Palestinians ‘Deserve To Be Dead’ - Joan Rivers

Now that I've given this excuse for a human being to be mourned, I am posting these 2 videos to show that she was a racist, disrespectful, lowlife.

I was amazed to see how many people shed crocodile tears over this worthless garbage and none had the courage to tell it like it is.



Here is the queen bitch disrespecting Adele:



Rot in hell, Joan!

‘Prays’ That Obama’s ‘Children Be Fatherless And His Wife A Widow’

Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal (R)


Kansas GOP House Speaker ‘Prays’ That Obama’s ‘Children Be Fatherless And His Wife A Widow’ 

By Marie Diamond 
On Jan 13, 2012 at 12:00 pm 
Courtesy Of "Think Progress"

ThinkProgress reported last week that Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R) was forced to apologize to First Lady Michelle Obama after forwarding an email to fellow lawmakers that called her “Mrs. YoMama” and compared her to the Grinch.

Earlier that same week, the Lawrence Journal-World was sent another email that O’Neal had forwarded to House Republicans that referred to President Obama and a Bible verse that says “Let his days be few” and calls for his children to be without a father and his wife to be widowed.

Nick Sementelli at Faith in Public Life notes that Psalm 109, which is a prayer for the death of a leader, became a popular conservative meme after Obama’s election. The “tongue-in-cheek” prayer for the president was seen on bumper stickers. The relevant part of the psalm reads:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

O’Neal forwarded the prayer with his own message: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

O’Neal’s office refuses to apologize for the email, insisting that the message was only referring to Obama’s days in office. Sementelli notes the response of a Rockford Register Star columnist who explains why this excuse won’t do.

Speaking to a reader he writes, “You say that verse 8 of Psalm 109, as applied to President Obama, does not suggest a wish for his death. But the first five words of verse 8 are: ‘Let his days be few.’ And verse 9 says: ‘Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.’…You suggest yourself that scripture should not be ‘taken out of context.’ Well, the context of Psalm 109 is a wish for someone’s death.”

Report Identifies Organizational Nexus Of Islamophobia

By Jim Lobe,
August 27, 2011
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

A small group of inter-connected foundations, think tanks, pundits, and bloggers is behind the 10-year-old campaign to promote fear of Islam and Muslims in the U.S., according to a major investigative report released here Friday by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The 130-page report, "Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America," identifies seven foundations that have quietly provided a total of more than 42 million dollars to key individuals and organizations that have spearheaded the nationwide effort between 2001 and 2009.

They include funders that have long been associated with the extreme right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel. 

The network also includes what the report calls "misinformation experts" – including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) – who are often tapped by television news networks and right-wing radio talk shows to comment on Islam and the threat it allegedly poses to U.S. national security. 

"Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran," according to the report whose main author, Wajahat Ali, described the group as "the central nervous system of the Islamophobia network." 

"This small band of radical ideologues has fought to define Sharia as a ‘totalitarian ideology’ and legal-political-military doctrine committed to destroying Western civilization," the report said. "But a scholar of Islam and Muslim tradition would not recognize their definition of Sharia, let alone a lay practicing Muslim." 

Nonetheless, the group’s messages receive wide dissemination by what the report calls an "Islamophobia echo chamber" consisting of leaders of the Christian Right, such as Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, and some Republican politicians, such as presidential candidates Representative Michele Bachmann and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. 

Other key disseminators include media figures, especially prominent hosts on the Fox News Channel and columnists in the Washington Times the National Review; as well as grassroots groups, such as ACT! For America, local "Tea Party" movements, and the American Family Association, which are behind current efforts by Republican-dominated state legislatures to ban Sharia in their jurisdictions. 

The report also cited the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), a press-monitoring agency created here in 1998 by former officers in the Israel Defense Force that translates selected items from Middle Eastern print and broadcast media, as a key part of the broader network, providing it with material to bolster its claims regarding the threat posed by Islam. MEMRI, which has just been awarded a State Department contract to monitor anti-Semitism in the Arab media, has often been accused of selectively spotlighting media voices that show anti-western bias and promote extremism. 

Judging by recent polls, the network has proved remarkably successful, according to the report which cited a 2010 Washington Post poll that showed that 49 percent of U.S. citizens held an unfavorable view of Islam, an increase of ten percent from 2002. 

The same network also succeeded in inciting a national controversy around the proposed construction of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan – the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" – which, according to Gaffney and others, was intended celebrate the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and "to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Sharia, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful." 

