tracking hostility to U.S. dominance

BBC has a handy and concise map about Latin America's upcoming round of elections.

apply this to current events

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience... therefore [individuals] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

- Nuremberg International Military Tribunal

que no se vayan todos

The Center for Constitutional Rights has a neat summary of U.S. travel rules vis-à-vis Cuba, just one facet of the larger plan to starve Cubans into overthrowing Castro. Why? Because he's cruel, unlike us.

Anyway, one particularly incomprehensible manifestation of the U.S. embargo/blockade shows itself in the case of Kip and Patrick Taylor. Quoting directly from CCR:

Knowing that U.S. law prohibited spending funds in the country, they stocked their sailboat with enough provisions to last for the duration of their trip. It wasn’t until they left Cuba, in fact, that their troubles began.

Sailing from Cuba, their boat was struck by lightning that destroyed the mast. The Cuban Coast Guard rescued the Taylors, towing the boat back to port. But when they applied to the U.S. Representative for permission to repair it, they were told to abandon the boat - and their two dogs - and fly back to the U.S. After weeks of attempting to negotiate, unwilling to leave their dogs and befuddled by a decision that left assets in Cuba worth more than the costs of repairs, the Taylors had the boat fixed. For this - and for being honest upon their return - they were fined $2,000 each. For the next four and a half years, the Taylors - who are on a fixed income - requested reconsideration. In April, 2001, Patrick Taylor’s tax refund, needed to pay for urgent medical expenses, was frozen and applied to the $3,200 they now owe.

Once you begin to wrap your head around the criminal idiocy of this case, keep in mind that rules have since changed (thank our fearless leader's June 2004 vote-whoring update to the Cuba suffocation policy) so that it is now illegal not only to spend money in Cuba, but also to have a Cuban spend any money on you or provide you with anything. I don't remember seeing any of this under executive powers in the Constitution.

i feel the hate

I'm pasting below a response to a column that I wrote for the Pitt News in February of 2004, because, well, it's comical in a "someone just libeled my name beyond belief in his blog" kind of way.

Allow me first, however, to run through the insults levied by "Omri" against this humble blogger: I am "not the honors-caliber student that Pitt is trying to attract," a "flaming hypocrite," "at most a B-/C+ humanities undergrad at Pitt", a possessor of "sneering self-righteousness," a member of the International Socialist Organization (yes, I consider that a bit of an insult), too stupid to be anti-Semitic because that would "require cognitive integration of facts," and, to boot, "a flaming idiot when it comes to math." Ann Coulter, I'd start to question my job security if I were you. Once you're done reeling from this highly dispassionate analysis you can continue to the full entry....if anyone sees anything worth responding to (pardon my French - "fat fucking chance") let me know.

(see original here, after scrolling down about 40 percent of the page - how are those for math skills?....oh, and memo to Scott Simeone, this is called "attribution.")

People Who Live In Glass Context Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones
Usually, I wouldn't bother fisking a college newspaper's opinion column. But since (a) we have the Pitt News on our blogroll so I feel kind of responsible, (b) it's a slow news morning (Kerry wins another race and more flu cases in Asia - be still my beating heart), (c) I hate to see my alma mater's paper fall to these depths, and (d) this article contains some very, very typical idiocy that you see elsewhere that can make it an instructive case study in how to take apart lies about Israel, I'm going to go ahead and blog it. And let's be honest: it's either blog this or do something productive, so it's a pretty easy choice.
So, with these things in mind, let's meet today's guest. One Kevin Funk, who's clearly not the honors-caliber student that Pitt is trying to attract nowadays. His main point is that the US media doesn't present the context for Palestinian deaths. The problem with getting through his (and I use this word generously) opinion, is that it's so filled with factual inaccuracies and snide insinuations that you sometimes lose track of the fact that he's a flaming hypocrite. I'll try to help keep you focused as we go through the article:

Thursday, Jan. 29, a Palestinian detonates a shrapnel-packed explosive on a crowded Jerusalem bus. He kills 10, plus himself. He wounds 50 more.
Even more tragic than this reprehensible act is the fact that, as wrong as it is, it is dwarfed by Israeli crimes.

