The Institute on Religion and Public Policy

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

Joseph Griebowski is one odd fellow. He's head of a very strange organization called Institute on Religion and Public Policy. It will be discussed in an upcoming post. Griebowski himself is some sort of a hardline Zionist. He's also a weird, Strangeglovian-looking character. It's apparently got some kind of big neoconservative and possibly Jewish money behind it.

He goes up on Capital Hill and travels all over the world agitating for "religious freedom", generally in lands that are being targeted by the neocons and International Zionism. He's also apparently waging US imperialism's war of words with China. His specialty is humanitarian intervention bullshit as my commenters have been discussing lately. His particular angle is "religious freedom".

If your country is not allowing enough religious freedom (which, frankly, is none of our Goddamned business) then he's going to wage fake human rights war on you in service of International Zionism or US imperialism. Lately his targets have been South Sudan, Darfur, China and Kosovo. Imperialism doesn't care about S Sudan or Darfur, but Zionism does. Imperialism hates China though.

For Kosovo, imperialism supports them, but probably hard right Zionism hates them for being Muslims in Europe. Looks like they have conned all sorts of suckers into going along with this scam. Looking through the officers and staff, I can't see any reason why most of these people give a flying fuck about "religious freedom".

Furthermore, they for the most part seem to be serving US imperialism in one way or another. So I figure this is just some bullshit "religious freedom" garbage to push the interests of US imperialism and Zionism. On their Board of Directors is a motley collection of Christians (almost all rightwing Catholics, fundamentalist Protestants or Baptists), Jews of various types, wacky New Age kooks, etc.

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The Cutting Edge: New Internet Publication

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

This is a new online magazine on the Net. I just noticed it; they've only been online for 4 months and they already have high readership of around 45,000 readers a day. Actually, this magazine is pretty scary, and it definitely has big money behind it. A very large number of the authors are extremely hard rightwing Zionist Jews, and some of them have CIA and probably Mossad connections.

Lets take a look at the authors:

Gal Luft is an Israeli or possibly Jewish "American" author who consorts with former CIA director James Woolsey and seems to have deep connections to the Israeli state.

Anne Korin, (photo) Jewish "American" author and pundit, is a hard-Right Zionist. A mysterious woman, she is a co-director with Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS). IAGS seems to have deep ties US and Israeli intelligence. She is also an agent of the weird ultra-rightwing seminal neoconservative group the Committee on the Present Danger.

Part of their agenda (Korin is the director of the weird, neoconservative and far rightwing Set America Free Coalition and editor of Energy Security) is the demonization of Arabs and Iran and concomitantly, urging the US and Israel to get off of oil in order to bankrupt the Arabs and probably also to sever the alliance between the US and Gulf Arab big money.

Cindy Hurst is a US naval commander who has deep ties to International Zionism and the CIA via IAGS. She works for the Foreign Military Studies Office, which is just a research office for US imperialism, armed branch. Quite a few high-ranking naval officers, often Gentiles, have deep connections to International Zionism.

Edwin Black, though the name does not seem to be Jewish, is a hard-rightwing Jewish "American" writer for the New York Times with deep connections to Israel.

Howard Kohr, the Jewish "American" director of the spearhead of the treasonous Jewish Lobby in the US, AIPAC, authors many pieces.

Walid Phares, is a Lebanese "American" scholar. He is a reactionary Lebanese Maronite Phalangist exiled from Lebanon because he is too reactionary for the current political situation there. The remaining Maronites in Lebanon are for the most part the saner ones - the real nutjobs have long left the place.

He is deep with USCFL, the neoconservative Phalangist arm in the US that has deep connections with far right Zionism in Israel and the US. In particular, he is in deep with Daniel Pipes, discussed in a previous post.

Sam Orez is a little known "American" author, but the name is Jewish and he writes for the Israeli press and on AIPAC and American Jewish Committee issues.

Jewish "American" David Harris, another contributor, is the director of the American Jewish Committee.

Benedict Rogers is deeply involved with the Tory Party of the UK. His purpose is to attack the admittedly horrible Burmese regime, not because it is awful, but because US and apparently British imperialism is waging war on the place because the economy is largely state-owned and the regime has not fully opened itself up to multinational corporations yet.

Joe Eskenazi is a hardline Zionist Jew and a reporter for j, a Jewish weekly. He profiles Jewish "American" gazillionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle (probably one of the world's most arrogant and unpleasant humans) on his trip to Sderot to commiserate with Jews living under largely ineffective rocket fire. Ellison is probably a big bucks money guy in the Jewish Lobby in the US, and it might be useful to investigate this.

Micah Halpern is an extreme rightwing Jew, the usual dual-loyalty type, born in the US and moved to Israel, probably treasonously holding dual citizenship. He frequently writes for far Right Israeli papers.

Ronald Kessler is a big editor at the far rightwing Newsmax.com website.

Gary Rosenblatt is the Editor in Chief of New York Jewish Week.

Aaron Klein is an "American" Jewish journalist who spends his time working out of the extreme rightwing Worldnetdaily's Jerusalem Bureau, often reported wild, insane and ridiculous Israeli propaganda. He did go out and interview the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade though, but he seems to have turned that into a book-length hit piece on armed Palestinians.

Klein is behind the "Obama is a 1960's Weatherman terrorist radical bomber" bullshit. He's currently waging jihad against Obama, apparently on the grounds of being soft on Israel and supportive of Palestinian terrorism, which is dubious. Syria and Jordan both refused him entry to their countries, supposedly for being a Jew, but I think it was mostly for being a Zionist agent and an asshole to boot. Good call.

David Brog is the insane Protestant fundamentalist Zionist connection. He's the Executive Director of Christians United for Israel, chaired by ultra-nutcase Pastor John Hagee.

