago in Europe, even earlier in Asia, did they see the train engine coming at them, running over everything on their way, already Tschekeslovakia was run over, then Polland and then...?
Did they see that the whole world was strapped to the tracks, and the engine was running unstoppable, madmen at the wheels and nobody to pull the emergency brakes?

Some people did see it. Their words are recorded. We still can read them.
But could they ever imagine that after the engine had run against the wall, 50 million dead bodies would be strawn around its tracks?
Who could have imagined this?

Did they see before hand the weapons that would be used, incinerating whole cities, burning land and harvests to the ground, leaving nothing but ruins and blackened earth?
Did they see the firestorms raging, the fires which couldn't be extinguished when they hit the skin, fires that would burn you alive in unimaginable pain?
Did they see the weapons which would exterminate cities in an instant and still would keep on killing twenty, fifty years after they were used?

They did not know about these kind of weapons then, the last time the engine ran over the whole world.
But we know now.
And most look away, too frightening is the view, too eery the sound. Afghanisthan has been run over already, Iraq a hundred thousand dead bodies already by last spring and nobody has been counting any more since then.

And the engine is running, running towards us, Iran will be next or Syria. A military option is proposed, a nuclear one is not excluded.
Madmen at the wheel and nobody to pull the emergency brake and Europe close at the side of the Americans, no longer wavering, but there in the engine.
How many bodies will it be this time, 50 million or 500 million or more?

It is planned to be a generational war, 30 years or so.
The last time a 30 year war was fought in Europe, half of the population was dead afterwards.
It won´t hit Europe this time? Really?
The whole world is strapped on the tracks. When the engine is not stopped it will run over us and it will run over you.
But the engine needs fuel to run. It's fuel is hatred. It´s an artificial fuel, not natural.

When the Danish paper printed those Muhammed cartoons. They were only done by Muslim hating cartoonist, printed by an Muslim hating editor in a paper owned by Muslim haters for the consumption of local Muslim haters. And there are so many of them now in Europe.
But when those cartoons reached the Middle East, half a year later, the anger there was real. But the activists threatening foreigners, first of all in Palestine, trying to empty the land of foreign witnesses to upcoming crimes, those agents were not real, they were mercenaries.
It happened right after a Hamas victory, but those violent agents weren´t Hamas. They were from some obscure Fatah group, Fatah who had sunk in their own corruption, undermind by Israel and probably riddled with collaborators.

But the anger has spread and the frustration and maybe the hatred has become real or maybe there are other paid agents to spread it.
And we are on a threshold of a Clash of Civillisations or maybe we already stepped over it.
And I hear the arrogance and ignorance in the talking heads on TV and read it in the papers, blowing the smoke of a "free society", a "information society", when their "information" is nothing but pure viciousness, deliberate instigation to hatred and war.

And the engine is running.

And the arrogant western atheist viciousness is telling us: what´s wrong with a little bit of fun, a little bit of fun on those retards who believe in something else than pure science, those religious idiots.
We Christians should not have taken it laying down, when those atheist fanatics were smearing crosses with urine and feces and called it art.
Because it gave them a precedent: Smearing what for many people is holy, is just fun or art or a matter of free speech.
I don´t believe in violence, but I believe in screaming. We should have screamed louder. Let them call us retards, so what?
At least we are not hate-mongering mass-murdering madmen.

For atheists not much is holy. But in their "free speech" defense they are just holier than thou.
However historically, they have a very bad memory.

Have you ever seen those cartoons, that were printed in the "Stürmer", the leading Nazi hate paper? Maybe you have seen it in history class and if not, maybe you can look it up.
Those cartoons will look eerily familiar now. They were used to defame an ethnic and religious minority, to bring the majority in the country up against them, put the majority into the right mood, the right mood for expulsion, deportation, incarcaration, slave labour oppression, abuse and murder.
It was not a matter of "free speech" then, it was a matter of hate and everybody knew it. But now we have gotten used ot our smoke screens. We need them to not feel guilty.

But when the engine comes running over us, the smoke screens won´t protect us, because they are just that - empty smoke.
The engine is fueled by hatred. And we provide it. It´s not their hatred, it´s ours, the western, enlightened, secular and so very rational hatred towards the "others" who do not want to be like us.

And the engine is running full speed at us, and I hear the rumbling.
And feel the vibration of forboding desaster.
And I can´t turn my eyes away.
And I only can imagine what lies ahead.
But then, those people 67 years ago, who felt like I feel now, nothing in their imagination could prepare them for the reality that finally hit them and hit also the others who didn´t want to look.
Nothing.

Culture and Philosophy

2006-02-01T12:54:00.000+01:00

Why waste time on talking about movies, TV-shows, books or some philosophical theory, when in the real world real wars are killing and maiming people, destroying their homes and lands?
Should it not be enough to just document the suffering and the crimes to get the peoples of the world to oppose them and stop them?
Obviously not.
Wars, massacres, oppression, torture and other atrocities are justified or downplayed.
We never see the world plain and obectively. We allways see it coloured through the glasses of our own worldview. While my individual worldview might differ from the views of my immidiate neighbours, it still is influenced by the collective worldview of my country and the culture I live in.
A worldview is created by culture and mirrored in it and it bases on a collective philosophy wich changes through the years.
Our western culture has become more cynical and less humanist in the last twenty years and has still not overcome racism. Instead, racism has changed its focus from skin-colour to culture.
Of course in our western self-righeousness we declare that this is not real racism, since, while people cannot change the colour of their skin, they could change their culture and religion or at least the attitude towards religion easily and become like us, the prototypes of the wonderful modern man, the over-humans instead of the barbarians they are now. And if those barbarians do not want to become like us, those barbarians just get what´s coming to them.
When westerners accuse Muslim societies of oppressing women and the Muslims accuse western societies of abusing women´s sexuality for profit, then most westerners wouldn´t even consider of looking at the accusations. They would not even consider, that the suffering caused by turning sexuality into a merchandize to be sold, bought and used for the advertisment of other products together with the economic devastation of neo-liberal politcs, might cause as widespread physical and psychological suffering among women as the legal discrimination of women in Muslim societies.
All this western self-righteousness is based on modern western philosophies, which define freedom in a whole different way than non-western people do or we ouselve have defined some twenty years ago.
We need to realize that our own culture is far from perfect or even on the way to perfection, it is not even a whole lot better than the cultures we critizice.
And I believe that we need to question our collective worldview including all the assumption we perceive as undeniable truths, which in reality are just theories.
Those theories stand in comptition to a other contrdicting theories which have just as much sceintific evidence behind them as the ones generally accepted by most of us.
When we analyze our culture mirrored in movies, music, tv-shows and books, we can recognize what the philosphies and assumed "truths" our culture is built on, and what philosophies are propagated by the powerful in order to move our culture into their direction.

"Munich": Responses

2006-02-01T11:23:00.000+01:00

"Der Spiegel" uses Spielberg´s movie as title to last week´s print magazine with the headline: May Democracies kill Terrorists - The Ethics of Revenge.
No matter to what conclusions the fanatic pro-Israel Spiegel comes, the headlines in themselves imply the first untruths.
Can there ever be an ethic in revenge?
Even the old Vikings with their very low threshold in refraining from killing came to conclusion that in the long run the circle of revenge and counter-revenge must be broken or it would destroy both parties and they invented a compensation system and a neutral court, which actually was the primare function of "Althingi" the parliament.
Mahatma Ghandi thought, that with the rule of an eye for an eye, everybody would go blind in the end. Revenge imprisons people in a vicious circle with no way out of violence and bloodshed, no hope for peace. How can anybody presume this was ethical.
And who has the ethics on his side. The Israeli death-squad revenging the kidnappings and killings of those Israeli athletes or the kidnappers revenging the far higher death-toll of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the eviction of the Palestinians from their land with the help of rape, murder and massacres?
Then the assumptions of the first question: Who actually are the terrorists. Are agents acting for a state less terrorists than other agents acting for a national liberation movement? Both are killing for their political goals.
And then, what actually is a democracy?
Is it a country where people can go to elections and make a cross behind some name or the name of a party?
Well, then just about every country in the world has some kind of elections and should be called a democracy.
Isn't the minimum requirement for a country to be called a democracy that is has equal legal rights for all its citizens and protects those rights. And Israel even fails in this minimum, by discriminating with written laws against it´s non-Jewish citizens.
But then words like democracy, freedom and justice have turned into Orwellian phrases with no meaning at all, phrases just to be used to justify the powers of the powerful.

Here are other responses to "Munich".
For instance a review by Lydia Howell, a Minneapolis-based journalist and host of KFAI radio's "Catalyst: Politics & Culture."

Israeli hardliners have little to fear from Spielberg's excursion into the political thriller genre, a bloody philosophy lesson from which only the most dedicated and sophisticated viewers will be able to discern any worthwhile, deeper meaning...........
Some Israelis (such as Ehud Danoch, the Israeli Consul-General in Los Angeles) have slammed Spielberg for making Israeli and Palestinian violence seem "equivalent" -- a totally absurd claim to anyone who's actually seen the film. In fact, Munich virtually omits "the Palestinian side" of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There's just one brief exchange, between the film's lead Israeli agent and a Palestinian, where the Palestinian expresses longing for a "homeland" and makes a fierce declaration that "Israel will eventually lose to the Palestinians, even if it takes a 100 years." It's a startling moment, because it's the only time a Palestinian speaks. Otherwise, Palestinians are portrayed in the usual way: nameless thugs "speaking gibberish" (untranslated Arabic) who commit "senseless" acts of brutality against Jews........
Avner (Eric Bana), the lead agent who serves as our primary lens, ultimately takes his wife and child out of Israel and moves them to Brooklyn. He must visit them in secret, and none of them seem "at home" away from Israel. There is the looming irony that perhaps in attempting to avenge his homeland, it is lost to him forever. But most disturbing to this viewer is that, in the film's final scene, it's still not his own violent acts that apparently haunt Avner, only the Palestinians' slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team. This should mollify Spielberg's pro-Israel critics. In a clumsy, ham-fisted display of propaganda, he saves the bloodiest flashback of all for last, with Avner "remembering" Munich, while having sex with his wife in Brooklyn. It would have made more sense, psychologically, dramatically, and morally, if he had been reminded instead of the blood-spattered, bullet-ridden female assassin they deliberately left naked, or the Palestinian couple they shot dead in bed.

In short, Munich is neither the equal of Schindler's List nor Saving Private Ryan, both of which showed more courage and complexity, with memorable characters entangled in moral ambivalence. It is more interesting than most action movies and is still worth seeing, but Munich doesn't do justice to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. That's too bad, because Steven Spielberg might be the only American filmmaker able to get both the cash and the audience to put a new perspective before the American people.

A response from a Socialist Site by David Walsh

.......One can find fault with Spielberg and principal screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America) on a number of grounds. Although there are references to the origins of the state of Israel, the film tends to suggest that the history of violence in the region began in Munich in 1972. In fact, the establishment of the Zionist state meant the expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians. In 1946, Jews owned less than 12 percent of the land in the area that became Israeli territory; that figure rose to 77 percent after the 1948-49 war.

Palestinians fled their land in large measure out of fear of Zionist violence. In the notorious massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948, Menachem Begin’s Irgun group massacred 250 men, women and children. This widely publicized event was part of a deliberate effort to terrorize the Arabs and empty Palestine of its population. Over a two-year period from 1947 to 1949, the Zionists destroyed and depopulated more than 400 Arab villages, systematically replacing them with Jewish communities. By 1972, then, masses of Palestinians had been living miserably in refugee camps distributed throughout the region for more than two decades. They had only recently taken up arms against their condition.

The killing of the Israeli athletes was an atrocity (how many were killed by Palestinians and how many by German police snipers remains unknown), but the ultimate responsibility for the violence lies with the Zionist authorities and their backers in Washington and elsewhere.

Moreover, it is reasonable to assume, and research apparently backs this up, that the decision taken by Meir was only in part a specific response to the Munich events. These rather provided the moral and political pretext for the Israelis to eliminate a portion of the Palestinian leadership, many of whom had nothing whatsoever to do with the Olympic hostage-taking. Avner raises this issue in the film, but, again, the reference is only a fleeting one........

And a response by Steven Spielberg himself in which he ends all speculation of the movie being pro-Palestinian or at least somehow neutral to both sides:

"I am as truly pro-Israeli as you can possibly imagine ... But there is a constituency that nothing you can say or do will ever satisfy." Spielberg himself admits that the silliest aspect of this whole buzz ball is that one faction is accusing him of "moral equivalency" - in other words, of making like Switzerland and refusing to pick a side. "Frankly," he tells Ebert, "I think that's a stupid charge." The film is meant to be critical of Israel, he says – but in the nicest, gentlest, most puppy-dogs-and-ice-cream, appropriate for a 10 year old's birthday party way possible.

"Munich": Spielberg's lies and cover-ups

2006-01-26T11:06:00.000+01:00

The Humanization of Israeli killers, and the Dehumanization of Palestinian civilians
Who is retaliating against whom in the Arab-Israeli conflict? That is the question

by As'ad AbuKhalil

(As'ad AbuKhalil, a native of Lebanon, is a leading expert on the Middle East. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He teaches at California State University at Stanislaus and at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC/Berkeley. He is the author of "Bin Laden, Islam & America's New War on Terrorism." His latest book is "The Battle for Saudi Arabia.")

This film reminds me of a line that comedian George Carlin used in his comedy routine that went roughly like this: "Why do we call Israeli terrorists 'commandos,' and Palestinian commandos 'terrorists?" His question never got a laugh the two times I saw him use it with a live audience.

The thrust of the Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare notwithstanding: Israeli killers are conscientious and humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter what--vicious killers.

Did you notice how one lone critical opinion of the movie by one Israeli diplomat (Ehud Danoch, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles), which mildly criticized the movie, got so much press in the US?It helped to promote the movie and to give the illusion of a "balanced" cast to the narrative, that it does not deserve. This supposed critical opinion reminded me of O'Reilly; how he always seems to find one e-mail from somebody in Montana who tells him that he is too liberal. He needs that to maintain an image that does not exist, just as Spielberg needs to maintain an image that he does not deserve.

This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. It is a celebration of Israeli murder of Palestinians. When Israelis kill, it is always moral, and always careful, and always on target. On Dec. 26, yet another New York Times neo-con reviewer thinks that Spielberg was not sympathetic enough to the Israeli killers.

I was angry watching it; and I grew more angry as I observed the liberal Berkeley audience with whom I watched it react sympathetically to the movie, rooting for the Israeli head assassin, as he went about his "civilized" killing. I watched a humane Berkeley audience root for an Israeli killing team,in a story with Palestinian victims who were real people, with real blood.

An emotional moment for Spielberg, and presumably for American audiences was when the chief Israeli assassin talked with his young daughter in New York, stating that he missed her very much. Oh, yeah. That was the point at which you were expected to shed a tear or two; the music grew particularly sentimental at that point.

Spielberg's movie is based on a "non-fiction" book by journalist George Jonas, Vengeance, which took the Israeli account at face value. But in the book the Israeli killers did not express regret or second-thoughts of any kind. None! In the book -- but not in the movie-- the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." Hmmm...How could Spielberg have missed that?

I can connect to the story, in its details and personalities. The first victim of the movie was Wa'il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah's son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that none of the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich.

But why should this movie, a Spielberg movie, bother with facts, especially if they get in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative? This movie is intended for mass audiences who know nothing about the facts of the conflict. That is exactly why it will work, and why it will deliver the propaganda goods.

Munich was not as planned an operation as has often been maintained. This was not planned months in advance, as Abu Iyad maintained in his account written with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land. Abu Iyad for years exaggerated the claims about the "carefully planned" Munich operation, and PLO media at the time lied about PLO gunmen throwing grenades into the helicopters, so as to make the last shootout more of a fight that it actually was.

Massacred Palestinians who were being bombed by Israeli fighter jets in their refugee camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO had to give them some, even if they were not legitimate heroes. The German police at the time were going to take the PLO out, no matter what, and no matter how much the Germans endangered the lives of the hostages, and they presumably had Israeli consent. An Arab League diplomat revealed this recently when he broke his silence in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the negotiator with the Palestinian guerillas in Munich.

It can be argued that the Palestinians risked the lives of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is similar to the moral perils entailed by hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. Quite true.

But it is also true that the "State of Israel" has taken a nation hostage, and has been endangering the lives of millions of Palestinians since the inception of the Israeli state. It is a question of who is retaliating against whom. One of the many false premises of the Spielberg movie is that Israel only went on a killing rampage-and only against Palestinian "killers"--after Munich; that Munich was some kind of watershed.

Watershed it was not, except in Israeli propaganda brochures. Israel has been perpetrating killing rampages against Palestinians, mostly civilians, since before the creation of the state of Israel. And how could Spielberg lionize Golda Meir and forget to mention her most memorable quote: that "there is no such thing as the Palestinian people"?

Spielberg must have missed that too,as he portrayed her as Grandma goodness who was pushed into vengeance by Palestinian monsters. More humanization of Israel and dehumanization of Palestine. That is why the movie showed the director of the Israeli assassination machine with his child: the audience must see him as a caring human being.

Not a single Palestinian in the movie appeared unarmed. They all were terrorists, and their murder had to be justified, and Spielberg did a great service for the state of Israel in that regard. They should name some stolen Palestinian property in his honor.

What were the Israelis doing before Munich? Before Munich -- not after-Israelis placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his 14-year-old niece. The teenage girl was not plotting the Munich attack when she was murdered by the Israelis; nor was her uncle. Kanafani wrote for Al-Hurriyyah magazine.

Israel, also before Munich, sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif, a writer and journalist, and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any group. But Sayigh was a really diligent researcher, and Israel did not appreciate it.

Abu Sharif never had a military role. He was an innocent victim of Israeli killing. He nevr held a gun. I see him as a human being, and not as the armed and vengeful character that appears in Spielberg's movie; typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when they speak Arabic never need subtitles. We get them them when people speak in French and German, but Arabic is not important. It is not important to know what cheap natives say; we only need to know what expensive people say: Europeans and Israelis.

Do you notice that Hollywood still portrays Israelis as Europeans: they still don't want to accept that some half of all Israelis come from Asian and African countries. This makes it easier for the White Man to identify with them. And there is this element that is never mentioned about Palestinian attacks: and this is true of the present and of the past. It is not that some Palestinian leaders recruit or compel Palestinians to attack Israelis. It is the other way round. Palestinians, regular rank-and-file pressure Palestinian leaders and commanders to send them on military or suicidal missions against Israeli targets. Munich occurred exactly like that. Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon, those who were trained by Fatah and by other groups, were lobbying for "action." Why? In February of the same year prior to Munich, Israeli jets bombed Palestinian refugee camps, and killed innocent people. This is what is missing in the movie. Most Palestinians who are killed by Israelis are unarmed and are killed not by conscientious and sensitive Israeli assassins-as they are outrageously portrayed in this movie-but by Israeli pilots who bomb refugee camps filled with unarmed civilians. Palestinians who are bombed from the air, long before Munich, are elderly and women and children in their beds. These are the victims that you will never see in a Spielberg movie.

Israel was killing Palestinians, and this was the context of pre-Munich. A small Palestinian group chose to seek venegeance--retaliation-- but they were not sure of their target, and this was only three months before Munich. One of the handful of people who knew about this was Abu Mazen, the Abu Mazen who today is the head of the puppet Palestinian Authority. But do you notice that US/Israel always forgive the past of those who submit to Israeli dictates? Look at how US and Israel forgave Anwar Sadat for his Nazi past. Abu Mazen was the money guy, and he dispersed the funds for Abu Dawud, who engineered the operation.

The American public and US media and popular culture are so enamored with the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, but the image of the Mossad does not match its actual reality. The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession with Abu Hasan Salamah as the "mastermind" of Munich when he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Munich. To be sure, Abu Hasan was a braggart, and had a big mouth, and would take credit for things he did not do, and would distance himself from failed "operations" that he planned, like the Sabena hijacking in 1972.

That was Abu Hasan: he lived the life of a playboy, and enjoyed a unique indulgent pampering from Abu Ammar who treated him like a son. Abu Ammar would never say no to Abu Hasan, on anything. But Abu Hasan had nothing to do with Munich, and this ostensibly all-knowing Mossad, did not know it. Former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, once said that the Mossad is a mediocre organization, but that it does outstanding PR. Former CIA man in Beirut Robert Baer said this about the Mossad--in an interview he gave to Al-Jazeera: "Let me tell you something, what people most err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that [i.e. Norway]. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge of those countries."

But this can never be maintained in a country that wants to exaggerate the prowess and knowledge of an intelligence agency not only to help feed the Israeli propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public for more ruthless times and ways. So a very small number of people knew about it, and of course Abu Iyad was one of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on the list, and yet his name was not on the list, just to show you about how much--or how little-- Israel knew. Abu Iyad spoke more than he needed not only because he wanted to send a message to the enemy, but also because the wars of factions and "Abus" within the PLO necessitated a game of one-up-manship, and of wild exaggeration at times.

And while Black September was a paper name, and did not have a separate organizational existence or structure, several factions used the name for their own ends. Nobody consulted with Abu Iyad about Abu Hasan's use of the name for the failed Sabena hijacking. Abu Dawud is a key person here. And while his name was mentioned in passing, it was added after the fact in Israeli propaganda accounts. Abu Dawud was arrested in France for another reason in 1977, and he was released because there were no German or Israeli warrants for his involvement in Munich. That shows you.

Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of Munich. But I personally believe the account of Abu Dawud more than I believe Spielberg, i.e. Israeli propaganda claims, or even German police. (Abu Dawud's account is found in Abu Dawud, Filastin: Mina-l-Quds Ila-Muikh (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1999). German police lied quite a bit about the case; they leaked to the press fanciful accounts of Palestinian infiltration of the workforce at the Olympic city, when none of that actually took place. They were too embarrassed to tell the truth. Similarly, the Israelis wanted to back the German account, especially as the violence at Munich was a propaganda bonanza for the Israelis in the West, just as Munich-this is not known in the West-was a propaganda bonanza for Fatah in the Middle East, as horrrific as the outcome was for all. And in that sense, the Germans, the Israelis, and Abu Iyad (and certainly Abu Hasan) lied about Munich, but not Abu Dawud, in my opinion. Abu Dawud is one of those 2nd tier PLO leaders who did not get corrupted in the messy Lebanese scene, and who did now allow the Gulf money that corrupted many PLO leaders to affect him.

