Killed at home.

The violence of Israel against Palestinians is illegitimate. It is the violence of the oppressor enforcing its domination.

By Stephen Gowans, Founding Editor, What’s Left

By Gary Corseri

(Wikimedia)

“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength,” Orwell told us in “1984.” All oxymoronically true and sad in our twisted world today. But, perhaps the greatest truth that prophet propounded was this: Whoever controls the information controls the imagination.

A couple of weeks before Israel’s most recent war on Gaza-Palestine, while zoning-out-channel-surfing after a day of some cerebration, I came upon that 90s movie, “Something Wild.” The first time I saw it, I was 20 years younger and lost myself in Melanie Griffith’s sumptuous curves. What struck me most this time was one of the last scenes: the spurned, crazy husband—scarily well-acted by Rob Lowe—keeps striking, beating, pummeling, his estranged wife (Melanie), while complaining: Why do you make me do this? Why do you make me hurt you? See what you make me do? Why? Why!?

A similar tone was set in Israel right after the disappearance of 3 hitchhiking Jewish youths (one an American) outside of an (illegal) settlement in the West Bank. Before anything was known about the fate of these young men, Netanyahu summarily declared the kidnappers “animals” and sent out his storm troopers to arrest over 300 Palestinian “suspects.” Eleven Palestinian “suspects” were killed while resisting the round-up. Then, a hapless Palestinian youth was captured by Israeli hoodlums (fanatical “patriots”?), forced to drink gasoline and set on fire. His American cousin was beaten by police—caught on cameras. No talk about “animals” this time. Rockets were fired from Gaza—mostly ineffectual thanks to the US-built and financed “Iron Dome.” Israel has responded with massacres, day after day, slaughtering as many as 1900 Gazans—mostly civilians, and hundreds of children.

See what you make me do? Israel and its US supporters cry in unison. Why do you make me do this? Why do you make me hurt you? Why? Why!?

I write “USrael” because we seem to have morphed into one Empire/Country/Entity. After all, the super-power supports the Middle East outpost of its power to the tune of some 3 billion dollars per year—by far more money than we give in “foreign aid” to any other country. And, we’ve been doing it for decades and our do-nothing Congress has just allocated hundreds of millions of dollars more to “replenish” the Iron Dome. (They could not come to any decision about the US-originated “crisis” on our own border, but AIPAC quickly whipped them into demopublican alignment concerning the “crisis” on Israel’s imposed siege-“border.”) I have wondered: If we really wanted to promote peace in the Middle East, shouldn’t we have built an Iron Dome for the Palestinians, too? When do “defensive systems” become offensive systems—allowing those within the “forts” to feel so strong they can venture into “Indian territory,” ransack, pillage and kill and then retreat behind their fortifications? This, of course, is the strategy the US employed against its own native population in the “settlement” of its “western territories.” We, too, answered critics of that expansionism by promulgating “chosen-people-manifest destiny.” A more honest riposte in the case of USrael would have been: “Might makes right!”

Returning to my home in the South, after a 3-week sojourn in DC (where I could at least get some alternative news programs such as “Democracy Now” or those on RT), I find that my 16-year old refrigerator is dying, making a noise that variously shrieks, squeals, moans. At the same time, my Internet connections is erratic and I can barely get news beyond Scott Pelly talking about the ISIS-Sunni “genocide” against the Shiites in Iraq, or the professional Jewish apologists, Dershowitz and Krauthammer, appearing all over the place, proclaiming that every other nation would behave just as Israel is behaving against the Hamas “terrorists”! Yes, they acknowledge, some 1900 Palestinians have died and fewer than 70 Israelis have died—mostly invading soldiers, they don’t tell us—but why should Israel be expected to behave differently from other countries?

From my childhood I recall my Jewish mother telling me that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” From my reading and re-reading, I recall Solomon’s words in The Book of Proverbs: “Envy not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.” And, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to its folly.”

What is one to make of a murderous fool like Netanyahu calling Palestinians “animals”? What should we make of a Jewish female member of the Knesset stating publicly that Palestinian children must be killed, mothers raped by Israeli soldiers; that they are all “snakes” who must be wiped out? What should we make of the fact that Netanyahu addresses our do-nothing Congress and gets more standing ovations from these AIPAC-sponsored dunces than any president in US history? Are we not one nation, one Empire, one people united against the “terrorists” of the Middle East? So, the story goes. So, the “information” is repeated ad nauseum.

While my refrigerator is dying and I cannot go out and buy food because I live in a car-dependent suburb and must wait for some technician to come and attend to my Internet connection, I play a little mind-game, one of those “thought-experiments” for which Einstein was famous. I am no Einstein, but I, too, am interested in relativity, and how things connect on various levels—quantum levels, if you will, individual to individual. When my refrigerator quiets a little, passes from squealing to a buzzing sound, I imagine it is like the buzzing of a drone over Palestine. The fact that my food supply is now limited to a couple of cans of soup makes me wonder what it is like to have no food for one’s babies.