"It’s remarkable what a small number of people have achieved with a small group of committed and generous donors," said Eli Clifton, a co-author of the report and a national-security reporter at CAP, a think tank which is close to the administration of President Barack Obama, who has himself been a prime target of the Islamophobic network. 

The report, which was funded by the financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI), comes at a particularly sensitive moment – just two weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and less than a month after the murders of 76 people in Norway by Anders Breivik whose Internet manifesto not only echoed themes propagated by the key U.S. Islamophobic ideologues, but also quoted directly from their writings in dozens of passages. 

Indeed, Spencer’s blog, Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, another group identified by the report as part of the Islamophobic network, was cited 162 times, while Pipes and the MEF receive 16 mentions, and Gaffney’s CSP another eight. 

According to the report, Jihad Watch has been supported via the Horowitz Center primarily by the Fairbrook Foundation, which is run by Aubry and Joyce Chernik. Between 2004 and 2009, Fairbrook provided nearly 1.5 million dollars to Islamophobic groups, including Act! For America, CSP, the Investigative Project, and MEF. 

The Cherniks also supported the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Aish Hatorah, a far-right Israeli group behind the U.S.-based Clarion Fund, which produced the video, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West that was, in turn, heavily promoted by the Islamophobic groups featured in the report. Breivik praised it in his manifesto. 

Some 28 million DVD copies of the Obsession film were distributed to households in key swing states on the eve of the 2008 presidential elections in an apparent effort to sway voters against Obama. Some 17 million dollars in funding for their distribution was provided by a Chicago industrialist, Barry Seid, according to a Salon.com report published last year, and was channeled through Virginia-based Donors Capital Fund, which includes several prominent right-wing and neoconservative figures on its board. 

Donors to the Fund have also contributed 400,000 dollars to the Investigative Project and 2.3 million dollars to the MEF between 2001 and 2009, according to the report. 

Other major donors to Islamophobic groups include several foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife; including 2.9 million dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to Horowitz’ Freedom Center. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has often coordinated its political philanthropy with Scaife’s foundations, provided some 300,000 dollars to MEF, 815,000 dollars to CSP and 3.4 million dollars to the Freedom Center. In addition to more traditional charitable activities, both Scaife and Bradley have long been major supporters of far-right and neoconservative causes. 

Other major donors included the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker foundations, the Russell Berrie Foundation, and the Anchorage Charitable Foundation and William Rosenwald Family Fund, according to the report. 

In its mission statement, the Russell Berrie Foundation cited as one of its principal goals "fostering the spirit of religious understanding and pluralism". 

"The intellectual nexus of the network is well understood," said Faiz Shakir, CAP’s vice president. "We know it’s driven primarily by hatred against Muslims; what we don’t know is what are the motivations of the funders. We don’t know to what extent they are aware of what is being funded," he said. 

Horowitz denounced the report in a statement issued on its website, calling it a "typical fascistic attempt to silence critics and scare donors from supporting their efforts to inform the American public about the threats we face from the Islamic jihad." 

Efforts to obtain comments from MEF and CSP were not successful.

(Inter Press Service)

The Oslo "Jihadist Terrorist" Blame Game Begins

Submitted by Tyler Durden
On 07/22/2011 14:12 -0400
Courtesy Of "Zero Hedge"

The news of today's Norway bombing is still developing and already the Telegraph has started the blame game. The target? Why jihadists of course. And while there may be reason to assume this is the case, the fact that there are absolutely no known confirmed facts at this point allows us to be very grateful for the phenomenon of broad ethnic and racial stereotyping and profiling. Incidentally, according to preliminary reports, the description of the shooter at the Labor Party youth camp is 6 foot tall, and blond: last time we checked Libya didn't have an endogenous Aryan population.

From The Telegraph:

As of June 2011, there were still six F16 fighters from the Royal Norwegian Air Force operating in Libya, which is a possible motive for the attack. However, it is unlikely that Colonel Gadhafi has the ability to mobilise such an attack.

Norway has deployed around 500 troops in Afghanistan, and three Norwegian newspapers (Aftenposten, Dagbladet and Magazinet) published the controversial Prophet Muhammad cartoons in 2005-2006, providing another possible motive.

There is precedent for jihadist targeting of Norway, with public spaces, government offices and media targets most at risk.

One possible culprit is the Pakistan-based core al-Qaeda group, which has previously shown interest in attacking Norway. In July 2010, three Norwegian residents, one of whom had received explosives training with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, were arrested on suspicion of plotting attacks against unspecified targets. One of them had attempted to construct the same hydrogen peroxide-based explosives as used in the 2009 al-Qaeda bomb plot against the New York subway and the 7/7 bombings in London.