Dawud was a man who was in charge of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and yet his name does not appear in any chronicle of the war because he was too low key, and because he never bragged. (he never talked even when the brutal Mukhabarat secret police in Jordan dangled him by his feet for days, while torturing him). People who saw him in jail at the time did not recognize him. But know this: your reliable "moderate" US allies in Jordan are quite proficient at torture. They are probably the best; they are helping the US in that regard as we speak. Most Lebanese did not even know Dawud's name. But this also explains why he survived, unlike say Abu Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois society. He could not get enough of that life. He developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment on Madame Curie Street in Beirut, and the routine he developed (going to the gym at the same time every day), made him an easy target for Israeli assassins.

Abu Hasan could get all the money he wanted for his own group from Yasser Arafat, and was doing a good job of maintaining not only good relations with the CIA but also with Lebanese right-wing groups. He became good friends with some right-wing militia leaders. Read the novel by Navid Ignatius, Agents of Innocence: it is based on Abu Hasan, although the author does not admit it.

It is interesting that in the Spielberg movie, the Israeli head killer (who was in the movie named "Troy"), was cast to be most appealing to the audience: a good looking and charismatic figure. But say what you want about Abu Hasan (and many people in Palestinian struggle, like Abu Dawud, did not like him) but he was a good looking and charismatic figure in real life. But in the movie the actor who played him in Spielberg's movie is not at all attractive.

Spielberg does not want the viewer to identify with any Palestinian in the movie. He just wanted to identify with the expensive human beings: the Israelis. The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir's painting, the Mosque,where they are an unidentifiable blob. For Spielberg they were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed to evoke emotions, and you were not supposed to see them bleed, and if you did, you had to cheer for their killers.

The only ones that you had to feel sorry for were the Israelis who get killed, including the killers when they kill. The sentimental music that plays when Israelis die, differs from the music that plays when Palestinians die n "Munich." And no speaking roles for Palestinians were necessary. Why bother? Give one a line, and you have done your "objective" duty.

The list of prisoners that Palestinian guerillas submitted to German authorities for release, did not have just "200 Arab prisoners" on it, as the movie clams. It had the names of some 234 Arab and non-Arab prisoners, including Japanese and Germans, but that was not in the movie.

The statement that was issued by the guerillas gave a name to the Munich "operation": "Bir`im and Ikrit," the names of two (predominantly Christian) villages in northern Palestine, the people of which were expelled by Israeli occupation forces in 1948 for "security reasons." In 1972, the people of those villages petitioned the Israeli courts to return to their native villages, and the Israeli courts turned them down.

But if Spielberg were to use the actual name of the Palestinian commando "operation" in Munich ("Bir`im and Ikrit") he would have to relate to his audience those burdensome details and it would have detracted from his celebration of the Israeli killing machine.

But this begs the question: why is the Munich massacre more infamous than the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps in February, prior to Munich? And why do the letter bombs to three Palestinian writers not get world attention? Why did American liberals not notice? Can you imagine what would happen if a Palestinian threw even a rose at an Israeli writer? Can you imagine the outcry among American leftists if a Palestinian were to say even a bad word to Amos Oz for example? That was the stature of writer Ghassan Kanafani among Palestinians.

I will not get into the military/intelligence background of the Israeli hostages as Abu Dawud does in his memoirs because the attackers did not know that information prior to the "operation." Abu Dawud gives many details about the military backgrounds of some of the Olympic hostages, but I do not think that this is appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that information before hand. I will not get into what actually happened at the site at the airport when the hostages were being transferred by their captors not only because the captors were responsible by virtue of the hostage "operation", but one can raise questions regarding the actual responsibility for the killing of the hostages. Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the 1990s in which writers raised questions about German police responsibility, and on how the German government never published autopsy reports of the hostages. The Israeli government also did not want to examine the bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would have settled the question, of course.

Dawud stressed that the attackers were under strict instructions to not shoot at the hostages, and you notice in the scene in the movie, that when they were storming the compound, they clearly struggled with the door and avoided shooting, when shooting could have shortened their entry time. Dawud claims that they were under strict orders to avoid using the grenades. He raises the possibility that the helicopter may have exploded from a bullet that hit its gas tank, but I don't know, and I have never relied on Spielberg, or on the book on which he based his account, for historical accuracy.

In retaliation for Israeli atrocities, Palestinians also have managed to assassinate Israeli military and intelligence leaders but those operations do not get Hollywood attention because the trend in US media and popular culture is that you should only show Palestinians when you can claim they are wantonly killing civilians, not when they are retaliating against Israeli military personnel.

It is not true that the Israeli response was confined to the assassination of the 11 Palestinians as was shown in the movie: Israel was also killing other Palestinians. Israeli "response" or initiative we should call it, was more massive and brutal that the operation of the secret team.

Three days after Munich, Israel ordered a bombing which required the use of some 75 Israeli aircraft (the largest attack since 1967). Their bombings of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon resulted in the killing of more than 200 civilians. And this is not because the Israelis were after a camp north of Sidon that was used for training the Munich attackers. That camp was not even hit (another sign that Israelis had no information about the real culprits of Munich) while other camps with civilians in them were bombed. While the "retaliatory" killings were being perpetrated by Spielberg's soulful assassins, Israeli bombing of Palestinian refugee camps continued uninterrupted.

The most glaring omission in the film, which shows you that the Israeli team was not only savage but also ignorant of their targets, was what transpired on July 21, 1973, when Ali Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter relaxing with his pregnant wife at a swimming pool in Norway, was murdered by Spielberg's beloved assassination team merely because Ali resembled what the hit team thought Abu Hasan Salamah looked like. The Norwegian police tracked and arrested the Israeli killers, but they were all released in a secret deal with the Israeli governement.

These inconvenient and uncomfortable facts about the Israeli killing team were omitted by Spielberg. Even Wa'il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in Rome who knew nothing about Munich, and was an academic with close ties to Leftist circles in Italy, was shot 14 times. He almost certainly never held a gun in his life. Zu`ytir was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on which he knew nothing. The PLO representative in France, Mahmud Hamshari also had nothing to do with Munich; he too was "liquidated."

The movie, it seems, relished detailing the 1973 Israeli revenge in Beirut. Spielberg really enjoyed depicting that act by Israeli hit squads. But who were the three PLO personalities killed in that so noble endeavor? And who cares about the details? Kamal Udwan was the Fatah/PLO leader responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. He not only had no responsibilities in Europe, but he opposed "operations" in Europe, and even those by Black September. More than that, Udwan was one of the most moderate PLO leaders, having accepted the two-state solution back in 1970, before any of his colleques in Fatah. Another victim, Abu Yusuf An-Najjar, was in charge of intelligence in Lebanon-Lebanon, not Europe. While Udwan had no knowledge of Munich, Abu Yusuf may have heard about it but had no role whatever in it. The third victim was another Palestinian writer: and Israelis have no qualms about the murder of Palestinian poets, artists, and writers: Kamal Nasir was a poet, who was killed in his bed. The movie did not tell you that by the time the Israeli terrorists finished with their retaliation "mission," some 100 Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered on that day in April 1973.

The PLO representative in Cyprus also had nothing to do with Munich; he was the intelligence envoy of Abu Yusuf An-Najjar. And some people targeted on the list of the Israeli murder team were not only not involved with Black September, but some were not even members of the Fatah organization. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a Palestinian scholar who had just completed his PhD in political science; I recently had dinner with Basil's best friend in college in Candada. Kubaysi was in the PFLP and not in Fatah. The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black September.

But we can rest assured the film is accurate: Spielberg offered the script to Dennis Ross and his former boss Bill Clinton to verify the "accuracy" of the film's Middle East political and historical references.

Spielberg portrayed the neighborhood where the PLO leaders and others were killed with all the features of the Orientalist imagination. The houses were old style with arches, and the place was protected like a military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived in a civilian residential building in the most modern and upper class neighborhood of Verdun in Beirut. But why bother with that fact?

The Munich movie does not tell you that on September 16, and 17, Israel launched an invasion of south Lebanon, razing the refugee camp of Nabatiyyah. The Lebanese newspapers at the time had on the first page a picture of a smashed civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians crushed inside after an Israeli tank ran over their car near Jwayya in south Lebanon. That must have been too messy for Spielberg to cover. The car had stopped at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance to the village. Were those civilians in the car also involved in Munich?

As Spielberg's movie ends,we see written on the screen the statement that Abu Hasan Salamah was later "assassinated." Spielberg forgot to add that he was "assassinated" by a massive car bomb in a crowded street in Beirut, which killed and injured scores of civilians--but hey--they were only Arabs and their blood is too cheap to mention.

NOT IN MY NAME

2006-01-25T19:10:00.000+01:00

President Chirac of France has indicated that the so-called "Nuclear Option" is thinkable against so-called "terrorist states".
The Chancellor of Germany, my home country, Angela Merkel has defended Mr Chirac´s remarks from critics within the German opposition parties.
Those government leaders of the biggest European countries have practically given the American and Israeli war-machine a green light for nuking Iran.

The war-crimes committed in the war against the Iraqi people were not committed in our, the German and the French name, the even worse crimes against the Iranian people will be.
I´m angry. I´m sad. I´m scared.
I knew that Ms Merkel as German Chancellor was not a good sign.
When Chancellor Schröder refused to rubber stamp the war against Iraq, I was so proud of him. I was so happy to be German, when I heard his speech in the Bundestag, when he said that the "power of the law" should rule and not the "law of power".
At that moment I was confident that we Germans had learned from history.
Cynics say, that the reason for Germany and France in not joining in with the Americans, was that those countries had opposing business interests in Iraq to the Americans.
But this at least was not the reason for Mr Schröder´s decision. I remember the media blast against him by all the pro-business media and generally by most all of the German media, even part of the publicly owned media.
I refuse to become a cynic dividing the whole world purely in business interests.
I refuse to believe in that dark and negative image of the human kind, which does not allow for ethical values.
I believe that in each one of us, is this ability for compassion and pure goodness, even politicians, even in capitalists.
Mr Schröder was the most business chancellor, the SPD, the German Social-Democrats ever had. In his office he was a German Tony Blair.
But he did not act like Tony Blair. In this short time span he became a compassionate and ethical human being, a person he used to be when he started to go into politics.
He possebly got the French President Chirac into the boat by pointing out French business interests going sour with an Iraq war. He might have gotten Russian President Putin in by pointing out that power would even shift more into the direction of the US when they would take over the whole Middle East, which in the long run would be dangerous to Russian sovereignity and interests. But Schröder was against the war for his love of ethics, ethics he might have compromised many times in his political career, but not this time, this one single time.

Ms Merkel is different. She has sold out all faith in human ethics a long time ago. And most Germans can feel it. Her party the "Christian Democrats", who actually have left pretense of the highest Christian value, the love of neighbour, quite a long time ago, had before the elections quite a bit of lead on Schröder´s SPD.
There had been quite a propaganda campaign against the SPD, by down-talking the German economy, which at the same time in reality had become the world-champion in export, far above the USA, still above Japan and even above the cheap wage, sweat-shop billion people country China. So while the high unemployment (high profit corporation were cutting down on personell, while also cutting down on paying taxes. Lacking those tax-revenues cities and towns were scrimping on public employment and work projects for small companies) and the so-called "economic problems" were causing the SPD government millions of votes, Ms Merkel was causing her own party to loose most of those votes again, just by being the parties front-runner, a person without charisma, unconvincing in her arguments and incapable of one single honest smile, that would reach her eyes.
As a conspiracy theorist I ask myself who, what economic big forces, pressed Ms Merkel, the vote-looser, on the CDU.
As a woman however I feel frustrated by her, the first female German Chancellor, one of very few female heads of government in the world. She sure makes us women look bad. She stands in a line with the British Margaret Thatcher and the American Condoleeza Rice, a woman without compassion or ethics, acting as if a woman in order to get respected in politics, must even act more cruel than a man.

And it makes me sad and angry. And it scares me.
But as a German and a woman I refuse to identify with Ms Merkel:

NOT IN MY NAME do I want the women and men of Iran being nuked, there homes, land and culture turned into radio-active rubble, their children being ripped to pieces, their future children condemned to life-long suffering of the consequences of radiation.
Who are the "terrorist states"?
Who terrorizes whom, threatening with the worst terrible destruction imaginable?

When Chancellor Schröder held his speech in the Bundestag, he knew, that chances were slim to stop the American war-machine, but he still refused to take part.
He thought, not in my name, the German name.
Now Schröder is no longer in power, now we Germans have to say it on our own:
NOT IN OUR NAME
so have the French, so have the other Europeans and so all the Americans of good will

NOT IN MY NAME - NOT IN OUR NAME

If enough people say it, over and over again, the mothers to their sons, the sisters to their brothers, the children to their fathers, they will stop the war-machine, because they will stop the soldiers.
It still goes: "Imagine it is war, and nobody goes there!"

"Munich" and Abu Nidal

2006-01-19T00:40:00.000+01:00

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME

There was a time when I thought that Palestinian was a synonym for terrorist - literally.
I remember exactly when I got impression. It was in August 1972 during the Olympic Games of Munich.
I was still a child then, I knew nothing about politics, very little about history and had not yet developed any interest in watching the news or reading a newspaper.
But from the few times I did pay attention to the news I knew that those Olympic Games were special for Germany.
Everybody was talking about it them, a long time before hand. Everybody was looking forward to them. And even people who normally weren't interested in sports or just interested in soccer were now watching the events on TV.
The openenings of the Games were so impressive, all those many athlets from just about every country of the world had come to Germany, the flags, the music, the cheering, the excited talks. It seemed like my whole country was so very, very happy.
And then all of a sudden everything changed. People were killed as hostages taken and afterwards those hostages were killed as well.
Everybody was in shock and all the happiness was gone. The Games went on, but there was no excitement any more. The reporters only made sad commentaries. And for the closing ceremonies there was no music, no dancing, no performances and no cheering.
I remember a group of children about my age, the commentator told the TV audience that they had practiced for many month to perform dances for these ceremomies, but because of the events, they would now only walk through the stadium.
I remember how sad those children looked and I remember that I hated the "Palestinians" for destroying all the happiness.
It was not until years later that I found out, that "Palestinians" didn´t just mean terrorists, that it was the name of a people.
By then I had seen the movie Exodus, which gave the impression, that Palestinians (or Arabs as they are called in the movie) are people who (most of them at least) did not want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbours, who had just come to the land after having fled terrible persecution in Europe.
Years later I watched the TV movie "Sword of Gideon" about the retaliation of Mossad against the people who were supposedly responsible for the death of the Israeli athlets in Munich. While I did not like the thought of assassinations I still did sympathize with those Mossad characters.
The events of Munich had poisened my mind for a long time against the Plaestinians. And it took many years and good antidote of historic information for me to realize exactly who is the oppressor and who is the victim in Palestine.
Now Stephen Spielberg has made a remake of the "Sword of Gideon" and from what I have read this movie seems to be not quite as pro-Israeli as the older movie.
At least the main-character shows in the end doubts about his murderous mission, doubts about its ethics, doubts about its goals and even doubts about the question, if the people killed are really guilty of any crime.However this movie is, according to reviewers, still blatantly from an Israeli point of view.

Looking back on the events of Munich I can see that I was not the only one who was influenced by them to become a staunch supporter of Israel at least for quite a while. The murder of those Israeli athletes was one of the best propaganda points for the Israely side ever.
Which leads me to the question what stupid idiot was responsible for this point.
He was called Abu Nidal. And he and his organisation "Black September" have scored many more points for the Israeli side.

I found some interesting information and credible speculations on Abu Nidal and his supposedly pro-Palestinian actions:

Abu Nidal began his long and bloody career in the PLO, only to become a bitter rival of Yasser Arafat. It was a situation that the Israeli Mossad, in a manner similar to their CIA cousins, would seek to exploit.

As Middle East expert Patrick Seale writes:

Israeli penetration of Palestinian organizations was common, but it was clearly not the whole story. Most intelligence sources I consulted agreed that it was standard practice to use penetration agents not simply to neutralize or destroy the enemy but to try to manipulate him so that he did one's bidding without always being aware of doing

Whatever jobs [Abu Nidal] might have done for Arab sponsors, and they had been numerous and nasty, he had done many other jobs from which Israel alone appeared to benefit."(1312)

Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization.

One French terrorism expert stated: "If Abu Nidal himself is not an Israeli agent, then two or three of his senior people most certainly are. Nothing else can explain some of his operations."

A former senior Jordanian intelligence officer said: "Scratch around inside Abu
Nidal's organization and you will find Mossad."

Backing up these reports was a former member of Abu Nidal's own Justice Committee, who told Seale that Mossad agents captured by Abu Nidal were usually killed very quickly to prevent them from confessing their true motives. Abu Iyad, former chief of PLO Intelligence, added,
"Every Palestinian who works in intelligence is convinced that Israel has a big hand in Abu Nidal's affairs."(1313)

Nidal's organization has been responsible for some of the most brutal acts of terrorism in the world. According to the State Department, Abu Nidal has carried out more than 100 acts or terrorism that have resulted in the deaths of over 280 people. Some of these attacks include the 1986 grenade and machine-gun assaults on El Al counters at the Rome and Vienna airports, attacks on synagogues, and assassinations of Palestinian moderates.
...........
What is curious is that Israel has never punished Abu Nidal's organization.Israel has a long-standing policy of launching immediate and massive retaliation against any terrorist attack. While Israeli forces have bombed, shelled and raided Palestinian and Shi'ite positions in Lebanon, and have sent hit teams to kill Palestinian guerrilla leaders in other countries, they have never attacked
Abu Nidal. Given Israel's harsh and unrelenting policy of retribution against terrorist attacks, this seems more than a bit bizarre. As Seale concludes: Abu Nidal is a professional killer who has sold his deadly services certainly to the Arabs and perhaps to the Israelis as well. His genius has been to understand that states will commit any crime in the name of national interest. A criminal
like Abu Nidal can flourish doing their dirty work.(1315) Former DEA agent

A curious feature of Abu Nidal's terrorism is that more than 50 percent of it has been directed against Arab and Palestinian rivals. The ANO's vicious war against the PLO has led to Arab claims that it was secretly manipulated by Israel's Mossad secret service. According to this seemingly far-fetched hypothesis, the Mossad penetrated Abu Nidal's organization and has manipulated Abu Nidal to carry out atrocities that would discredit the Palestinian cause.

The hypothesis is based on four main points:

1. Abu Nidal killings have damaged the Palestinian cause to Israel's advantage
2. the suspicious behavior of some of Abu Nidal's officials
3. the lack of attacks on Israel and lack of involvement in the Intifada,
4. and Israel's failure to retaliate against Abu Nidal's groups.

Another distinctive feature of Abu Nidal's terrorism is that the ANO has generally not concerned itself with captured ANO members, preferring to abandon them to their fate rather than to attempt to bargain for their release. These traits would seem to suggest that the ANO has been more a product of its leader's paranoid psychopathology than his ideology

Another interesting speculation on Abu Nidal is here. If you follow the link, you will see, that this was posted by Gordon Thomas in September 2001, probably before 9/11 since it was not mentioned:

Abu Nidal is back
Branded by Western intelligence services as the “grandmaster of terrorism”, who vanished from their tracking computer screens a year ago, has surfaced - and sent a surge of fear around the world.
Abu Nidal is alive and well in one of Saddam Hussein’s magnificent villas on the outskirts of Baghdad - according to intelligence reports received this week by the CIA, Mossad and French intelligence.
All three services conclude that this most feared of terrorists who has remained out of sight for a year - and has not attacked a Western target for ten years - is planning some new outrage for his new host paymaster: Saddam Hussein............
Now his confirmed presence in Baghdad has sent a collective shiver through Western capitals.
Recent killings - including the murder of an Egyptian cleric in Yemen last month - bear the hallmark of Abu Nidal. Counter-terrorism experts say their ground intelligence suggests that Nidal has solved a problem for Saddam: giving him what he lacks - a ready-made terrorist organisation able to operate world-wide.
Nidal’s ANO is believed to now number no more than 200 followers. Mossad believe that over the past few months they have slipped into Iraq via Jordan.
Many of them are veterans of terrorist attacks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior adviser to the Israeli government on counter-terrorism, told me: “Nidal and Saddam have a tortured history and their relationship is hardly based on mutual trust. Saddam financed Nidal’s early activities - only to discover that Nidal was also working with Syria - to Iraq’s disadvantage. Nidal left Baghdad in a hurry.”
But now he is back. And, for the moment at least, Nidal’s well-known history of conducting terrorist acts on behalf of his host, almost certainly has led Saddam to welcome him.

Now Gordon Thomas, the author, has written a book about the Mossad and is said to have excellent connections into the Mossad and into British intelligence.
So Mr Thomas´sources have told him that Abu Nidal was in Baghdad with Saddam ready to use his organisation for major terrorist attacks.
And after 9/11 most neocons wanted to attack Iraq right away, but were stopped by others to go after Afghanistan first.
Could it be that Abu Nidal, with him the Palestinians together with Saddam were supposed to be framed for 9/11 first? But then they were forced by the oil-interest backers into a change of plan and frame Osama to get into Afghanisthan?
Remember the cheering Israelis who gave each other high fives will filming the collaps of the WTC buildings. When they were arrested they told the police "we are Israelis, we are not your problems, the Palestinians are."
The question of course is, why did they not use the Abu Nidal story to frame Saddam? Why did they have to cook up some story of an Iraqi agent meeting Mohammed Attah in Prague?

Thoughts about Ariel Sharon

2006-01-08T07:02:00.000+01:00

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME

When I heard that Ariel Sharon had had a stroke, my first thoughts were, to be quite honest, God let him go to hell now.
For Palestinians Sharon is the posterman for oppression and mass-killings of their people. He was
"the mass murderer who led the assault on the West Bank village of Qibya, on October 14, 1953, in which his troops blew up 45 houses and killed 69 Palestinian civilians -- about half of them women and children, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Beirut, Tal Alzaatar,Ain Alroumanah, Jenin"

Read comments on Umkhalil´s blog.
Read there also an article by Karma Nabulsi first published in the British paper the Guardian.

Nabulsi writes:

Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at
home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our
condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this
day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my
eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who
evokes this terrible reaction.

I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the
survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not
forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the
Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return
to public office....

