Bigfoot News July 11, 2012

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper passes peer review, now awaiting publication date. From sources inside the Ketchum camp, I strongly believe that Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA paper has finally passed peer review with its endless requests for changes and revisions, major and minor. When did it pass review? I am not sure. At least by yesterday, June 10, 2012 and maybe earlier. When will it publish? I do not know. It depends how long journals wait from when they approve a paper until when they publish it. I know that at the end of May, Ketchum said that all revisions had been completed, and that the journal was only asking for some photo and video evidence to complete the paper, and the team was working to round that up. A recent post on Ketchum’s site stated:

Melba Ketchum: “Everyone keeps asking for posts. Just waiting with no control over timing so there is nothing to report! It is out of my hands at this time!!!!!”

Checking in with sources inside in the Ketchum camp, I was able to confirm from multiple persons that the paper is finished and has finally passed peer review. Now all Ketchum is waiting for is a publication date, and she has no idea when that is coming. This is great news! Excellent new video out by Facebook Find Bigfoot. This video shows a Bigfoot watching boys playing with go-carts in Northern Pennsylvania. There was a camera attached to the go-cart and video was shot while they were riding. After they went home and viewed the video, they saw the Bigfoot, but it only appeared for a few seconds. This video was sent in to Dr. Jeff Meldrum, and he thought it was interesting enough that he passed it along to FB/FB for analysis. They are correct. I believe that this is a Bigfoot. Also shows some excellent footage of a Bigfoot shot in Del Norte County, California in 2009. I am quite certain that this is a Bigfoot. I don’t want to tell you why. Hoaxers are extremely crafty and they are always trying to perfect their Bigfoot hoaxes, which are endless and continuous. The more information we give them about about what a real Bigfoot looks like, the more they will perfect their hoaxes and make them better and better. They are already good enough so it’s often hard to tell the hoaxes from the real thing, and it’s getting to the point where even the best photo on Earth of a Bigfoot, such as the Hovey photo, will be denounced by a loud majority as a confirmed hoax when it’s nothing of the sort. Video is here. Very nice Kansas Bigfoot photo posted by Facebook Find Bigfoot.

Two Bigfoots along a river in Kansas.
Taken by Greg Wood on February 5, 2012 in Sedgewick County, Kansas in a remote area along the Ninnescaw River near Lake Cheney southwest of Wichita. The Kansas Auburn Bigfoot video that made the rounds earlier was also shot in this county. The BFRO database has three sighting reports along this same river. The original photo is much further away, and the Bigfoots can barely be seen as tiny dots. What you see above is a dramatically blow up version of the same photo. These photos were originally discovered by the Crypto Crew, who found them on the photographer’s blog. In foreground is what I think is a female Bigfoot who is retreating from the cameraman. The large male Bigfoot is watching from behind the tree and covering for her as she retreats. There may be a baby somewhere in the photo, but I can’t see it. Great photo, and I do think it is real. The entire photo set is here. Nothing more to report, sorry! They’ve (Ketchum and her gang) killed off most of my sources, and it will be hard to get some new ones. Every time we get a new one, Ketchum and her gang kills them off pretty quickly. It’s endless cat and mouse, like espionage and counterespionage. Very tiresome. All this secrecy is surely not necessary.