Armstrong Williams is an ultra-rightwing Black Oreo talk show host and token House Negro serving tea for massa. He was thought to have fallen to infamy recently, but I guess he's resurfacing on this weird website and his radio station is either back on the air or never left the air. Armstrong peddled himself as an ultra-rightwing Black Christian ranting and raving about liberals and liberal values destroying America.

Truth is that Williams is fucking gay, and he's been known to have sexually harassed over 100 men to try to get them to fuck him in the ass or let him suck their dicks or whatever. The media properly buried this story, since it involves a far rightwinger, but it's all true. I don't mind gay men, but I really hate hypocrites.

He's still totally closeted and a liar, and if you look on his website, you have to admit he looks awfully queer. Armstrong loves Israel too, by the way, but probably not as much as a big White cock.

James Quinn is a economist and a professor and Senior Director of Strategic Planning, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He certainly doesn't serve imperialism or the US ruling class. He's some kind of far rightwing "buy gold and silver" sky is falling nutcase economist type of whom we've always had plenty in the US.

Nonie Darwish is some kind of a crazy person, a Palestinian raised in Gaza who moved to the US and decided to shill for Israel! What the Hell? Who's signing her checks anyway?

Joseph Griebowski is an odd fellow. He's head of a very strange organization called Institute on Religion and Public Policy. It is discussed in another post.

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Russia and the Jews, 1795-1916

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

A review of Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together, a history of Russia and its Jews from 1795-1916. It's the best thing I have ever read on the subject, and I've read a lot of crap about this area from all sides. The author is Richard Pipes and it's published by Benador Associates.

Benador Associates is Neocon Central, home of all manner of rightwing, Zionist, pro-Terror War and pro-Iraq War nasties. From the About US page:

Among the experts are James Woolsey, A.M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Amir Taheri, Kanan Makiya and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

It's supposedly run by some reactionary Peruvian ruling-class woman named Eleana Benador who I've never heard of before. Her photos are here. I hate to make fun of people's appearances, but I will make an exception in here case and call her a hunchbacked dwarf. Why? Because I don't like her, that's why.

Her biography shows you what kind of nasties make up the horrible Peruvian ruling class. Such a malignant bunch of gangsters could only have produced equally malign revolutionaries like the Shining Path. Like creates like; politics is a mirror.

Ms. Benador is also apparently in deep with International Jewry of the nastiest sort, but that's not unusual, because I understand that some members of the Peruvian ruling class are in with them. These folks are fabulously rich, care nothing at all about their country, and don't even spend much time there, they are so busy jet-setting around.

They spend most of their time in foreign cities or on jetliners and they put most of their money in the US, often in the New York Stock Exchange. They're afraid to invest in their own country because it's so "unstable". The reason it's unstable is due to their existence.

I figure she's fronting for some big money lurking somewhere in the background?

I always thought Richard Pipes was a complete prick. He spent most of his life working for the CIA, more or less, as a Sovietologist. Most prominent Sovietologists like Condoleeza Rice were always pretty much just glorified CIA employees. He's another Robert Conquest. Plus, he produced, from the spawn of his loins, an abhorrent ultra-Zionist maniac son named Daniel, he of the fascist Campus Watch.

Pipes was one of the original neocons, along with Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey and Richard Perle. He even worked for Henry Jackson in the 1970's, and you can't much more seminal neocon than that (the neocons were birthed by a largely-Jewish group operating out of Henry Jackson's office in the 1970's). Of course he wrote for Commentary - that's another classic neocon steppingstone.

He opposed detente, served on Reagan's National Security Council in 1981-1982 and teamed up with Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the Team B "Beware the Bear!" liars.

He dedicated his whole life to US imperialism's war with the USSR. He lied all day, went to bed, dreamed a bunch of dishonest dreams, got up the next morning, poured some liar crystals into his brewing coffee and started off another day of lying. That was his life; every time he opened up his mouth, it was just the voice of the CIA.

Pipes' work as a Sovietologist, while quality scholarship, was also a politically motivated pack of lies, propaganda and bullshit from the very start, though he did have his moments. Check out his thesis on the cause of the Russian revolution, which I agree with:

Pipes is famous for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th century Muscovy in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis.

In Pipes' opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that there was no concept of private property in Muscovy, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes' view, this separate path undertaken by Russia ensured that Russia would always be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar to the values of Western civilization.

Nice, huh? It's true in part, but avoids the crucial role of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Anyway, like many of these one-sided characters, once you get them away from the subject of their feverish obsession (in his case, the USSR), they can be surprisingly level-headed, because they're extremely smart and they are finally thinking clearly for once.

Since he is Jewish, I expected the usual Jewish bullshit pile of invective towards the Czar, the Russian people and Russia in general, but this nice review is fair to all sides and sums up the role of the Czar, the Church, Russian nationalists, Jews both traditional and assimilating, revolutionaries, etc superbly.

Check it out and learn something.

I assume his evil spawn Daniel will just go on being an asshole for the rest of his life.

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This Asshole Wrote a Book?

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

And Verso, of all houses, stooped to publish it? The subject itself is reasonable; I just think that this guy, and all of the silly acolytes he surrounds himself with, is a putz. And so is his Trotskyidiot party, by the way.

As long as he is on the subject of all these former Leftists transitioning to the Right since the fall of the USSR, and in particular aligning themselves with the War on Terror (the pro-war Left in the UK, the neoconservatives in the US), I wonder if he will touch on the notion and an unbelievably over-representative number of them are Jewish?

I mean, in the UK and in the US, this movement, at least at the beginning, was for all intents and purposes are Jewish movement. It's still practically a Jewish-led movement at the very least.

Will Dickie touch on this most sensitive of subjects? Of course not. He's got an anti-Semitism phobia worse than a stadium full of rabbis.

Screw you Dickie.

Here's his blog. It's popular and gets about 2,100 visitors a day. That's beating me at 1,300.