To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our
resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and
above all our national liberation movement....

This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination,
imprisonment, violent military invasion...

His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to
make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an
inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military
aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in
Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was
a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of
the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty
gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel...

Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and
worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have
returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three
years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the
PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the
massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees
that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist
Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not
take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his
forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia
did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let
busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.......

For Egyptians Sharon, who was head of the 9th brigade of the Israeli army in the 1967 war, was responsible for the murder of hundred´s of POW and civil workers in the Sinai.

The Israeli newspaper Maariv published accounts given by two Israeli officers, Arye Biro and Mordechai Brown. They confessed, giving facts and figures, that they and other officers had carried out collective massacres of Egyptian POWs during both wars. Biro and his unit killed 49 unarmed POWs in Sinai during the 1956 war, and Brown, commander of battalion 890, was responsible for the deaths of more than 500 POWs, including civil workers, during the 1967 war.
The pair also revealed that the murdered POWs were forced to dig their own graves using only their hands. They were then shot in the back.

For me Sharon is the proto-type of a man without a conscience and the most prominent representative of not only Nihilist theory but practice.
Power for himself and power for Israel are the only aims of his politics. And for this he walks over thousands of dead bodies.

For me Sharon is a character straigt out of Orwell' 1984. He says peace when he means war. His lies flood the main-line media and have taken in all mainline politicians in America and in Europe.
Just yesterday the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, said: "Even in difficult times, we stand steadfastly on the side of Israel".

He is the man who has so much influence within the American government, that he can walk into the Pentagon without restrictions making demands of any kind.
He is most likely one of those pressuring America into the Iraq war.

And still, while I cannot fault anybody who has suffered under Sharon, or see his family and friends suffer under him to hate him, it will not do for me.
For I know this hatred would spread in my mind.
Sharon´s attitude and politics are not unique in Israel. And although most Israelis know about his crimes against humanity, far too many see him as a hero.
If I hate Sharon, I will start to hate others as well.
But I know deep in my heart, that hatred even of the most guilty is counterproductive in a quest for peace.
Hatred will cause fear in those who are hated, not insight in what they have done to deserve this hatred.
Hatred and fear are the greatest obstacles in coming to a mutual agreement of living together, for a beginning of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Hatred asks for aggressive revenge and fear for protection through violent aggression.
The circle of violence will never end in a framework of hatred and fear.

So all I can do is repeating the prayer, Jesus said on the cross: "Father forgive him, for he knew not what he did." For his mind was clouded, by lies told to him, and lies he told to himself, clouded by an ideology, which makes murderes out of men.
And Father forgive those, who have followed his command, his orders and his lead, for they knew not what they did. For their minds were clouded by fear and hatred towards those they feared and still in reality were never a danger to them.
And Father forgive us, the rest of the world, for standing by and doing nothing to prevent the murders and the terrible sufferings, for we knew not what we did. For our minds were clouded by ignorance and cowardice.

Why is it so hard to accept evidence

2005-08-18T10:43:00.000+02:00

The evidence that the attacks of 9/11 could not have succeeded without US-government involvement is practically overwhelming, if you are objective.

Three highrise buildings have crashed into their own foundation on the same day. The cause of those crashes is supposedly fire. That steel-framed buildings have totally crashed without the help of explosives has never happened before 9/11 2001 and never happened afterwards. The crashes only took seconds, barely more than a free fall. If you watch those crashes you can see that they look exactly like controlled demolishions carried out by expert-firms, something you might have seen in documentarys on this matter.
It is said, that the air-plane crash had weakened the buildings´structures. But the third building was not hit by an airplane. And the WTC-towers were especially built to withstand a hit by an airplane of similar size as those on 9/11.
It is said, that a fire fueled by airplane kerosene is hot enough to weaken steel.
And again, the fire in the third building was not fueled by airplane kerosene.And in one of the twin-towers most of the kerosene burned out at the impact of the crashing plane outside the building.and the fire-fighters in the towers could get all the way up to crash-sight without feeling an extraordinary high heat. In fact, they were convinced to be able to extinguish the fire in a short time. Photographs of the towers before the crash show victims who still were alive at the time directly at the impact area. No extraordinay heat had killed them yet.
After the crash of the WTC-buildings no experts, according to Fire Engineering Magazine, were allowed to examine the remains of the buildings to find out what caused their structural failure.

"For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car... Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members - described by one close source as a "tourist trip"- no one's checking the evidence for anything."

(Fire Engineering Magazine, January 2002)

These facts are indefutable. They comprise undeniable evidence that the key-points of the official 9/11 story are lies.
There different opinions on how the American government was involved in the planning or in the attacks themselves. But the physical facts point to the use of explosives in bringing the buildings down. And the fact that the US-Government did not allow examination of the remains, provide strong evidence, that it were not Muslim extremists who had gained access to those buildings to plant the explosives in the strategically right positions, but people who worked in collusion with powerful members of this very government.

There are thousands of other facts digged up by the 9/11 truth-movement that point in the direction of government involvement, but of course there is also disinformation floating around. While the disinformers try to discredit the facts, they cannot make them disappear.
Those undefutable facts are convincing enough to allow yourself to be convinced.

However for most people, especially on the Left, evidence be damned, they just cannot allow themselves to fundamentally doubt the official story.
It does not fit into their concept: "Islamistic terrorism is a blowback for American imperialism in the Muslimic world."
And of course many people in those Muslimic countries resent the American foreign politic. But the motive alone does not make a suspect into the murderer, he also needs an opportunity. There are others who have a motive as well: the members of the PNAC think-tank, who most of them are sitting now in the US-goverment or work as cheerleaders for war in the US-media. The government members have access to the buildings and the means, financially and the personal (special intelligence units probably), to do the job and cover their tracks. They might have used Islamist patsies, by having their organisations infiltrated and so manipulate their actions. But those patsies could never have succeeded on their own.
Chances are that the role of those patsies was rather minor.
Logic tells me that the man pretending to be Attah in Florida, could not have been a fundamentalistic Muslim. Being a fundamentalist means you strongly believe in your religion and accept all its rules. You want those rules to be a basis of behavior for everyone else. A man who is so convinced of his faith, that he is ready to martyr himself for it, would never ever break all those rules just before his supposed martydom. A fundamental Muslim would never drink alcohol, use cocain, live with a non-Muslim girlfriend, wear forbidden jwellery, go to a strip-bar and put money in the strip-dancers´ underwear. This all defies logic.

The arguments used by those who cannot accept a government involvement are, that it could not have been a government conspiracy are something like:" Thousands of people would have been involved and they could not have been kept quiet for so long."
In reality it depends on the method used for those attacks how many people needed to have been involved. And American intelligence agancies have a budget of 30 billions a year, drug revenues not counted, and nobody knows how many staff they employ. Special units are trained rigidly to follow commands without asking questions, they allways work on a need to know basis, never being allowed to see the full picture. And of course the organizers would have their own interest at stake, either financially or ideologically.

To salvage their belief in a international Islamist terror-network in the face of mounting evidence, that many of those blamed for terror-attacks are not acting like fundamentalists at all in their private life, some lefties have now started to see Islamism as a ploy used by political dissidents from Muslim countries to get the population on their side.
They just cannot come to grips with the notion, that AlQaeda is of course a political organisation, but it´s not fighting American and Israeli imperialism but supporting it by providing the propaganda tools to justify American military interventions, a planned generational war, a "clash of civilisations" and an exponential growth of military expenditure to enrich the main-shareholders of the military-industrial complex.

There have been precedents of lies to justify wars, precedents of false-flag operations by intelligence organisations.
In Italy it has been proven by a court of law that right-wing organisations had committed brutal terrorists acts blaming the radical left.
"Operation Gladio" it was called.

Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.
Indeed, it would not do for the families of the 85 people ripped apart by the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station to know that their loved ones had been murdered by "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence," as the Italian Senate concluded after its investigation in 2000.
The Bologna atrocity is an example of what Gladio's masters called "the strategy of tension" -- fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat. And as Rajiva notes, this strategy wasn't limited to Western Europe. It was applied, with gruesome effectiveness, in Central America by the Reagan and Bush administrations. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, guerrilla armies and state security forces -- armed, trained and supplied by the United States -- murdered tens of thousands of people throughout the region, often acting with particular savagery at those times when peaceful solutions to the conflicts seemed about to take hold.

There is documentary proof of personal connections between those Italian right-wingers and the CIA.
One of those connections is Michael Ledeen, who once again is a high offical in the Pentagon.

."Ledeen was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s.In the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues. More recently, Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar (the medium between Oliver North and Iran in the Iran-Contra affair) in support of resistance efforts in Iran. In addition to his work with the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen has supported or co-founded a number of advocacy groups pushing for a radical transformation of the Middle East, including the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, JINSA, and of course, Ziad Abdelnour’s U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.

The Left, the secular and the religious humanists and everybody else who believes in democratic values will never be able to overcome the war-profeteers and stop war and oppression unless they will accept the fact, that those fascists lie, cheat, manipulate the media and even mass-murder innocents in their own country to be able to profit from further mass-murder in other countries.
There has been a "Reichstags-fire" and a "Sender Gleiwitz incidence",a "Gulf of Tonkin" and an "Operation Phoenix" before. There has been a "Lavon affair" and the "Pseudo Mau Mau".
Through Phoenix over 40000 people were murdered in cold blood by US-employed CIA snipers, some of the victims were American military personell seen as security risk. British employed Pseudo Mau Mau murdered black Kenyans and white missionaries alike. In the Lavon affair Israel murdered British and American civillians, citizens of those 2 countries which had made the Jewish State possible, just a few years before.
Now there is al-Zarqawi a Palestinian from Jordan committing atrocities against civilians, fellow Muslims, totally counterproductive, if he wants the support of the Iraqi population.

If you do not recognize the enemy´s tactics, how can you beat him?
One of the tactics, of course, is to call conspiracy-theorists insane.
Why for God's or Marx's sake is the Left so totally incapable to accept that there are people within the upper echelon of the capitalist system who walk over dead bodies, thousands if necessary, for their political,ideological and financial gain?
They have done it before.

Talk to the Christians

2005-08-12T13:48:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday, August 10, 2005 my friend Umkhalil wrote on her blog
"An Apology From a US Christian to Palestinians"
There she distances herself from the attitude of the Christian Zionists, represented by Jerry Falwell, who boasts: "The Bible Belt is Israel's safety net in the US"
and Ed McAteer, who promotes ethnically cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.
She writes:

"For their malice, for their perversion of Christianity, for their promulgation of lies regarding the Palestinian people and their history in Palestine, for their demonisation of the Palestinians, for their lack of regard for the dwindling numbers of their co-religionists in Palestine, for the lies that their leaders spew about God; i.e., "Those who promote a Palestinian state have placed themselves in alliance against God," for their incitement to hatred, for their advocating ethnic cleansing, for their role in promoting Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories, for those who believe as does Gary Bauer, co-founder of Stand For Israel, that it is an "obscenity" to give up land for peace, and for their complete and total abdication of the Golden Rule, I apologize to the Palestinians on behalf of US Christians."

Here is the answer I wrote to her:

This was a very good post and I agree with you fully in your assessment of those socalled Christian leaders.
And as Christians we should distance ourselves from those leaders and even apologize for the crimes other Christians justify or even commit in the name of our religion.
However, I do not believe that McAteer actually represents any kind of "moral majority". His views are unethical and immoral. And I am convinced that the majority of Christians, even US Christians do believe in high ethical values. The trouble is that many Christians are totally misinformed.
There are being informed by mass-media which either bend the truth about Palestinians and other Arab people by emphasising on so-called terrorist attacks neglecting to mention Israeli state-terrorism or American military terrorism against the people of Iraq or those media outlets just blatently lie. And Fallwell and McAteer can use those lies for their hate-mongering politics.
I´ve met conservative American Christians who have changed their pro-Israel attitude when they had received more truthful information about the situation in Palestine.

There are religion-haters on the Left who say it is useless to talk to conservative Christians,for they all are nothing but fanatical haters.
This is not true.
It might take a while for the shocking truth to sink in, but in the long run more and more Christians are realizing that they have been misled, that some self-appointed leaders are false prophets and that in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we should not support the oppressors, but the oppressed in Palestine and in Iraq. For Jesus himself has during his life on earth been the spokesmen for the poor and the humiliated, and He himself has been tortured. Jesus has told us to see Him in those who suffer.

So while we probably cannot reach those immoral leaders, it is in my opinion paramount to not give up on their duped followers.
We as Christians ourselves need to find ways to get the truth out to those other Christians. We need to figure out how to do it best and most effectively.
And then miracles can happen. Like a tidal wave the truth will wash away all the lies, and true justice can finally have a fertile ground to grow in Palestine and in other places.

Prejudices and the "Undermind"

2005-08-02T17:27:00.000+02:00

"Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen". (A German proverb: "When someone travels, he has a lot to tell about afterwards")
The last few weeks I have been traveling through altogether 9 European countries. Maybe you remember the American movie:"It´s Tuesday this must be Belgium."
This is about the way we traveled on this trip.
I haven’t done a lot of traveling the tourist way so far, have most often just been visiting close relatives when I was away from home. So this time I thought, I’ll use the chance to see as many places in Europe as possible. Who knows when I ever get another chance.
One other positive aspect for me was, that when I ride as passenger in a car or a bus or a train and see the landscape move by in front of my eyes, my thoughts also start moving.
(By the way, the other best place for me to think is the bathtub at home, where nothing at all is moving. Maybe its the Icelandic hot water, it’s full of sulphur and actually very good for your skin. Maybe it’s also good for the brain cells, mine at least.)

What I noticed most during my trip, when I was talking to the people I met, was that just about everybody from every nation or ethnic group seems to have some prejudices against people from other nations or ethnic minorities.
Many Germans are prejudiced against the Tschek and the Polish, many Tschek are prejudiced against the Polish and the Gypsies, most everybody else in Europe seems to fear the Germans are still Nazis in their hearts. And while many Icelanders are prejudiced against Asian immigrants into Iceland, most other Western-Europeans are now severly prejudiced against their Muslim immigrants.
And actually if I’m really honest, I have to include myself in this litany. How often don’t I just generalize "the Americans", when I talk about the horror and disgust I feel for the crimes of war and oppression organized by the American government and acted out by American military and intelligence agencies.
My friend Umkhalil thinks, that the major reason for all these prejudices people have against "the others" might be the superior complex nearly everybody has sometimes. And she is probably right in this.

Everybody has some doubts about him- or herself, feels slightly incompetent in some situations, and this makes him or her feel bad. But when we can compare ourselves favorable to somebody else our self-doubts get smaller and we feel better.
It’s the situation Jesus describes in the story about the Pharisee standing in the front row of the synagogue praising and thanking God for being so much better morally than the sinner back there in the last row. And Jesus said that the sinner in the last row who accepts that he has done wrong and asks sincerely for divine forgiveness will find far more favor in the eyes of God.
But alas, it seems to be human nature to think far more often like the Pharisee than the repentant sinner.
But we do not only compare ourselves individually with others, since we are social beings, nearly all of us identify with some social groups, very often a national or ethnic groups. And there we also try to make ourselves feel better by thinking that our group of people is morally, intellectually, economically or in some other way better than some other group.
Since this prejudiced thinking is so very common, it most often isn’t really dangerous to the people who are objects of our prejudices.
Take for instance an elderly German aunt of my husband’s (He is half German, half Icelandic and we were also visiting his German relatives on this trip). As a child she lived in Poland as a member of a German minority. Together with her mother and sister she was driven out of Poland during after WWII. She never grew out of the prejudices against the Polish people taught to her by her parents and neighbors so very long ago.
She actually told me that nearly all Polish are lazy workers and steal.
I just gaped at her. How can anybody nowadays believe a thing like this?
And this aunt is not a general right-winger hating all foreigners. She has quite a good relationship to the foreigners living on her block.
I told her, that I knew many Polish people from my parish. All of them are very diligent workers and would never think about stealing anything, ever.
"And besides, think about the German farmers who are sometimes interviewed on TV, when it is talked about forcing unemployed Germans into work as seasonal harvest helpers on farms. Those farmers are actually horrified by the thought of having to employ only Germans instead of the Polish who come year after year as guest workers for the harvesting season. The farmers say, that the Polish workers are by far more diligent and skilled in this hard work than any unemployed German they have sometimes tried to employ." "These are the special Polish" the aunt thinks, "They are exceptions."
So if this aunt would ever have to deal regularly with some Polish people, she would probably meet them at first with quite a bit of distrust. But after a while she would probably decide, that these Polish neighbors probably belong to the small group of the "special Polish". I don’t think that there would be too much harm done.

It only starts to become dangerous, when some powerful politicians are using those prejudices for their own selfish reason, most often for war-mongering in the pursuit of more power and more land ore other economic advantages.
But for this purpose to play upon our inner superiority complex is not enough. The war-mongerers have to play on something else as well: our hidden fears.

And these fears have something to do with the way our brain works.
In the book "Hare brain and Tortoise mind", by Guy Claxton, the author explains, that we all are thinking on different levels of consciousness. And on all levels the mind tries to figure out patterns so we can function as good as possible in a complicated world.
Our conscious logical mind, which is related to our speech centrum tries to figure out the most obvious patterns.
But like with the learning of physical skills, the patterns involved in social situations are often far too complicated for our rational mind to cope with the entire subtle tale telling signs and recognize the underlying patterns.
This is when our "undermined" gets in. Our "undermind" has a mote of thinking, which can deal with far more information than our rational mind and see the underlying patterns.
And from the time we are very small children we start watching the people in our environment, watching their facial expressions and body language. And from the experiences we get through this, our "undermind" tries to figure out patterns in behavior, feelings and thoughts. And most of us are getting rather good in reading other people especially their opinions and feelings about ourselves. And from this our "undermind" tries to figure out, if we can trust these other people or not.
So far explains Claxton in his book.

My guesses in this are, that the trouble with this pattern seeking of our “undermind” is, that it bases its judgment on signs which are not universal. Some signs like smiles or a threatening aggressive posture are probably more or less the same throughout the human race, but the more subtle signs of our body language are probably depending on the culture we come from. And when we meet people from an unfamiliar culture our "undermind"has not enough information to base its judgment on. We are no longer able to "read" the other’s mind in the same way as we would in a familiar social setting. This makes us insecure and slightly fearful. And this is also the moment, when we are most vulnerable for the self-serving propagandists and the fear-mongerers.
Hitler and the other Nazi propagandists used these vulnerabilities, the old prejudices and the subconscious insecurities Germans felt when dealing with Eastern Europeans both Jews and Slavic people. The Nazis used them when proclaiming to the Germans that those "others" are dangerous to the Germanic race, that those strangers are planning to overwhelm or even eliminate the "superior Germanic race", out of envy of course.

Some people might conclude from this, that it is always dangerous when people of different cultures live together in the same country, the same town or the same neighborhood, for the differences and insecurities between the cultures can be exploited by the powerful and ruthless for instigating violence between those different cultural groups, even instigating a civil war or a war between nations.
This surely could happen. And therefore you might conclude to either ban any kind of immigration of people from other cultures or demand absolute assimilation. This is what most German politicians are demanding of the Muslim community in Germany right now. They see a multi-cultural society as dangerous.
And I think they are wrong.
Even while part of the mechanism, which could lead to violence between different cultural groups is subconscious, we, each and every one of us also has a conscious, rational mind. And this mind has, given enough time to think, always an override over our "undermind".
I actually see a big chance in a multicultural, multiethnic society, a chance we can use to promote a permanent peaceful world with just a bit of deliberate positive effort.
By having people of different cultures living just next door or across the street, if we reach out to them, we have the chance to overcome our conscious prejudices and our subconscious insecurities and fears, so they can no longer be abused by self-serving manipulators.
As human beings our ability to learn stays with us for all our lives or at least until we get Alzheimer. Just like our conscious mind can learn a new language, our "undermind" can learn in on a new culture. It however does take a slight bit of effort or even courage to stand the insecurity we will feel in the beginning of this new social experience and not just run away.
In my opinion the reaching out to other cultures should not only be done on an individual bases, but it would be more effective on a collective bases.
And since the modern self-serving propagandists are trying to use the differences between the so-called Judeo-Christian culture and the Muslim culture for their newest project in war-mongering, I see a big obligation of especially the Church to counter their unscrupulous efforts.

Who Profits?

2005-07-18T13:28:00.000+02:00

The last couple of weeks I had no internet access and very little access to news in any language I can understand. But still, when I heard about the London bombings,
I never believed that "Islamists" actually were behind those bombings. It just doesn´t make any sense.
Officials in London now say, that the 4 perpetrators were tricked by their "Islamist" group-leaders, since they still carried their IDs. "Those perpetrators were ready to transport the bombs, but not kill themselves".
Well, this makes even less sense.
Why would islamic radicals murder the members of their own group?
They could have told them, to just leave their backpacks behind and get off the bus or subway before the explosion.
While the investigators now admit that the transporters of the bombs were tricked, the taboo-subject is still to ask the quite logical question, if the people behind the bombings were actually "Islamists" or even Muslims at all.
I think Joh Domingo is right, when he asks Muslimic leaders to stop defending Islam by trying to distance themselves from those crazy mass-murdering radicals, when Islam should not be on the suspect list of those mass-murders at all.

And here I go again asking: "Who profits?"
In every criminal investigation this is a legitimate question, only in political crimes these questions are banned or only allowed to "crazy conspiracy theorists" like me.
And yes I agree that even in criminal cases the person with the strongest obvious motive is not allways the perpetrator of the crime, but to take him off the suspect list is surely a bit unprofessional, isn´t it?