Review of Peter Fritzsche's Germans Into Nazis, by Robert John

Repost from the old site. I am proud to present a book review by a new guest author, Robert John. His biography is at the end of the piece. In this piece, he reviews a book by Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis. This book takes on, in part, a thesis by a best-selling book by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen’s book was wildly controversial, to say the least. His thesis was that Nazism was a normal evolution of the virulent anti-Semitism inherent in German society for decades, if not centuries. An anti-Semitism spanning all of society, from top to bottom, urban to rural. Goldhagen gives examples of how ordinary Germans knew full well the nature of the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, but either did nothing about it, or cheered it on. He cites postcards sent back by German soldiers to family at home, telling gleefully about how the soldiers were massacring Jews on the Front. The reaction to Goldhagen’s book was ferocious, much of it coming from conservative Catholics, anti-Semites and German nationalists but also from serious scholars. To this day, Goldhagen is a favorite whipping boy of anti-Semites and Holocaust revisionists and deniers, except that their own behavior seems to prove Goldhagen correct. So those who hate Jews take exception to Goldhagen saying that Germany was a nation of Jew-haters. One would think they would cheer this assertion on? Regarding this review, here are some facts for those lacking background in this matter: After World War 1, Germany was hobbled at the Treaty of Versailles with horrible reparations that were essentially unpayable and ruined the economy. John points out correctly that Versailles led logically to the rise of Nazism. Immediately afterwards, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, German Communists attempted to overthrow the state. They were defeated. German anti-Communists, including most of the middle class, noted that many of the leaders of the Communist revolutions in Russia and Germany were Jewish. History is not kind to losers. For better or worse, German Jews were blamed for a few of them having led the failed German revolution. In the 1920’s, Germany had a series of very unstable governments known as the Weimar Republic. At the same time, there was widespread political violence in the streets, often between Communists and socialists on one side and nationalists and proto-fascists on the other. The economy was devastated and it took a wheelbarrow full of worthless money to buy a loaf of bread. At the same time, a wealthy and decadent class lived it up in the nightclubs of Berlin. Many of this decadent artist class were Jewish and many were also homosexuals and bisexuals. The movie, Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, about the life of gay author Christopher Isherwood, was set in Weimar Berlin. Comedians and artists, many of whom were Jewish, ridiculed German nationalism and the things that patriotic Germans held dear to their hearts. This nationalism, along with traditional German culture, was held by these artists as having led to the war and the disastrous defeat. Enraged German nationalists saw only decadent urbanites, many of them Jewish, attacking German culture and values. Further, the decadent lifestyle in Berlin enraged traditional elements in Germany. The wild life of the rich in the cities aroused rage amongst the immiserated poor, workers and middle classes. While German Gentiles were being economically ruined, many German Jews had avoided economic destruction by stashing their money outside the country early in the crisis. No doubt this led to charges that the Jews were failing to invest in Germany. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, as German property values plummeted, German Jews were able to return bring their money back and buy up much of the country for 10 cents on the dollar. By 1932, German Jews, After quotas on Jews in government jobs, the professions and universities were lifted in the 1920’s, the ranks of attorneys, doctors, judges and law professors were quickly filled by high-IQ Jews. 1/2 of German law professors and Berlin attorneys were Jewish. 1/3 to 1/2 of Berlin doctors were Jewish. 2 Many Germans were outraged at the overnight Jewish success and implied humiliation of German Gentiles and insisted that the Jews must have cheated to get these positions. Just before they seized power, Nazi propagandists made much use of these figures. They also claimed that most politicians and civil servants were Jews, which was not true. Only a few high-ranking civil servants were Jewish. There were few Jewish politicians – during the entire Weimar Period, there were only 8 Jewish members of the Reichstag from Berlin. After 1922, there were almost no Jewish Cabinet ministers. Similar claims that most pickpockets were Jewish and that German prisoners were filled with Jews were also false. Looking at figures from 1925, only 1.0 As you can see, the Nazis were engaging in some scapegoating and out and out lying about German Jews. The Weimar Regimes (republican democracy) seemed to be powerless to remedy any of these problems. Democracy came to be seen as symbolic with ineffectual government that fiddled while the nation burned, with decadent intellectuals and artists who attacked beloved German culture and values, with an outrageous gap between rich and poor, and with a disastrous economy. So the Nazis ran on a platform of “the Hell with democracy”. At the same time, similar fascist movements were spreading across Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe, where most nations had fascist governments during this period. Even Finland and the Baltics had fascist governments. Fritzsche’s book points out that the Nazis succeeded due to good old politics, Karl Rove style. They appealed to workers, women and liberals, though their program was secretly hostile to all three. They attacked social conservatism and the rich while hiding the fact that support for these elements was an essential nature of their project. Even the name “National Socialists” was chosen along the same lines, to co-opt the rising Socialist and Communist movements in Germany. By playing such dishonest political games, they gained support of socialists, Communists, liberals and even some Jews. While the socialists and Communists seemed boring or dangerous, the Nazis were all about getting Germans to feel good about themselves and have fun at the same time. Instead of Reagan’s “Morning in America”, it was “Morning in Germany”. After they seized power, no German socialist or Communist was fooled by the Nazi lies about being a socialist party. In fact, at its core, Nazism was hostile first and foremost to liberals, union members, socialists and Communists. Communists, socialists and union members were the first to go the concentration camps, Dachau being the most famous. The Jews were number four on the list, after these three! After they seized power, at the Night of the Long Knives, the Left Nazis were all killed or driven out of the party. Through the 1930’s, most of the German Left went to ground, fled the country or took up arms against the government. The German Communist Party declared war on the Nazi regime during this period. The name “National Socialists” has confused many people, including rightwing ideologues. There is much more to the refutation of the disgusting rightwing lie, “Nazis were a leftwing, socialist movement” but I will save it for another post. I realize that a quick, ignorant, emotional read of this piece could lead one to the conclusion that it is some defense of Nazism. If you read it closely, intelligently and soberly, you should notice that it is nothing of the kind. I hope you enjoy John’s piece.

Those Abnormal Germans? Understanding Goldhagen Robert John*

Germans into Nazis Peter Fritzsche Harvard University Press, 1998 269 pages. ISBN 0-674-35091-X The history of this century has been dominated by the horrors that came from the inferno of World War I. The rise of Nazism in Germany is only comprehensible by taking into account the national hardships and frustration provoked by defeat and the harsh and punitive treaty of Versailles, in which President Wilson played the leading role. Peter Fritzsche, professor of history, University of Illinois, and the author of Reading Berlin 1900 (Harvard), gives an account of what gave the German National Socialists their electoral victories in 1932 and why. Why were 37.4 percent of German votes cast for the Nazis in the July 1932 legislative elections, when for the first time they became the largest party; the SPD was second with 21.6 percent? Half a century after their destruction, new accounts of German National Socialism, and its leader, still contend for space on bookstore shelves. Many seek to explain German support for a leader portrayed as the most dangerous archfiend of recorded history, or to analyze the dynamics of that leader himself. Daniel Goldhagen, in his best-selling book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, suggested that Hitler was little more than a midwife in a German war against the Jews. Goldhagen blamed successful appeal to widespread German anti-Jewish prejudice for the Nazi victories. He alleged that by the time Hitler came to power in 1933, racial anti-Semitism had already made Germany “pregnant with murder.” Fritzsche gives an account of some of the confusion of patriotism and social turbulence from 1918 to 1933. He quotes the Berliner Tageblatt of 10 November 1918:

Yesterday morning . . .everything was still there – the Kaiser, the chancellor, the police chief – yesterday afternoon nothing of all that existed any longer.