Technically false. According to Amnesty International Palestinian terrorism constitutes a crime against humanity, which is a juridical category of the most severe magnitude. Israel has yet to be formally accused of crimes against humanity by anyone who, well, knows what that is (Al Jazeera editorialists don't count - they don't exactly have much game on international law). But that's not the point.
The Palestinians, incidentally, also regularly violate international law by using children as soldiers, treating civilians as human shields, utilizing ambulances as combat vehicles, and storing weapons in mosques. But that's not the point either.
The point of this post is context and hypocrisy. So lets see what context he provides. Civilian vs. Combatant deaths? No. Accidental vs. Intentional Deaths? Not so much. Remember, the distinction between targeting civilians versus targeting terrorists is the heart of the moral case for Israel's self defense - and fortunately it's an intuitive distinction that's very, very hard to answer. Ergo the "maybe if I don't talk about it people won't notice it" strategy that this rhetorical genius uses. Hypocrite.

As the BBC reported -- apparently, foreign media outlets try to give context -- at least 2,600 Palestinians and 875 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada -- Arabic for "uprising" -- in September 2000. For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths -- at least 439 of which were victims younger than 18, according to Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem -- outnumber Israeli deaths three to one.
If this sounds new, thank the press.

Sigh. Where to begin?
First of all, it's factually misleading. It wasn't the BBC that compiled these statistics it was a report from If Americans Knew, a Berkeley based group (I know, I know - he says "reported" - but his point is that everyone on this side of the Atlantic is hopelessly biased). Their website is here. Lets talk about it for a sec. They present some charts proving that Israelis are evil. They say that "Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none" - without mentioning that the UN is structurally biased against Israel and makes it the only country on the planet, among dictators, thieves, tyrants, and murderers, that is banned from sitting on the Security Council. They say that "920 Israelis and 2,706 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000" - without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. They say that "The Israeli unemployment rate is 10.4%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 37-67%" - without mentioning that every time Israel tries to let Palestinians into Israel, a suicide bomber attacks and they have to shut down the border crossings again. They say "106 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 513 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000" - without mentioning that many of those children died while being used as human shields by Palestinians, and at least some of them died as suicide bombers themselves. So lets be careful with the whole "foreign media outlets try to give context" thing, shall we?
So that's hypocrisy in his source. Now lets talk about his own hypocrisy. For some real statistics, we go over to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism for a look behind the numbers. Now, while If Americans Knew (gosh, the name just reeks of professionalism and legitimacy, doesn't it?) does indeed have bar graphs, the ICT does some actualnumber crunching. This is where I go off on guy's sanctimonious little line about "the math-impaired." It's true that numbers help us understand things - but something that every first year stats student learns (you know, the non-math-impaired among us) is that numbers can be deceiving and you can't just take two numbers and conclude that you have meaningful results - only ignorant ideologues do that. So the ICT actually did some analysis and came up with the following (and I urge you to click through to their site - their analysis is imposing):

# The usual fatality count quoted in news articles presents an inaccurate and distorted picture of the al-Aqsa conflict, exaggerating Israel�s responsibility for the death of noncombatant civilians... our database shows a total of 603 Israelis killed, compared to 1596 Palestinians... numbers in general agreement with media reports... But such numbers hide as much as they reveal: They lump combatants in with noncombatants, suicide bombers with innocent civilians, and report Palestinian �collaborators� murdered by their own compatriots as if they had been killed by Israel. Correcting for such distortions, we can arrive at a figure of 617 Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel, compared to 471 Israeli noncombatants killed by Palestinians.
# While Israeli fatalities in the al-Aqsa conflict have consisted of 80 percent noncombatants... Palestinian fatalities have consisted of more combatants than noncombatants
# The �combatant gap� � that is, the �excess� of Palestinian combatants killed by Israel over Israeli combatants killed by Palestinians � has continued to grow over the life of the conflict.
# If we restrict our view to each side's noncombatants killed by the opposing side, the gap in the percentage of females among those killed is even wider: 40 percent of Israeli noncombatants killed by Palestinians have been female, compared to 8.4 percent of Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel... In absolute terms, many more Israeli females have been killed than Palestinian females. If we include combatants and fatalities for whom responsibility is unclear, 70 Palestinian females have been killed; the corresponding Israeli figure is 190... Restricting ourselves to cases where clear responsibility can be reliably assigned for noncombatant deaths, we see that Israel has been responsible for killing 52 Palestinian noncombatant females, while Palestinians have killed 187 Israeli noncombatant females � more than three times as many

And so on... The cool thing about this part of the fisking is that it points out that this guy is not only a hypocrite because he intentionally takes figures out of context to demonize Israel, but he's also a flaming idiot when it comes to math. Want to read his line again? "For the math-impaired, this means that Palestinian deaths... outnumber Israeli deaths three to one. " Snide little hypocrite. Moving on.