Nevertheless, Norway is not a priority country for jihadists, and any al-Qaeda targeting of Norway would probably be opportunistic, based on the fact that they had happened to recruit a Norwegian national. We also assess that any plans for spectacular attacks in Western Europe would probably have been altered or put on hold following bin Laden's death, pending internal security reviews. A further possibility, therefore, is that the attack was led by Norwegian jihadist sympathisers acting on their own initiative, possibly after receiving basic training from jihadist groups overseas.

The profiling continues:

This pattern was seen in Stockholm in December 2010, when Swedish citizen Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly blew himself up in a busy shopping street. He had visited Iraq for jihad, but appeared to have received minimal, if any, external training and guidance when planning the Stockholm attack. One possible training provider would be Somalia's al-Shabab, which maintains fundraising networks among Norway's Somali community and has proven attractive as a destination for Swedish and Danish jihadist sympathisers, though it has not so far shown interest in deploying its foreign fighters back home to conduct attacks.

Of course, the most probably explanation: that this is merely a domestic operation with no "jihadists" at all, is presented last. Because bond, blue eyed terrorists don't really sell page views.

Hours later there was an summer camp youth conference of the ruling Labour Party, which is being attended by current Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The conference is taking place on the island of Utøya. The man apparently infiltrated the conference on the pretence that he had been sent by the police as a security measure in the wake of the Oslo explosions. As such, it is likely he was ethnically Norwegian. This could indicate the involvement of a far-right group rather than an Islamist group, though it is also the case that the Labour Party would be a favourable target for Islamist groups due to its role in authorising Norwegian military deployments in Afghanistan.

So much for the speculation. How about next time the "punditry" at least waits to get its fact straight before starting out on yet another senseless stereotypical crusade which will certainly make it far more likely that just this  stereotype is precisely what is behind the next attack.

Israel Has Become A Society Of Force and Violence

What will Israelis think about when they are spoon-fed scary stories about the flotilla, if not about the use of force? Those activists want to kill IDF soldiers? We'll arise and kill them first.

By Gideon Levy
Published 01:46 30.06.11
Latest update 01:46 30.06.11
Courtesy Of "Haaretz Newspaper"

Are we listening to ourselves? Are we still aware of the awful noise coming from here? Have we noticed how the discourse is becoming more and more violent and how the language of force has just about become Israel's only official language?

A group of international activists is slated to sail a flotilla to the shores of the Gaza Strip. Many of them are social activists and fighters for peace and justice, veterans of the struggle against apartheid, colonialism, imperialism, pointless wars and injustice. Just stating that is difficult here, since they have already been described as thugs.

There are intellectuals, Holocaust survivors and people of conscience among them. When they fought against apartheid in South Africa or the war in Vietnam, they won admiration for their actions even here. But to say an admiring word now about these people, some of whom are elderly, who are risking their lives and investing their money and time for a goal they see as just, is considered treason. It's possible that some violent people have intermingled with them, but the vast majority are people of peace, not haters of Israel but those who hate its injustices. They have decided not to remain silent - to challenge the existing order, which is unacceptable to them, which cannot be acceptable to any moral person.

Yes, they want to create a provocation - the only way to remind the world about Gaza's situation, in which no one takes an interest unless Qassam rockets or flotillas are involved. Yes, the situation in Gaza has improved in recent months, in part because of the previous flotilla. But no, Gaza is still not free - far from it. It has no outlet to the sea or air, there are no exports, and its inhabitants are still partially imprisoned. Israelis who freak out if Ben-Gurion International Airport shuts down for two hours should be able to understand what life without a port is like. Gaza is entitled to its freedom, and those aboard the flotilla are entitled to take action in an effort to achieve this. Israel should be allowing them to demonstrate.

But look at how Israel is reacting. The flotilla was described immediately, by everyone, as a security threat; its activists were classified as enemies, and there was no doubt cast on the ridiculous assumptions that defense officials are making and the press has lapped up eagerly. We haven't heard the last of the campaign to demonize the previous flotilla, in which Turkish citizens were killed for no reason, yet the new campaign has already begun. It has all the buzzwords: danger, chemical substances, hand-to-hand combat, Muslims, Turks, Arabs, terrorists and maybe some suicide bombers. Blood and fire and pillars of smoke!

The unavoidable conclusion is that there is only one way to act against the passengers aboard the flotilla: by force, and only by force, as with every security threat. This is a recurring pattern: first demonization, then legitimization (to act violently ). Remember the tall tales about sophisticated Iranian weaponry coming through arms-smuggling tunnels in Gaza, or those about how the Strip was booby-trapped? Then Operation Cast Lead came along and the soldiers hardly encountered anything like that.