The March 1917 Menshevik Revolution in Russia was being re-enacted in Germany, with Friedrich Ebert playing the role that Kerensky had played in Russia the year before. With knowledge of the red terror the Bolsheviks were waging in Russia, and some awareness that the majority of their leaders were Jewish, gave grounds for the development of a counterrevolution with anti-Semitic elements. Like most other historians of the Allied Powers, Fritzsche omits significant reference to Allied failure to honor President Wilson’s Fourteen Points for peace which were announced by him on 8th January 1918. It was on their basis, and Wilson’s declaration a month later: that there were to be no annexations, no contributions, and no punitive damages, that General Ludendorff had recommended to Field-Marshall Hindenburg that Germany ask for an Armistice. Diplomatic exchanges followed until 23rd of October. On that day, Wilson informed the German government that, were he compelled to negotiate with the military rulers and monarchist autocrats, he would demand not peace negotiations but a general surrender. The Kaiser abdicated. In his haste to present the circumstances and appeal of National Socialist policies to the German people at the beginning of the 1930’s, Fritzsche also skips reference to the continued Allied food blockade of Germany for nearly six months after the war had ended. Even the German Baltic fishing fleet, which had augmented German food supplies during the war, was prevented from putting to sea. (See The Politics of Hunger: The Allied blockade of Germany, 1915-1919, Vincent, C. Paul, Ohio Univ. Press, 1985, and the Kathë Kollwitz lithograph Deutschlands Kinder hungern – Germany’s Children are Starving.) In the spring of 1919, both the putting down of Communist insurrections in Berlin, Bremen, and Munich and breaking of general strikes in Halle, Magdeberg and Braunschweig by a Freikorps of nationalist volunteers, temporarily suspended the threat of a repetition of the Bolsheviks’ October revolution in Russia. When the Freikorps finally disbanded, they left behind a loose confederacy of secret organizations, veterans’ groups, and rifle clubs. Organization by both the Left and the Right seems to have satisfied a popular need for feelings of solidarity and renewal. By 1924 there were signs that this social activity was taking a more coherent political form. New organizations were also distinctive for being more open to women, who established their own auxiliaries, and attended patriotic celebrations. Activities for women, common in international socialist organizations, were included in nationalist events in community life. Brass bands and choral societies joined in what looked more like a family celebration than a wartime field service. The wife of an engineer described a new look in her city streets: groups of young people passing by, singing patriotic songs. In midsummer her daughter Irmgard, living in Nordheim, looked forward to Sunday’s flag consecration and dance.

Everywhere there is great excitement . . . all the regimental associations are coming, even the riflery clubs. (p. 134)

Fritzsche chooses such illustrations of entertainment and excitement, rather than negative appeals, that drew many of the young and others away from the blandness of the Social Democrats, and the preaching of international revolution, “Workers of the world: Unite,” of the Communists. ‘For good reasons or bad, Germans turned indifferent to the Weimar Republic, but they did not remain inactive or apathetic. The real consequence of the revolution was not so much the parliamentary government it secured as the organization and activism of thousands of constituents it made possible. The new Germany can best be found in the humdrum mobilization of interest groups, veterans’ associations, and party branches and in the self-authorization of a hundred voices, libelous, illiberal, and chauvinistic as they may have been. It is a sad but compelling paradox that the hostile defamations of the president of the republic were as indicative of democratization as the presidency of good-willed Fritz Ebert himself’ (p.136). In the hard economic times of 1930,when the social welfare programs of the state were being cut back, the Nazis erected a “rudimentary shadow welfare state” for their supporters, responding to the crisis in a concrete way. They never made the mistake of Hugenberg’s German Nationalists of holding political meetings in the best hotel in town. During a metalworkers strike, striking party members were fed three times daily in Nazi pubs. Womens’ groups associated with the party were particularly active. National Socialist speeches and propaganda repudiated the narrow politics on the “reactionary” bourgeois parliamentarians and the proliferating interest groups and splinter parties. In speech after speech at mass rallies, Hitler and his followers tended to address voters as citizens, rather than as blocs or constituents, and repeated again and again the need to solve local problems by liberating the entire nation from republican misrule. (In Britain a National Government was set up in 1931 with slogans of unification, patriotism, insulation, planning, etc.) The National Socialist message brought to the people in town after town was not the class consciousness of Hindenberg’s upper class, nor its representation in the primacy of ‘the class struggle’ of the Communists and Socialists; instead, national solidarity was the answer to Germany’s vexing problems: social reform, economic productivity, the shameful peace. There was a deliberate attempt to enroll Germans in a collective destiny and to present Hitler as a national savior rather than a solicitous politician (Fritzsche, p. 195). Nazi propaganda very effectively portrayed political choices in Utopian terms: here was a party that opposed the present “system” and, once in power, would rebuild the nation. It was not just the modern methods of political campaigning that the Nazis used that brought them success; it was their message. With Hitler as Chancellor, workers who had watched the Social Democrats fight long and hard and always unsuccessfully to persuade the Reichstag to recognize 1 May as an official holiday, looked or listened to the Leader’s May Day speech to a disciplined mass at Tempelhof in 1933. All day the radio played the songs of “miners, farmers, and soldiers.” A “symphony of work” composed by Hans-Jurgen Nierentz and Herbert Windt, featured interviews with a dock worker from Hamburg, an agricultural laborer from East Prussia, a steel worker from the Saar, a miner from the Ruhr, and a vintner from the Mosel Valley. The crowd drank beer, ate sausages, and, in the evening, marveled at the fireworks. Should one wonder why many former Communist and international Socialists who joined the Nazis, came to be called “underdone beef:” —brown on the outside, still red on the inside? The Nazis distanced themselves from liberal state administrators, social conservatives, and traditional authoritarians. They were as dismissive of the Kaiserreich as they were of the Weimar Republic. ‘In short, the Nazis were ideological innovators.’ They met popular demands for political sovereignty and social recognition and insisted that these could only be achieved through national union, which would provide Germans with an embracing sense of collective identity and a strong role in international politics.