He's actually really smart and writes well, but you can say that about a lot of assholes. He hates me and has banned from his stupid blog. He banned me for anti-Semitism, but I really didn't say much. You don't have to say much over there. Just say the word "Jew" with the wrong inflection and you're pretty much done.

Dickie says that I am actually an anti-Semitic rightwing racist provocateur who has infiltrated the Left in order to try to taint the Left with racism. Or something. Whatever, dude. He's also banned at least one of my commenters too.

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Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

One wonders where to begin with a post like this. Rafik Hariri, of course, was the Prime Minister and self-made billionaire who ruled Lebanon for a time recently. He was assassinated in an expertly planned car bomb attack, but no one really knows who did it. All suspicion fell on Syria, and Syria did have good reason to kill Hariri.

You really need a lot of background in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics to even begin to understand the twists and turns of this sinuous murder mystery.

Hariri was elected head of Lebanon and proceeded to go on a borrowing spree, mostly with Saudi money, and rebuilt Lebanon after the Civil War destroyed it. He did this by playing all factions off each other. He also instituted a Lebanese version of free market economics, an economic system that, thank God, is largely absent from the Middle East because it contradicts Arab and especially Islamic values.

Hariri is a Sunni, but a fairly secular one. The Sunnis make up maybe 17% of Lebanon. The Shia, represented by Hezbollah, make up about 40%. The Maronites make up about 30%. The Druze and Orthodox Christians make up about 10%. There has been no census taken in about 50 years, because everyone is afraid of how things are going to turn out.

The Christians used to be the majority - in fact, Lebanon was originally split off from Syria by the French to give the Christians their own country. Partly for this reason, it's very existence is resented by a number of Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, who figure that Syria and Lebanon are all one country.

Syria itself has long regarded the severance of Lebanon from Mother Syria as illegitimate, and her behavior in recent years has been motivated in part by these feelings. The Shia were long-downtrodden, especially by the Sunnis. The Sunnis were the Muslims who were pretty much in charge of the place in terms of who was in charge of the Muslims in the country. The Sunni held the reigns, and discrimination against the Shia was rife.

Shia were regularly attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut up into the 1970's. The Shia complain that the Sunnis would only allow them to be garbagemen - that was the best job they could get. After the late 1950's, when a Christian lost the election and Lebanese Christians feared that their power would be constricted, there has been a power-sharing agreement in place.

The Prime Minister must be a Sunni, another high post must be a Christian, etc, etc. As the Christians have gone from majority to minority, this system has become less and less fair. In particular, Muslims, especially the Shia, are dramatically underrepresented. The Christians did not want to give up their power in the late 1950's, so the US Marines landed to enforce illegitimate Christian rule over Lebanon.

The Civil War began in part once again over demands that Lebanese democracy be derived more on one man one vote and that the excessive power of the Christians be curtailed. Further, the Christians have always run the Lebanese economy, at least in recent years.

I say all of this because in the US there is a strong tendency to side with the Lebanese Christians against the evil Muslims. Further, the Lebanese Maronite Christians (the largest sect) have made an important alliance with the Zionist Jews in Israel, an alliance that helped to drive the Civil War.

So US Zionist propaganda, which floods our media night and day, strongly favors the Maronites once again. As an example of this alliance, one of the highest ranking neoconservatives of all is a Maronite Lebanese lawyer named F. Michael Maloof who is very close to uber-neocons Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. He is up to his eyeballs in the planning of the war on Iraq.

With the Lebanese Civil War and the rise of Hezbollah, the Shia have finally been given a place at the table of Lebanese politics. The Druze are a real wild card. They shift all over the place on the whim of their erratic leader, Walid Jumblatt, from anti-Israel and anti-US to anti-Syrian and pro-US.

The Shia, and Hezbollah along with the more secular Amal Party, are allied with Syria and Iran. Syria keeps Hezbollah armed in Southern Lebanon as a tool to threaten Israel with in order to try to get the Golan Heights back. That's all Syria gets out of the game. If Hezbollah is disarmed in Lebanon, Syria loses it's most powerful weapon and may never get its land back.

Hezbollah has since taken up the cause of Lebanese nationalism, agitating for the return of the Shebaa Farms and some nearby hills that they say Israel is occupying. It is probably Lebanese land, but Israel seems to have captured that land from Syria when it grabbed the Golan.

For its purposes, Syria wants to say that the Shebaa is Lebanese for purposes of keeping Hezbollah armed, and to say it's Syrian as soon as Hezbollah tries to make peace with Israel or vice versa. So Syria must play a double game here, but everyone is in this crazy part of the world.

As a condition of ending the Civil War, Syria was tasked with ruling the place. Syria had actually entered the war to save the Maronite Christians from defeat, but the Christians soon forgot about this and turned on the Syrians. The Taba Agreement, constructed with the help of the US and other powers, put Syria in charge until the Lebanese could figure out how to stop killing each other.

Syria quickly started meddling in Lebanese politics bigtime, and an independence movement arose to get Syria out of Lebanon. This was ignored by the US until George Bush came to office. Now the same US that put Syria in power started demanding that Syria leave. Not only that, but there were increasing demands on Lebanon to "disarm all militias", code words for disarm Hezbollah.

Now, Syria needs Hezb in Lebanon until it gets the Golan back, so them's fighting words to the Syrians. At the same time, the US invaded Iraq and threatened Iran, Libya, and Syria, while Israel killed Arafat by poisoning him.

This whole process was set into motion by the neocons who were operating in the interests of the Israeli government. It was an Israeli plan to deal a powerful blow to some of their worst enemies in order to secure the realm, as Xymphora lays out brilliantly here.

Part of this Zionist plot was to knock out Hezbollah in Lebanon as part of a triple blow against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. Hezbollah kept getting more powerful on Israel's northern border, and the Israelis were getting more upset.