The attitude toward the flotilla is a continuation of the same behavior. The campaign of scare tactics and demonization is what contributes to the violent rhetoric that is taking over the entire public discourse. For what will Israelis think about when they are spoon-fed scary stories about the flotilla, if not about the use of force? Those activists want to kill Israel Defense Forces soldiers? We'll arise and kill them first.

Now the politicians, the generals and the commentators are competing with one another over who can provide the most frightening description of the flotilla, who can most inflame the public, who can best praise the soldiers who will save us, and who can deliver the most pompous rhetoric of the kind one would expect before a war. One important commentator, Dan Margalit, has already waxed poetic in his newspaper column: "Blessed are the hands," he wrote of the hands that sabotaged one of the ships meant to take part in the flotilla. That's another thuggish and illegal action, one that wins immediate applause here, without anyone asking: By what right?

This flotilla, too, will not get through. The prime minister and the defense minister have promised us this. Once again Israel will show them, those activists, who's more of a man - who's strongest and who's in charge, in the air, on land and at sea. The "lessons" of the previous flotilla have been learned well - not the lessons of the pointless killing or the violent and unnecessary takeover of the ship, but of the humiliation of Israel's military.

But the truth is the real humiliation lies in the fact that naval commandos were deployed to intercept the ships in the first place, and that is something that reflects on us all: how we have become a society whose language is violence, a country that seeks to resolve nearly everything by force, and only by force.

Free Speech At Any Cost?

We Ask If US Politicians and Political Pundits Are Fanning The Flames Of Hatred.

Last Modified: 15 Jan 2011 11:35 GMT
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"





Should free speech be allowed no matter what the cost or is there a line that cannot be crossed?

Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman, was injured in a shooting, which left six others dead, at a political event in Arizona. Some are blaming radio and TV pundits for fanning the flames of hatred and politicians stand accused of polarising opinion and pushing people to extremes.

So, when does saying what you think become incitement to violence?

Inside Story discusses with guests: Kevin Keenan, an associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo; Andrew Langer, a Tea Party activist and president of the Institute for Liberty; and Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist and president of Bannon Communications Research.

The Climate Of Hate - Arizona Shooting

It was not too long ago that Rush Limbaugh said, "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus--living fossils--so we we'll never forget what these people stood for." Ann Coulter, another bigot and provocateur, said, "My only regret with Tim McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times building."

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
January 15, 2011
Courtesy Of "IslamiCity's iViews"

ne to political violence. Nine presidents have been the targets of assassination, along with one president-elect and three presidential candidates. In addition, some eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, 10 Representatives, 11 mayors and 17 state legislators have been violently attacked. No other Western country with a population over 50 million has as high a number. 

As to the reasons behind such attacks, Columbia University History Professor Steven Mintz says, "Political assassinations have tended to occur during periods of civil strife and intense partisanship. The first presidential assassination attempt - against Andrew Jackson in 1835 - coincided with a sharp upsurge in anti-abolitionist and ethnic violence... Between 1865 and 1877, 34 political officials were attacked, 24 of them fatally. These included a U.S. senator, two Congressional representatives, three governors, 10 state legislators, eight judges and 10 other officeholders. The 20th century saw three peak periods of political violence: at the turn of the century, the 1920s and 1930s, and 1963 to 1981. Each coincided with periods of civil unrest and bitter partisanship."

When John F. Kennedy went to Dallas on November 22, 1963, conservative protesters were everywhere. One activist handed out 5,000 handbills about Kennedy modeled after police 'most wanted' circulars. "This man is wanted for treason," the handbills read, for "turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations" and for having been "WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S."

We see similar accusations against the sitting President these days. As noted by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman of the Princeton University in a recent article in the New York Times, something very ugly has been taking shape on the political scene since at least the time of 2008 presidential election campaign. As Senator John McCain's chances faded, the crowds at his rallies were, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It was not just a mob phenomenon - it was visible in the right-wing media, and in the speeches of McCain and his running mate - Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. 

With an Afro-American President in the White House -- the first ever, who happens to have a Muslim-sounding name -- courtesy of his Kenyan roots, there is undeniably a climate of hate today. The diatribes are increasingly nastier and dangerous. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence. Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by a whopping 300 percent. We are told that a number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness. But there is no doubt that something about the current state of America has been causing far more 'psychos' than ever before to act out their 'illness' by engaging in political violence.