Like in Spain a year ago, now in Britain the population is getting less and less enthusiastic about the American war in Iraq. Even war-mongerer Tony Blair did show notions that he did not want to help expand the war to Iran. He seemed to fall in line behind the European position about Iran and her nuclear energy program.
Could it be, that those attacks were a shot at Tony Blair, that if he would no longer support the Anglo-Saxon-Israel course, it would be easy to just murder his people?
Of course I might be wrong, and Blair was in on it from the get going.
But when we remember the Madrid attacks, then we can be quite sure, that the former Spanish prime minister Aznar was not in on the Madrid attacks or he would have handled the propaganda war a bit less clumsily.
Some people thought that Aznar needed a bit of help in the elections and then they also thought the Spanish would react like a vengeful mob craving for Muslim blood just like the Americans have done after 9/11. But Aznar knew his people better, so he tried to blame the ETA for the few days before the elections. It didn´t help him.
Possible the same people who were behind the Madrid attacks had now in London learned their lesson. They waited til after the reelection of Tony Blair.
And my guess is, that they didn´t ask his permission, just as they didn´t ask Aznar´s.
Maybe, just maybe, there are indications that Europe is not taking the whole thing laying down any more. By officially stating that the bomb-transporters were being tricked, officials leave a small door open to one day tell their people that backers of the attacks were false flag agents of some non-muslimic intelligenc agency.
The purpose of course might also be, to discourage Muslims from becoming patsies for those agencies by joining some sinister groups, telling them: " At least, be careful, your leaders might trick you and murder you."
But besides that, the anti-Muslim propaganda goes on unhindered. From normal decent people in Germany I hear things like: "I have nothing against those people personally, it´s just their terrible religion. I hope this religion will die out some day." (Being exterminated or what do you mean by this?)

No, I don´t think, there is any other way: We need the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to prevent further slaughter of people, Muslim people and non-Muslim people alike.
And for this all people of good will, need to get the courage to become "conspiracy theorists". And there I mean especially the people from the left, who are more worried about their own reputation and credibility than about truth and the terrible consequences those propaganda lies, they themselves encourage, have on all the poor people of the world.
Look at the evidence produced by so many diligent people about 9/11. Yes, there are a few disinformant agents among them or a few others who love their own preconceived theories so much they do not care about evidence, but if you look at the bulk of the research of the 9/11 truth movement, you can say with certainty, that the official story is a lie: The events couldn´t have happened this way, there are physical and organisational impossibilities.
So lets be couragous enough to look, couragous enough to ask the obvious question:
"Who profits?"

Oversexualisation

2005-06-22T06:30:00.000+02:00

I have a real issue with the sexualisation of public life.
I´m a nightshifter, and even on my free days I´m often awake during the night, often watching German satellite TV.
During the night the private stations finance their program with phone-sex advertisments. Normally I use the remote real fast because those ads really sicken me: Women present themselves as objects for one purpose and one purpose only, letting go of the last remnant of self-respect.
What should I care? It´s a way of making a living isn´t it.
Quite likely, that those women in the ads really make a good living. But millions and millions of others just make a very good living for some others, mostly men, and not just on the phone or on an ad. Many are literally forced into prostitution by men who had tricked them with promises of normal jobs, others were forced by poverty and desperation.
Speaking of that, I can tell you a personal story, as usual.
Some years back still in Germany while my kids were still small, I had been living for a couple of months in a shelter for the homeless. How I got there is another story.
However I was desperately trying to get out and find a decent place to live. I went to many interviews for a place to rent, nobody wanted to rent me anything, there were enough others applying for these apartments, who looked less risky.
But then there was this one woman. She said, she was going to move in with her boyfriend and wanted to sublet her apartment for a year at least.
However, she would need the permission of the building company and since her place was only one livingroom, one bedroom, she wouldn´t get it for a family with 3 children.
But then she looked at me and said, "it´s hard to live with children in a shelter isn´t it". I said yes, and she felt sorry for me. She had a little boy of her own.
So she sublet to me without permission, but we should be careful so the manager wouldn´t find out or she would loose her contract.
And so we moved in. And even when she after only 4 months told me she needed her apartment back, since things weren´t working out with her boyfriend, she still told me, not to worry, she would wait until we had found something new. (I panicked anyway, but that is still another story.)
She had been a bit vague on her job, but since we took over her phone, we soon found out from the strange calls we received, that she must have been connected to the redlight business.
I had several temporary jobs at the time, in one they cheated me of all wages for 3 weeks work, in another I worked 4 weeks and only got 3 weeks paid.
And that´s when I actually played with the thought of not saying: "wrong number", at the next strange call. Well, I was never seriously considering it just playing with the thought, I was not at the end of my tethers yet.
But I surely can identify with women who are, women who were slightly more desperate than I was and slightly less religious, women from countries were the economy has broken down, women who have hungry children to feed.
And one of those, for whatever reason she went into the business, showed compassion to me, when nobody else would.
No, I do not hate those women, not even the ones on TV, that go so much on my nerves.
But I hate a system where women and even children are sold, bought, used, humiliated and hurt badly, a system that makes women and children into discardable objects.
And I do not just blame the system on the pimps and their organisations, the providers of the business, I also blame it on the market.

If you take together prostitution and pornography, then it is one of the biggest markets in the world.
There has allways been a prostitution business, but in the last decades it has grown out of any proportians. Some free-sex advocates had argued, that with no more taboos on sexuality, there would no longer be a need for this kind of business.
I guess they were wrong.
The less taboos, the more demand and the more extreme. Normal prostitution is no longer enough. Now it must be violent sex.
Normal pornography is not enough, now it must be child porno or snuff movies.
It looks like adults, just as children, need certain rules and restrictions, even when some of them break them once in a while, for kicks.
But when the rules fall and no borders are any more visible, the people who need the adrenalin kick of breaking rules start getting so far over in their search for kicks, that they start seriously hurting others.
And with sexuality it seems, as if, just like with drugs, some people get addicted to their sexual kicks, they need more and more either life or in images. And it gives them less and less of kicks, so they need higher dosages, extremer ones.
This is the market for exploitation of women and children.

And how did we get so far?
I blame it on Freud. His ridiculous and never verified theories about sexuality being after food and water the most important need in life, and that restrictions on sexuality will make a person emotionally disturbed, these theories have opened the way to the falling away of rules and restrictions, which normally would keep a lid on the extremes of sexual behavior.

Sexualized images are now all around us, selling every product imaginable, and giving men the feeling that women are really only good for one thing and one thing only.
Date rape has not become less seldom, but even more frequent, than before the sexual revolution. For now many men just can´t take no for an answer any more. They quite honestly think the woman is just playing around and no doesn´t really mean no.

Besides rape, there is sexual pressure on teenage girls even as young as 11 years old.
They are told, that sex is allways cool and who doesn´t take part is totally out.
The newest "inn thing" seems to be, that as entrance fee for a cool party, girls have to perform oral sex on the organizing boys.

If this is the peak of women´s liberation, I definitely don´t want it, for the young girls I know!

We in the west are a society out of control in many ways, and sex in my opinion is definitely one of them.

Brainwashing

2005-06-13T06:40:00.000+02:00

Thecutter says, that mainline media, like CNN for instance is brainwashing the American public. They no longer present information, like in the case of the 9/11 attacks they were presenting the headline: "War against America".
And this brainwashing was very, very dangerous.
I agree, we, or better said our ancestors, have been there before.
And I think she is absolutely right, the whole media spectacle was intentionally staged to produce a feeling of helpless shock and subsequent irrational anger and thirst for revenge, a New Pearl Harbour, as the PNAC writers had planned or a new "Reichstagsbrand"incident, like Hitler had staged.

But no matter, what some thriller movies say, brainwashing is not permanent. It needs constant reinforcement and it can be undone.
For some people it might take a little longer (like for my German grandma. She was 90 years old, when she finally accepted, that Hitler was NOT a good guy with only a few corrupt subordinates. Most everybody else in Germany only needed a few years after the war to realize how indefensible Hitler and the whole Nazi ideology was.)

I think the brainwashing by Corporate Media in the US is not so very different from what the Nazis did in Germany, when they took over all of the media. It is just a bit more sophisticated, since they make it look is if there was a variety of opinions, when in reality the media agrees on just about everything that is of any political consequence, just like all the mainline parties, both in the US and in Europe agree on the same economic course, just fighting about smokescreen issues.

Anyway, the brainwashing worked on me for a while, although I´m not an American. By now I think I can very well understand the feelings of many Americans. The events had hit home, undermined the normal feelings of security. They, like me, were not able to think critically at that moment.
For me the whole thing was also a bit too close to home. In a rather strange coincidence, September 11, 2001 was the day my husband was sceduled to fly for the fist time in his life to America. He wanted to help a friend who was in trouble there.
We turned on the TV to look at the Icelandic video text for information of eventual flight delays - nothing unusual there. Then we changed to German satellite TV, to pass the time for a little game show, something similar to Trivial Persuit, we sometimes watch together.
The first tower had fallen already. My youngest son came home from school, and together we watched the second tower implode – life.
“It´s falling, it´s falling” he cried. “No, no it isn´t” I said. “They just show the fall of the first one again.” Not believing my own eyes.
Then my husband left. He was picked up to be driven to the airport, it´s an hours drive. Nothing was clear yet about those attacks, and I was unable to think or talk coherently for the rest of the day.
Then, there came the news about the plane, which had hit the Pentagon and the one that had crashed in a field. There were rumours that other planes might have been kidnapped, still in the air,dozens maybe, possibly ready to be crashed into some other buildings - nobody knew anything.
My son went to the phone, calling his Dad on the cell-phone: "Papi, another plane has crashed. Papi, please don´t go."
Of course my husband was sent back from the airport. All flights had been cancelled that day and the next few days as well.
And of course, even if he had flown a day earlier, the chances for him to have been on one of those flights were very slim, but still, for children chances and statistics don´t matter.
The next several weeks my youngest son got out bed every morning, hours before everybody else and turned on the TV, watching news; only the news-channel, nothing else, no cartoons, no children´s stuff, only news. He didn´t eat very much either.
When finally the Afghanistan war began, I told him, that Afghanistan was very far away, and when they have caught the Osama binLaden and his men, then everything would be all right again.
He still kept watching the news to see, when they would catch Osama.
They never caught him.
My youngest son was 10 years old at the time.
How many American children were there at the time, the age of my son or a few years older, waiting for Osama to be caught, so everything would be alright again?
How many of them are now in Iraq wanting to catch Osama or Zarqawi or some other Emmanuel Goldsteinn, so everything would be alright again?

Was it Hitler or Göring, who said, that the general population do not want war, but that the leadership only has to tell the people that they are attacked and then they will be ready for fight any war.
The lies haven´t changed a bit, the methods just have become more advanced.
And still, "brainwashing" gives you the image, as if your whole thinking facilities can be taken over by some outside power forever.
But they´re not even succeeding with all of the soldiers. Even in such a restrictive environment as the military, some soldiers start thinking for themselves, recognizing that what they´re doing is ethically wrong. Some of them break down pychologically others become dissidents, American soldiers and Israeli soldiers alike.
Dissident thoughts are spreading within the military and their families.

History does not have to repeat itself. It could, but it doesn´t have to.
We know more now, than the dissidents before and during WWII and even the dissidents from the Vietnam war. We should be able to learn from the experiences of our ancestors.

Truth, Lies and a Change of Thinking

2005-06-11T18:14:00.000+02:00

Many times I have repeated myself, saying, that truth is important, saying that if people only knew the truth, the corrupt governments would fall.Some disagree with me, they think that most people aren´t interested in the truth.
I sometimes ask myself, if they are right, and I´m just biased by own feelings.

And of course I see things through the lense of my own experiences.
I wrote before, that I´m Catholic now, but have belonged to another church for many years. I went to that other church as a young girl, because I was promised a better and more harmonic family life in there, and this was so very important for me. There was also the matter of no smoking and drinking, which also was important to me. I could be abstinent and my peers would no longer make fun of me. Outsiders would respect my choices,no longer urging me to have a drink, and young people inside would be just like me.
And yes, much of what I was promised came true.
Yes,I missed a certain spirituality, which for me is combined with catholic rites and prayers. But I didn´t even realize how much I had missed it, before I rejoined the Catholic church again, that was after I had left this other church.
What actually made me leave, was, that I had found out, that the founding narrative of that congregation was a bunch of lies;
not honest errors,mistakes or even delusions, I could live with that. Everybody makes mistakes and one person´s delusion is another one´s spiritual experience.
No, they were bold deliberate lies. And this is, what I can´t live with.
Some atheists tell me, that all Christian faith and all other religions, for that matter, are built on deceptions.
No,I say, they are not.
The events described in their holy scriptures happened a long time ago, no longer really verifiable, and those who talked or wrote about those events believed in them with all their hearts. In ancient religions you can also find ancient wisdom, an insight that goes deeper than any historic narrative.
You might call the belief in the presence of the Divine a delusion, but I have seen delusional thinking in a lot of modern ideologies and even in some scientific theories. The difference often lies in your point of view.
I think the absolute and ultimate truth lies beyond human understanding, in a world beyond three or even four dimensional thinking.
So while truth, in my opinion, never is relative or arbitrary, however it neither is ever final or absolute. Our view on spiritual, scientific and even historic truth has to be revised over and over again, to come closer to the final truth, while we realize that we never will reach it.
But while the final truth is beyond our reach, we are quite able to recognize lies, and debunk them. A lie is, when somebody tells deliberatly something he knows it isn´t true, or he twists facts in such a way, that they disguise their true meaning.

Most people have lied in their lives for different reasons. And in modern society, especially in the media, lies are no longer portrayed as unethical.
And still, deep down in ourselves, we know, that lies are wrong. Lying destroys trust. Too much broken trust destroys a society. Maybe the upper class and their intellectual lackeys can reason these facts away.
But we, the little people, know intuitively, that lying is destructive. And this is, what we teach out children, it´s ancient truth, religious, yes, and very valid.
And then, when we hear, that some trusted politicians have lied big time, we still are shocked. So shocked actually, that some of us will fall into denial. This denial protects their sense of security.They tell themselves, it wasn´t a lie. That politician just made a mistake, had some wrong information, maybe.
Some American people, I know, voted for Bush, because they honestly believed, that he was a man of integrety. They were disgusted by a political system where people openly lied.
Of course, to see any kind of integrety in the Bush government is a serious delusion. Those guys are some of the worst liars who have ever walked on the face of the earth.
To realize this will be a very hurtful experience for many people. The wall of denial cannot be broken by a few missing WMD. This could be an honest mistake.
The truth about 9/11 could brake the wall of denial.
September 11, 2001 was the day, when I fell into shock for hours.
Nothing came through, but the thought, that now WW III will start. It was not logical, why should an act of terror start a world war. But those pundits kept repeating, America is under attack, over and over again.
And I could no longer think, for it felt like the war had started.
Maybe it was something in the Bush speech, I don´t remember -
I was in shock - I couldn´t think - stared at the TV - watched those towers implode - over and over again - for hours - all day long - scared - just scared - feeling the bombs would fall soon - the world would end.
The next day, German politicians said: "We are all Americans now."
It took days to get over the shock, not only for me, for others, too.
It took a whole year, until I started to think again. When they started to plan after Afghanistan also an attack on Iraq and when a German magazine printed an article on the PNAC papers, then I first thought maybe they deliberately didn´t stop those attacks.It was like loosing the ground under my feet to even consider this.
But there it was, the doubts were there and my mind started to open up for many other questions as well.
When I look around myself, talk to others, I have found out, that it´s no longer very hard to saw doubts about the official 9/11 story. Most people have started to have their own doubts, most are glad, to be able to talk about them, feeling they aren´t alone. And from this, and the stubborn denial of all main-line media, to the realization for the little people, that they can no longer trust those media pundits, from there, the step to new and more independent thinking is but a small one.
The issue of Palestine, the issue of the Iraq war, the issue of planned wars against Iran or Syria, the possible false flag operations to instigate civil war in Iraq or Lebanon, all this is interrelated.
When 9/11 is debunked, false flag operations will no longer work, the population of the West will no longer support a crusade against the Muslim world. The pressure on Israel will be stronger.
I´m absolutely convinced that the truth about 9/11 is one the major keys to fight against the crimes of Imperialism. It is not the only key, other lies need to debunked as well.
But I think it is the easiest key to obtain, because there are millions of people who are already reaching out for it.
Sorry to say, but most of them do not belong to the progressive left.
Why this is so, in my opinion, is subject for another post.

My Brother´s Child

2005-06-10T03:04:00.000+02:00

The next piece I wrote last night. It´s a way for me to cope, to find a perspective. And of course I´m comparing things that shouldn´t be compared, but it´s just the way I feel right now.

Heaven cries, when a child dies.
And I look up to the skies asking why
Why does she have to die
And I cry
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Europe a child is dying
The doctors knew no child has survived
Her illness with chemo-therapy,
And still
They wouldn´t allow anything else.
It´s the only method big pharma allows,
The only one that makes big money,
The only one taught in medical school.
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God,
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Nigeria a child is dying
The land she lived on is poisoned
The oil companies needed it
For profit
No more good food, no more clean water
And the child gets ill and the child is dying
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God,
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Columbia a child is dying
Hit by government bullets
They only wanted to fight
The "terrorists" and the war against drugs
And the child was just
In the wrong place
At the wrong time
Don´t tell me, it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Iraq a child is dying
A smart bomb was not smart
Had hit her house
And blown it apart
And buried her in rubble
Don´t tell me, it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in America a child is dying
Born already ill
With no hope to survive
For her father has been a soldier
In Iraq and breathed in depleted uranium
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

And I feel my brother´s pain
After hoping in vain
And I see him cry
Looking up to the sky
Asking why
Why did she have to die
And heaven cries, when a child dies
My brother´s child

Breaking a Vicious Circle

2005-05-30T04:38:00.000+02:00

Israel Shahak, when he researched Jewish history over the last 2000 years, was in his book " Jewish Religion Jewish History" describing a pattern, .
Jews have been both in Muslim and in Christian society outsiders, who sometimes had been isolated by decree of some political authority, most often however they have isolated themselves and walled themselves in, so that the lower class Jews had little contact to their Christian or Muslim neighbour. The contacts the upper class had with gentiles was one of hostile business dealings at least towards the lower classes of the gentiles.
Most often those upper class Jews worked as some kind of middle men between the king or other aristocratic rulers and the peasant and artisan population. They were very good tax collectors, even in times when the peasants had problems paying. They also became monopoly money lenders, since the taking of interests was forbidden in Christian and Muslim society. In both professions they put a lot of hardship on the gentile peasants. And when the pressure became unbearable, riots and progroms occured.
And then the whole Jewish community was attacked not only the oppressors.
And I think, that the ordinary Jews who had not done anything to hurt the gentiles, most often had never even had direct contact with them, didn´t even know what hit them.
They were probably told that the gentiles had gone crazy like gentiles normally do once in a while.
One other pattern was, that when the Jewish upper class had a very good contact to the ruling king, the gentile aristrocracy had very little to say. However when this aristocracy became stronger, they pushed the king or the Church to get rid of the Jews, because the Jews were in direct competition with them for power at the court.
This time the Jews were forced to leave the country, leaving their homes and most of their possessions.
And again the ordinary Jews did not know what hit them.
And so hostility and distrust grew with every of those occations. And so besides certain attitudes in the Talmud it was also those memories of past abuses which made Jews even less ready to show compassion in their dealings with their gentile neighbours.
And there was hostility and distrust on both sides over and over again.
Israel Shahak took the Nazi persecution of Jews out of this pattern. And he thought that modern antisemitism has totally different quality from that of earlier years, since it is far more racist.
Maybe this is right in one way, since in older times Jews were allowed to fully integrate into gentile society, if they converted honestly.
The differences were religious not racist.
But if you overlook the racist aspect, a similar pattern seems to be visible in the beginning of the 20.century as well.
In the Balfour declaration the head of the Rothschild family got the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, if he could get the Americans to join the war against Germany on the British.
Maybe the Americans would have joined anyway for their own reasons. But one way or the other the Germans believed that their defeat was the fault of the Jews.
The heavy reparation payments were pressed unto Germany and the ordinary people suffered. The only ones who actually profited were banks which were in a good part in Jewish hands. The anger of big parts of German middle class, who had lost their life savings grew. The industrial class saw the Jewish banking elite a direct encroachment on their own business and so they helped Hitler with his radical antisemitic rhetoric come to power, so he could ban the Jews from business and public life as he had promised.
And so the hate propaganda campaign began which then led to terrible Jewish suffering. And once again the ordinary Jewish had no idea what hit them.
They had been well integrated in all parts of German society and lived as equals and very often as friends with their German neighbours. They sure that the Hitler times would blow over and things would return to normal, that they didn´t even leave the country when their citizen rights were taken and they had to suffer all kind of discriminations.
And the cynical Zionists who instigated the whole affair and profited from it to the boot, were telling each other, that "one cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews of Europe" and did nothing whatsoever to save the European Jews. Instead they sometimes even sabotaged efforts to help Jews to emmigrate from Europe, efforts made by compationate gentiles in other countries.
After the war, they treated the survivors with disdain. And when it suited them, they lit fire under the paranoia caused by this terrible trauma.

And thanks to those cynics, many ordinary Jews who had been liberated from the ghetto after the Enlightenment are isolating themselves again behind psychological walls and in the case of Israel the walls are physical, isolating themselves in fear and deep distrust against gentiles.
And the way it looks like with the Neocons in Washington and the Likudniks in Israel pushing for a new round of the vicious circle by oppressing Palestinians to the edge of absolute despair, destroying other Arab societies and through their expansive warmongering the American military and the American economy at the same time.

But we do no longer live in the middle ages, the ghetto is no longer obligatory and information can flow freely.
For their own sake, ordinary Jews have to break this vicious circle. They have to distance themselves from leaders who show just as much contempt for their Jewish brothers and sisters as they show for gentiles.
Those leaders are either dumb enough to have not learned anything from history or they are just so full of themselves, so full of hybris, that they think they can get away with anything.

But so many ordinary Jews have been integrated in the societies of all the countries they live in, except in Palestine.
Ordinary Jews work in many humanitarian causes. They have universal ethics which they share with their gentile neighbours and they have friendly relationships with them.
Ordinary Jews do not need to protect criminals who call themselves the leaders of Jewish society.
They have to realize that their safety does not lie with those warmongering zynics, who have already brainwashed the Israelis into committing terrible crimes.
Their safety lies with us, their brothers and sisters in humanity.
They have to denounce Zionism and the belief that gentiles cannot be trusted.
They have to realize that the golden rule, which is also part of the OT, applies towards everybody in absolute the same. Only this way we can live in peace with each other.

The vicious circle can be broken, there still is time, but it´s running out soon.

Trauma, Healing and History

2005-05-29T00:08:00.000+02:00

From Avigail Abarbanel´s website:

I believe that( ) Jewish Israelis will never be happy (even if there were no Palestinians left — God forbid) and that is because they have done nothing to heal their own trauma and are spending their entire life going around in circles and acting it out on others.........
.......Abusers hide the truth not only from others but also from themselves. They do so by telling themselves that they are the real victims. They wholeheartedly believe that because of their suffering they are justified in everything they inflict on their victims. They are often successful in eliciting sympathy from others and it is usually the victim that is left isolated....