It was this far-reaching program of renovation that made the Nazis stand out and made them attractive to a plurality of voters. If Hitler and his followers had simply recirculated the anti-Semitism of Anton Drexler’s German Workers’ Party or blustered on about the shameless Treaty of Versailles or devoted all their energies to combating the Social Democrats and other treasonous “November criminals,” the movement would have stalled completely. This is exactly what happened to Wolfgang Kappa and the Freikorpsmen of 1919-1920 and also explains the demise of Alfred Hugenberg and the German Nationalists in 1924-1930. Instead, attacks on conservatives as well as Marxists, denunciations of local power arrangements as well as the national parliament, and an affirmative vision of a prosperous, technologically advanced nation gave the Nazis a sharp ideological edge. At a time when so much civic strife is defined in terms of cultural affinities it is all the more important, if sometimes difficult, to recall the force of ideology. Long-standing ethnic hatreds, religious fundamentalisms, and transnational “civilizations” dominate contemporary discussions about instability and unrest, which are frequently understood in terms of the friction between basically essential cultural qualities that have come into contact with one another. However, the Nazi phenomenon was not a hyperventilated expression of German values, even as it pronounced the allegedly superior quality of the German people. Nor was it the pathological result of economic hard times, instead National Socialism comprised a program of cultural and social regeneration premised on the superordination of the nation and the Volk and modeled very much on the public spirit and collective militancy of the nation at war.

Fritzsche concludes:

even as the Nazis upheld an integral, almost redemptive nationalism, they created new categories of outsiders, enemies, and victims. That system was neither accidental nor unanimous’ (p.235).

Some Jewish historians have noted almost marginally that National Socialist election material did not directly appeal to anti-Jewish sentiment (for example, Avraham Barkai’s From Boycott to Annihilation, Brandeis Univ. Press, 1987, 11, Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews, Harper-Collins, 1997, 4), or Finkelstein and Birns’ A Nation On Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis, Henry Holt 1998). So why is the Goldhagen account and conclusion so different from that of Fritzsche? The parsimonious explanation is the ‘Zoom syndrome.’ This is a tendency to magnify items supporting the prejudices of the observer. Goldhagen focuses on German critics of Jews or practices associated with them, and projects these as anti-Semitism leading to a program of Jewish extermination. His premise is—unchecked criticism of Jews leads to a ‘Holocaust.’ With this ‘tunnel vision,’ he is deprived of depth and width of perspective. Leading Jewish academics are stressing the importance of incorporating the Jewish ‘experience of the Holocaust’ into the perspective of Jewish studies programs. This would help Jewish scholars to regain or maintain historical perspective. In his review of A Nation On Trial in the New York Times Book Review, Max Frankel, a former executive editor of the paper, recorded his mother’s experience in wartime Berlin in 1940 as an enemy alien Polish Jew. A commissioner of police gave her the name and location of the Gestapo chief who would give the family an exit permit.

As she thanked him and turned to leave, the commissioner suddenly asked, “Where did you say you want to go?” “To America.” “If you get there, will you tell them we’ re not all bad?” To her last day, she did.

The facts cited by both Fritzsche and Goldhagen, and other previous writers, are explained as never before, using evolutionary and social identity theory, by Professor Kevin MacDonald’s analyses of anti-Semitism published in the Praeger Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence series, in 1998 “Separation and Its Discontents: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique, and in his previously published A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Strategy, 1994. *Dr. John is a diplomatic historian, policy analyst, and a former professor of psychiatric education. He is the author of The Palestine Diary: British, American and United Nations Intervention 1914-1948, 3rd. ed. 2006, 2 volumes, with a foreword by Arnold Toynbee, and Behind the Balfour Declaration: The Hidden Origins of Today’s Mideast Crisis, 1988. He has been a U.S. correspondent for the monthly Middle East International and adviser on international affairs to the Council on American Affairs. He was presented with the 1997 Freedom Award by the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Analysis in Baden-Baden “for his outstanding work and contributions towards the fight for human rights, justice and liberty.”