So the US and France pushed through a UN resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon and for the disarming of Hezbollah. Note that France is still an imperialist power in the region, defending the interests of the Christians who they put in charge of their former colony.

Also, the US Congress pushed a bill called the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, a bill that may as well have been written by the Israeli Knesset. It's so pro-Israeli, it's almost impossible to comprehend that the US Congress wrote it. Apparently, it imposes sanctions on Syria for a variety of mostly-bullshit reasons.

The US is in Iraq, apparently forever, threatening Syria and Iran, for the most part in order to benefit the Israelis, since Syria and Iran have no particular beefs with the US. Iran and Syria clearly want the US out of Iraq and US guns away from their doorstep. They have no interest in keeping the US in Iraq at all.

Anyway, the US status of forces agreement that they are trying to negotiate with the Iraqis is explicitly meant to use Iraq as a base for attacking neighboring countries, mostly Iran but possibly Syria too. So rage at Syria and Iran for not being overjoyed about the US military in Iraq is misplaced. No sane Syrian or Iranian leader would want us there.

Amidst this backdrop, Hariri supported UN Resolution 1559, probably because finally even the Lebanese Sunnis were getting fed up with Syria's high-handedness. They had supported Syria for a long time, but Syria kept trying to push people to their limits.

It was the Maronite Christians who really hated the Syrians being there. Why is uncertain. The Maronites despise the Shia and Hezbollah and want the Palestinian refugees gone too.

By the way, the reason that the Palestinians have never been allowed to work or become citizens in Lebanon is because of the Maronites. The Maronites fear that allowing the Pallies to become citizens will increase the Muslim population at the expense of the Christians.

So the Hariri crowd was riding the wave of anti-Syrianism. At the same time, he was closely allied with the Saudis. The Saudis' whole role in the region is to support the Sunnis and screw the Shia, in a word. So the Saudis were backing Hariri solely because he is Sunni, and also to stop Iran and Hezbollah and increasingly Syria, who is allied with Iran and Hezbollah and hence in the enemy camp as far as the Saudis see it.

There really is not much sane reason for the Saudis to fear Iran. All the hate in the region goes from Sunni to Shia, pretty much. Perhaps the Iranians could energize the long-downtrodden Saudi Shia to rebel against the Saudis, but the Saudis ought to give them more rights anyway. Sunni fears of Iran attacking the region are simply insane, kind of like Nazi fears of the USSR overrunning Europe, so the Nazis had to attack first.

Iran has never attacked another state in at least 100 years and possibly longer. The Shia are on the outs in the Arab World, and the Sunnis have all the power. There are no nefarious Shia plots to evangelize Shia Islam and convert all the Sunnis - this is just mad Sunni paranoia. But the Saudis do work hard in Iran to convert the Shia Ahwaz Arabs to Wahhabi Sunnism, and they have had some success at this.

The Shia have been killing a lot of Sunnis in Iraq, but the Sunnis started it. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, started the war against Iran for no good reason, and received volunteers and money from most of the Sunni states in the region.

Against this backdrop, as Syria was leaving Lebanon (though a spy network remains behind) Hariri was killed in the very professional car bomb attack. An Al Qaeda type radical Salafist Islamist associated with Jund al-Sham (Army of the Levant) was promptly fingered in the attack, though there were a lot of questions about whether or not Syria was actually involved.

The US and France got a UN commission to actually send a law enforcement team to investigate the killing. A couple of teams were sent out there and a couple of reports came back. One team was headed by Detlev Mehlis, a German.

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a journalist in Germany, is an acquaintance. He's a former member of the STASI and is associated with the former East German government and the political party that came afterwards. Külbel is a Leftist, and for a long time he was pushing theories saying that US imperialism was in back of a lot of the shenanigans in the ME, including I guess the invasion of Iraq.

He showed a profound disinterest in investigating any Israeli or Jewish Lobby involvement in many of the conflicts over there. This is standard Leftist line that absolves Israel of everything and pushes it all off on imperialism.

So it is interesting that Külbel has now come around to the notion that Israel killed Hariri and then tried to pawn it off on Syria. He has also shown links that Mehlis had with the US AIPAC. Mehlis, as it turns out, used to work for WINEP, which is nothing AIPAC as a research arm. So his finding that Syria was involved has been attacked by Külbel.

Külbel was subsequently imprisoned for ten days for violating a court order by printing some East German STASI papers on his website. I'm not sure of their contents, but it may have shown how Mehlis was associated with WINEP. So the Voltaire Network has taken up the cause of Külbel, about which I feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Of interest to our Maronite discussion above, a group called UNIFL, which has interests that are almost precisely in line with the Israeli government, figures in all of this. These are the most hardcore radical rightwing Maronites, who are for all intents and purposes a quasi-fascist movement.

They were deeply involved in the War Against Iraq and other great big messes. They've been selling this BS story about how the Christians are so persecuted in Lebanon, and the persecution is being done by evil fundamentalist Islamic Syria (run by ultra-secular Alawis).

It's mostly just a pack of lies, but there were arrests, tortures and killings under Syrian rule, it is true. That's all over now, and the Maronites did tons of killing in their own day.

After all, they committed the most and worst massacres of all during the Civil War.

Maloof is in with these guys, so is a guy named David Wurmser (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) and his evil witch of the West wife Meyrav (read Hebrew for "Mary", no? Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship).

So is Richard Pele (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?), and worst of all, Daniel Pipes (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) of Middle East Watch and Campus Watch and all of that Zionist fascist censorship, harassment and firing crap leaping up all over our land). Nice long sentence.

Pipes, whose father was an evil Cold War maniac and professional liar about the Soviet Union, inherited the evil maniac part, but all he cares about is Israel. Paul Wolfowitz (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) is also in deep with these guys.

Harold Rhode (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is another one, but no one has ever heard of him, so I will make him famous today for all time. Rhode is a Jewish guy who is religious and was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He was in on the plot to attack Iraq with all the rest of them from the very start.