Jewish people in Israel and in the diaspora feel traumatized, but it´s not only the atrocities and murders the Nazis committed against Jews, which make up this trauma.
The trauma goes back far longer, a trauma of thousands of years. There were progroms and Jewish communities have been over and over again driven out of the places were they had settled.
The Jewish narrative goes like this:
Ever so often gentiles get inflicted by some kind of insanity and start persecuting Jews. And the only thing Jewish people can do to prevent this kind of crazy persecution is to become stronger and more powerful than their gentile neighbours.
This is the reasoning behind Israel´s constantly growing military expenditure.
This is the reasoning behind the denial of Israel to give equal rights to Palestinians as to Jews and the denial of the right to return.

In these American court-movies you can sometimes hear from the prosecution, when the councill for the defendant in a murder trial asks his client under oath about his or her problematic relationship with the victim: "Objections! We are not here to put the victim on trial!"
In German court TV shows you never hear this kind of objection, and I really think it is a pretty stupid one. Of course, the court needs to hear what happens before the crime, what were the motive, what were the reasons. Only then judge and jury can decide, if it was premeditated murder out of greed or maybe manslaughter out of some other reasons. The deed is never justified, to be sure, but the circumstances should determine how high the sentence should be, and they can tell the court if the perpetrator can be rehabilitated one day or not and if the perpetrator is likely to commit a similar crime again.
So, if take this analogy to Palestine, then we can see, that Palestinians have been the victims from the day the Zionist project was conceived. You can read in Zionist lterature itself, how even the early Zionist showed disdain for the indigenious population of Palestine, you can read about mistreatment of Palestinian workers, of misappropiation of property, about the driving of peasants from land they had cultivated for many generations after it was bought from absentee owners and other examples of mistreatment. There were many instances of violence against Palestinian towns and villages already before the foundation of the state of Israel.
When Palestinians fought back, they had good reasons for it.
After the terrible atrocities of 1948, the reasons became even better, and still better after the occupation of the West-Banks and Gaza. And these are the reasons for Palestinian suicide bombings and other violent acts of resistance against an oppressive power.
Seeing the history of the conflict, it´s clear, who are the victims here.
And it´s just as clear, that the Palestinians did not cause the Jewish trauma.
Some victims, like abused children are innocent, and the reason for their victimization does not lie in them, but some place else.
But then, some former victims, like in this case the Jewish Israelis, become perpetrators who victimize others. Ms Abarbanel says, because they have not healed their trauma.
But how do you heal a trauma? As a professional therapist Ms Abarbanel has probably other answers to this than I as a lay person have.
I think a trauma only can heal, when you can overcome the fear that the traumatic event might happen again any time.
As a victim of abuse the worst feeling is the one of helplessness, of being unable to stop it. You try to find strategies to prevent further abuse and find safety. And you base those strategies on the information you have.
But when your information is false, your strategy will be wrong.
If you believe that the reasons for your victimization is the mental illness of your aggressor, it makes sense to contain this aggressor, because what else can you do against a mental illness.
But if there are other reasons like, if you have provoked the aggressor, it makes a lot more sense to stop the provocation.

In the case of the Jewish trauma it is necassary to put the victim on trial, for the victim´s sake.
Only if the patterns leading to progroms and other prosecutions historically are brought out into the open, the vicious circle can be broken, fear can be banned, hatred and the compulsion to senselessly beat around in retaliation on those, who never were responsible for the trauma, can be overcome.
Truth is important, so very important.
Truth can heal a trauma.

Differences and Strategy

2005-05-25T23:33:00.000+02:00

Thinking about the ethnic cleansing of Germans from areas which belong now to Russia, Poland and Tschekoslovakia there seem to be some similarities to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from large parts of Palestine.
But there are also differences:
Germany had just lost a war, which the German government had started and in which the German army and special units had committed terrible atrocities against the peoples whose country they were occupying.
While the first years after the war were difficult and hard on all Germans, especially on the refugees and deportees, after those years, when the country was rebuilt and economy grew, everybody became integretated in the process, including the people who had been driven out of East-Prussia, Schlesia and the Sudetenland. There also were paid some compensation money by the German government.
Because of all this, the acceptance of historical guilt, the economic integration and the policy of compensation, most of the younger generation of those people from former German areas accepted the loss and so did the next generations.
Nowadays there are extremely few people who actually even think about a return of these areas to Germany or of a return of Germans to these areas.

Policies were totally different in Palestine:
Palestinians had only defended their own land, homes and property and had never invaded other people´s countries or committed atrocities against them.
So, of course, they never had the feeling of being at least partly at fault for their predicament.
The refugees were never compensated for their loss, instead even their long history of living in Palestine for thousands of years was flatly denied.
The refugees never were integrated into the population of the countries which had taken them in, but many still have to live in seperate areas, refugee camps. They are often discriminated against and in some places have no legal rights or even legal passports to travel at will.
Worst of all, however, is the fact that the ethnic cleansing, the driving of people off their property and the destruction of their homes and the killing of people has not stopped and is still an ungoing process.
If the German people would have to live under similar conditions, they would never have accepted the situtiation either, historical guilt or not.
The question is, was there a chance or even is there still a chance, that Palestinians could or can accept their losses.
I recently read excerpts from the diary of Moshe Sharett, a Israeli prime minister in 1954 and 55. In there Sharett contemplated on an agreement with neighbouring Arab countries and even on matters of compensation, but his efforts were sabotaged by the hardliners Ben Gurion and others.
This made me think, that possibly in the 1950s there was a time, when there could have been made a compromise between a Zionist Israel, the Palestinian people and the neighbouring Arab countries.
Sure, compensations could never have made up for what was lost in homes, land and human life, but it would have helped the Palestinians to start a new life away from home. Compensations could have given the Palestinian economy within the rest of Palestine and in the neighboring countries a boost and would have helped Palestinians to establish themselves there.
For Israel it would not have been too hard to make those compensations really substantial. By making peace treaties with both the Palestinians and other Arab nations, Israel could have spent far less on military expenditure, so that part of German compensations and American aid could have been diverted to compensation for the Palestinians.

But then, when I tried to google those diary excerpts again, I found some other excerpts and they made me doubt, that there ever was a possiblity of compromise for the Palestinian people with Zionism.
On the Al-Bushra website of Arab American Roman Catholics I found this article about the Moshe Sharett diaries:
Here is an excerpt:

Sharett's diary, for 5/26/55 records the thinking of some of those who orchestrated Israeli attitudes and also influenced world opinion. The principal spokesman for the opponents of the possible peace was Dayan. And the diary reports:

"We do not need (Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S., such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the west, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to an infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us freedom of actrion, and this is what we need in the coming years. Reprisal raids which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph. First (the reprisal raids) make it imperative for the Arabgoernmentsto tkae strong measures to protect the borders. Second, AND THAT'S THE MAIN THING, THEY MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO MAINTAIN A HIGH LEVEL OF TENSION AMONG OUR POPULATION AND THE ARMY. Without these actions we would cease to be a combative people and WITHOUT THE DISCIPLINE OF A COMBATIVE PEOPLE WE ARE LOST....We will have to cry out that the Negev is in danger SO THAT ANGRY MEN WILL GO THERE."

Sharett then adds his own comments:

"The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This state has no international worries, no economic problems. THE QUESTION OF PEACE IS NON-EXISTENT. IT must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly AND LIVE ON ITS SWORD. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Towards this end it may, no, IT MUST, INVENT DANGERS AND TO DO THIS IT MUST ADOPT THE METHOD OF PROVOCATION AND REVENGE....and above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally GET RID OF OUR TROUBLES AND ACQUIRE OUR SPACE...Ben Gurion himself said it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war."

Of course these diary entries are taken out of context, so that it is not quite clear to me, if Sharett did actually share the same opinions as Dayan or Ben Gurion or if he just interpreted their words. But since Sharret was only in power for a couple of years and everybody else in the Zionist movement seems to have been against even minimal compromises, his real opinion didn´t make a real difference one way or the other.
It seems quite obvious to me now, that even then, there never was a chance for compromise with Zionism.
The Zionist ideology does not allow for compromise, it only wants to overcome all obstacles towards its goals by the ruthless use of military power and by deceit.

But then, while Zionism surely has its roots in the "Jewish exceptualism-chosen people-eternal victim" narrative, I think we still have to make a difference between the opposition to Zionism and the opposition to Judaism or the Jewish people.
Just as you have to make a difference between the Nazi ideology and the German people, although the Nazi ideology does have its roots in some part of German culture.
And this is not just a matter of mushy heart, humanitarian, liberal thought. It´s a matter of strategy.
Here is another excerpt from the al-bushra article:

The eternal, Zionist dialectic again! If the people are not obsessed with fear, create conditions to frighten them. If there are no visible enemies - create them! Ignore any hand outstretched in friendship, for the friendship CAN DISSOLVE THE IDEOLOGY.

I agree with their view on this.
Zionism is an ideology built on fear and distrust of gentiles. Somebody like Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli with a 100% Jewish background, might be able to do a total critizism of Judaism without doing harm. If non-Jewish persons do this, it might become counterproductive to their cause. Open hostility towards the Jewish People per se or the insistance that Judaism has no right to exist, will feed into those feelings of fear and distrust against the rest of the world and reinforce this Jewish national paranoia.
I don´t think, there is much hope to convert Ariel Sharon or other extremists away from Zionism, but I do think, it is possible with most of the ordinary Jewish people in the diaspora and even in Israel.
I think it is necessary to to find the words which make it quite clear, that the Zionist ideology is unacceptable to us, but that we still reach out in friendship to the Jewish people.

I know, that it sounds unfair, that we should tiptoe around the Jewish people, a people who is overrepresented in the media and in the economic, political and academic upper classes of western society. And given the terrible atrocities committed in Palestine and by proxy in Iraq and other places, it sounds even more unfair.
But then, only a minority of Israelis or diaspora Jews is personally responsible for those crimes. For most the only guilt they bear is the silence and failure to oppose those crimes. If we do not seperate between the Zionist ideology and the Jewish people, Zionism´s hold on ordinary Jews will become even stronger. The false believe, that Zionism is in the long run the only way of survival for individual Jews or the Jewish people, will be strengthened. Fear and paranoia can strangle logical thought and ordinary compassion for the suffering of others.
And this special paranoia is so dangerous exactly because the Jewish people are over-represented in the media and other influencial professions.
There needs to be a strategy to counter the paranoia.

Non-Violence

2005-05-11T04:05:00.000+02:00

According to international law the struggle of the Palestinians against Israeli occupation is legal. According to Church doctrine it would probably constitute a "just war".
So nobody has the right to criticize Palestinians for a militant struggle.

So what I´m doing now, is asking hyopthetical questions as some kind of personal brain-storming.
The question is, what is strategically the best course.
When I talk about "loving the enemy", it for sure cannot mean to accept abuses against Palestinians silently, because actually this is not really love.
For the Israeli Jews, by acting inhumane, they are destroying part of their humanity through these actions and hurt their eternal souls. And quite obviously is, that Israelis, through the acceptance of brutalizing Palestinians, are more and more starting to brutalize each other as well. After having committed untold crimes against other human beings, people just don´t come home and live a normal life. The same happens to many American veterans. They come home and become violent towards family or neighbours. If you love them, you try to stop their self-destructive behaviour.

So non-violence in my opinion cannot be passive, it must be very active and demanding; in the spirit of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement as a movement for joining hands in common humanity. Justice for him did not mean seeking revenge, although, considering the really horrendous crimes white Americans had committed against the people abducted from their African homes and also against their descendents, a call for revenge might be understandable. But to demand an eye for an eye would make everyone blind in the end.
So "loving" means most often: forgiving - and allowing a new start for a relationship between people. But it cannot mean to allow injustice to continue.
The non-violent civil-rights movement worked, but when King was killed, not all goals were reached.
Racism had not been overcome in all aspects of life.
There still was, for instance, alot of economic discrimination.
And racism had not been overcome in everybody´s mind.
And recently, looking at the ever increasing prison population of predominantly non-white people and at the disenfrenchment of African Americans at the voting polls, there even seems to be a back slide.
So the question is would an exclusive non-violent movement like this work in Palestine?
There are many differences in the situation.
The civil-rights movement, seemed to have an enormous positive media coverage in the USA.
Mainline media throughout the western world would not cover a Palestinian movement in the same positive way. There are so many non-violent demonstrations already going on against the "Wall", and the international media takes rather little notice of them.
Would the coverage of alternative media and the work of activist make up for the lack of positive mainline media attention?
The growing effort by Zionist groups to censor pro-Palestinian voices on campus in the US seems to indicate that Israel is afraid of their influence.
Another difference to the American civil rights movement would be the ruthlessness Israeli forces already show against non-violent demonstrations and other actions, even using poisoned gas. American police could by far not risk the same ruthlessness against demonstrators. The degree of ruthlessness risked depends naturally on the public attention paid to it.
And there again, can international activists help focus enough attention on Israel´s behaviour to influence her against state terrorist acts?
Can the mainline media be forced to pay attention?
Another question is of course, if it is possible, that all Palestinian organisations could come to agree on the same short time and long time goals. A big coordinated non-violent effort over a long time would need to put up concrete demands, which have to be fulfilled.
One thing is for sure, Sharon wouldn´t like Palestinian non-violence.
Zionist Israel does everything to portray Palestinians as aggressors and herself as just answering the violence. It is quite obvious that Sharon deliberately tries to provoke violence whenever Palestinian groups try to negotiate a seize fire. And when violence then comes forth, Sharon escalates his terror. Although on a lower level Israeli terror, while not reported in mainline media, is on going constantly.
And I´m convinced, that some attacks credited to some or other Palestinian group are actually Mossad black ops (like the suicide-bombing where more than 50 people died, but nearly all of them foreigners,since it went off in quarters of town, where only guest workers live). There have been documented instances of such tactics against other Arab people before, like against Egypt in the Lavon affair, whose perpetrators actually have recently received some medals or so.
(I´d say, a real chutzpah, since their victims were partly Americans. How can they dare to anger and humiliate the Americans so publicly, when they so very much depend on American financial and military help? Well, it looks as if Israel can get away with anything because of her influence on the media.)
So an organized non-violent movement would actually have each and every single Palestinian group to agree upon non-violence, to counter any possible Mossad false flags.
Violent groups can act on their own with all their own goals. However, non-violence as a main strategy needs to be coordinated.
Is this actually possible? And would it work?
One other probable strategic reason for Israel in killing Palestinian leaders is, besides provoking violence, also to kill off possible popular coordinators in non-violent strategies.
Israel, of course, would not give in one iota on its own. Only the international community could force Israel to make real concessions. But would the West do this?
How much publicity is needed so that western sympathizers could put enough pressure on their own government?
How far would Israel go to prevent being pressurized?
What tactic would she use?
How much influence does she have on western countries?
Is there any way to counteract Israel´s tactics?

One thing is sure. Non-violence is a powerful tool.
The enemy is using it. In the majority of cases in the recent years, where
governments were overthrown and replaced by American puppets, it was done by non-violent means. American sponsered NGOs were using youth-groups or student movements, paying a few instigators and using the others´ enthusiasm for democratic changes in bringing to pass an American agenda, which really isn´t interested in democracy, just in looting the place for corporate interests.
It happened for instance in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. It was tried unsuccessfully in Lebanon and Venezuela. And they are still trying it in Iran. However, the Neocons in the Pentagon opt rather for a military campaign there and in Syria,since the Likudniks in Israel think a new government in Iran and Syria wouldn´t be safe enough. They want Iran and Syria destroyed and cut into tyni pieces.

So non-violent strategy is not just an idea of a few other worldly Christian, or in case of Mahatma Ghandi Hindu, dreamers. It needs however far more consistency and coordination than violent tactics. And it only works in combination with lots of public attention.

Anger and Fear

2005-05-09T09:19:00.000+02:00

Many people in the pro-Palestine movements have witnessed Zionist atrocities up close, others have friends who have been hurt. I can understand, when criticize me for too much philosemitism.
It´s so much easier for me, who has never been touched directly by all the cruelty inflicted in the name of Zionism, to have a concilatory attitude towards Jews.
If I´d ever been hurt personally I quite likely would be a loud raving anti-semite. But if this should ever happen to me, I hope that people would realize, that those ravings would just be a reaction on being hurt and would weigh the things I have said and written before as my more accurate attitude.
For I believe, that reaching out to the Jewish people is not only a religious duty for a Christian, it is also a very important tactic in the struggle for peace.

Gilad Azmon and Israel Shamir believe that Jews need to give up their identity of being Jewish in order to reconcile with the rest of humanity. I have not subscribed to Shamir's newsletter, although I read it regurlarly, because I believe that to demand from Jews to give up their Jewish identity will probably not work.
A feeling of identity is such an important psychological factor wihtin a person, it´s for many people next to impossible to give it up.
I didn´t realize before I started living permanently here in Iceland, how important my German identity is for me. And I´m definitly not one who keeps yelling: I´m proud to be a German. That´s considered a Neo-nazi attitude.
I have lived here for so many years, I could apply for Icelandic citizenship, but I haven't done it yet because until recently I thought I would loose my German one.
There would be a lot less historical baggage and sometimes negative attitude to carry, if I could identify as an Icelander, but I just can´t. For better or worse I´m German.
The same is true for my religion. In my late teens I went from the Catholic to another church, because I was turned off by the insincerity and the liberal sexual attitudes of my catholic peers and fell for the promise of a more family oriented church with no drinking, smoking and more strict sexual rules.
With time I realized, that I couldn´t stand the Old Testamentarian attitude and the America centeredness of that church, but I would have stayed anyway for the sake of family and friends, found some niche for me somehow, but I didn´t because I couldn´t find any spirituality there.
I finally realized why I couldn´t find it, when I went back to the Catholic church: I had missed the rituals most and foremost. I do not believe, that only Catholics go to heaven, or only Christians or only religious people, but I do believe that I myself go to heaven as a Catholic or not at all, for my spirituality I only can find in the Catholic church.

Of course not everybody is like me and there are many who can find a new national identity or spirituality outside their childhood faith, but nevertheless there are for sure a lot of people who can´t.
Jewish national identity is not bound to national borders, but still it is a traditional national identity. And many Jews have a religious identity as well, but this does not mean, that they have to indentify with all the ancient precepts. There are quite a lot of different attitudes to what it means to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist or a Hindu.

So I think, for a Jew to reconcile with the rest of the world does not necessarily mean he has to give up Jewish identity, he could reconcile with Jewish history instead.
Avigail Abarbanel writes on her blog, that the Jewish people is traumatized and that this is what lies mostly behind the Zionist atrocities.
Of course most Jews living today have not lived through Nazi persecution themselves. It is not what has them traumatized, rather what was told to them about this persecution together with other instances of persecution in history is traumatizing Jews.
And again its not the historical events, but the perception of those historical events, what traumatizes Jews.
Into this perception belongs the belief, that the Jewish people has been the most persecuted in the world and that they are in danger of persecution all the time.And so, very often when Jews perceive that gentiles are angry at some Jews even for quite legitimite reason that trauma comes up. Trauma, that´s true for Jews and for Gentiles, makes normally decent people act, talk and think irrational. For decent people to justify Zionist injustice and brutality in any way, is irrational.

Many people within the pro-Palestine movement feel angry when they hear about another act of Zionist oppression and murder. And because there are so many Jews who justify Zionism, this anger is sometimes directed at Jews per se. And its natural, that people get angry, when somebody they care for is hurt so badly. And the members of the pro-Palestine movements have all started to care deeply for the Palestinian people, even if they are not Palestinian themselves.
The trouble is, that Jews, who are conditioned by this certain perception of history, will perceive this anger as hatred, as unreasonable anti-semitism and react with an even closer bond to Zionism.
Anger is in my opinion counterproductiv, if you want to break this bond.
"Love your enemy" is actually a method to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles to peace.
You keep on trying to get the enemy to reciprocate your love, even if it takes a long time.
On the other hand I do not think, that it is productive to accept and even promote a distorted perception of history, in order to make Jewish people trust you.
It quite obviously does not work. At the memoration of the Ausschwitz liberation, the whole UN was singing, or at least listening to, the Israeli national anthem, in spite of there having died many people from many other nations as well, and Israel had not even existed at the time. It was as if everybody was agreeing to that Jews, represented by Israel were the only victims of Nazi brutality. And still Zionist does not trust gentiles and feel constantly threatened.

"And they will know the truth, and the truth shall make them free."

The cause for Jewish trauma, persecution-complex or mass-paranoia, however you will call it, is a misconception of history. And this has to be overcome.
And yes, when you start to attack Jewish history, most Jews will perceive it as attack on the Jewish people, since national history is often tied to identity and yes, they will react with anger or fear.
But there is just no way around it. And in the long run one doesn´t have to loose one´s identity when one accepts a more accurate and less sanitized version of one´s people´s history.
We Germans had to do it, and we can live with it.
And for me personally it means to not only stifle anger when it comes up in me, but to do my best to actually overcome it and overcome fear as well.
For yes, of course I´m afraid. I fear, that Zionist pressure on the American government for war in behalf of Israel will lead to an unlimited world-war. But fear is just as big a hinderance for a peaceful world as anger is.
Racism is just another word for xenophobia (fear of strangers), antisemitism another one for judeophobia (fear of Jews) and there is no word for what Zionists feel for non-Jews, but you can call it Gentile-phobia.

Make It Personal

2005-05-06T22:15:00.000+02:00

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
I don´t remember where I read this quote, but I know, it is true.