Alt Left: Countering Lies About Hezbollah

Repost from the old site. Ever since the Lebanon War last summer between Hezbollah and Israel, much nonsense has been written about this organization, much of it from Zionists and US imperialists in the press. It is time for a rational overview. Lie: Hezbollah is the puppet of Iran and Syria. Not true! Is Israel the puppet of the US? Well, the US supports Israel, right? Despite the US support, Israel is not the puppet of the US. Israel does what it damned well wants. Well, yes, Hezbollah gets support from Syria and Iran, but they don’t take orders from them anymore than Israel takes orders from America. In truth, Hezbollah does what it wants. Iran was probably informed before Hezbollah started this war, but that’s about it. And Hezbollah’s autonomy from Syria is well-documented. Syria uses Hezbollah to keep up the pressure on Israel, not because they want to kill all the Jews, like insane Zionists insist, but because they want the Golan Heights back. Iran supports Hezbollah in order to support Shia power in the region, and because Hezbollah’s leadership supports the Iranian revolution and because Iran hates Israel. Lie: The Lebanon War was started by Iran to take the heat off its nuclear program. Not true! It looks like Hezbollah started the war on its own in order to try to win back some Lebanese that Israel has been holding captive for a long time. But they had no idea that the war would go this way. They thought it would just be a few days of shelling back and forth and then they would get down to some hard bargaining. They were totally taken by surprise by Israel’s response. Lie: Hezbollah “started the war”. Well, yes, Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid, killed and wounded some Israelis, then grabbed some captives and took them back to Lebanon. But to place all of the responsibility for the resulting war in which Israel destroyed Lebanon is insane. Israel’s wild response was part of a war that they had been planning for over a year, in concert with the US, and the war was conducted by both the US and Israel. In fact, Ehud Olmert has recently given testimony in Israel that he had been planning this war for months along with the neocons in the Bush Administration. The Israeli military already had advanced plans for this war that they had developed with Ariel Sharon. The neocons were trying to use the war against Hezbollah as an excuse to attack Syria, but Israel would not take the bait. They wanted to go after Hezbollah’s main backer, Iran. Since Iran could not be hit itself, the second best option was to go after Syria. The apparent purpose was to weaken Iran’s allies Syria and Hezbollah prior to an attack on Iran itself. This explains why both the US and Israel have been refusing to deal with Syria’s increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate a settlement on the Golan Heights (Syria is even willing to turn the Golan into a “peace park” and give Israelis free access to visit it. Since this war, logically, Syria has been edgy, and has been building up its forces along the border with Israel. But in the crazy paranoid Israeli mindset, this is seen as Syria preparing for a (in my opinion, an obviously suicidal) war with Israel. Even the distinguished Martin Van Creveld, Israel’s top military historian, has bought into this nonsense. What will stop the upcoming Syrian war? Let’s ask Van Creveld. Only a US attack on Iran. What will hasten it? A US withdrawal from Iraq and a US refusal to attack Iran. We can see the twisted Israeli thinking. If the US does what Israel wants, the nonexistent war can be prevented. If the US acts against Israel’s wishes in the region, the fake war can be prevented. Lie: Hezbollah is an insane terrorist group that is dedicated to killing all the Jews. Jews just love this one, since so many of them are afflicted with a paranoid-masochistic character that just eats this stuff up. It’s not true. Hezbollah is not opposed to a Jewish state, they just don’t like that Jews stole Palestine, which they did. Lebanon is a Lebanese nationalist organization. They mobilized to fight Israel when Israel annexed South Lebanon. Ten years of guerrilla war won it back for Hezbollah and Lebanon and Hezbollah were the heroes of Lebanese nationalists. Hezbollah is now fighting to get back the Shebaa Farms, Lebanese land that Israel occupies and refuses to give back to Lebanon on some very phony grounds. They have also made some noises about three or four Lebanese Shia villages that Israel conquered, ethnically cleansed and annexed in the 1948 War. Many of the people in the South, where many Palestinians live in refugee camps, and people have lived through numerous conflicts with Israel, really hate Israel, and understandably so. So here for an overview of the people’s views of Israel. Hezbollah has said that if the Palestinians accept Israel for a Palestinian state, Hezbollah will stand by that. Unfortunately, Hezbollah’s leaders have made some lamentable anti-Semitic remarks and it is disgusting that they call one of their missiles “Khaibar” in reference to the Khaibar tribe of Jews who had their men killed and their women enslaved by Mohammad. Lie: Hezbollah are radical fundamentalist Muslims, like Al Qaeda. Not so! At the beginning, Hezbollah laid down Islamic Law in south Lebanon but over time they found that it was not going over well, so since 1990 or so, they have lifted most of their restrictions. At the time, Hezbollah banned alcohol and forced women to wear headcovers. Both of those bans have now been lifted by Nasrallah. However, Hezbollah still arrests homosexuals and turns them over the Lebanese police, since I believe that homosexuality is illegal in Lebanon. They may beat some of them too. The Shia in particular seem to take a hard line against homosexuality, as the Iranian regime and the Iraq Shia have really persecuted gay men. The Iranians mostly beat them up, harass them and send them to jail for short stays. The Iraqi Shia have also been beating them, but apparently they have also killed quite a few gay men. The Shia doing this include the Dawa and SCIRI parties that the US supports in Iraq. Hezbollah’s supporters include many liberated females, I saw a video on Youtube of Lebanese women without hijabs driving a car and smoking cigarettes, then doing a belly dance, all the while saying how they supported Hezbollah. Hezbollah rallies have included quite a few beautiful young women without hijabs, and many have been dressed racily. Josh Landis tells of how during the Lebanese Civil War, when Hezbollah took over a district, they imposed Islamic Law, but it went over so poorly that they soon rescinded most of it. Lie: Well, at least Iran is a radical fundamentalist state like Al Qaeda. Nor is Iran. Women have many more rights in Iran than they do in the Gulf. The dress code is loosely adhered to and the religious police no longer bother mixed couples. Fredericks of Hollywood stores dot Tehran. Middle class and upper middle class young people are engaging in lots of promiscuous sex and not much is being done to stop them. One of Iran’s top race car drivers is a woman. There are many women in Parliament and most or all professions are open to women. Compare to Saudi Arabia where only Alcohol, marijuana and especially opium are widely consumed at parties and not much is done about that. Prostitution is widespread, especially