According to a recent study of Middle East coverage in the San Jose Mercury News -- a representative part of that intractable U.S. liberal media -- "the killing of an Israeli was over 19 times more likely to show up in a front-page headline than the killing of a Palestinian." Nor was the paper likely to mention who's footing the bill -- only 1.1 percent of articles mentioned U.S. aid to Israel. Similar figures exist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
This may explain why only 12 percent of respondents in an August 2002 poll correctly identified Israel as "mainly to blame for the violence."

Sure it's clunky and awkwardly written. But we're past that by now.
First, I actually remember when this poll came out, and the significant result was that "When asked who is mainly to blame for the violence in the Middle East, those who blame both equally has increased from 26% in July last year to 44% today [August 2002]." Now, you're thinking - "what? this guy insists on context, but then makes it seem as if the media is fooling the public into supporting Israel?!?! What a flaming hypocrite!!" And I sympathize. But I'm afraid it gets worse.
You see, they count each causality for their figures, not each attack!! That means that, for instance, when there's a spectacular suicide bombing in Israel and 50 people die, it makes the front page and each of those people get counted individually!! I know, I know - can you believe the mendacity?
Read it again: "math-impaired." But wait - this next part is even more sanctimonious and snide.

Those of us concerned with reality may also be interested in a larger view of human rights in the Occupied Territories.
With all the subtlety of a G Unit album, Israel is building a "security fence," which, as even the hawkish New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, "is apparently part of a broader [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest."

So Kevin Funk, who I imagine is at most a B-/C+ humanities undergrad at Pitt, authoritatively describes Tom Friedman as a hawk while telling the rest of us to be "concerned with reality." His opinion of "reality" can be usefully contrasted with that of Dr. Cori Dauber (Phd, Northwestern), arguably the leading security studies media analyst in academia, who takes it as a given that Tom Friedman has a basically liberal bent.
"Concerned with reality." Is there a name for Funk's combination of flaming ignorance and sneering self-righteousness? Please email me - I'm running out of synonyms for "idiot."
I won't get into the land-grab issue. It would involve introducing some background to the Israeli/Arab conflict that is found nowhere in this article (why introduce nuance, right?), which would be satisfying, but might get in the way of highlighting over and over and over again how this hairpiece is wrong about even the things he does write about.

The list of abuses goes on, from Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement that have "crippled the Palestinian economy" (over two-thirds of Gaza Strip residents now live in poverty), to the "war crime" of the destruction of more than 4,000 Palestinian homes in the last three years.

Do you wonder why war crime is in scare quotes? It's because Israel's house demolitions are so specifically targeted against terrorists that they don't rise to the level of collective punishment, which is what is necessary for a war crime. So when Funk says war crimes, he actually means not war crimes. I know, it gets confusing (for those of you keep track at home, this is the point in the article where he actually crossed the line from blatant hypocrisy to out-right lying).
And although I suppose it's overkill by now, it's probably also worth noting: (a) that Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement have been repeatedly lifted and re-imposed after suicide bombers slipped out within a couple of days (it took me 30 seconds on Google to confirm this with specific examples from Bethlehem and Tul Karm - so you can see what kind of research a Pitt News opinion writer is obligated to do these days), and (b) that the threat house demolitions directly stop terrorist bombers from killing Israeli schoolchildren.

Lest we operate under the delusion that this constitutes yet another instance of a faraway people who suffer through no fault of our own, a glance at the downright insulting U.S.-brokered "peace process" is in order.

Lest we operate under the delusion that this constitutes yet another instance of a faraway people who suffer through no fault of our own, a glance at the history of the Middle East shows not that the vast majority of the Arab world has rejected peace in the past, but that the vast majority of the Palestinian public supports continued war with Israel even if they were offered peace again.