Afterward, he became obsessed with the Jewish religious relics that the evil anti-Semitic Arab-Nazi government had somehow, through a sudden stroke of anti-Semitism, managed to preserve, despite their genocidal intentions towards all the world's Jews.

Saddam wanted to kill every Jew on Earth, of course, but damn right he was going to save those Jewish holy books. That proves Saddam was a madman all right, just like the yahoos screamed before the invasion.

Rhode ran over to Iraq as soon as the war was done and got himself a big team put together right away while the museums and archaeological relics of the nation were being devastated. After all, the history of Jews receives precedence of the history of those lowly, dirty Arabs and over the very history of mankind itself, right? Jews take precedence over Arabs. Jews take precedence over humanity. You get the picture.

Well, anyway, a lot of money was spent grabbing every single Jewish relic in Iraq and "storing" it away in the US (in Jewish hands, I guess). Well, that's sort of illegal. Now that Iraq is more stable, the Iraqi government wants their Jewish stuff back. It belongs to Iraq, not to the world's Jews. Whoops, I forgot. No nation is allowed to own Jewish relics. Jews take precedence over all real nations on Earth.

Also, it's funny that the US (Are we the second Jewish state?) bent all over backwards to grab all that old Jewish stuff, while we sat back and watched, first, while the whole non-Jewish history of Iraq was looted and destroyed to Hell, in particular the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Well, screw the Ottomans, they were just evil Muslims who ruled the Arab World and treated the Jews like crap, right? Or they were just scummy Muslims, screw em. Anyway, obviously the Jewish history of Iraq got nabbed by the nimble hands of the Jewish "Americans", but the non-Jewish history of Iraq was scatted to the Seven Winds and the Seventy Thousand Thieves.

After all, in any country with lots of Jews, only the Jewish history matters ,and the non-Jewish history is just, pshaw! Right? Trash the museums and the libraries and re-burn the Library of Alexandria if the US and Israel are in the book-burning and library-sacking business, which apparently they are.

Funny how the US can't spare a soldier to save the history of Muslim Ottoman Iraq from being ruined. Those records have been flooded and subjected to all sorts of abuse, and the US can't spare one sentry to guard that stuff. Wow, gee, why do they hate us anyway?

They must be jealous of all of our stuff, and our freedoms, and you know, our stuff.

Ever notice that the far-Right jingoist dickheads who scream the loudest about "our freedoms" and "they hate us for our freedom" are the first ones to start shutting freedoms down? Scooter Libby (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is in with UNIFL too. So are Steven Hadley and Donald Rumsfeld. Hadley's some weird poli-sci ultra-rightwing Vulcan dude.

Külbel also accuses UNIFL along with Israel of killing Hariri.

And it's surely possible that a Maronite or UNIFL-type spy was used by the Mossad in Syria to kill Iranian super-agent Imad Mughniyeh. My theory, yes, I read up on that one too.

Why can't Syria uncover the Mossad network deep in its very bowels?

Why can't Iran either? Iran did catch one Mossad agent, and they just sentenced him to death after one of the shortest trials in recent history. If he's really Mossad, hang him high, go ahead.

And I know that Iran is full of US spies and even US undercover troops (500 total? How many?). Same with British spies. Iran can't catch these guys? The US guys are running around blowing up stuff up, and the British are giving bombs to Iranian rebels, including Al Qaeda types called Jundallah in Balochistan.

I guess Mossad, the US and probably the UK too, are all trying to get at Iran's nuclear sites, and yes, I am certain the Iranians are making a nuclear bomb right now. I think they already have one, but it's just a uranium bomb, and that isn't good for anything but making one square mile of Earth uninhabitable for 70 years.

Actually, just to be a completely evil and horrible scumbag and make people hate me even more than they already do, I will right now officially support Iran's efforts to get a nuclear bomb.

Is that an evil position or what?! Not to shoot one, just to get one.

Also to make a whole bunch of evil biological and chemical weapons and WMD-this and WMD-that. Also, just to be even more of an ass and arouse more hatred, I will say that I was deeply sad when North Korea blew up their reactor, because I wanted them to make more nukes to threaten people, namely the US, my country with. Not to shoot at us. Just to even it up.

Why be an ass? Long argument, but it has to do with imperialism's gross abuse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.

I'm not saying this is what happened or anything, Maronites and Mossad killing Hariri. No one on Earth will ever know what happened. Figure it out yourself, I give, and I spent many long hours reading and poring over this mystery until I finally just gave up and don't want to read about it anymore.

Such are the homicidal intrigues of the Middle East, like vines in a jungle, no beginning, no end, no middle, nothing much to grab, and every new lead carries you off on more red herrings and impossibilities and possibilities, and everything seems possible, but still nothing ever totally adds up. God I love a mystery. To a point.

Sorry this went on, but I never wrote a Hariri post. Now it's done, and hopefully I won't need to write any more. Believe it or not, I could have written way more, but I'm not into putting readers to sleep. I'm long-winded enough, as it is.

Try the Angry Arab blog (I've talked to this guy; As'ad, a Leftist Arab nationalist professor at a university very close by) if you can't get enough of this maddening Lebanon stuff.

Or Joshua Landis' (an acquaintance) great Syria Comment if you want to dip into the Syrian mystery casserole, where nothing makes sense either, and you think you can see the fish in the bowl, but the more you look, the more you can hardly make them out, and plus they always change.

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Giovanni Gentile on Fascism

Gentile is one of my favorite rightwing intellectuals, not because I agree with him of course, but because he is a true intellectual, and I respect that even in my ideological enemies.

Beats fake intellectual clowns like Jonah Goldberg any day of the weak. The fascists were not liars peddling bullshit and crap like so many of today's rightwing intellectuals. Classic fascist doctrine held a lot of important truths and was not dishonest at all. Instead of being a pile of crap and lies, it merely peddled repugnant truths.