We humans are social beings. We are created to live in groups and relate to each other. We can feel empathy for each other, even feel each others emotional pain. Some neurologists say that there are devices in our brains,neural patterns, for feeling empathy.
But we are also emotionally limited. We cannot feel for people we do not know. So when people get hurt or killed some place far away from us, people we never met, we never heard about on the other side of the world, our intellectual knowledge may tell us about the injustice being done to them. But intellectual knowledge is just not enough to act on it, to give up some comfort and conveniences for those who suffer injustice, we need emotional knowledge, we need to feel.
But then for us humans there are other ways of getting to know a person than seeing him or her face to face. We can see his picture, listen to her story told by others or watch a documentary on TV.
A few weeks ago there was a short documentary in a news-magazine on German TV about the Gaza withdrawal plans of Sharon. We saw an elderly Jewish couple who lived in one of those Gaza settlements. They had lost their daughter in an attack a few years back. Her daughter was buried in the cemetary of the settlement. We were told that in Jewish religion it was impossible to exhume bodies and bring them to another cemetary. We watched the mother going to the cemetary mourning for their daughter. She said she would never leave the settlement voluntarily.
Then the moderator of the news-show told us, that it was indeed difficult, the Gaza disengagement. Injustices would been done no matter what happened.
It would have worked on me, if I had not known better.
It would have worked,
if I had not known about the security zones around those illegal settlements, where Palestinians are shot at sight, when they came close,
if I had not known about the stealing of farm-land and water in a densely populated area, where Palestians went hungry and had to scrimp with water while Israeli settlers lived in luxury,
if I had not known about the little boy who was shot close to one of those security zones while trying to catch birds to sell on the market because his family was poor and needed the money.
I did not feel sorry for this elderly couple, I did not feel them to be justified for their attitude, but I would have, if I hadn´t known better.

The media can form opinions in the way they show an issue, in the way whose plight they show and whose they leave out. We need to see the faces of those who have suffered, we need to hear their stories. We need to get to know them.
Often even fictional stories told in movies or TV-shows can bring a point across.

Yesterday I watched a show from the TV-series "Without a Trace":
Here an old man went missing, a Peter Dusek. He had been a juror in a murder trial.As the story unravels we find out, that Dusek had recognized one of the witnesses of the trial,a Max Reinhard a former Gestapo officer who had lived in the US under a false name. During the war Reinhard had searched out Jews who lived in hiding with non-jewish families. Reinhard went up to children of the towns he was searching through to persuade them to become informers on their families or their neighbours. Peter Dusek was one of those children. He lived in the same apartment building as the family who were hiding Greta´s family. Greta was Peter´s friend, but he became an informer. He was maybe twelf years old. After Peter had recognized Max Reinhard, he went to Greta, who had survived Auschwitz and gave her a painting, her family had owned and Peter had taken into custody after their deportation. He also told her the truth of what he had done 60 years ago as a child, hoping for forgiveness, but he didn´t get it. So Peter Dusek went to Max Reinhard and turned him over to a Mossad agent, who was able to abduct him to Israel. In the end a policewoman said, that justice sometimes takes a long time.

Only a year ago I would have liked the show about fictional Greta, Peter Dusek and Max Reinhard, glad that justice was done in the end.
A year ago I knew so very little about the people of Palestine and of course I did not know anything about Ahmed Salah.
I read about him on Umkhalil`s blog. He lives in Al-Kahder village near the west bank city of Bethlehem. He is 14 years old.

(Ahmed)Salah(...),told reporters that soldiers arrested him from inside a grocery shop, took him to the nearby Road 60, and asked him to lead them to the homes of three teens who earlier had thrown stones at traveling Israeli vehicles.
"I told them I saw no stone throwers," Salah said.
Yet, soldiers took Salah to his home, searched the place and asked him to call his father. When the father, Taha Salah arrived, a soldier told him that his son threw stones at them. Taha then slapped his son on the face, but the officer told him that his son did not throw stones, but that they wanted him to lead them to the homes of three teens who had thrown stones at soldiers.
Salah told his father that he didn't see anyone throwing stones at soldiers, but soldiers didn't believe him and strongly pushed him and his father.
"I told them that you say my son didn't throw stones, leave him alone. You have no right to force him to lead you to the homes of other villagers" the father said.
One soldier pushed the father once more and warned him that if Ahmed refused to lead them to the homes of alleged stone throwers, they were going to arrest him.
"I told them to do what they want, and asked Ahmed to step out of the military Jeep. Ahmed jumped out and started to run towards our home. At this point, two soldiers started chasing Ahmed, a third soldier fired at him from few meters' distance," the father said.
"I jumped off the Jeep and ran towards home. I heard shooting and felt something penetrating my body. I fell on the ground besides the fence of my home, and woke up in the hospital," (Ahmed) Salah said.

Ahmed was wounded in the back and the chest. It happened last Wednesday.
Maybe Ahmed really didn´t see who threw the stones, but knowing the kids of the village, he probably knew anyway or he could have guessed. He knew he would be arrested when he didn´t collaborate. He probably had heard what happens to Palestinians in Israeli jails.
He did not become an informer.

Ahmed Salah´s story, the story of his family, his friends and his village would make a great movie.
Why doesn´t anybody make one?

To Be Chosen

2005-05-06T10:53:00.000+02:00

In Christian and Jewish Theology the Jewish People is chosen by God.
In Christian Theology it was chosen to bring forth the Messiah of the world,Jesus Christ, God incarnate, Son of Man and Son of God.
In Jewish theology the Jewish people was and will always be specially chosen by God.
But what does that mean?
It could mean that the Jewish people is seperated and superior to all other peoples of the earth. Some Jews believe this, many others don´t.
Christian monks and nuns believe that they were chosen by God for special tasks, like praying for the souls of their fellowmen or serving the poor and the destitute.
Catholic priests believe they are chosen by God to perform the rites of the Sacraments in order to serve the Christian community.
The orthodox Jews of Naturei Karta believe, that the people of Israel was chosen to perform the acts of the law, and so serving all human kind and bring the light of God to the world.
Chosen to serve is a good way of feeling chosen.
By serving you heal yourself and you heal others.
There was a time, when I thought the most urgent reform the Catholic Church should make should be to throw out the Old Testament.
And I still can´t read it or listen to it without a few cramps in my stomach. People tell me,I must learn to read it in a different way. But I just can´t overlook the violence and, what I consider, injustices. I only can tell myself, that probably those parts were not inspired.
But I´ve come to the conclusion that there must be a reason, why Jesus, who created a religion of the most egalitarian principles for all mankind, was chosen to be born inside the nation who already was the most alienated from the rest of mankind.
Simon Jones argues on his blog in the post "We are all Jews now", that in our capitalist society whose motor is the taking of interest, which before was a Jewish privilige, we all have become alienated from each other and from nature. And we all need to heal from this alienation.
But healing, I think, is a spiritual task. We need ourselves to be healed and help others to heal.
So when our late Pope John Paul and our current Pope Benedict talk to the Jewish people they are trying to heal Jewish alienation from us Christians and from the world by using what Jesus has taught us: "Love your enemy, love those who curse and abuse you."
Maybe you believe the Jewish people must heal themselves. I think they can´t, due to mass-paranoia through misconceptions of history.
The main-tool the Zionist leadership uses to keep the Jewish people in line of their Zionist goals, is fear.
The Catholic church tells the Jewish people:
You do not need to be afraid of us!
You are our brothers and sisters, we do not wish you harm.
At the same time the Catholic church opposes globalized capitalism, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and wars against the Muslim world obviously fought in behalf of Israel.
This opposition has caused rather vicious attacks by the Zionist dominated media of the US. The child-abuse scandal is, in my opinion, just an overblowing by the media of a few isolated real incidences, with a lot of bandwagon cases, when it was clear how much money can be made out of those accusations. And while the Church did allow herself to be blackmailed for money, she did not give up in her opposition to war and exploitation of the developing world.
While the Church has probably no illusions about changing the minds of the leadership of Zionism, she does still actively reach out to the ordinary Jews. There is a psychological aspect in it: If you touch somebody, who is angry at you for whatever reason, in a friendly, non-threatening way, it is very likely that his anger will recede.

So, I do not believe, that the Jewish religion is beyond redemption and that the Jewish people can only be healed by mass-conversation to Christianity.
Healing lies in facing uncomfortable historical and present truths.
Healing lies in overcoming fear and mistrust.
Healing lies in accepting universal rights.
Healing lies in universal love for all mankind alike.
Healing lies in the interpretation of being chosen:
To feel chosen not for being superior in any way but, like the Jews of Naturei Karta, to feel chosen to serve for the universal good of all human kind.

And since we in the west are actually "all Jews now", we have to heal in just the same way, so war, oppression and exploitation will finally be a thing of the past.

"Die Kinder von Izieu"

2005-05-02T08:39:00.000+02:00

"Die Kinder von Izieu" is a song by Reinhard Mey, my favourite German composer, singer and songwriter. It used to be also one of my favourite songs.
I listened often to it and taught it to my children.
The song is about a group of 44 Jewish children between the ages of 4 to 17 years, who in 1944 were hiding from the Nazis in a house in Izieu in the mountains above the Rhone valley in France.
The song gives us the names of some of those children like Elie, Sami, Max und Sarah. It tells us that Joseph painted landscapes with horses, Theodore liked to feed the chickens and the cows, Liliane could write like a poet and Raoul would sing all day long. The song also tells us, that these children were betrayed to Germans. On the Thursday before Easter, the day of Getsemane, they were picked up by trucks, sent to Auschwitz in a train and that none of them escaped the murderers.
This song made me see those children in my mind, even though they died years before I was born. The song let me feel their hopes and then their fear, their pain and their despair.
Those children were real human beings, with names and a life history, who suffered because of the Nazi ideology of racism and racial superiority. And they were victims of war against the ethical values of humanity.
To remember those children, meant for me, that never, never again should children be murdered for such ideologies.
We should do everything to work against racism.
We should become a society that shows respect for all human beings, a society that shows respect for differences of religion and culture, a society that sees the value of every human being as absolute, to protect his dignity as the maxime of all political acts, just as our constitution, the "Grundgesetz" states.
This is what the rememberence of those real children symbolized for me.

But then, not very long ago, I found out that remembering the murderous atrocities of Nazi-Germany meant something a whole lot different for Zionists.
Zionists do not see those atrocities as acts of racism and an ideology of superiority, they see them exclusively as acts directed against the Jewish people per se. For them those atrocities show what they thought all along, that gentiles are inflicted with the uncurable decease of Anti-Semitism, a murderous insanity which can break out without warning erverywhere, and that all Gentiles are a potentially lethal danger for Jews.
Some Zionists use those Nazi atrocities as a justification for their own atrocities against other people, other children. They do not object racism or an ideology of "Übermenschentum". They believe in that same ideology in a value system where the Jewish race is on top.
Some Zionists do not see the children of Izieu, with their names and their history. They do not see Elie, Sami, Max, Sarah, Joseph, Theodore, Liane and Raoul. They see numbers adding up, the higher, the better, sacrificed for an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, for

"One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Europe",

said Izaak Greenbaum -- head of Jewish Agency Rescue Committee February 18, 1943.

So, no longer do I sing the song "Die Kinder von Izieu", but I still remember those children and I cry for them, as I cry for all those other Kinder:
The Armenian Kinder of Turkey in 1915,
the Ukrainian Kinder in 1932,
the Chinese Kinder of Nanking in 1937,
the English Kinder of London and Coventry in 1941,
the Tschek Kinder of Lidice in 1942,
the Polish Kinder of Volhynia in 1943,
the German Kinder of Hamburg in 1943 and of Dresden in 1945,
the Japanese Kinder of Tokyo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
the South African Kinder of Sharpeville in 1960,
the Vietnames Kinder of My Lai in 1968,
the Indian Kinder of Killevanamani in 1969,
the El Salvadoran Kinder of El Mozote in 1981,
the Nicaraguan Kinder of El Juste in 1987,
the Rwandan Kinder of Kigali in 1994,
the Chechnyan Kinder of Grozny in 2000,
the Russian Kinder of Beslan in 2004,
the Darfur Kinder of Sudan in 2004
and the Iraqi Kinder of Fallujah in 2005.
I cry for the children of wars against humanity.
I cry for the children shot, bombed, burned, or starved to death or humiliated, beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and raped because some grown-ups believe themselves or their race or their people or their class as more deserving of life and the treasures of the earth than others.
And I cry for the Kinder of Palestine,
the Kinder of Deir Yassin in 1948,
the Kinder of Qibya in 1953,
the Kinder of Kafr Qasim in 1956,
the Kinder of Sabra and Shatila 1982,
the Kinder of Hebron in 1994,
the Kinder of Jenin in 2002.
I cry for Shayma Al Masri, 4 years old, killed together with her brother Arafat and three neighbour children Mohammed, Bara and Aziza on March 4, 2002 in a failed Israeli assassination attack.
I cry for Raghda Adnan Al-Assar, 10 years old, struck in the head by Israeli fire while sitting at her desk in UNRWA’s Elementary C Girl’s School in Khan Younis camp on September 10,2004
I cry for Imam Al-Hams, 13 years old, killed on her way to school when she came too close I to a check point and an Israeli officer empied his weapon into her, on October 5, 2004.
I cry for Rajeh Ghaben, 10 years old, killed by Israeli shells together with his brothers Jaber and Mohammed and his cousins Hani, Mohammed and Bassam, while he was picking strawberrys on his family’s fields in northern Gaza on January 4, 2005.
I cry for Nouran Iyad Dib killed by an Israeli sniper during recess in her school in Rafah on January 31, 2005
I cry for Ashraf Moussa, 14 years old, and his friends Hassan and Khaled who were killed when they played soccer in a field in Rafah on April 9, 2005
And in my heart and in my mind those children are there, together, on exactly the same place as the children of Izieu.
And I see them when I close my eyes and hear Reinhard Mey sing in the end:

"..I talk and I sing
And if necessary I scream
So that our children
Will know who they´ve been….
They were just like them,
Like all children everywhere…
Die Kinder von Izieu
Above the Rhone valley there."

The New Pope

2005-04-29T02:42:00.000+02:00

It´s a bit of patriotic pride, I guess, and yes, I am happy that the new Pope Benedict XVI is former Cardinal Ratzinger.
They say, he is a reactionary just like the former Pope John Paul II was a reactionary. It depends what you call a reactionary in my opinion. I read the former Pope´s messages on peace and on poverty and they sure didn´t sound reactionary to me. But yes, there are those views about sexuality, feminism and liberation theology. I´ll get into those topics in another post.
Here I would like to let Pope Benedict talk for himself, with my own thoughts attached.
On April 25, 2005, after talking to representatives of the Eastern Christian churches, he talked to those of other faiths:

I turn now to you, dear friends from different religious traditions," said the Holy Father in English, "and I thank you sincerely for your presence at the solemn inauguration of my pontificate. ... I am particularly grateful for the presence in our midst of members of the Muslim community, and I express my appreciation for the growth of dialogue between Muslims and Christians, both at the local and international level. I assure you that the Church wants to continue building bridges of friendship with the followers of all religions, in order to seek the true good of every person and of society as a whole.
The world in which we live is often marked by conflicts, violence and war, but it earnestly longs for peace, peace which is above all a gift from God, peace for which we must pray without ceasing. Yet peace is also a duty to which all peoples must be committed, especially those who profess to belong to religious traditions. Our efforts to come together and foster dialogue are a valuable contribution to building peace on solid foundations."
Benedict XVI concluded by inviting all present "to become together artisans of peace, of a reciprocal commitment to understanding, respect and love." -V.I.S.

The above quote made it it quite clear, that the catholic Church will not support any kind of modern "Crusade" or "Fight of Civilisations". By emphasizing especially the dialog and the building of bridges between Muslims and Christians you can be sure that this was not just a diplomatic meaningless gesture, but he was making a point.
Cantrast this "bridge building speech" to Bush´s "fire speech" at his inauguration.
Peace as a duty for all those who profess to belong to religious traditions, is an obvious counter towards Bush and his followers of Christian and Jewish Zionists.
By the way in an interview Bush gave after the last Pope´s funeral he said:
"I think John Paul II will have a clear legacy of peace, compassion..."
This for sure is the opposite legacy of what Bush himself will have.

Here are excerpts from Pope Benedicts inauguration homely:
Talking about the "pallium" which would be placed upon his shoulders as a liturgical symbol, symbolizing both the "yoke of Christ" and the "lost sheep" he said:

"The symbolism of the pallium is even more concrete: the lamb's wool is meant to represent the lost, sick or weak sheep which the shepherd places on his shoulders and carries to the waters of life. For the Fathers of the Church, the parable of the lost sheep, which the shepherd seeks in the desert, was an image of the mystery of Christ and the Church. The human race - every one of us - is the sheep lost in the desert which no longer knows the way.
The Son of God will not let this happen; He cannot abandon humanity in so wretched a condition.
He leaps to his feet and abandons the glory of heaven, in order to go in search of the sheep and pursue it, all the way to the Cross. He takes it upon His shoulders and carries our humanity;
He carries us all -
He is the good shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep.
What the pallium indicates first and foremost is that we are all carried by Christ. But at the same time it invites us to carry one another. Hence the pallium becomes a symbol of the shepherd's mission, of which the second reading and the Gospel speak. The pastor must be inspired by Christ's holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God's darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth's treasures no longer serve to build God's garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The Church as a whole and all her pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.
The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished.
When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, Himself became a lamb, He stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how He reveals Himself to be the true shepherd: 'I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep,' Jesus says of Himself (Jn 10:14ff). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God's sign: He Himself is love.
How often we wish that God would make show Himself stronger, that He would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God's patience. And yet, we need His patience. God, Who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified Him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man...."

Yes, the Pope does see the salvation of men more in the spiritual than in the political realm, however by using the words "the powers of exploitation and destruction" he also shows critical inside into the reasons for the miserable state the world is in right now.
The Pope puts love as the opposite of power. And I think he is right. The world cannot be got off the destructive path, it is on right now, by just another power struggle.
We have seen, that in China and the Soviet Union a violent power struggle towards the supposedly humanistic and universalist goal the Marxist ideas represented has brought on in both countries and their satellites immense suffering for exactly those people who should have profited, the poor, the peasants.
And in both countries when the governments reversed to capitalistic goals, for the majority nothing of the idealist mindset of universalism was left.
An ideology based on power struggle is just not capable of creating an altruistic mindset neither in its adherents nor in the people they want to convert.
A philosophy however, based on the idea of unconditional love, even love of enemy, is far more likely to change the attitude of the surrounding society towards universalism and egitalism in the long run.
And this is where God´s patience comes in: Change doesn´t come suddenly it takes time. The Church herself, after she had become state-religion for the Roman Empire, took far more than a thousand years to change herself from a political to a moral authority. And this is where the strength of religion lies, in ethics.
Human progress must lie in human ethics, it cannot lie in human power of some over others, no matter who those some are. History has shown us, that power corrupts men - nearly all of them.

Cut Backs and Paranoia

2005-04-17T00:10:00.000+02:00

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME

Steve Maich from the Canadian publication MACLEANS writes puts up the question "Is America going broke". In an interview David Walker the Comptroller General of the United States explains, that

that plush North American lifestyle to which we've all grown accustomed has been bought on credit, and the bill is rapidly nearing its due date. If the United States can't find a way to pay up, the results will spill beyond national borders, spreading economic misery far and wide

And this way to "pay up" would have to be by raising taxes and cut down on spending:

Walker stresses the need to make "tough decisions," and none will be tougher than tackling the runaway costs of providing health-care coverage for the elderly and the poor. Health spending in the U.S. is projected to jump 63 per cent by 2010, and to continue rising even faster after that. Most analysts agree that, at some point, the government must find a way to clamp down on those costs, yet any cuts in coverage are sure to raise an outcry from the swelling ranks of senior citizens -- a highly influential voting bloc.
Academics have proposed such reforms as a national retail sales tax, a luxury tax and a rollback of all tax cuts enacted since 2001. Others are calling for increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service to catch tax cheaters. Many insist there must be increases to Medicare premiums, as well as massive cutbacks in a wide range of social programs.

If these cut-downs and tax-raises are not done, then in a few years debts will rise to such a height, that the basics, like education, environmental programs and the legal system can no longer be afforded.
National Security is mentioned fleetingly, but military spending it never even was taken seriously into account as having to be cut down as well.
Right now the United Stated spends more money on weapons and "intelligence" than all other countries of the whole world combined and still a cut down in this is not considered a serious option in an extremely serious fiscal crisis?
Even just cutting down military costs by half would probably get the US out of debts in a short time.
Are those economists blind or why don’t they consider this option?
Maybe it’s just American paranoia, believing, that if America cannot threaten the whole world with destruction at the same time, all countries of the world will combine, attack and destroy America.
Maybe it is also the realisation that America has committed so many heinous crimes against humanity in the last few decades that the rest of the world will want revenge.
America projects its own crimes on the rest of the world and hates the rest of the world for them and therefore fears the world in a paranoid way.
America, even secular America, is totally Old-Testamentarian. Founded both on Puritan ethics and on Secular Supremacism, America does not believe in repentance through apologizing and forgiveness.
In this American believe salvation does not come by regretting what was done wrong, repenting and doing better from now on.
In this paranoid believe system salvation comes by faith alone, faith not in the humble, suffering redeemer, who identifies himself with the poor, humble and suffering of the world, not in the Prince of Peace but in the King of Power and Might.
And so while more and more starving its own people at home, especially the poor, the old and the weak, in selfaggrandizement America is showing the outside world the face of a mighty blood-thirsty warrior.
But paranoia is extremely bad for your health and self-aggrandizement is bad for your relationships. In the end, paranoid fears could become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I´m an Alien

2005-04-16T05:11:00.000+02:00

I no longer fit into any box. I used to see myself as a socialist. I don’t any more. I used to see myself as progressive of leftist. I don’t any more. But I haven’t changed course and become a conservative all of a sudden, neither in the American nor in the more benign German sense.
Umkahlil comments in her blog about the "liberal bloggers" who complained of not being invited to the press-party, when so many conservatives were. But when she checked out their blogs, she couldn’t even find one pro-Palestinian article in March from all the list of those "liberal" bloggers.
Those "liberals" were totally blind to the suffering of the Palestinian people.
In the same way I could not even find one single article by so-called progressives who could see, that there was enough evidence in Schiavo case to point to a mercy-killing not of a "brain-dead" woman but of a severely handicapped but awake woman, whose life was declared "unworthy" to live, something the Nazis have done to thousands of people.
In the same way I see the German liberals and progressives being satisfied with the ban of women wearing a headscarf teaching in public schools or working in other public services, since according to their logic those women are either oppressed by their families or they are potential terrorists or married to potential terrorists.
So by banning women from working they are trying to liberate them?

I never was a feminist, but when I read progressive stuff, it seems to me, that feminism is a main prerequisite of being a progressive and in nearly all cases, atheism as well. However feminism nowadays means no longer to fight for equal rights in politics, in the family and at the working place, no, it means most and foremost and over all the fight for "female reproduction rights" or just plain pro-choice or still more plain pro-abortion.
Not agreeing on this issue means a woman is self-hating and reactionary. It’s not even possible to discuss the matter, arguments, even scientific arguments are not allowed to be raised. End of discussion, Punkt, basta.