in the religious city of Qom, where they serve the religious students. There, throngs of young women meet men and go before mullahs to get a temporary marriage in order to have sex. The temporary marriage is merely a cover for prostitution. There is so much prostitution in Tehran that the religious leadership has suggested having official houses for them, all under the banner of temporary marriage. The religious leadership has also recognized transsexualism and one of the top mullahs is a transsexual. Temporary marriage is widespread, and a famous Iranian female parliamentarian has had sexual relationships with many men, including top mullahs, under this rubric and has written about it. Also, Iran is much more democratic than most of the Sunni regimes, and this is one of the things that the Sunni regimes fear most about Iran. Supporters of this theory can always come up with this or that atrocity to demonstrate how Iran is an Al Qaeda-like state, but the truth is more complicated than that. Lie: Hezbollah has savagely persecuted the Israeli-backed South Lebanese Army. After Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, most people expected that there would be widespread paybacks for the South Lebanese Army (most of whom were Shia, not Maronites as it is commonly thought. In fact, after Israel withdrew, Hezbollah issued a directive forbidding any attacks on the South Lebanon Army members, many of whom just went home. Quite a few others defected over to Israel. That’s pretty amazing, considering that the French Resistance executed 10,000 “traitors” during World War 2. It’s also highly untypical behavior for a “terrorist” group. Lie: Hezbollah is a terrorist group. Well, for the most part it is a Lebanese resistance organization, and the vast majority of its attacks are against Israeli military targets. It’s true that during the war, they fired rockets at Israeli cities and killed some civilians, but many of those attacks were actually aimed at strategic targets like arms factories and military bases that Israel cynically put right in the middle of Arab towns, so that if they enemy attacked, they would kill a lot of Arabs by accident. On the other hand, Israel killed far more civilians in this war, and somehow avoided the “terrorist” label. Isn’t that kind of unfair? Lie: Hezbollah and Iran are out to kill or convert all the Sunnis and then attack and kill or convert all the infidels in a world war, after which everyone will be a Shia Muslim. I could not believe that people actually believed that one, but I heard a number of (mostly) Zionists and US imperialists repeating this bit of Sunni paranoia. On the Sunni conversion, see here. On the rest of it, forget it. Shia is the nigger of the (Muslim) World. The relationship between Sunni and Shia is similar to that between Whites and Blacks during the Jim Crow South, with the Sunnis being the Whites and Shia being the Blacks. The notion of Shia takeover is similar to fantasies of poor downtrodden Blacks taking over the South, or America. In Lebanon, the Shia say that the Sunnis used to only let them work as garbage collectors. Shia youngsters were routinely taunted and attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut in the 1970’s. Lie: Hezbollah gets Iranian money for schools and hospitals to brainwash Lebanese into supporting the terrorists. No! The reason they do this is because to this day, the bigoted Lebanese government that the US supports provides almost zero money whatsoever for any kind of development whatsoever in South Lebanon. This is the reality of Lebanon, and its always been this way. Someone has to do it, the government won’t, so Hezbollah steps in. Good for them! Lie: Hezbollah is trying to take over Lebanon to make a fundamentalist Islamic state there. Well, that is their stated intention. In the early days, they may have believed it. In recent statements, Nasrallah has said that an Islamic state is only possible in Lebanon if the “vast majority”, meaning over 8 Lie: Lebanese Christians are poor, downtrodden and horribly persecuted by Muslims. Nonsense. In fact, they have always run the country! This lie is spread by some of the Maronite fascists. In the late 1950’s, Marines landed in Lebanon to help preserve an election that the Christians stole. The real cause of the Civil War was the Muslims wanting a fairer share of the pie that the Christians had unfairly dominated for far too long. The Christians are being forced to concede some of their excess power in Lebanon (though they still have most of the money and much of the political power) and this is why some of the Maronites are wailing so much about “persecution”. Lie: The Lebanon War last year was between Israel and a group of terrorists called Hezbollah. Most other Lebanese were not involved or opposed Hezbollah. As you can see here, Israel was fighting much more than Hezbollah in South Lebanon. In the Battle of Aita Al Shaab, most of the village fought against Israel, under the leadership of Hezbollah, true, but most fighters were just “local militia” who were not actually Hezbollah fighters. Further, there was quite a bit of fighting from members of the Lebanese Communist Party. The Amal militia fought against Israel too. Truth is, Israel was essentially fighting a war against the people of South Lebanon. It’s true that a certain amount of that resistance was Hezbollah, but much of it was just local militia fighting for their homes and towns. In the town of Marjayoun, during the Civil War the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army, Israel came under attack soon after they entered the town by members of Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). Most of the members of this party are Greek Orthodox. In fact, it may be the most popular political party among Lebanese Greek Orthodox. In the Sunni villages, the local Muslim Brotherhood and another fundamentalist group organized an armed resistance. Furthermore, 80-9 Lie: Hezbollah forces salute using “Nazi salutes”, so that means that Hezbollah idolizes and Nazis and wants to kill all the Jews just like Nazis did. Much is made of this on Zionist and rightwing blogs and even in the mainstream press. See here and here for two examples. For more examples, see here, here and here. In the last example, written by a militant Jewish Zionist named Lewis Loflin, although the photo on the right is of Hezbollah forces giving a “Nazi salute”, the photo on the right, which he states is of a Hamas fighter giving the Nazi salute, is actually of a PFLP fighter. You can tell it is a PFLP fighter by the characteristic red headband and the poster and Ahmed Sa’adat, the present leader of the PFLP. Many people say that the PFLP is dead, but it is interesting how a dead organization could afford full uniforms, headbands, posters and automatic weapons. This blog strongly supports the PFLP, and as leftists, I assure you that the mainstream PFLP does not like Nazis one bit. The fact is that the “Nazi salutes used by Hezbollah fighters” is propaganda. This is a type of salute which was originally known as the “Roman salute”. It has a fascinating history, and was widely used by many countries before World War II. Under the name “Bellamy salute” or “flag salute”, it used to be usual salute used when saying the US Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. A photo of the Bellamy salute is here. From Wikipedia:

Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute.

The association with Nazism has been so strong that the salute has rarely been used by non-Nazi organizations since the end of World War II. There are several exceptions; one is the Republic of China (Taiwan), where the salute is still used during the swearing of oaths in inaugurations. The salute is also still used by some Palestinian militant groups. It is also known to be used by the Tamil separatist organization, the LTTE, while saluting their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Lie: Hezbollah does not support Israel’s right to exist and therefore they want to wipe it off and map and kill all 5.1 million Jews there in the process. Embedded in this clever argument is the notion that any nation or regime has any kind of inherent right to exist. Did colonies and empires and occupied territories have a right to exist too? The very notion that any nation-state on Earth has some kind of a rock-solid “right” to exist is strange and counter-intuitive. Sure, humans have a right to get together and make nations out of mapped out geographical parcels, but why does that mean that that nation has some kind of a laid in tone specific right to exist? The fact is that throughout history, nations, empires and colonies have come and gone. The ones that no longer exist had no greater or lesser right to exist than any existing state does. ***** Meanwhile, the US has initiated a very controversial plan to counter Shia influence in the region. The plan is being coordinated with Saudi Arabia, specifically Prince Bandar, who has a longstanding relationship with US Administrations, and possibly the Jordanian government, especially Jordanian intelligence. They are working to arm and build up the pro-US Siniora government and stoke sectarianism in Lebanon. Part of this plan, outrageously, has involved money given by the US, via the Siniora regime, to three Sunni Salafist groups who are pro-Al Qaeda. These groups are being armed in order to fight Hezbollah (since they loathe Shiites). If push comes to shove between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, these groups will be used to battle it out with Hezbollah. Outrageously, the US is once again funding Al Qaeda, which shows that imperialism truly has no morals at all. See The Seymour Hersch’s The Redirection in the latest New Yorker magazine (video here). The Saudis are racists who hate the Shia and want to keep them down. In fact, most of the Sunni Arab regimes are like this. They all look to the Ottoman Empire when the Sunnis ruled the roost and the Shia were kept down by force. This is the Sunni Jim Crow era that they long for. It is outrageous that the US is supporting Sunni Jim Crow racism against the downtrodden Shia and it is particularly despicable that the Israeli Jews, considering the history of the Jews, are supporting the oppressor against the oppressed. Or maybe that is what Israel is all about?