The Doctrine of Fascism, by Gentile (supposedly by Mussolini himself, but Gentile actually wrote it) from 1932, is the clearest evocation of Mussolini-type fascism, which was different in important ways from the biological racism of the Nazis. Let's take a look at some excerpts from this seminal essay. In particular, we will note how Mussolini's fascism differs from Marxism, because the two are often confused.

Mussolini came to power after the "March on Rome" in 1922, and was appointed Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel.

In 1932 Mussolini wrote (with the help of Giovanni Gentile) an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism.

Let us now examine Leo Strauss, the father of the neocons. A woman named Shadia Drury has done an excellent job of explicating his work. Strauss operated very much in a Mussolini fascist tradition.

Two Drury articles are here - the first, by Drury herself - Saving America: Leo Strauss and the Neoconservatives - is an analysis of Strauss and the Straussians. The second is an interview with Drury - Noble Lies and Perpetual War.

I have read this material are recommend it highly. It's a bit hard to get through, but it's not Marx. If you read it carefully and really think about what you are reading, you may finally figure out what these neocons are really all about.

Drury notes some other authors who ply the same waters as Strauss - in particular Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt. All of these have influenced the neocons. The unmistakable conclusion is that the neocons are fascists.

Astute reader James Hajduk sees Gentile as a "rightwing Hegelian". I agree with that odd analysis.

Gentile follows, in blockquotes, followed by my analysis.

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice.

War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death....

This is very Straussian. These guys believe in war for the sake of war and for no other reason. When man does not go to war, he becomes soft, decadent, depraved, cosmopolitan, and...democratic. He sits in cafes and becomes effete, devotes himself to pleasure, and develops a fear of death to the extent that he will hardly fight for anything anymore.

...The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others -- those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after...

This is very "organic" blood-and-soil type stuff here.

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production....

Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect.

More organic blood-and-soil type stuff here.

And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history.

And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

Fascism actually arises when there is a severe crisis in capitalism such that the workers or the Left is about to seize power. As a last-ditch effort to save their power and money, the elite resorts to fascism. It's not ideal, but it's better than the alternative.

In 1921, Italy was semi-feudal. Peasants were rising up all over the land against the landlords who held almost all the land. The peasants worked on the land as farm laborers or rented land in debt bondage in a semi-feudal system. There was a Left revolution in the rural areas all over Italy.

This is when Italy started to go fascist, as the landed oligarchy in the countryside mobilized working class men as an army to attack the rural peasantry. The upshot was Mussolini's March on Rome the next year - 1922. Italian fascism needed a crisis, and they got one in 1921.

Note the use of working class, especially thuggish, young male, working class elements to attack the their brothers, the peasants. In the same way, Salvadoran fascism in recent years made use of young working class men as an army for the oligarchy - they constituted a significant portion of the death squads.

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application.

Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....

Fascism at its core is simply elitist. That is all there is to it. It opposes democracy because they think that the masses are asses. Rule by the common man is the ultimate horror, not because he doesn't know what he is doing and will be persuaded to harm himself, but because this will lead to the pleasure society and the softening of men.

Further, the elite fears it will lead to a loss of power and money on their part. By denying the obvious existence of class struggle, fascism actually cements ruling class rule forever. It allows class struggle on the part of the elite, of course, but denies it on the part of the workers.

The business class is allowed a good profit, but Italian fascism may ask that they produce for the state instead. Producing for the state usually produces high profits for business in all varieties of fascism.

...Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress....

Fascism is actually opposed to the notion of the progress of men. Things are cemented and in some ways are timeless. We are the same as we were 100 or 1000 or 2000 years ago. Class relations, male and female roles, etc., are cemented forever in the name of tradition. Liberalism and even science is regarded with contempt.

Varieties of fascism similar to Italian fascism sprang up all over Europe in the 1920's and 1930's and were often very powerful. Note that conservatism is also generally opposed to the notion of progress of man. Man is man, he is the same as he will ever be, and all attempts at moving forwards are "social engineering" designed to upset the "natural order of things".

Conservatism often tosses in the notion that this "natural order of things" is ordained by whatever Deity is worshiped by the people.

The "natural order of things" usually means something like a few rich people owning just about everything and most everyone else having hardly even anything, but both conservatism and fascism regard this as "normal" and attempts to change this natural order as unnatural, doomed to failure and against human nature itself.

...Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority...a century of Fascism.

For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State....

However, this collectivism preserves profits. It collectivizes workers and owners as one coherent mass with "mutual interests". This is quite the opposite of Marxism.

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.

The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

It is true, from its foundations in the Dark Ages, when society continued to exist without the state, liberal society has always seen the people as being first and then the state.

The people create the state and run it. The state is run by the people themselves for their interests and is subordinate to them. The state and society are separate. This is the root structure of all Western liberal democracy, and it is in opposition to fascism and also to Russian thinking, where the state and society have always been one.

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

...For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death.

Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude.

But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century, and would oppose it by recalling the outworn ideology of the nineteenth century - repudiated wheresoever there has been the courage to undertake great experiments of social and political transformation; for never before has the nation stood more in need of authority, of direction and order.

If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time. For if a doctrine must be a living thing, this is proved by the fact that Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it.

This is classic stuff here. All fascism is imperialistic and expansionistic, because this is the natural and normal tendency of the tribe or nation as state. Fascism takes different ethnicities and molds them into one in the form of the state.

Fascism is Phoenix-like - a society used and abused for foreigners, fallen into decadence, enslavement and weakness, will rise again, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of its own abasement, mining the glory of the nation's past (in Mussolini's case, there were constant evocations of reclaiming the ancient glory that was Rome) to once again rise in the tradition of the elders to the greatness that is the destiny of the people of that nation.