The United States, furnishing Israel with around $3 billion each year in military aid, has single-handedly rejected dozens of U.N. Security Council resolutions on the conflict that are accepted virtually unanimously throughout the world.

Ahh. The United Nations.

The fate -- and the blood -- of the Palestinian people lies in our hands.

I agree. For instance, if Clinton had never brought Arafat to the White House, just think how many lives could have been saved. If Carter had never pressured Begin to give up the Sinai, Israel would have a self-sufficient economy and not even need U.S. loans.
Of course, it's probably unfair to use historical examples. For brave activist students like Funk, the Middle East conflict didn't really begin before he picked up his first International Socialist Organization pamphlet as a starry-eyed college first-year.
Even his signature is annoying:

To preempt accusations of anti-Semitism, Kevin would like to say that only people with strong fascist tendencies equate the criticism of a government with the criticism of a religion.

First of all, I'm not sure what the reference to fascism here is supposed to do. I think it's a word he learned as a synonym for "bad." I'm also getting increasingly tired of the Left's criticism-stifling strategy of fighting the straw-argument of anti-Semitic accusations (it's a weird reversal - they bait or accuse their opponents of accusing them of anti-Semitism so that they can get indignant about being called anti-Semites). But Funk isn't anti-Semitic. I don�t think he�s capable of anti-Semitism - that would require conspiracy theories, which in turn require cognitive integration of facts, which requires at least a bare minimum of fidelity to the way the world actually is rather than the way Kevin wants it to be.
So, in the interest of restoring the Pitt News to a level of respectability, I�ll review the relevant and necessary facts that the paper should remember: (1) Either Kevin Funk is criminally ignorant or he's a flaming hypocrite. Either way, he should be forced to pass a series of basic aptitude tests before being allowed to publish again. (2) Penn State still sucks.

this man represents us at the UN

UN Ambassador John Bolton will be the keynote speaker at the crème de la crème of events for the humanitarian minded, the annual award dinner of the Zionist Organization of America. Bolton will be receiving the highly-coveted "Defender of Israel" award (perhaps the name "Defender of colonialistic far-right Zionist militarism" was rejected for being too clunky a title) from an organization that the skeptical observer may be inclined to accuse of supporting forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing - what else could be interpreted out of an organization which warns "about the dangers of creating a Palestinian Arab state"?

you know it's bad when Blair has to talk you out of bombing things

According to the Daily Mirror, Pres. Bush spoke with Prime Minister Blair in 2004 of bombing the Al-Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar (yes, Sarah, unlike Iran and Turkey, Qatar is an Arab country). This of course actually happened at Al-Jazeera offices both in Kabul and in Baghdad, where one journalist was killed - which is fine by some.

holy "missing the point," batman

I was forwarded the email that follows from a friend who contacted the Pitt News about its chronic bouts of stupidity (see for one amongst myriad examples) and the rebuttal letter which they are now refusing to print, only to have this intellectual equivalent of rotting deer carcass sent back his way from one Jessica Lear, editor in chief.

I chose not to print the rebuttal because it would lend some sort of legitimacy to Scott's original column, suggesting that it even deserves the attention of the rebuttal. What I did print last week was a retraction and an apology to the readers, explaining our policy on plagiarism (which is a no-tolerance policy) and the actions I took in response. The writer was dismissed and banned from ever working for The Pitt News again.
Thanks for your concern.

Jessica Lear
Editor in Chief
The Pitt News

So, and follow me on this wild ride kiddos, she is choosing not to print the letter that she A) promised to run in the paper, and B) asked to be resubmitted several times, with the reason that printing harsh criticism of something apparently lends to it unmerited "attention." The very face of journalism itself will surely be shaken from its foundations with this remarkable contribution to media theory, and, to take one relatively small example, Ms. Lear should now begin advocating that the BBC remove mention of U.S. troops having killed three children at a checkpoint, because this sort of reporting gives too much credibility to the violence of the U.S. occupation in the first place.

Simply following the tortured logic of media commissars is a task of Herculean proportions.