And then what about my religious opinions? Most people in my parish came from countries with far more conservative Catholicism than I. Theologically I do not always agree with them. I can’t read the bible literally, but I see much symbolism in it.
However I do believe in the central points of the Creed, the divinity of Christ, his suffering and death for the sins of the world, his resurrection, the promise of eternal life for us and Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.
But then most German Catholics do no longer believe this either. And those you hear about in the news are all for reforming the Church by turning her upside down.
For sure I wouldn’t mind a few minor changes, but in these so very dangerous times for the Church to get into an inside battle, dancing around her own navel is in my opinion not only self-defeating but out right irresponsible. Should the Church to be changed into something the small but vociferous middle-European liberal Catholics want against more than 90% of her practicing membership in times where we are on the edge of a new world-war?
And so I pray with my whole heart, please, God, let the next Pope be a conservative but not a Zionist. But the German liberal Catholics will tell me, so you want the Pope to be a Jew-hating Inquisitor?
No, I’d say, I just want his main work be not changing the Church from the inside but strengthening her message of peace and justice towards the poor of the world. Let the next Pope also become an ambassador between the world’s cultures and religions, a peace maker, a true pontifex, a builder of bridges.
But the liberals won’t listen to any explanations, they never do. They call me conservative, they call me reactionary, they call me self-hating, and they call me anti-Semitic.
I’m none of those things.
I’m Erlenda, I’m an alien.

I Would Want to Live

2005-03-31T05:09:00.000+02:00

Some of you disagree with me on the case of Terri Schiavo, comparing it to cases, when terminally ill patients, often under excruciating pain, wanted to not prolong their suffering needlessly or, when brain-dead people were taking off life-support machines.
There is, in my opinion, a difference between pulling a plug and taking somebody, who cannot protest, off his or her food and water.
A person dying of cancer under a lot of pain very often wishes to end this pain by overmedication on pain relief-medication, and I truly understand and would respect his or her wishes.
And, if I should have to suffer from terminal cancer, I would most probably choose myself to use as much pain-relief as possible, even if it would shorten my life-span.

But the case of Terri Schiavo is different. She was not terminally ill, she did not suffer from excruciating pain, and she had not left any will saying, that she would rather die than live in a semi-awake condition.

The accusations against her husband did not come from the media, but they came from her brother, who lived at the same apartment-complex and from her best friend, who told her parents that Terri was contemplating leaving her husband because of emotional and physical abuse.
These accusation were made years before Michael Schiavo went to court for ending Terri´s life, years before all the media attention. These accusations were made, when Terri´s parents wanted to gain custody over their daughter because Michael had refused to let her give rehabilitating therapy and antibiotic medication in two cases when Terri contracted an infection. These testamonies were not allowed into court by judge Greer.
I find Terri´s family and her best friend more believable than her husband.
The way she became isolated more and more from her family of origin and her former friends, together with other forms of control of her, does seem rather typical for an abusiv relationship.
I also find the testamonies of nurses and doctors, who say that Terri is reacting towards her family and even trying to communicate, quite believable.
Most of these testamonies were not allowed into court, which is in my opinion an abuse of justice.

And as I said, both the religious right and the Republicans jumped on the Terri band-wagon for their own political reasons and only after the parents had created enough publicity so they would find it worth it.And having the "wrong" people support Terri does not take away from the fact, that killing a handicapped person just because somebody is saying her life is worthless, is morally wrong. And it will, just like in Hitlers times, lead to more and more mercy-killings. Nowadays you call it lack of life-quality, when then it was called "lebensunwertes Leben" (life not worthy of living).

I think, to kill somebody because he or she is not seen as productive enough for capitalist society, is the end of civilization and the beginning of what Marx called barbary. Of course with these wars for profit we are already in the middle of a barbarian age. The killing of Terri Schiavo is just one more symptom.
To think about it, more people were getting killed in the last century and now in the beginning of the new one by wars and economic oppression than in any other age of humanity.

And in Germany, still one of the richest countries of the world with not yet as much poverty as you can see in the United States, just of few weaks ago, the leader of the junior Free Democrats said, "die Alten sollten den Löffel abgeben" (old people should drop down and die), because they are a drain on the system. And then some reporter on a follow-up, could find quite a few young people on the street with exactly the same opinion.
The retirement system might have some financial flaws and it might be in need for reform, like asking for a bit more solidarity from the rich, who nowadays can totally opt out of the system in Germany, or from the corporations who make billions of profits with a small work-force and therefore pay next to nothing into the social-system.But the young in Germany rather think, the best way would be for the elderly to just drop down dead.

We are a society of self-centeredness run amok.
Which means, we are on the way to self-destruction, because we can no longer empathize with one another.
As I pointed out in "Religion and Politics", altruism has been an important survival tool for humanity. The strength of the human species has allways been in cooperation far more than in in competition.
Caring for the sick has made society more compassionate, more tolerant towards differances and also more capable to find cures for healing, which improved survival rates for everybody.
And so, while not being able to care for themselves, handicapped people like Terri are still able to change society for the better, just by their very existance.

Thinking about Terri, I thought about what I would feel, if I ever came into her condition. While I´m rather sure, that she is indeed awake, I do not know, how capable she is of reflecting on her condition. If she is just dreaming most of the time, are her dreams making her life worth while?
Sometimes between dreaming and waking I feel most alife and most happy. And while I never can share those dreams, for they vanish, the minute I´m fully awake, I still can feel that there was something there, worth to have been lived through.
But what, if Terri actually can think, like us. The way she is laughing at jokes and closing her eyes at prayers, opening them again when prayer is finished, suggests, that she might be able to think but unable to speak, like some people who have a stroke.
There she lies incapable to communicate her thoughts.
If it was me, would I feel incarcerated into a personal hell?
I´ve done a lot of thinking during the last few years myself and most often was unable to communicate my thoughts with others, partly because I have a problem expressing myself verbally, partly because those around me aren´t too interested in my thoughts. And still, when I think about it, then I feel that every thought was worth it, even if only for me alone.
I believe in a higher purpose to life and in spiritual growth, personal and for the community.
And yes, even living in a world of dreams and thoughts all by myself, all alone, if I was Terri, I would want to live.

Why Progressives Should Help to Save Terry Schiavo´s Life

2005-03-21T00:57:00.000+01:00

Terri Schiavo, a severely handicapped woman is sentenced to death by dehydration by Florida judge George Greer.
Her husband Michael Schiavo claims that Terri has told him before the incident which had caused her disability that she did not wish to live, if she should ever fall into a coma. Terri’s parents, however, say, Terri would never have expressed such an opinion.
The husband’s lawyers and medical experts claim, that Terri is in a constant vegetative state, a waking coma, where sounds and movements she makes are just involuntary reflexes.
Other experts however agree with the opinion of Terry Schiavo´s parents, that Terry is awake and reacting to and interacting with other people especially family members.
Dr. William Hammesfahr, an highly decorated expert, who had worked with many patients like Terri states plainly, that she is not in a coma, with appropriate therapy her condition could improve to the point, that she gets part of her mobility back in one arm and one hand up to the point, that she can transfer herself from her wheelchair into her bed.
There are also dozens of eye-witness accounts about how Terri reacts to people and also to music, together with Video-evidence which, in my opinion, present convincing evidence, that Terri Schiavo is not comatose.

Terri’s parents and brother brought up allegations that Michael Schiavo was an emotionally and physically abusive husband and that Terri had planned divorce shortly before she became ill and that he therefore was not an appropriate guardian for his wife.
Feminists should note that while these allegations could be a desperate try to change the custody situation by Terri´s parents, it seems more than likely that they are true, since they mainly come from Terri’s best friend. She claims she had helped Terri to make plans for divorce. Some of Michael Schiavo´s behaviour, corrobated by other people, like the urge to control and monitor his wife’s every movement point to an abusive relationship.
No wife should be left in the guardianship of an abusive husband when she due to illness is no longer able to protect herself.

But there is still another level to this:
Nazi Germany had a policy of terminating so-called "unworthy life", meaning the killing of retarded or mentally ill or of severely physically handicapped patients. In order to get the German people to agree with this policy, they produced propaganda films which depicted the life of handicapped or mentally ill people as a living hell. Then they asked the audience to have compassion on those unfortunate creatures and support putting them out of their misery.
The political reasoning behind this was of course not in any way compassion, it was Eugenics and getting rid of useless eaters.

The case of Terri Schiavo, who is not in any terrible pain, nor is she dying, nor is she with all likelihood in a comatose state, could become a case of precedence for just such a policy. And it could have a meaning for the current situation in Iraq or in wars that are still planned. And in this way to think about and fight for this one single handicapped person Terri Schiavo, is not a distraction from fighting to save the many people currently and in the future in danger of being killed by aggressive wars.
Many American soldiers come home from this war in body bags, far more however come home severely injured, some of them with brain-damage. If Terri Schiavo, who is most probably not comatose, is declared in coma and she is no longer declared to be worthy to receive life-saving care or treatment, the same thing will eventually happen to many brain-damaged veterans, if they are unable to talk clearly or control their movements precisely.
They will be declared comatose and the army will deny them financial support for their necessary care or treatment. The families of those Veterans are most often too poor to pay for medical treatment themselves and while they might clearly see that their loved one is responsive to them and not comatose, they will be financially unable to go through court-proceedings to prove their case - court-proceedings, which they could quite likely loose as you can see in the case of Terri Schiavo.

You might say that it was Jeb Bush, who saved Terri last time at the eleventh hour, portraying himself as her guardian angel. But he did not come in on his own. It was only pressure from his potential religious voters, which made him intercede.
And yes right now there are mostly right-wing religious groups supporting the survival of Terri; however these groups did not come right away to the help of the Schindlers, the parents of Terri, when they asked for their support. It was only after the Schindlers had succeeded to get enough media coverage on their own and therefore public sympathy, about 2 years back, when those groups jumped on the band-wagon. Right now Republican politicians are reacting on pressure by their religious base, while the so-called "liberal" media is calling for Terri’s death.
But remember, the "liberal" media was and still is cheer-leading for the Iraq-war and now saying, that no matter the terrible casualties on both sides, the torture and the poisoning of the whole country with thousands of Nagasaki bombs worth of radiation with depleted uranium, the "democratic" elections in Iraq make it all worth it.

What about the ACLU, who is also calling for Terri Schiavo to be "humanly” dehydrated to death?
There we come into the private area of our own psychology. Often, when we look at someone like Terri Schiavo, we do actually not see her, as the unique single human being she is; instead we see only our own worst fears reflected there is this wheelchair or this bed.
When people look at Terri they think or even say aloud:” I would never want to live like this.”
But what they actually mean by it is, that they never want to become like Terri Schiavo. And this is true, there is not a living soul in the world, except maybe someone who is presently tortured, who wants to become like Terri Schiavo. Who would want to loose so many of ones abilities and freedoms?
But then, if you ever would come into the same situation as Terri is in right now, you would want to live. People, who become physically but not mentally handicapped through an accident or an illness, are far more likely to become so severely depressed, that they wish themselves dead, than people with mental damage to their brain. The latter usually ready to accept their condition and take life as it comes. They feel sad, when they are neglected, and enjoy life, when there are people around who care for them.
Many of them live in their own world, which is slightly different from ours. But a loving relative or an empathetic care-giver can enter their world and function as a kind of an ambassador from our world to theirs, so that their world becomes brighter and they can live with the restrictions our world puts on them.
However, it has occurred to me, that Terri Schiavo might be far less mentally handicapped than it seems at first glance.
In an affidavit a nurse states, that when a priest was praying with her, Terri reacted, by trying to be quiet and closing her eyes during the prayer, opening them again afterwards. And then, after the prayer, when that priest was joking with her, she laughed appreciatively.
For a person to understand the abstract principle of prayer means, that she can understand her environment quite well.
But then, you never know, what understanding a handicapped person, who is unable to talk, really has. An appropriate reaction in a social situation is always a sign for a good grasp on reality.
I once worked with a lady, who in the last stages of the Alzheimer-decease. She was no longer able to talk or walk or feed herself. But we noticed that she, a former music-teacher, still calmed down and seemed to be more happy and content when she could listen to music-tapes. But then I noticed that when I tried to sing to her old well-known fold-songs myself, she started to move slightly and make melodic sounds, at times it was just like she was trying to hold the tune with me. And then, one day, after I finished a song, this lady, who had never spoken a single understandable word in over a year, now softly uttered two of the most beautiful words in the world:"Thank you"

Bush´s "Freedom" in Mainz

2005-02-25T05:21:00.000+01:00

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME

The WSW-site describes the extra-ordinary security measures the German city of Mainz had to put up with during the Bush-visit:

"In advance of Wednesday, February 23, a virtual state of emergency is being imposed in the Rhine-Main area, one of the most heavily populated regions of Germany.

Four motorways are being completely closed, rail travel restricted, navigation of the rivers Rhine and Main halted, schools and local offices closed down. The historical center of the city of Mainz will be totally blocked off. Helicopters will fly overhead, while the city is besieged by police units and snipers.

The rerouting of traffic and closure of the main routes between Frankfurt airport and Mainz will force tens of thousands of employees in the region, including workers at the huge Opel auto works at Rüsselsheim, to change shifts or take a day’s holiday.

Air space over Frankfurt airport is to be closed for nearly an hour. All private airplanes within a radius of 60 kilometres from Mainz are to be grounded for the entire day. For the first time ever, fighter planes of the German Air Force will be on standby to take off and attack in the event of any disturbance of air space.

US snipers will be posted on balconies and roofs along the route from the airport to Mainz and its city centre—this in a country that normally forbids foreign security forces, even bodyguards, from carrying weapons in public. Days in advance, US Secret Service agents have been surveying the region, and huge armoured cars, helicopters and hundreds of American “specialists” have been flown in.

A high security wall has been erected in the Mainz city centre around the historic cathedral, the castle, the regional parliament, the state chancellery and the world famous Gutenberg Museum. The city centre has been criss-crossed with barricades and placed under the control of armed policemen. Thousands of residents and those working in the city centre can leave or gain access only on foot, after showing their IDs. The central link over the Rhine to Wiesbaden, the Theodor Heuss bridge, is to be totally closed, even for pedestrians.

Some 1,300 gully and manhole covers have been welded shut, while free-standing mail boxes, garbage cans, electrical connection boxes, and even bicycles have been removed. City residents have been expressly forbidden from going onto their balconies or looking out an open window. They have been banned from parking their cars either in the street or in their own garages. Many garages have been sealed. The police have warned that they will break into and tow away all vehicles found in the restricted area beginning early Tuesday morning.

Garbage disposal and road cleaning will be halted on Wednesday. The university hospital, including its emergency ward, has been vacated and is being kept free for possible emergency use. Other hospitals have organised onsite overnight accommodation to make sure physicians, anaesthetists and nursing staff can be available for work."

In an interview on public TV German chancellor Schröder explained, in kind of a backhand way, that those measures were ordered by the Americans. He said, that if we want a visitor like this, we have to do the kind of security the Americans ask us to. And then he repeated himself that of course, the American president is very welcome in Germany and therefore we had to comply with American security demands.
Maybe he was speaking for himself, but my guess would be, that at least in the Mainz area, close to a hundred percent of the population were opposed to this visit, after it became clear what kind of paranoid measures the population would have to endure, and in which all the people of Mainz were treated as potentially highly dangerous terrorists.

Maybe the whole thing was good for us. For now we could see, what kind of freedom, Bush and Co actually have in mind for the rest of the world.
Protest-signs at a demonstration, very far outside of Bush’s view, spelled it out: "Bush, we don’t want your "freedom".

Although I doubt, that this incident alone will be a permanent wake-up call, it could be one drop in a barrel that will eventually overflow.
Sure is, that the German government cannot afford to take active part in the Iraq-war or any future wars without risking the population going on the barricades.

Of course, a stunt like 9/11 could be pulled off in Germany. But then, there were at least 20% of the German population, who already knew by last year, that percentage probably has grown in the last year.
If something like 9/11 would happen in Germany, the people who blaming America would soon be the majority. It is not so hard for the one person in five, who already knows, to inform the other 4.

The Bush-people have shown, how paranoid afraid they are of the German people. Only guilt can produce such a big paranoia.
And the Germans have seen, how insane the Bush-administration is, close up with their own eyes.

Nathan, the Wise

2005-01-22T08:50:00.000+01:00

Atheists, the Marxist kind or the others, tell us they built their philosophy on the Enlightenment. They tell us, they are the rational ones, and we, the religious people are the non-rational.
They tell us, that religion is responsible for war and warmongering. The left-wingers tell us that behind Hitler’s philosophy were Christianity.
It seems to me, that they are twisting history just as right-wingers do.
Fact is: Hitler many times denounced Christianity as weak and not fit for German nationalism. Many hundreds of priests and pastors were incarcerated in concentration camps. And many died there together with communists, socialists, peace-activists and other political prisoners.
The philosophical foundation of Nazism was Nietzsche, just as it is the foundation for Social Darwinism.
The non-religious streams of the Enlightenment have brought us Marx and Nietzsche. But there were religious streams as well. And they brought us for instance Mendelssohn and Lessing, German born, all of them.
Neither religion nor atheism per se is responsible for wars and oppression, but philosophies from either can be used to inflict unending pain and misery on other people.

There were hateful anti-Semitic writers in Germany, preparing the way for Hitler, but there were others as well, who had a deep respect for Judaism and the Jewish people. One of them was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Born in 1729, he was the son of a Lutheran minister and he became a very good friend of Moses Mendelssohn, working on joint writings and projects. In 1779, two years before his death, Lessing finished his last work, the theater-play “Nathan, the Wise”. It is said, that the character of Nathan was based on his friend Mendelssohn.
I loved this play, when I had to read it as a kid in school. And I still believe, it is the best thing German literature has ever come up with.
It culminates in a very old parable, the parable of the ring, but Lessing has changed it just a tiny bit, and in doing this, he put a new enlightened interpretation into it:

Nathan, the wise, is an old Jewish merchant living at the times of the crusades in Jerusalem, whose family, his wife and seven sons had been killed by Christians many years ago. After that, he had wandered around in total despair, hopelessness and burning hatred, until he found a tiny orphan baby, a Christian girl.
He took her in and raised her as his own daughter, never even telling her otherwise.
One day, when he comes home from a business journey, he finds out, that his house had caught fire, but a knight templar had rescued his foster-daughter. Nathan tries to contact this young crusader to thank him, but is rejected by him. The young man is full of bitterness, he is the only one left of his order in muslimic Jerusalem, since the Sultan had all the other crusaders killed, but spared the life of this one, because he resembled so much the beloved younger brother of the Sultan, who had disappeared a long time ago. Nathan makes another attempt of talking to the Knight Templar and finally wins his trust.
In the meantime, the Sultan is in financial trouble and asks for Nathan to come to his palest and give him a loan. While there, Nathan is asked by the Sultan, what in his opinion is the right religion. Nathan answers him with the parable of the ring.
In the end the young knight templar finds out through a piece of jewelry, that the daughter of Nathan, the Jew, is in reality his, the Christian crusader’s, sister, and the Sultan finds out, that the young Christian is actually his brother’s son.
In this way Lessing, of course, implies the close relationship between Jews, Christians and Muslims.

And this is the parable of the ring:
Many years ago, there was a man who owned a beautiful and very precious ring. Embedded in it was a stone with magic powers. It could make the bearer, who was confident in it is power, become beloved by God and every man around him. So the owner of the ring commanded, that it would stay in the family forever and always be given on towards the most beloved son of the next generation. But then, in one generation, the father had three sons, he loved all alike. Whenever, he was alone with one of them, he felt, that he loved this one best and promised him the ring. So, he had promised the ring to all three of his sons, when he finally knew, that his end was near. Not wanting to disappoint any of them, he had a jeweler make two exact copies of the ring, so close to the original, that even the father couldn’t tell the difference and he gave one ring to each of his sons.
After the father’s death, each of the sons claimed to be the father’s most beloved, the owner of the true ring and the leader of the family. They went to court hating each other, each taking an oath of what the father had said to him. Not wanting to blame the father, each one accused his brothers of fraud.
The judge responded, that the bearer of the real ring should be discerned by the powers it is magic stone gave him of being loved by the others. But, the judge decided, since each brother only loved himself, the real ring must have been lost, and all three of the rings were imitations to hide the loss.
“And”, the judge added, “if you don’t want my advice instead of my decision, then go now!
My advice however is this:
You take the thing totally as it is. If each of you has his ring from his father. So should each of you believe that his ring, is the real one.
Possibly the father no longer wanted to allow the tyranny of the one ring in his house, and sure is, that he loved you all and loved you all alike, by not lowering down two of you, to elevate one.
So go, and let each one of you imitate his love, that was free of prejudice!
So compete with one another every day, to let the powers of the stone come to light,
In gentleness of character, congeniality of heart and deepest devotion to God.
And when in your children’s children, the powers of the stone will show,
Then, in a thousand thousand years, I invite you back here to this chair.
And then, a wiser man than I will sit on it and will decide.
Now go!”
So said the humble judge.

Inauguration differences

2005-01-22T02:52:00.000+01:00

Jeff Wells quotes in his blog from January 20,2004, part of the inauguration speech of Jimmy Carter:
"You have given me a great responsibility--to stay close to you, to be worthy of you, and to exemplify what you are. Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust. Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes...............
We have learned that "more" is not necessarily "better," that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything, nor can we afford to lack boldness as we meet the future. So, together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best........"

Can anybody see the difference in attitude to the Bush-people? I can and those quotes made me cry.
Carter is, or at least at those times was, a true Christian. Humility and the ability to see oneself as person with limits and failures is a true Christian trait. He even is an Evangelical. So they have gone a long way too; in the direction to the dark side, of course.