In a healthy liberal democracy there is no room for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary. But that is what has been happening in the USA, thanks to Republican politicians like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, and talk show hosts like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly. As bluntly noted by a neocon -- David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, "Republicans originally thought that Fox (owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch) worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."

It was not too long ago that Rush Limbaugh said, "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus--living fossils--so we we'll never forget what these people stood for." Ann Coulter, another bigot and provocateur, said, "My only regret with Tim McVeigh (responsible for Oklahoma city hall blast and terrorism) is that he did not go to the New York Times building." Glen Beck said, "Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore (an award-winning political commentator and documentary movie producer), and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could."

It was only a few months ago that Sharron Angle, the Tea Party-endorsed candidate who failed to unseat Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) in last year's midterm election, had said, "If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking towards those Second Amendment remedies." The statement makes reference to the Second Amendment's right to bear arms as a defense against an intrusive or oppressive government. And then there is Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) who in 2009 said, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back." She also said, "Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing. And the people - we the people - are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country."

With the passage of health care reform last year, there has been increasingly violent language coming from opponents of the legislation, along with vandalism directed at Democratic members of Congress. Sarah Palin did her part to raise the rhetorical intensity, telling her Twitter followers in March of the last year, "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: 'Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!'"

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), who was shot last week during a public event in Tucson on January 8, was among 20 other members of Congress who were on a so-called hit list published by Sarah Palin. Jesse Kelly, Giffords's Republican opponent in the 2010 mid-term elections, similarly employed guns in a campaign event. He staged an event in July asking supporters to "get on target" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office" -- all while shooting "a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Consider also the fact that one out of every five Americans is known to have psychiatric problems. A small fraction of this population (some 40,000) is extremely vulnerable to what it sees and hears and is capable of committing terrorism.

So this latest massacre in Tucson in which 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl, were murdered and Representative Giffords severely wounded should not come as a surprise, especially in the state of Arizona where gun laws stand out as among the most permissive in the country. Last year, Arizona became only the third state that does not require a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The state also enacted another measure that allowed workers to take their guns to work, even if their workplaces banned firearms, as long as they kept them in their locked vehicles. In 2009, a law went into effect allowing people with concealed-weapons permits to take their guns into restaurants and bars. In the last two weeks, two bills were introduced relating to the right to carry guns on college campuses, one allowing professors to carry concealed weapons and one allowing anybody who can legally carry a gun to do so. And if the comedian Jon Stewart is to be believed, the sale of automatic guns actually increased after the assassination attempt on Giffords.

Mainstream news organizations linked the attack to the offensive target map issued by Sarah Palin's political action committee. The Huffington Post erupted, with former Senator Gary Hart emphatically stating that the killings were the result of angry political rhetoric. Keith Olbermann demanded a Palin-repudiation and the founder of the Daily Kos wrote on Twitter: "Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.Ó" Others argued that the killing was encouraged by a political climate of hate.

These accusations - that political actors in a liberal democracy contributed to the murder of 6 people - are extremely serious. The Republicans obviously don't like such charges laid on their dirty hands. In a statement read out on Wednesday, Palin called herself the victim of "blood libel" - the original term for blaming Jews for the (so-called) death of Jesus and an anti-Semitic rallying call that led to countless deaths of Jews, primarily in Europe and Russia. Many rabbis called her remarks insensitive, ill-chosen and offensive to Holocaust survivors and other victims of anti-Semitism. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said Palin's own words - that violent political language can endanger people - are "affirming exactly what her critics charge."

Whatever may be the excuses now put forth by the messengers of hatred, fact remains that the crazies and terrorists don't kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of American political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. They cannot have separate rules for Muslim loonies while being too forgiving for breeding their own homegrown terrorists and assassins.

Some 37 years ago when Black Muslim leader Malcolm X (Malik Shabazz) was asked to comment about the assassination of President Kennedy, he wisely said, "chickens coming home to roost." The sad fact is unless American public is serious about reining in its addiction to gun, war and violence, the horror prompted by the attack in Tucson last week will pass, the outrage will fade, and the murders will continue. It'll be all over again with new targets, and new Columbine and new Tucson killing fields!

*****

Dr Habib Siddiqui has authored nine books. His book: "Democracy, Politics and Terrorism - America's Quest for Security in the Age of Insecurity" is available at Amazon.com.

A 12-Step Program For Warmongers

The Pentagon Has Been Hooked On Empire For 30 Years

Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military need to enter rehab for their addiction to waging war and empire across the planet.

January 5, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.