But, it is no good. A pathetic attempt to imagine the unimaginable! Not even my experience with a tornado destroying my home above my head about a dozen years ago can help me to imagine the unrelenting terror of life in Gaza/Palestine now!

And, on the quantum level—Are these Palestinian children not our children, too? When the girls were kidnapped by a terrorist organization in Nigeria, was there not a universal cry to “Bring Back Our Girls”? When an Afghan girl was shot in the head because she wanted to attend school, was there not universal outrage?

Are the U.N. and the other international organizations established after the Second World War in order to prevent forever a return to war-mania and serial holocausts, now merely useless window-dressing to assure humanity there still is a humanity with a conscience?

Scott Pelly can talk now of “genocide” in Iraq, but he never peeped the word when the US killed a million Iraqis and displaced 4 million because of “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed!

Who controls the Information controls the Imagination!

Getting back to Einstein, he said that Imagination was more important than Knowledge. I think he meant this: Knowledge is well and good, but without Imagination, we shall never put things all together to get to Wisdom. And wisdom, as we learn from the Book of Proverbs, is “the principal thing: therefore, get wisdom: and with all thy getting, get thee understanding.”

The hydra-headed monster of USreal has been murdering democracy—in the name of democracy!—for about as long as I’ve dwelled on this sad planet. Because, like the Melanie Griffith character in “Something Wild,” THEY made us do it! THEY compelled us to go into Korea and Vietnam and kill millions! THEY compelled us to go into Iraq and Afghanistan because… well, Saddam Hussein’s soldiers were throwing babies on the floor, dashing their heads! Right? Er, right?

There never seems to be enough time for questioning, for cross-examination! “Facts” are presented as indisputable, and in the words of that consummate liar, Colin Powell, we are simply told, “Trust me.”

As Imagination dies, a culture dies, the Arts die, and a people die. The people enclose themselves in a fraudulent world, from which they lack the imagination to break out. They fail to see a “siege” for the act of war it really is. They fail to see the malfeasance of their elected officials as the criminal offense that it is. (“O, my offence is rank,” too-late awakened Claudius tells us in Hamlet; “it smells to Heaven!”)

In Orwell’s other brilliant book, Animal Farm, he shows us how a collective of pigs has taken over from the other rebellious animals, killed off former leaders of the restive, idealistic group, and now amend the original declaration thus: All animals are equal; but some are more equal than others!

Too many in our “advanced, modern” world think they are “more equal than others”! They are “privileged,” “entitled,” “chosen.” In Madeleine Albright’s not very bright phrase: “the indispensable people.” Refusing to tell the whole story, failing to contextualize, to provide the essential background, they scarify Truth and disenfranchise the people’s right to know, to imagine, to feel deeply!

Two bits of truth did leak out while I scavenged among the rubble of the MSM: one news clip showed a Palestinian girl of ten who had awakened paralyzed in a hospital after her family had been killed by Israeli bombs. When she could not feel her limbs, she thought she had died.

Actually, she had died… the life she might have had, had died forever.

Another bit of truth showed another Palestinian girl, also ten. She had just witnessed her grandmother and three uncles being blown apart by Israeli bombs. She held her palms to her head and kept crying, “Enough! Enough! Enough!”

gary_corseri@comcast.net.

The World Is Doomed By Western Insouciance—
don’t expect to live much longer

Paul Craig Roberts

[E]uropean governments and the Western media have put the world at risk by enabling Washington’s propaganda and aggression against Russia.

Washington has succeeded in using transparent lies to demonize Russia as a dangerous aggressive country led by a new Hitler or a new Stalin, just as Washington succeeded in demonizing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Qaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, Chavez in Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.

The real demons–Clinton, Bush, Obama–are “the exceptional and indispensable people” above the reach of demonization. Their horrific real crimes go unnoticed, while fictitious crimes are attributed to the unexceptional and dispensable people and countries.

The reason that Washington demonizes a leader and a country is to permit the creation of circumstances that Washington can use to act with force against a leader and a country.

Washington’s incessant lies alleging “Russian aggression” have created Russian aggression out of thin air. John Kerry and the State Department’s Marie Harf issue new lies daily, but never any supporting evidence. With the stage set, the US Senate, the NATO commander and the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff are busy at work energizing the wheels of war.

Senate bill 2277 provides for beefing up forces on Russia’s borders and for elevating Ukraine’s status to “ally of the US” so that US troops can assist the war against “terrorists” in Ukraine.http://un.ua/eng/article/522930.html See also: http://www.globalresearch.ca/collapse-of-ukraine-government-prime-minister-yatsenyuk-resigns-amidst-pressures-exerted-by-the-imf/5393168

NATO commander Breedlove is preparing his plans for stockpiling war material on Russia’s borders so that US/NATO troops can more quickly strike Russia. http://rt.com/news/175292-nato-poland-supply-base/

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, is at work preparing American opinion for the upcoming war.

