|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ANNOUNCEMENTS and ARTICLES: http://pnews.org/art/art.shtml ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hatred between ethnic or religious communities by definition entails denial of the humanity of 'the enemy'. Denial of humanity in turn engages the worst potentials for human brutality.
Reviewing WW2 one saw the Allies gradually shift over from absorbing brutal blows from their enemies -- the Nazi Blitz and horror bombings of London's civilian centers and the wolf pack attacks on our convoys, the Japanese atrocities in the Pacific culminating in their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor -- to the Dresden and Tokyo (far more destructive of life than Hiroshima and Nagasaki) fire bombings.
Viet Nam became a horror with our anti-personnel weapons directed indiscriminately against anyone who moved or those unknown below in those free fire zones.
War dehumanizes. Thus, one enters into a war, as Livy (quoted by Machiavelli below) only as a last resort.
Whatever the injustices done on the ground (per the revisionist historians -- Benny Morris and others), one can at the very least excuse if not justify the Zionist quest for a safe place for Jews following upon the horrors of two millennia of anti-Semitism, pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. Israel is now a fact and reality, a homeland. It has as much right to exist as any other nation -- virtually all have been carved out of someone's space, if one traces the history of human migrations.
As Mel and George know, I have joined the peacemakers in Israel who plea for reaching out to those who are suffering the evils of the occupation and appeal to conscience to halt the abuses that any occupation entails. Israel needs more than simply the retributivist responses of a Sharon to the latest retaliation by Palestinians.
However, that having been said, Israel, unlike the U.S. is responding, however clumsily, to direct threats from suicidal individuals bent on expressing their hatred in denial of the humanity of Jews.
In contrast, while our occupation of Afghanistan may have been justified to root out the Al Qaeda bases there, Iraq was a pre-conceived program of aggression launched by our neoconservatives and carried out, as we are now seeing, in violation of the most fundamental standards restraining human abuses -- international law, human rights, the Geneva Convention, the U.S. Constitution. We are killing Iraqis at a ratio of more than 10 to 1 in contrast to Israel's 3 to 1. We are imposing an aggressive war in contrast to Israel's defensive one.
I will continue to criticize Israel's excesses, but it is the U.S. that is the world's principal rogue state today. All the world sees us as such while our media blither on about the latest child abuser or murderous husband or whatever to distract the public from our latter day imperialist blunders.
Hopefully the pictures will somewhat awaken our public. The reports that I heard this morning on npr would suggest that much more is to come -- that we sent the fox of Guantanamo over there to police our abuses of prisoners -- or to try to cover up our programmatic gulag approaches to 'enemies' that has been adopted by the Bush administration from Baghdad to Brooklyn?
I am still enraged that one of our finest Brooklyn College students was thrust across the Canadian border last summer because she happened to be a Muslim from Bangladesh as well as a pizza and rock loving Americanized young woman who had graduated from Stuyvesant (one of our super NYC schools) overlooking the former World Trade Center. Our national leadership is contemptible and has converted world-wide sympathy for Americans 9/12 to universal hatred of the proverbial brutal bully. What a shame and how shameful! -- "A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy) -- Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
--- / o o \ PNEWS Topic Specific Portals (Vortals) ===OO=====OO================================================= http://pnews.org/vortal/ New World disOrder and Myth Busters http://g0lem.net/vortal/ Insane Planet and Wacko World http://g0lem.net/portal/ Bad-Ass Truth and TheGolemsPortal http://pnews.org/portal/ Naked Truth and PNEWS Portal ============================================================= \_/ \_/