An open letter to Ms. Jessica Lear, editor in chief of the Pitt News

By Michael Butler and Kevin Funk

November 17, 2005


We are writing to you, Ms. Lear, about the recent instance of plagiarism in the Pitt News, and your response to this incident. In the article in question, a Nov. 4 column entitled "Rhetoric against Israel Unfair," Mr. Scott Simeone lifted nearly an entire paragraph directly from an Anti-Defamation League report without attribution.

Once this came to our attention, we met with you on Nov. 7 to discuss this issue. In the course of our meeting, you expressed grave concern over Mr. Simeone's actions, which you informed us were grounds for "immediate dismissal." Further, you stated that you would write a column explaining the Pitt News' policies regarding plagiarism and how the newspaper would proceed in this matter. Additionally, you committed to printing a letter which we submitted the next day, on Nov. 8.

After three days without hearing from you or seeing any mention of this matter in print, we again contacted you on Nov. 11, one week after the column was printed. In this telephone conversation, you told us to expect our letter to be printed on Nov. 14 or that you would contact us by this date.

On Nov. 15, you included a brief retraction in the newspaper apologizing for the article and explaining the Pitt News' policy on plagiarism, which curiously was not published on your newspaper's website. Our letter failed to appear in either medium, prompting us to contact you again. You asked that we resubmit our letter without any specific references to Mr. Simeone's plagiarism, which we did later the same day.

As of Nov. 17, you still have not published our letter nor responded to us in any form.

We are therefore appealing to the University of Pittsburgh community, as well as those concerned with fair and accurate reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to contact Ms. Lear and the Pitt News to ensure that we are able to respond to Mr. Simeone's plagiarized and one-sided commentary.


Jessica Lear, Editor in Chief
editor@pittnews.com
412-648-7985
412-648-8491 (fax)


To see the original article, which has since been taken down, go to the copy of the Google cached version that has been uploaded to Michael’s Pitt webspace here. A copy of the most recent version of our letter is pasted below:

According to George Orwell, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Perhaps never before have such words been more applicable than in regards to Scott Simeone’s recent column, “Rhetoric against Israel Unfair,” which vacillates between complete unintelligibility and logical fallacies that would give pause to the Flat Earth Society.

For a writer who claims in his article’s title to be uncovering a wave of “rhetoric against Israel,” Simeone provides only one actual example – that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Exposing a deluge of such sentiments certainly requires more than one citing of a hardliner.

Furthermore, he states that Israel is “surrounded by 22 Arab neighbors” in “the heart of a turbulent region.” Israel, in fact, is “surrounded” by only four “Arab neighbors” – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Of the other 18 countries generally considered as “Arab,” only in Simeone’s parallel universe do the Indian Ocean islands of Comoros or the western African nations of Mauritania and Morocco constitute the potential threats to Israeli security that he implies.

While Simeone extols Israel’s “willingness to appease its surrounding neighbors,” it is in reality still occupying parts of both Syria (the Golan Heights) and Lebanon (the Shebaa Farms), and continuing its stranglehold of and brutal military offensive into the same Gaza Strip from which it has supposedly “disengaged.” Far from Simeone’s radar, apparently, is the still-occupied West Bank, home to constantly-expanding and illegal Israeli colonies, as well as a population of millions of Palestinians forced to survive in ever-shrinking Bantustans.

It is bad enough for a writer to baselessly make claims of anti-Israeli rhetoric, worse still to justify military occupation and policies reminiscent of South African apartheid.

Faces of the Fallen

Moral responsibility stares you in the face.

Praying with Their Eyes Closed: Reflections on the Disengagement from Gaza

Sara Roy, Harvard Middle East specialist, penned an article worth reading, despite its intimidating length, on Gaza's economic situation (hint: Palestinians "are currently experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history," she writes) and the recent "disengagement" plan.

She cites the plan itself to the effect that "it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including major Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel." In other words, whatever it feels like. It is clearly, then, an attempt to consolidate, and NOT to end the occupation, and one in which, according to Roy, "Israel seeks, and will no doubt secure, control over Palestine while ceding all responsibility for it." Real, live, breathing bantustanization.

plagiarism at the Pitt News update

A full eight days after bringing Scott Simeone's sentence-pilfering to her attention (see my original entry for background), Pitt News editor in chief Jessica Lear has finally addressed this issue in print. Below I have transcribed her letter, hidden as it was - I in fact had to transcribe it, since it mysteriously does not appear in the online version of the paper.