Just as 2010 ended, the American military’s urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way.  It seems that “leaders” in the Obama administration and “senior American military commanders” in Afghanistan were acting as a veritable WikiLeaks machine.  They slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, possibly on the tinderbox province of Baluchistan, and undoubtedly on the Pakistani government and military via cross-border raids by U.S. Special Operations forces in the new year.

In the front-page story those two reporters produced, you could practically slice with a dull knife American military frustration over a war going terribly wrong, over an enemy (shades of Vietnam!) with “sanctuaries” for rest, recuperation, and rearming just over an ill-marked, half-existent border.  You could practically taste the chagrin of the military that their war against... well you name it: terrorists, guerrillas, former Islamic fundamentalist allies, Afghan and Pakistani nationalists, and god knows who else... wasn’t proceeding exactly swimmingly.  You could practically reach out and be seared by their anger at the Pakistanis for continuing to take American bucks by the billions while playing their own game, rather than an American one, in the region.

If you were of a certain age, you could practically feel (shades of Vietnam again!) that eerily hopeful sense that the next step in spreading the war, the next escalation, could be the decisive one.  Admittedly, these days no one talks (as they did in the Vietnam and Iraq years) about turning “corners” or reaching “tipping points,” but you can practically hear those phrases anyway, or at least the mingled hope and desperation that always lurked behind them.

Take this sentence, for instance: “Even with the risks, military commanders say that using American Special Operations troops could bring an intelligence windfall, if militants were captured, brought back across the border into Afghanistan and interrogated.” Can’t you catch the familiar conviction that, when things are going badly, the answer is never “less,” always “more,” that just another decisive step or two and you’ll be around that fateful corner? 

In this single New York Times piece (and other hints about cross-border operations), you can sense just how addictive war is for the war planners. Once you begin down the path of invasion and occupation, turning back is as difficult as an addict going cold turkey.  With all the sober talk about year-end reviews in Afghanistan, about planning and “progress” (a word used nine times in the relatively brief, vetted “overview” of that review recently released by the White House), about future dates for drawdowns and present tactics, it’s easy to forget that war is a drug.  When you’re high on it, your decisions undoubtedly look as rational, even practical, as the public language you tend to use to describe them.  But don’t believe it for a second.

Once you’ve shot up this drug, your thinking is impaired.  Through its dream-haze, unpleasant history becomes bunk; what others couldn’t do, you fantasize that you can.  Forget the fact that crossing similar borders to get similar information and wipe out similar sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War years led to catastrophe for American planners and the peoples of the region.  It only widened that war into what in Cambodia would become auto-genocide.  Forget the fact that, no matter whom American raiders might capture, they have no hope of capturing the feeling of nationalism (or the tribal equivalent) that, in the face of foreign invaders or a foreign occupation, keeps the under-armed resilient against the mightiest of forces.

Think of the American urge to surge as a manifestation of the war drug’s effect in the world. In what the Bush administration used to call “the Greater Middle East,” Washington is now in its third and grimmest surge iteration.  The first took place in the 1980s during the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proved the highest of highs; the second got rolling as the last century was ending and culminated in the first years of the twenty-first century amid what can only be described as delusions of grandeur, or even imperial megalomania.  It focused on a global Pax Americana and the wars that extend it into the distant future.  The third started in 2006 in Iraq and is still playing itself out in Afghanistan as 2011 commences.

In Central and South Asia, we could now be heading for the end of the age of American surges, which in practical terms have manifested themselves as the urge to destabilize.  Geopolitically, little could be uglier or riskier on our planet at the moment than destabilizing Pakistan -- or the United States.  Three decades after the American urge to surge in Afghanistan helped destabilize one imperial superpower, the Soviet Union, the present plans, whatever they may turn out to be, could belatedly destabilize the other superpower of the Cold War era.  And what our preeminent group of surgers welcomed as an “unprecedented strategic opportunity” as this century dawned may, in its later stages, be seen as an unprecedented act of strategic desperation. 

That, of course, is what drugs, taken over decades, do to you: they give you delusions of grandeur and then leave you on the street, strung out, and without much to call your own.  Perhaps it’s fitting that Afghanistan, the country we helped turn into the planet’s leading narco-state, has given us a 30-year high from hell.

So, as the New Year begins, strap yourself into that time machine and travel with me back into the 1980s, so that we can peer into a future we know and see the pattern that lies both behind and ahead of us.