There is an ethnic (or at least national) supremacism here, no matter how much folks try to say Mussolini was not racist.

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Jonah Goldberg, Intellectual Lightweight and Hack Journalist

I guess my main issue with this guy is that he fashions himself as some sort of a scholar. Not that the Right lacks scholars. William Buckley, Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek, Winston Churchill,Hell, Giovanni Gentile (!), are all at least welterweight intellectuals. You might disagree with them, but they don't write garbage.

Jonah Goldberg is a pretend scholar. He drifted into fame on the back of his ultra-right wing Momma, Lucianne Goldberg, a very rich lady who ran a rightwing publishing house. She put sonny boy in charge as vice president anyway through no talent or degree of his own.

Lucianne was the charmer that helped use Linda Tripp to publicize the completely preposterous charges that led to the near-impeachment of a US President on one of the corrupt episodes of US politics since the election of Grover Cleveland by a fraudulent Electoral College in the 1870's. Before that, Dred Scott. Before that, Aaron Burr murdering a fellow politician while a nation cheered.

Modern conservatism has been a process of sinking lower and lower morally to the point where they are about as close to the ground as slugs and worms. And Jonah Goldberg.

This book is just stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Now, mind you, I don't mind stupid. Give me pro wrestling and a beer anytime. I just want it properly labeled as such. This is pro wrestling stupid labeled as serious intellectual discourse. Instead, it's just right-wing Kuru. Like Kuru, modern conservatism pretends to be a tasty intellectual dish while secretly rotting your brain.

This book is all about why fascism is really a leftwing philosophy. You know, how leftists, liberals, Communists and all the rest are really fascists. Yeah, he says that.

Throughout the book, he explicitly denies the long-standing connection that sane historians and political scientists have long established between fascism and the rightwing movement. As in, fascism is a movement of the far right wing. As in, Communism is a movement of the far left wing. As in, conservatives have as much in common with fascists as liberals do with Communists.

All of these distinctions are lost on Goldberg in his quest for the Holy Grail or Rightwing Propaganda. Goldberg wasted three years of his life writing this book, which is useful for lining bird cages but for little else.

What is truly sad is that this book shot to #3 on the New York Times best-seller list. That means that lots of Americans, many of whom think they are intellectuals, actually bought this book and ate intellectual Alpo as they consumed its 400 pages.

This book has turned into a modern day opus among conservatives. I am on a list with many conservatives, and it is clear that many are highly intelligent. But something has happened. Conservative kuru has set in and their brains are starting to rot. They don't make much sense when they write. They think Jonah Goldberg is a great intellectual thinker of our time. All the signs are there.

Some reviews of this immensely sad and frightening book here, here, here and here.

Oh Hell, just gimme Giovanni Gentile. He's horrible, but at least he's a real and even great thinker. You've got to have a list a trace of respect for a guy who counted Fichte, Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche among his influences, and Croce calls him the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in modern philosophy.

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The Israeli Lobby and American Society

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated February 13, 2008:

Joachim Martillo has posted a lengthy and excellent opus, Judonia Rising: The Israeli Lobby and American Society, on one of his websites, an encyclopedic analysis of the US Israeli Lobby and its effects on US society. Noam Chomsky offered a critique (see the first comment at the end of the post for details), and afterwards, Joachim rewrote several pages. I have also been asked to offer a critique.

This is a very important work that ought to be read in full by anyone interested in the subject. It deserves to be widely disseminated and commented on, dissected and analyzed.

First of all, I agree with much of what he has written so there is no need to comment on what I agree on. If I don't mention it in what follows, that probably means I agree.

I do disagree with certain things.

Obviously, as a Commie, I have serious issues with the whole Bolshevik Jew killers thing. It's hard to argue that people who reduced the death rate by 70% in Russia were the worst killers to ever set foot in Russia. I'm so tired of debating the Bolshevik Jew killer thing that I don't even want to get into it anymore.

Now, for the rest.

It is incorrect to say that Jewish values include early age of sexual initiation and serial polygamy. Kevin MacDonald notes that US Jews have sex at the latest age of any ethnic group. They also have some of the most stable marriages last time I checked.

It's difficult to lump Abigail Thornton, a rightwing Jewish Republican opposed to civil rights, in with a US Jewish agenda that relentlessly promotes civil rights. Martillo fails to note that the Jewish neocons are actually opposed to civil rights law in the US, either by promoting Supreme Court justices sworn to dismantle it or by cheering on Republicans who have been refusing to enforce civil rights laws for almost 30 years now.

It's very hard to say that Friedmanite freemarketeer neoliberalism is part of the US Jewish agenda, as most US Jewish organizations are agnostic on economics and if anything, promote more state intervention, regulation of business, socialist redistribution programs, socialized medicine and education, etc.

Friedmanism is part of the agenda of the neocons, but the neocon agenda in whole is embraced by only at most 20% of US Jews who vote Republican. This is where the equation of Jewish neoconservatives with US Jews gets dangerous and wrong. US Jews vote up to 80% Dem in recent years.

Neocons are best seen as a rightwing split-off of Republican Jews whose views in whole are rejected by the overwhelming majority of US Jews. However, on Israel, many liberal US Jews are becoming neocons in whole or in part, but the average US Jew is still pretty diverse on Israel. It is better to say that the large US Jewish organizations have gone over to neoconservatism on Israel.

I am still not sure that the US media can be painted as 100% Jewish owned, as there are large media firms still run by old WASP money. Murdoch is apparently Jewish, but that goes way back. Here is a summary from the web on Murdoch's Jewish connection. It sounds reasonable:

Rupert (actually Keith Rupert) Murdoch's father was Keith Murdoch (died 1952), his mother Elisabeth Joy (nee Greene) and yes her mother, Marie Grace de Lancey Forth was born from a Jewish mother.