UK’s David Cameron and France’s Francois Hollande shaking hands. What this ugly duo share is their abject subservience to Washington’s criminal designs. They bring shame to their nations.

On July 24 Dempsey told the Aspen Security Forum, a high level group where US opinion is formed, that Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is comparable to Stalin’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and that the Russian threat was not limited to Ukraine or Eastern Europe but was global.http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/25/gen-dempsey-were-pulling-out-our-cold-war-military-plans-over-ukraine

Gen. Dempsey: as stupid and corporatized as you can find a guy wearing our uniform.  A puppet of more intelligent malefactors.

The intellects in the Aspen Forum did not break out laughing when Dempsey told them that Russia’s (alleged but unproven) involvement in Ukraine was the first time since 1939 that a country made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. No one asked Dempsey what Washington has been doing during the last three presidential regimes: Clinton in Serbia, Bush and Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen, Obama in Libya and Syria.

Here are Dempsey’s words: “You’ve got a Russian government that has made a conscious decision to use its military force inside another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives. It’s the first time since 1939 or so that that’s been the case. They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently not just in Eastern Europe, but Europe in the main, and towards the United States.”

Washington’s view that the world is its oyster is so ingrained that neither Dempsey nor his upper echelon audience at the Aspen Forum noticed the absurdity of his statement. Washington and the brainwashed US population take if for granted that the “exceptional, indispensable nation” is not limited in its actions by the sovereignty of other countries.

Washington takes for granted that US law prevails in other countries over the countries’ own laws–just ask France or Switzerland, that Washington can tell foreign financial institutions and corporations with whom they can do business and with whom they cannot–just ask every country and company prevented from doing business with Iran, that Washington can invade any country whose leader Washington can demonize and overthrow–just ask Iraq, Honduras, Libya, Serbia, and so forth, and that Washington can conduct military operations against peoples in foreign countries, such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which Washington is not at war.

All of this is possible, because Washington has claimed the title from Israel of being “God’s Chosen People.” Of course, Israel’s loss of the title has not stopped Israel from acting the same way.

Washington now has in motion the wheels of war. Once the wheels of war begin to turn, momentum carries them forward. The foolish, indeed utterly stupid, governments and media in Europe seem unaware of Washington’s orchestration of their future or lack thereof, or they are indifferent to it. They are dooming themselves and all of humanity by their insouciance. Heaven help if the British PM or French president or German chancellor were not invited to the White House or the Polish nonentity did not get his Washington stipend.

Readers who cannot tolerate problems without solutions always request solutions. OK, here is the solution:

The only possibility of avoiding war is that Putin take his case to the UN. If Washington can send Colin Powell to the UN unarmed with any truth to make Washington’s case for war against Iraq, Putin should be able to take his case to the UN against Washington’s war against Russia.

The case that the emperor has no clothes is an easy one to make.

Unlike Washington, Putin is willing to share the evidence that Russia has about who is doing what in Ukraine. It is a simple matter to establish that Washington organized a coup that overthrew an elected government, supports violence against those who object to the coup, and has turned a deaf ear to Russia’s repeated pleas for Kiev and the separatists to negotiate their differences.

Putin should make it clear to the world that Washington continues with provocative military steps against Russia, with force buildups on Russia’s borders and calls for more buildups, with S.2277 which reads like a US preparation for war, with provocative actions and accusations by top US generals and government officials against Russia, and with efforts to isolate Russia and to inflict economic and political injury on Russia.

Putin should make it clear to the world that there is a limit to the provocations that Russia can accept and that Russia believes that Russia is in danger of preemptive nuclear attack by Washington. Putin can describe Washington’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty, the construction of ABM bases on Russia’s borders, and the announced change in Washington’s war doctrine that elevates US nuclear forces from a retaliatory role to a preemptive first strike role. These actions are clearly directed at Russia (and China–wake up China! You are next!).

Putin must state clearly that the likely consequence of the world continuing to enable Washington’s lies and aggression will be not merely another disastrous war but the termination of life.

The governments of the world, especially Washington’s vassals in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, need to be told that it is their responsibility to stop their enabling of Washington’s aggression or to accept their responsibility for World War III.

At least we could all have the enjoyment of watching the arrogant Samantha Powers and the craven British lapdog rise and walk out of the UN proceedings. There is no doubt whatsoever that Washington is unable to answer the charges.

Here again is the Wolfowitz Doctrine that controls US foreign policy and that condemns Planet Earth to death:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that posses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

A hostile power is defined as any country that is not a Washington vassal.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine commits the United States, its peoples, Washington’s gullible EU allies and those peoples to war with Russia and China. Unless Russia and China surrender, the world will be destroyed.

The destruction of the world is what the idiot EU governments and the presstitute Western media are fostering by their enablement of Washington’s lies and aggression.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. a man who loves animals,  was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.