To the readers:

I’d like to extend my sincerest apologies for a column that ran Nov. 4 titled “Rhetoric against Israel unfair,” in which several lines were taken from the Anti-Defamation League’s web site without attribution. The editors were unaware of this plagiarism, and the employee has since been dismissed.

According to Pitt News policy, plagiarism is defined as “submitting another person’s work, whether previously published or not, as your own, or taking portions of another person’s work, and presenting them as your own in your work without properly attributing them to the person who created the work.” The consequence is that “the employee will be immediately fired from the newspaper and will never be permitted to work for the newspaper again.”

Jessica Lear
Editor in Chief


It is beyond me why it took better than a week for her to write 119 words, nearly half of which were merely reprinted from the Pitt News' ethics manual (yes, such a thing does apparently exist). Speaking of ethics, Ms. Lear has also thus fair failed to comply with her promise to print a letter that we submitted. Somebody send her a new pair of shoes, she's been dragging her feet so much.

Italian TV :US used chemical weapons on civilians in Fallujah then tried to kill reporters reporting on it

According to a recent documentary aired on Italian television, available here for download/viewing, U.S. forces are guilty of war crimes in Fallujah.

The mainstream U.S. press, that bastion of all that is liberal and anti-American, has little to say about it.

"xenophobic orthodox rabbis who hold Christianity in contempt embracing dispensationalists who look forward to the...end of the Jews"

It's not a new theme, but Jeff Halper's article on Israel's role "as an Extension of U.S. empire" is worth a read.

Halper clearly and concisely describes the symbiotic drunken hook-up that is Zionist/neo-con relations. He cites the spawn of this melee, a manifesto called the Jerusalem Declaration, to the effect that the failure to create an Israel that encompasses all of historic Palestine "may well spell doom for civilization itself"; creating a "PLO state" in the West Bank and Gaza would constitute "a historical injustice of colossal proportion."

Give it a read, then send Pat Robertson a congrajulatory note for recieving Israel's Freedom Award in 2004.

watch out for Comoros

It is a veritable rite of passage for Zionist apologists to wax agonizingly about Israel's tragic position amongst 22 Arab countries who are conspiring in a region-wide attempt to drive Israel into the Mediterranean.

Witness the following representative example:

Israel is a tiny country, with only six million inhabitants (a million of whom are Arabs). It is surrounded by 22 Arab countries, with 300 million people.

The purpose of such a comparison is twofold: first, to demonstrate that Israel teeters on the crumbling edge of imminent destruction seven days a week and twice on Sundays, and second, should the first argument fail to stick, that the Arab hordes already possess massive tracts of land - why not allow just a little bit of colonialism?

I'll refrain from commenting on the second, for what should be obvious reasons, and instead turn to the first. Who is this international cabal seeking the destruction of the chosen people? The problem is that it doesn't exist - at least not in anything resembling the dire terms in which it is described.

We’ll start with a basic fact: Israel only has, in a strict definition of "surround," four Arab neighbors - Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. And, problematic to those attempting to fabricate this group's intransigent hostility, these four countries all fall into one of two categories. Either they have peace treaties with Israel (Jordan, Egypt), or Israel is still occupying parts of their land (Syria’s Golan Heights, Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms). In other words, the only surrounding countries with which Israel does not currently have a peace treaty are countries whose land it is illegally sitting on.

Interesting to note is that Israel has previously occupied territory administered by Egypt and Jordan as well – in the course of the Six-Day War, Israel captured both East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt. One might (rightfully) point out that Jordan and Egypt had little right to the land themselves. But if that’s the case, then neither does Israel. And in a broader sense, what nation-state has a “right” to any piece of territory?

Returning to Israel’s supposedly tenuous position, forever a tremor away from being swallowed by the same menacing neighbors whose land it has a record of stealing, one is left to wonder just which of the 18 non-bordering Arab states will be behind the quake.

• Is it Comoros, whose 600,000 inhabitants live primarily on 3 volcanic and desperately poor islands off of the not-so nearby southeast coast of Africa?


• Or Iraq, which is currently occupied by the military of Israel’s simultaneous overlord and vassal state?


• Maybe Mauritania or Morocco, which are closer to “surrounding” Brazil than they are to engulfing Israel?