Rupert's paternal grandfather, Patrick John, was a reverend, the maternal grandmother was Marie Grace de Lancey Forth, who was born in Warnambool, Victoria (Australia), HER mother Caroline Jemima (nee Sherson) was born to a Jewish family, hence by "Jewish law", making Rupert Jewish.

Also for the record, it was not unheard of "way back then" for Protestants or Catholics to marry Jews, and I know this as my grandparents are prime example. My grandfather, born in Ireland in 1895 to a prominent protestant family, married a Jewish woman, making my father and all his siblings Jews.

The Jewish ancestry comes purely from the MATERNAL line and has squat to do with the paternal.

It should also be noted that many Jewish families settled in Australia post 1788.

It's downright bizarre the way so many ethnocentric voraciously attack the notion that Murdoch is Jewish. You would think they want to claim him.

Martillo fails to discuss the theory of the Jewified US Gentile, as Albert Lindemann coined the term in his book Esau's Tears, Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. This is also a theme of Yuri Slezkine's Jewish Century, the theme of which is best described as "we are all Jews now". Many US Gentiles are Jewified via marriage to or deep friendship with ethnocentric Jews.

This aspect of US politics is overlooked in folks trying to "blame it all on the Jew". Americans support Jews and support Israel. We are Jewified. I believe Karl Marx said that in 100 years the US would be a Jewish country. He was correct.

How those Gentiles got Jewified is open to debate.Perhaps they became Judeophiles and Zionists by brainwashing. Well, so what? Most of our political views are due to propaganda of some sort. Any analysis of US Jewry, the Lobby, etc, that does not take into account all of the Gentile support for Israel is bound to fail.

US Jews have plenty of money, but it is mostly in certain parts of economy. They were run out of the banks long ago and the Holocaust finished off the rest of Jewish banking power. Banks are now run by international corporations out of Japan, Hong Kong, Europe and the US. The ones in the US are not noticeably Jewish-owned.

It is true that Jews are important in investment banking. They made serious gains in this area in 1910-1920 but the effort to take over the regular banks was resisted by Gentile ethnic warfare. Jews also tried to take over the stock market at that time but were rebuffed similarly.

All of this is documented extensively in Henry Ford's The International Jew, an excellent book that is often not really anti-Semitic in any way, and at any rate is essential reading for documentation of US Jewish ethnic warfare in the US from 1900-1920. It was during this period that the Jewish Hollywood and media dominances were created.

I do not believe that the US financial or high tech industries are run by Jews at all. US Jews are huge in retail department stores, especially clothing, and also in jewelry, furs and a few other things. They don't really dominate real estate at all.

I also disagree that a US Jewish or Zionist elite is set to take over a rather democratically diminished US. There will be some Jews in such a setup, mostly neoconservatives, but most will be White Gentiles like Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney, with some Blacks like Condoleeza Rice and the Powells and some Latinos like Alberto Gonzales.

Increasingly, the US is becoming a caste society based on income alone, and members of any race may join these hard rightwingers in their elitist project. It's all about money, not race, religion or ethnicity.

This undemocratic, quasi-fascist project will be resisted by many, and I assure you that liberal US Jews will be leading the charge to oppose this nightmare. People see Jews leading contrary movements going head to head with each other and think it's all part of an exceptionally devious and convoluted Jewish plot.

The truth is so much more mundane: Jews simply lead movements, and are also disproportionately attracted to fanaticism and extremism in general, in part due to the nature of Judaism itself, as Kevin MacDonald points out.

In related news, Tom Lantos, longtime Congressman from San Mateo, is dead. A Hungarian Jew and a Holocaust survivor, he has been a longtime, very strong supporter of the Israeli government. He led the charge to invade Iraq and promised an Israeli legislator that the US would take out Saddam for the benefit of both countries in 2002.

He helped rally Congressional Democrats to go along with Bush's mad war. Lantos is a good example of some of the very liberal California Jews who represent us Californians. They are superb on most liberal issues and get high marks from most liberal organizations on their voting records.

But on Israel, they are often surprisingly hawkish. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are good examples, as is Brad Sherman. As a progressive, I would probably vote for them, as the Republican running against them would be just as pro-Israel, if not more, along with being wrong about all the domestic stuff. Politics is so complicated.

As'ad AbuKhalil of the Angry Arab blog has a great article up about George Habash of the PFLP in the Electronic Intifada, who we wrote about previously. The lead photo is really nice too; I would run it here but I'm unsure about rights issues. EI, run by Ali Abunimah, is a great publication with superb views on the conflict.

It's run by reasonable Palestinians, exemplified by Abunimah, and their supporters, and it's as far from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as it is from Zionism. Zionists, mostly Jews, have been running a vicious campaign against Abunimah for years calling him an anti-Semite (What else?) but there's nothing to it.

To what extent the views of EI represent those of the average Palestinian on the street is not known. My worry is that as this conflict festers idiots like Hamas and IJ and bigger idiots like Al Qaeda will gain increasing power in Palestine. They won't achieve their goals, and I would not want them to anyway, but a lot more people, mostly Palestinians, are going to die.

AbuKhalil is wrong about one thing in his piece - that the PFLP hardly exists anymore.

While dwarfed by Hamas and Fatah, it's still a large and powerful organization with at least 80,000 active supporters, plenty of money, a fully armed guerrilla force that carries out regular attacks, a busy propaganda faction with websites, a newspaper and magazines, and up to a dozen above-ground organizations for everything from youth to women to workers.

Islamic Jihad gets way more press, but they are not much bigger than the PFLP. As an example, the PFLP fired 7 missiles on February 5th and 2 rockets on February 6th, all from Gaza and aimed at Sderot and Ashkelon. I think shooting these rockets is idiotic, but it's kind of hard to understand how a nonexistent army can fire 7 rockets in 2 days. They also fought a battle with Israeli forces in Gaza on February 5th.

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