Op-Ed
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
Back in September 2017 I wrote an article for the Unz Review site entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” with the subtitle “Shouldn’t they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?” The article focused on the fact that most of the individuals and groups in the US that were agitating for war with Iran in particular were Jewish and most did not hide their loyalty to Israel, headed then as now by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I argued that it was a mistake to have Jews managing America’s relationships in the Middle East in particular as some of them certainly would experience a conflict of interest that would inevitably not be beneficial to the United States. And, one might add, that in spite of that tie that binds with a foreign government, no pro-Israel group has ever been compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 which would provide some transparency on finances and concerning direct contacts with the Israeli government or its Embassy in Washington.
OK, the big question: Should our country – USA! USA! – return to a place of godliness?
Suddenly the nation’s stewpot of controversy started boiling over, thanks to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito being secretly recorded agreeing with a fake conservative at the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner last week.
The fake conservative – progressive filmmaker Lauren Windsor – managed to snag (and record) a conversation with Alito at the event, in which she lamented she could see no way a conservative Christian could make peace with liberals and their focus ought to be on “winning the moral argument.” They had to “keep fighting” and, ka-wham, “return our country to a place of godliness.”
If we can end, let us say . . . slavery — the legal “ownership” of other human beings — can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?
As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.
But it was worth it, right?
Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.
The topic of this column is the abolition of war — the urgent necessity of doing so — so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong . . . or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement a hundred years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)
Despite President Biden's weak proposal for a ceasefire and a solution to Israel's genocide of Gaza, it appears that Benjamin (NutenYahoo) Netanyahu intends to kill them all if he can. At the same time, it is clear that Israel is nowhere close to eliminating Hamas, so the world is expected to watch this horror show for an extended period of time. The American public is shielded from the horror show by a compliant media, none of which showed the horrible image of a real beheaded (and burnt) baby which was seen by the rest of the world.
Ohio AG Dave Yost wants to criminalize free speech. Last week, he issued a "legal fatwa" where he threatened to invoke a 1953 law better known as "anti-KKK" against 41 brave OSU students and faculty who were arrested last April 25. Reason? The protesters were calling for their university to divest from Israel and an end to the Israeli genocide and starvation in Gaza. Simply put, he will charge OSU students & faculties fourth degree felony charge under his silly unheard-of law.
By cracking down on OSU students for protesting against genocide after 14,500+ slaughtered Palestinian children and billions in US aid, weapons, and political cover, that makes AG Yost as complicit.
Contrary to AG Yost "Yo Yost" TV campaign commercial in which he promised to protect Ohioans' religious freedom, AG Yost ordered his troops to attack students while they were praying and violate Muslim students' religious rights as they were exercising their First Amendment's rights at OSU campus. Furthermore, students and faculties who were arrested were subjected to illegal, inhumane, and degrading treatments such as:
1. They had to wait 12 hours to use the restroom.
We will not evolve into the future with closed minds.
And nothing closes the human mind – either individually or collectively – like the weapons of war . . . and the freedom to use them. Step one: Dehumanize those you’re about to kill (i.e., accuse them of being who you are, as exemplified by, among so many others, our old pal George W. Bush, who declared that America’s enemies “view the entire world as a battlefield” and proceed to turn the entire world into a battlefield).
But there’s a far deeper irony here as well – a positive irony, according to Martin Luther King. Consider the fourth of his six principles of nonviolence:
Dear AG Dave Yost,
Ohio AG Dave Yost wants to criminalize free speech. Last week, he issued a "legal fatwa" where he threatened to invoke a 1953 law better known as "anti-KKK" against 41 brave OSU students and faculty who were arrested last April 25. Reason? The protesters were calling for their university to divest from Israel and an end to the Israeli genocide and starvation in Gaza. Simply put, he will charge OSU students & faculties fourth degree felony charge under his silly unheard-of law.
By cracking down on OSU students for protesting against genocide after 14,500+ slaughtered Palestinian children and billions in US aid, weapons, and political cover, that makes AG Yost as complicit.
Contrary to AG Yost "Yo Yost" TV campaign commercial in which he promised to protect Ohioans' religious freedom, AG Yost ordered his troops to attack students while they were praying and violate Muslim students' religious rights as they were exercising their First Amendment's rights at OSU campus. Furthermore, students and faculties who were arrested were subjected to illegal, inhumane, and degrading treatments such as:
In 2014, we wrote an article titled “The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism.” At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his sixth continuous year as Israel’s prime minister, while President Obama was well into his second term. And J Street, an emerging organization of Jews aligned with the Democratic administration, had momentum as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”
From the outset, ever since its founding in 2007, J Street has implicitly offered itself as a liberal alternative to the hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was established more than four decades earlier. An avowed purpose of J Street has been to seek a humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while maintaining fervent allegiance to Israel as “the Jewish state.”
New York - What exactly is Israel’s strategy in Gaza? Behind all the clamor about antisemitism, films about the 1940’s Jewish Holocaust and western politicians chanting about Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ lie some ugly facts that are not spoken of in polite society.
I know antisemitism when I see it. While still a boy, I was sent to a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire. At dinner, many of the campers would chant ‘all you guys with long, long noses, come and join the fight for Moses’!
A close Jewish friend of my father bought a resort hotel on New Hampshire’s Rangeley - only to be informed that it refused to rent to Jews. That was the virulent antisemitism of the 1950’s.
At the same time my mother, a renowned journalist writing about the Mideast, and I were repeatedly threatened by pro-Israel thugs who threatened to throw acid in our faces if my mother kept writing about the nearly one million Palestinian refugees driven from the Galilee region in the 1940’s who - according to the US media - did not actually exist. They did. Many are now refugees in Gaza. My mother was forced to stop writing for US newspapers due to the cascade of threats.