What I heard from Bush and Cheney today made me cry, too. But this time in frustration, anger and desperation.
And, yes fear.
And I thought I have gotten over it, gotten cynical enough for these times.
So Israel will attack Iran, Iran will retaliate, America will protect Israel, and we German cowards will finally stand strong at the side of our beloved Big Brother Nation walking with them into sundown or into the "clash of civilizations", slaughtering Muslims abroad, probably incarcerating our own.
(One CDU opposition leader, the speaker for foreign politics, already expressed his sympathy for the American cause in Iran. And those dirt bags from the CDU will probably lead the government after the next elections.)
And I am praying for a miracle.
Nothing short of a miracle can stop this unprecedented slaughter ahead of us. If this will be a World War as the Neocons are planning, more people will be killed than in the last one.
When I saw the face of Bush looking at me from the newspaper front-page this morning, I thought about "the banality of evil".
Yes, I know, evil is a word the intellectual call Manichean. So what?
I say it loud:
Bush is the front man of a government of pure and unadulterated evil:
Mass murderers, war criminals, criminals against humanity and planners of mass-genocide.
And our mass-media journalists are either accomplices in those crimes, or cowards and turncoats with no backbone and so are most western politicians.

Elite Fighting

2005-01-21T03:46:00.000+01:00

Jeff Wells comments in his Rigorous Intuition blog from January 12, that finally the mainline media is going after the CIA-money-laundering banks.
However, I am not so sure, that the motives of those media-outlets are really as pure as they make it look.
Whenever the mainstream media, especially the Wall Street Journal, is going after a seemingly controversial story I suspect an ulterior motive, which would have nothing to do with informing the public about political crooks and getting them to justice.

The CIA has been in the cross hairs of some of the Bush-administration for quite a while. By now, it has been quietly dismembered for also.

It seems to me that there is a power-struggle going on between different economic elites.

The elite with the upper hand is more attuned to the super-secret NSA, which is working from inside the Pentagon and has no congressional oversight at all - and of course, they have their Office of Special Plans as well.

They are trying to get the CIA on their side by transforming it. But this might have a blowback. Some of the displaced might not go quietly.

So now in order to discredit them some beans are being spilled, not enough of course to really rock the boat. Some countries, which are very big in money laundering, are not mentioned at all. And the targeted Saudi-Arabia is on the shoot-down list of the Neo-cons.

Since Bush, the younger, always has been nothing more than a puppet in this administration, Cheney and his minions might not have any scruples in sacrificing him now, after the elections.

We should remember that Bush, the older, ex-President and ex-CIA-chief, has been publicly against the Iraq adventure. At first, I thought that this was no more than a ploy, but now I am convinced it was his honest opinion, an opinion shared by most of the CIA.

Osama bin Laden, of course, was a creation of the CIA. And the guy impersonating bin Laden a few times until the last elections was an actor paid by them. It was last minutes try to get Kerry elected instead of Bush by showing Bush’s incompetence in this supposed "war against terrorism". And it would have worked, if the elections had not been rigged.
Of course, another outfit did the Osama tapes after the election. Even Jihad Unspun caught unto that, or maybe they got a tip. Some say they have some relationship to the CIA.

So, whom should we be rooting for?
The CIA or the NSA and the Neocons?
Or maybe should hope that they will finally destroy each other?
But then, the last time those 2 elites had a disagreement it brought us WW II: There was the banking elite around Churchill and Roosevelt against the industrial elite in Germany and the US (Henry Ford and Prescott Bush, for instance), financing Hitler.
And the cannon fodder for their power plays was most of the world, soldiers and civilians alike - and the final victims were 50 million dead and untold millions maimed.
The stakes might even be higher this time around.

American education

2004-12-12T22:22:00.000+01:00

Rules and discipline "über alles".
If you look at the news-story below you see a frightened little girl, who has broken a rule without knowing it, and a school administration together with a police department gone bananas on rules and regulations.
For me this is one more sign of a growing fascist atmosphere, the infatuation with rules, without regard for the well being of even the weakest members of society.
Yes, a story like this does not happen every day, but still it is a symptom.
There are other symptoms of course:
Children can go to jail for 10 years or longer for non-violent crimes. Political protesters can get many years or even life-sentences for civil disobedience.
Adolescent and retarded offenders can get death penalties.
Terrorist suspects (everybody looking Arabic or like a dissident) can be held in secret prisons indefinitely without any sentence at all.
This is America today, the "land of the free and the brave", with the biggest prison population per capita of the population in the western world and scared to death by 10-year old girls with scissors.

"4th-grader arrested for having scissors at school
Associated Press
Dec. 11, 2004,

PHILADELPHIA -- A 10-year-old girl was placed in handcuffs and taken to a police station because she took a pair of scissors to her elementary school.
School district officials said the fourth-grade student did not threaten anyone with the 8-inch shears, but violated a rule that considers scissors to be potential weapons.
Administrators said they were following state law when they called police Thursday, and police said they were following department rules when they handcuffed Porsche Brown and took her away in a patrol wagon.
"My daughter cried and cried," said her mother, Rose Jackson. "She had no idea what she did was wrong. I think that was way too harsh."
Police officers decided the girl had not committed a crime and let her go.
However, school officials suspended her for five days. Administrators will decide at a hearing whether she may return to class, or be expelled to a special disciplinary school.
The scissors were discovered while students' belongings were being searched for property missing from a teacher's desk.
School district officials have promised a crackdown on unruly students this year, and new policies give administrators the power to expel students for infractions as minor as violating the dress code, chronic tardiness or habitual swearing.
Administrators say the steps are needed to regain control over a notoriously unruly school system, but some parents have complained that discipline has been overly harsh and that school officials have been too quick to call police about minor problems."

The New Mongols

2004-11-19T08:14:00.000+01:00

- US Troops On A Killing Spree
An open letter
By
Sam Hamod
an expert on the Middle East, a former advisor to the U.S. State Department on Middle East and Islam; he also edited, 3rd World News (in D.C.). He also edits www.todaysalternativenews.com . He is at shamod@cox.net

11-18-4

There is an old prophecy among the Iraqis that says that when the Khan was wounded, after he'd conquered Iraq, that as he went home to die that he would return some day to once again conquer Baghdad. The Iraqis remember this prophecy and they have sworn on the Qur'an that when he returned he might once again burn Baghdad as did Ibn Timur (Tamerlane) but that they would set fire to his camps wherever they found them until the Mongols had to go home again.

America was basically a true Christian leaning nation, America as far as the world was concerned followed Jesus' dictum in the Beatitudes and in Matthew where Jesus said,

"Blessed are the peacemakers," and things that relate to justice, peace and mercy. Somehow, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Allawi have turned the American troops, most of whom were raised as God-fearing, decent, merciful Christians into Mongols. It's as if they never read Jesus' words, or that they forgot the New Testament, that they read the Old Testament or some Mongol book on warfare. Or America may have let the Mossad of Israel and the IDF teach American troops the Israeli/ Nazi SS style which has been used for years on the Palestinian civilian population.

There are strong parallels between what happened in Fallujah and what the Israelis did in Ramallah, Hebron and other Palestinian cities. The dictum was, "Destroy everything, kill anything that moves and terrorize them into submission." This is exactly what our troops are doing in Iraq, just as their Israeli trainers told them to do. But, as with Palestine, in the short term it may work, but in the long term, you will have made enemies who will never forget and who will someday take their revenge.

Otherwise, why would our young men and women go into battle saying, "Let's kill'em all," and "Send their souls to hell," and other such things when they gunned down women, children and Iraqi resistance fighters. Why would an American helicopter crew gun down women and children trying to escape Fallujah who were crossing a river in broad daylight. Why would one of our officers gun down wounded civilians in a mosque. We have no excuses except that somehow our troops have become dehumanized. I lay the blame at the U.S. leadership who had the gall and immoral judgement to bring in the Mossad and the Israeli IDF and to send commanders to Israel for further training in this brutal style of warfare not seen since the Mongols (but then again, perhaps we did see it in Viet Nam with Agent Orange and My Lai, etc. but not on this scale). Perhaps this is also why even in Israel there are more and more refuseniks, and in America over 30% of our troops are coming back with mental problems-because it's in conflict with their Christian upbringing and for the refuseniks it's in conflict with the moral aspects of Judaism.

There are hundreds of stories as of this past week from eye-witnesses, from photographers, from BBC correspondents, from NBC and from independent writers and people who escaped the blistering shelling and helicopter straffings who have spoken of women and children trying to escape the bombing who were gunned down by our troops, gunned down by helicopters as they were trying to cross a river, being blown to bits by tanks as they hid in their homes.

THE QUESTION WE MUST ASK OURSELVES IS, WHO MADE OUR TROOPS INTO MONGOLS ON A KILLING SPREE? We must also ask, as I did over 2 years ago, what is going to happen "'When the Killers Come Home"? We already have evidence from North Carolina and other bases that many of these men abused their wives on their return, others killed them, others are so mentally sick that they cannot return home. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CHRISTIAN TRAINING OUR TROOPS HAD. I think it has been corrupted by the un-Christian commanders who claim they are Christians, like General Boykin, Settle in Morocco, Bush in the White House and the Israeli influence on our military commanders. This also is related to the new batch of ministers that have been sent in by the military, most of whom are "born again Christians, " who have somehow developed a hatred for Islam and an allegiance to Israel through their political indoctrination by such as Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

A friend of mine, a Christian minister had asked the same questions when he visited Camp Pendleton, the big Marine base close to San Diego. I do not use his name or denomination for fear of what he called, "possible reprisals from the base command," but he said that many hundreds of troops who came back from Iraq had either turned so cold that they refused to talk about Christ and mercy, and others broke down and cried about what they'd done to women and children. Many of them spoke of the commanders ordering them to terrorize everyone in Iraq in order to make victory short and sweet, that these Iraqis were "heathens," and "sons and daughters of satan," and that they were doing "God's work." Unfortunately, too few of our troops have had the courage to say, "NO." Or the intelligence or religious training to know how to stand up to what was an obvious lie and distortion of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
IT IS TIME TO CALL GEORGE BUSH, IYAD ALLAWI, DONALD RUMSFELD, PAUL WOLFOWITZ, GENERAL MYERS, GENERAL ABIZAID BEFORE A CIVILIAN TRIBUNAL, MADE UP OF HONEST SENATORS AND CITIZENS, TO PUT A STOP THIS NEW MONGOL HORDE, AND IF NECESSARY PUT THEM UP BEFORE A CIVILIAN JUDGE OR AN INTERNATIONAL COURT TO BE TRIED FOR WAR CRIMES AGAINST CIVILIANS IN IRAQ, ESPECIALLY IN FALLUJAH, IN BAGHDAD AND IN OTHER CITIES WHERE THEY HAVE ATTACKED CIVILIAN POPULATIONS WITH UNDUE FORCE AND THEN, AS IN FALLUJAH, DEPRIVED THEM OF MEDICINES, WATER, FOOD AND A CHANCE TO SAFELY ESCAPE.

My- Lai in VietNam pales beside the butchery our Mongol-like troops, on the ground and in the air, have performed against these civilians and even against the resistance fighters who were but defending their families, their homes, their city and their country. Wouldn't we have done the same; wouldn't we do the same, defend our families, our homes, our cities and our country?

It is time we all did something about this, for a start, send this article to your ministers, to your rabbis, to your friends and most of all to your senators and congressmen and to George W. Bush himself so that he may hopefully wake-up from the narcotic of war and return to the words of Jesus, "Mercy, " and "Blessed are the peacemakers," not those who make war or kill women and children.

This curse of the Mongols is on his head and ours if we don't stop this-Bush has no mandate from God or man to order the killing on this scale (and yes, he is the man who pulls the strings on Allawi, to order this brutal and inhumane attack on Fallujah), everyone knows that unless they were born without a brain or a moral conscience.

As you are all aware, the world now sees us as butchers. One German friend said it reminded him of Dresden; I agree. One British friend who has lived in London all his life said it reminded him of when Hitler would bomb and sent rockets into London in WWII. A friend who served in Viet Nam said he can no longer watch the news because it brings back memories of atrocities in Viet Nam. Muslims from all over the world have written me saying they cannot believe the Americans have allowed themselves to become so bestial-they now see America as in league with the devil. Ironically, Khomeni could not get anyone to see America as "the great satan," but it took George W. Bush and his minions only a few years to do exactly that, to show America is now the great satan in Muslim eyes.
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While I agree with Mr. Hamod in all points, there is one thing I would like to add. Therefore I wrote a letter to him:

Dear Mr. Hamod

9/11 was the beginning of WW IV, this is what the neocons say and what they have planned a long time ago.
The troops and the population of America are indoctrinated by 9/11.
There is now enough evidence available on and offline, to prove that the 9/11attacks could never ever been committed by Islamic terrorists on their own. It was an inside job, and everybody looking at the evidence with an open mind knows that.
When the real culprits of 9/11 will be caught, it can no longer be used as a propaganda tool.
Then this so called "War on Terrorism" will stop and the war criminals will be send to trial.
When the propaganda is undone and the "big lie"revealed, the masses will no longer follow the "Führer".
Then "we will know the truth and the truth will set us free."

Balance of power

2004-11-18T07:16:00.000+01:00

Russian President Putin declares Russia is building atomic bombs more advanced than what any other atomic power has to show for their money.
Why does he do this so publicly before the technology is even fully developed?
He is threatening, do not mess with us. We are capable of more than you think.
We are approaching a new Cold War, which hopefully will end America’s hot wars, the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ones planned for the future.
In the same way we might possibly see the announcement of the Director of a Russian Government Virology institute as a threat, that a deadly flu Virus might be on the way, killing up to a billion people in the world.
The virus would be related to the Chinese bird virus and since the USA and Russian have about the same population, in both countries the same number of people would probably die.
So could this mean: If you release a virus on us, we will release one on you, one you won’t have a vaccine for, just as we don’t have one for yours?
Well, we cannot see into the heads of those politicians. We will not know for sure, what they have in mind, but right now threats are fine with me.
I’m all for a balance of power.
The world is at the edge of a cliff; whatever keeps it from falling over is fine with me.
But one day we will have to get rid of the insane forces, which keep trying to push us over.

Falludjah and Wagner

2004-11-17T09:29:00.000+01:00

Did you know that 'Ride of the Valkyries' by the German Opera composer Richard Wagner was the same melody the Nazis used as underplay in their Wochenschau, the weekly news program being shown in every German movie-theater during the Third Reich.
They used especially this song, when they displayed the "heroes" of the German Wehrmacht (the German army during Nazi-times).
The music and the pictures should proclaim to the German people the "greatness of the Aryan soldiers marching into battle, and conquering the peoples of the lower races in their inequity and cowardice"
Now, here is, how an embedded reporter of the "Chicago Tribune" describes the marching into Falludja on 11/10 2004:
"A psychological operations Humvee blaring Richard Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' drove by, followed by creaking military construction equipment."
What kind of chutzpa do you need to use even the same symbols as the Nazis in WW II?

And still the mainline media and politicians in Europe and America don’t notice anything?
How blind can you be?
No, I do not think any European politician is blind, nor is the media. They do notice.
But Europe is watching with her mouth closed.
We are cowards, politicians, media and most citizens.
We are afraid of America, terribly afraid. We do not want to become the focus of it’s military attention, atomic bombs, or maybe a biological weapon, just a sneaky virus, or a covered operation, instigating civil war between Christian and Muslim citizens in our countries.
And so, we keep quiet, closing eyes and ears as well, hoping, when we open them again, the nightmare will be over and nothing will have happened to us.
And so, we become guilty as well. There are no innocent bystanders, when genocide is committed. Silence means consent and encouragement for the murderer.
If there will be a time of reckoning, we will sit on the same bench with him as accomplices.
And one day our grandchildren might ask us, why did you watch and let them happen, these terrible crimes against humanity.
They will ask, just as I have asked my own German grandmother.
And she just told me: " I didn’t know."
But this time it will even be a worse excuse than last. For how could anyone not know?
How?
But who knows, maybe there will not be any grandchildren to ask questions this time? Maybe there never will be any, again - nowhere

I´d wish I was wrong

2004-11-13T23:11:00.000+01:00

When you are a conspiracy-theorist people tell you many times, that you are crazy or that you are duped by other crazies and everything you and they found out about the real agendas of our "democratic" governments is just imagination, just in your head.
So I think sometimes: One day I will be able to tell those people, I told you so, this will be my satisfaction.
But then I keep checking myself. It won’t be a satisfaction at all, because by the time, those people will realize I was right together with all the other conspiracy-crazies by that time the world will be in a terrible state, we all will be in agony mourning the good times we had and the future our children won’t have.
No, I told you so, will not be a satisfaction then and it should not now.
For now, I just tell you:
I’d wish I was wrong. I’d wish I really was crazy and the world was not.
I’d wish I was wrong. But I’m afraid I am right.

Election Night

2004-11-03T06:09:00.000+01:00

So far, it looks as if Bush will get another turn. Is it a real election or is it fixed by fraudulent voting machines. Who knows?
But should I really care?
There is no actual difference between Bush and Kerry, not in the important issues of war or peace, anyway. In Germany, people are speculating that with a Kerry Presidency it would be harder to reject military or financial involvement into the Iraq war. So maybe Bush would be better, so the "Old Europe" will keep on holding its distance.
What angers me a bit, is how all the TV pundits see the appearance of Bush at home with his family before TV-cameras as something important for the rest of the world to watch over and over again. It just goes to show how superficial our media is - in Europe just as in the US.

Osama and the CIA

2004-11-02T11:49:00.000+01:00

Now I know Osama binLaden or whoever is impersonating him on this last videotape is working for the CIA.
Why?
Well, binLaden has always been a CIA-asset, since the time he was helping to overthrow the Afghani government in the eighties and drive the Soviet army out.
However now, Osama binLaden is endorsing John Kerry to be elected. He openly appears before a camera mocking Bush for his inaction on 9/11. Bush had stated quite recently that binLaden was no longer important. But there the guy stands threatening other terror-attacks, triumphant, healthy and in best shape; showing quite obviously that Bush has not done a very good job in this so-called war on terrorism.
The confession itself is totally bogus, of course, since everyone who has been researching the evidence thoroughly can tell you without a margin of doubt, that neither binLaden nor Attah could have committed the crimes without inside help. Since there are not enough Muslims in any places of power and influence in the US (like inside NORAD, the military, NYC authorities, destruction companies, phone companies, intelligence communities) the helpers must have been non-Muslims. So why is binLaden not telling the whole world about his many, many non-Muslim helpers, the ones he made a strategic alliance with, and starts mocking the corruption of those western people?
The most logically reason is of course, that neither binLaden nor this impersonation of him were behind the attacks, though there might have been a few Muslim dupes or mercenaries involved. The planners and coordinators were all totally non-Muslims. As a reason for his terrorist acts this binLaden look-alike does not give the story about infidels in the land of Mecca and Medina. No, he says, the reason is America’s support of Israel in the occupation of Lebanon. It is not a secret, that the majority of the CIA has a big problem with the Bush-administration and its Likudite neo-con block.
The CIA and its master Wall Street have not always the same interests as Israel. While they are not opposed to this "War against terrorism", since it enriches the military-industrial complex, they don’t want to do it the Israeli way. John Kerry has promised to go on with this war, just as Bush would have. However, Kerry will be able to pull the Europeans into the boat. This will lower the costs of war and bring greater profits for Wall Street.
The ploy would definitely work, if the election had fixed already by Republican owned voting machines. So let’s see, if the CIA is strong enough to keep the Bush-people from cheating.
However, I’m not sure, what good it will do the American people and the rest of the world, if a different war-is-peace candidate is getting into power. Maybe there will be no more false-flag operations against the American people, since Kerry might be slightly less corrupt and will refrain from killing his own people, who knows. My guess is, that it was not the CIA, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but some other agency, closer to the Bush-administration and with the help of the Israeli Mossad.
The CIA however was most definitely involved in the cover-up, even if some of their agents weren’t happy about the operation. Since, if the majority of the public will come to know the truth, people will become so distrustful of any government or any government agency, they would demand openness and ban secrecy, and the CIA would loose most of its power.
Right now the new Bush appointed head of the CIA tries to prevent the publication of a document drafted by the CIA itself, showing who was on duty during 9/11, and who was not prosecuted for negligence but was getting a promotion instead. However, details of the document are leaked left and right, probably by the ones, who wrote the document in the first place.
So the Bush-administration might even be right on one thing: AlQaeda wants John Kerry to be elected, since AlQaeda is a CIA creation. However, AlQaeda was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, neither was Iraq, Iran or any other Muslim country or organization. John Kerry is not the one who will get us out of disaster and destruction, as so many in the US and around the world hope for.
Our only hope is finding out as much about the truth as possible and getting it out to as many people as possible, and yes, trying to pull the heads of all those mainline ostriches left and right out of the sand.

Facts and speculations

2004-11-01T05:46:00.000+01:00

This blog will talk about facts and speculations, trying to make sense from what I have read on- and off-line.
Sometimes I will be probably widely off mark, but then, I can never be more off mark than the mainline media is most of the time.

My kids keep telling me, whenever conspiracy stuff and world-politics come up in our family-conversation, that we do not have to be afraid. Living in my husband’s small country, which never has been involved in war for many centuries, we are on the safest place in the world. I do not contradict them, of course, because I remember how it was, when I was a kid. My own country had been deeply involved in many wars, but that was a few decades ago, and for a child this seems like an eternity. I was deeply troubled by the pictures of war and suffering children on the news, and I prayed hard that God will stop the wars, but I myself still felt totally safe, since it was happening a long, long way from where I was, on the other end of world.
Being all grown up now, things look different.
When the Empire falls, it might pull the whole world with it into final disaster. And there might be no safe place, not even on the remotest island of this earth. And it is not my religious side, that believes in that Armageddon, it is the secular one.
We know, that those passionate war-lovers in Washington, including their pay-masters and their half-crazed fans, have no scruples whatsoever to use nuclear weapons on every perceived enemy and possibly competitor, no matter what the incalculable consequences might be. But what I am even more afraid of, are all the biological weapons they have. The death of those many microbiologists sure seems suspicious; especially after these PNAC-gangsters, have stated publicly that they would like to use that kind of weapons, when they can be aimed against a single race. For God’s sake don’t those racists.....( Dreckschweine doesn’t quite get it, there is not a swear-word bad enough for them in any language I can understand,) know, that a virus can mutate, so no vaccine can protect you any more, and a bacteria can become resistant to any kind of antibiotic. The mischievous and intellectually challenged magician’s apprentices are unlocking powers, they never can get back into the bottle and it does not look as if the master will come home in time to bail them out.
Oh, you of little faith! That is what my parish-priest would say.

And I just keep on praying just as I have done as a little kid. The Vietnam War has ended, hasn’t it? And when I was little, I steadfastly believed, it was my prayers that ended it.