• Western Sahara, one of the world’s most barren and unpopulated areas, and whose independence as an actual country is in dispute?


• Somalia, which lacks a central government?

Who’s next, the guy who bagged my groceries at Giant Eagle yesterday?

What becomes clear then, is that this tired propaganda line is indeed malarkey, and should go the way of the dodo. If Israel is indeed facing existential threats from anyone, it’s Iran – a country that is definitively non-Arab. Credit the hubris of Zionists for harping on a classification of countries that supposedly imperil Israel’s very existence, all while ignoring an actual adversary. Such is the work of deception.

"We hate France and France hates us"

Such reads the headline of a Guardian article that gives voice to several participants in recent rioting. Sylla, identified only by this name, had this to say:

"We burn because it's the only way to make ourselves heard, because it's solidarity with the rest of the non-citizens in this country, with this whole underclass."

Hard to argue with that.

I don't claim to be at all knowledgeable about European affairs, but I know enough to be aware that France has a legendarily weak conception of certain political freedoms – bear witness to the "secularity" laws in effect in public schools.

Well, it’s getting worse – much worse. French authorities have now resorted to detaining bloggers - good thing I’m not North African. Even more chillingly, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy dropped this payload:

"I have asked the prefects to deport them from our national territory without delay, including those who have a residency visa," he said. (emphasis added)

According to the article, three-fourths of the French public supports the state of emergency, under which "Police are entitled to carry out house searches and ban public meetings" – then again, we might be on the cusp of a new republic before any of this matters.

Anyone have any information on whether this is spreading to other sectors of society – students, workers, etc.?

a diffusion in the Peruvian-Chilean conflict

It isn't Israel-Palestine, but there's certainly no love lost between Chile and its neighbor to the north. They've fought over everything from land to who has bragging rights on Pisco, and I have borne personal witness to Chileans swearing on the grave of Bernard O'Higgins that Peruvian children learn to hate Chile in school.

Continuing in the vein of this historical bad blood (and the fact that Chile stole part of southern Peru in the aforementioned War of the Pacific), the South American neighbors are now involved in a sea border dispute. Let's take a look at the border proposals made by both countries, LINEA SEGUN CHILE referring to the LINE ACCORDING TO CHILE, and likewise with Peru (courtesy of BBC News):



Again, forget about past Chilean imperialism, and the catfighting over distilled grapes - whose line approaches a more balanced and just solution? It sure ain't coming from Santiago; Chile's proposal leaves Peru only a dime-thin sliver of Pacific waters, while Lima's represents a more 50-50 split.

Well, at least they can work together on extradition. Point being, don't expect a war. The real question is when will Bolivia get its sea access back.

one fewer Zionist journalist...a victory for the people

While scanning through a recent issue of my alma mater's oily propaganda rag of a student newspaper (a publication to which this humble blogger used to contribute), I and a friend came across a mostly unintelligible mess of Zionist rambling. Standard fare for U.S. media.

It soon became apparent, however, that the few parts that actually bordered on coherence had actually been plagiarized - note the following comparisons between Mr. Simeone's remarks and an Anti-Defamation League report on imagined "Anti-Israel Activity on American College Campuses"...

Scott Simeone’s column:
“Many rallies and events have gone beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and
have been marked by hateful attacks against Jews and the Jewish state,
crossing the line into blatant anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Defamation League:
“Many rallies and events, often organized or supported by radical Muslim
student groups, have gone beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and have
been marked by hateful attacks against Jews and the Jewish state,
crossing the line into blatant anti-Semitism.”


Scott Simeone’s column:
“Colleges and universities across the United States have recently
experienced highly charged anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activity.”

Anti-Defamation League:
“Colleges and universities across the United States have experienced
periods of highly charged anti-Israel and anti-Zionist activity…”

Whew. It's bad enough when you justify forced population transfers, colonial dispossession, and policies reminiscent of apartheid, even worse when you have to plagiarize to do so. I would advise all to cast a wary eye towards similar incarnations in their own media markets.

To the credit of the Pitt News, Mr. Simeone will be relieved of his duties, meaning they'll have to find another unimaginative hack that can wash us away with deluges of stories celebrating Israel's legendary restraint. Unfortunately, there's certainly no shortage of such people.