Getting High in Afghanistan

As 2011 begins, what could be eerier than reading secret Soviet documents from the USSR's Afghan debacle of the 1980s?  It gives you chills to run across Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens (“The Politburo had made a mistake and must correct it as soon as possible -- every day precious lives are lost.”); or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan war must be ended in a year, “at maximum, two.” Yet, with the gut-wrenching sureness history offers, you can’t help but know that, even two years later, even with a strong desire to leave (which has yet to surface among the Washington elite a decade into our own Afghan adventure), imperial pride and fear of loss of “credibility” would keep the Soviets fighting on to 1989.

Or what about Marshal Sergei Akhromeev offering that same Politburo meeting an assessment that any honest American military commander might offer a quarter century later about our own Afghan adventure: “There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier.  Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels.” Or General Boris Gromov, the last commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, boasting “on his last day in the country that ‘[n]o Soviet garrison or major outpost was ever overrun.’”

Or Andrei Gromyko, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, emphasizing in 1986 the strategic pleasure of their not-so-secret foe, that other great imperial power of the moment: “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan.  On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” (The same might today be said of a far less impressive foe, al-Qaeda.)

Or in 1988, with the war still dragging on, to read a “closed” letter the Communist Party distributed to its members explaining how the Afghan fiasco happened (again, the sort of thing that any honest American leader could say of our Afghan war): “In addition, [we] completely disregarded the most important national and historical factors, above all the fact that the appearance of armed foreigners in Afghanistan was always met with arms in the hands [of the population]... One should not disregard the economic factor either.  If the enemy in Afghanistan received weapons and ammunition for hundreds of millions and later even billions of dollars, the Soviet-Afghan side also had to shoulder adequate expenditures.  The war in Afghanistan costs us 5 billion rubles a year.”

Or finally the pathetic letter the Soviet Military Command delivered to the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan on February 14, 1989, arguing (just as the American military high command would do of our war effort) that it was “not only unfair but even absurd to draw... parallels” between the Soviet Afghan disaster and the American war in Vietnam.  That was, of course, the day the last of 100,000 Soviet soldiers -- just about the number of American soldiers there today -- left Afghan soil heading home to a sclerotic country bled dry by war, its infrastructure aging, its economy crumbling.  Riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized, the Red Army limped home to a society riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized led by a Communist Party significantly delegitimized by its disastrous Afghan adventure, its Islamic territories from Chechnya to Central Asia in increasing turmoil.  In November of that same year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down and not long after the Soviet Union would disappear from the face of the Earth.

Reading those documents, you can almost imagine CIA director William Webster and “his euphoric ‘Afghan Team’” toasting the success of the Agency's 10-year effort, its largest paramilitary operation since the Vietnam War.  The Reagan administration surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan had been profligate, involving billions of dollars and a massive propaganda campaign, as well as alliances with the Saudis and a Pakistani dictator and his intelligence service to fund and arm the most extreme of the anti-Soviet jihadists of that moment -- “freedom fighters”as they were then commonly called in Washington.

It’s easy to imagine the triumphalist mood of celebration in Washington among those who had intended to give the Soviet Union a full blast of the Vietnam effect.  They had used the “war” part of the Cold War to purposely bleed the less powerful, less wealthy of the two superpowers dry.  As President Reagan would later write in his memoirs: “The great dynamic of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism -- money.  The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever.”

By 1990, the urge to surge seemed a success beyond imagining.  Forget that it had left more than a million Afghans dead (and more dying), that one-third of that impoverished country’s population had been turned into refugees, or that the most extreme of jihadists, including a group that called itself al-Qaeda, had been brought together, funded, and empowered through the Afghan War.  More important, the urge to surge in the region was now in the American bloodstream.  And who could ever imagine that, in a new century, “our” freedom fighters would become our sworn enemies, or that the Afghans, that backward people in a poor land, could ever be the sort of impediment to American power that they had been to the Soviets?

The Cold War was over.  The surge had it.  We were supreme.  And what better high could there be than that?

Fever Dreams of Military Might

Of course, with the Soviet Union gone, there was no military on the planet that could come close to challenging the American one, nor was there a nascent rival great power on the horizon.  Still, a question remained: After centuries of great power rivalry, what did it mean to have a “sole superpower” on planet Earth, and what path should that triumphant power head down? It took a few years, including passing talk about a possible “peace dividend” -- that is, the investment of monies that would have gone into the Cold War, the Pentagon, and the military in infrastructural and other domestic projects -- for this question to be settled, but settled it was, definitively, on September 12, 2001.

And for all the unknown paths that might have been taken in this unique situation, the one chosen was familiar.  It was, of course, the very one that had helped lead the Soviet Union to implosion, the investment of national treasure in military power above all else.  However, to those high on the urge to surge and now eager to surge globally, when it came to an American future, the fate of the Soviet Union seemed no more relevant than what the Afghans had done to the Red Army.  In those glory years, analogies between the greatest power the planet had ever seen and a defeated foe seemed absurd to those who believed themselves the smartest, clearest-headed guys in the room.

Previously, the “arms race,” like any race, had involved at least two, and sometimes more, great powers.  Now, it seemed, there would be something new under the sun, an arms race of one, as the U.S. prepared itself for utter dominance into a distant, highly militarized future.  The military-industrial complex would, in these years, be further embedded in the warp and woof of American life; the military expanded and privatized (which meant being firmly embraced bycrony corporations and hire-a-gun outfits of every sort); and the American “global presence” -- from military bases to aircraft-carrier task forces -- enhanced until, however briefly, the United States became a military presence unique in the annals of history.

Thanks to the destructive acts of 19 jihadis, the urge to surge would with finality overwhelm all other urges in the fall of 2001 -- and there would be a group ready for just such a moment, for (as the newspaper headlines screamed) a “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.”

To take full stock of that group, however, we would first have to pilot our time machine back to June 3, 1997, the day a confident crew of Washington think-tank, academic, and political types calling themselves the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) posted a fin de siècle “statement of principles.” In it, they called for “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”  Crucially, they were demanding that the Clinton administration, or assumedly some future administration with a better sense of American priorities, “increase defense spending significantly.”

The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types.  After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Aaron Friedberg, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida.  (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)

This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank.  In either case, more than 13 years later, the success of that group can still take your breath away, as can both the narrowness -- and scope -- of their thinking, and of their seminal document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published in September 2000, two months before George W. Bush took the presidency.

This crew of surgers extraordinaires was considering a global situation that, as they saw it, offered Americans an “unprecedented strategic opportunity.”  Facing a new century, their ambitions were caught by James Peck in his startling upcoming book, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights, in this way: “In the [Reagan] era, Washington organized half the planet; in the [Bush era] it sought to organize the whole."

“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.”  It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons.  In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone.

In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”  It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet -- and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.”  Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were -- so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded -- to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.

We could, they insisted in a phrase they liked, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana, for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions -- they refused to estimate what the real price might be -- into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace.  Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet  (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.”  It was also the only that the “homeland” -- yes, unlike 99.9% of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term -- could be effectively “defended.”

In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest as well that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even (gasp!) in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies.  They couldn’t have thought more globally.  (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.)  Nor could they have thought longer term.  (They were twenty-first century mavens.)  And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.

Yet on the most crucial issues, they -- and so their documents -- couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided.  They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military.  They believed it capable of doing just about anything.  As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global power.  Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China).  Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks -- in the Greater Middle East, no less -- by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans.  To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.

It was a genuine American tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12th of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged.  Oh, how they surged!

That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.  "[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon... Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'")

And so they did.  They swept up everything and then watched as their dreams and geopolitical calculations were themselves swept into the dustbin of history.  And yet the urge to surge, twisted and ever more desperate, did not abate.

The Soviet Path

To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan more surges.  Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take.  Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all.  Our country, still far more wealthy than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase.  At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made “soviet” and “totalitarian” synonymous. 

The U.S. economy looks increasingly sclerotic; moneys for an aging and rotting infrastructure are long gone; state and city governments are laying off teachers,police, even firefighters; Americans are unemployed in near record numbers; global oil prices (for a country that has in no way begun to wean itself from its dependence on foreign oil) are ominously on the rise; and yet taxpayer moneycontinues to pour into the military and into our foreign wars.  It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the U.S. will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015 (and undoubtedly into an unknown future) -- and that’s but one expense in the estimated $120 billion to $160 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of America’s war stimulus package abroad.

And, of course, the talk for 2011 is how to expand the American ground war -- theair version of the same has already been on a sharp escalatory trajectory -- in Pakistan. History and common sense assure us that this can only lead to furtherdisaster.  Clear-eyed leaders, military or civilian, would never consider such plans.  But Washington’s 30-year high in the region, that urge to surge still coursing through its veins, says otherwise, and it’s not likely to be denied.

Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab.  They desperately need a 12-step program for recovery.  Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.

[Note on sources:  The National Security Archive, filled to bursting with documents from our imperial and Cold War past, is an online treasure.  I have relied on it for both the Soviet documents quoted on the Afghan war of the 1980s and an analysis of the American version of that war.  For those who are interested in reading PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” click here and then on the link to the pdf file of the document.]

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.