From Jew to Jew: Why We Should Oppose the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza

Repost from the old site. Here is a document I received from a progressive Jewish colleague who is associated with the group that published this document, A Jewish Voice For Peace. The group is located in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In this struggle, we need all the allies we can get. A real 2-state solution, described below, would, for all its deficiencies, be light years better than the hardline Zionist horrorshow that has America in a death grip. The single-state solution preferred by so many anti-Zionists lacks international support at this time and thus is little more than a pipe dream, whatever moral weight it may throw. While Hamas was surely the democratic choice of the people, so was Hitler. So was George Bush. So was Ariel Sharon. So what? Many Hamas members are racist anti-Semitic bigots who have no interest in sharing Palestine with Jews. They have helped spread backwards Islamic fundamentalism in Palestine, which has encouraged abuse and terrorization of secular Muslims and especially of Palestinian Christians. The emigration of Palestinian Christians is to a large degree due to the increasing fundamentalism in Palestine. But see here for some recent commendable positive moves by Hamas towards Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem. This blog condemns fundamentalism in all forms and all religions everywhere on Earth, from Afghanistan to India to America to Palestine. While Hamas is not Al Qaeda at all, there is much to criticize there. Furthermore, the activists described above would attack the essay below for “being directed only at Jews” and for being “Jewish-centric”. Yet politics is the art of the possible, and with the region in flames and the conflagration threatening to spread to new lands, the sane people need all the friends we can get at this point. Those who know quite about the Middle East conflict will find this essay, which is somewhat dated, to be old hat and may wish to skip it. Those who know little about the Middle East (only 1 Along similar lines as this article, see Christopher Hedges, Get Carter, in the January 7, 2007 issue of The Nation. Although the 2-state solution may seem like a shameless sellout to the fringe anti-Zionists described above, in the US right now, sentiments like we see both this and Hedges article are regarded by the Israeli Lobby as ultraradical and are attacked with animal-like ferocity. Note: This publication is seriously dated, dating back possibly to 2002. Nevertheless, it is still quite relevant.

From Jew to Jew:

Why We Should Oppose the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Written by Jews for Fellow Jews

A Jewish Voice For Peace Publication

Download the PDF file here Introduction Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, A Jewish Voice For Peace is the oldest and largest of a growing number of Jewish groups that are convinced that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory must end. There are two compelling reasons for this. First, we wish to preserve the best part of our Jewish heritage -a deeply-ingrained sense of morality – and pass it on to the next generation, unsullied by the mistreatment of another people. We were brought up to believe that, as Jews, we are obligated to always take the moral high road and we can’t imagine letting this proud ethical tradition die now. Second, as we will show in this paper, we are convinced that the only way to ensure the security of the people of Israel is for their government to conclude a just peace with the Palestinians. Without some reasonable version of justice being done, there will never be peace, and so we oppose any Israeli government policy that denies the Palestinians their legitimate rights. What those are will be examined shortly. Is this position “anti-Jewish”? No, it is not (any more than criticizing U.S. government policies is anti-American.) Even as we love all of humanity, we have a special love for the Jewish people and for the warm and compassionate side of Jewish culture. We share with all Jews the trauma of the genocide of our people by the Nazis and our long history of periodic persecution. We understand the instinct to “circle the wagons” when our people face danger, and we long for the day when Jews in Israel, as everywhere, will be able to lead normal, secure, productive lives. The question is how will that happy day come about? By blindly supporting the Israeli government’s self-destructive path to war and more war? We don’t think so. We feel that these crucial issues need more discussion within the American Jewish community, not less. They certainly are debated at length in Israel itself, as evidenced by a recent Ma’ariv poll showing that 5 It’s time for us to join the debate as well, and help formulate a more reasonable solution to the conflict. Unfortunately, the ongoing violence in Palestine and Israel has led too many people, on both sides, to adopt blanket stereotypes of one another, turning them into something “less-than-human”. This process of dehumanization then allows people to justify the violence committed by their own side, starting the cycle all over again. This is a classic “lose-lose” situation that can continue on forever. Is there a way out of this mess? Yes, we think so, but only if we suspend our understandable reaction of automatically blaming the other side. Only then can we objectively assess the root causes of the conflict and the realistic choices there are for resolving it. So, in the interest of peace, and with an open heart and mind, please consider the following facts. 1. THE OCCUPATION The international community, through the United Nations and other forums, has made it clear that virtually the entire world considers the Israeli occupation of territories it captured in the 1967 war to be wrong and contrary to basic principles of international law. Every year since 1967 (up until the Oslo Process started), the UN General Assembly passed the same resolution (usually by lopsided votes like 150-2), stating that Israel is obligated to vacate the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, in exchange for security guaranteed by the international community, in accordance with UN Resolution 242. While the circumstances were much different, the legal basis of these resolutions is the same principle used to force Iraq out of Kuwait—i.e., a country cannot annex or indefinitely occupy territory gained by force of arms. The only reason that Israel is able to maintain its occupation of Palestinian land is that the US routinely vetoes every Security Council resolution that would insist that Israel live up to its obligations under international law. One of the original goals of Zionism was to create a Jewish state that would be just another normal country. If that is what Israel wants (and that is a reasonable goal), then it must be held to the same standards as any other country, including the prohibition against annexing territory captured by force of arms. 2. THE SETTLEMENTS Similarly, all Jewish settlements, every single one, in territories outside Israel’s 1967 boundaries, are a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed and is obligated to abide by, as well as UN Security Council Resolutions 446 and 465. As John Quigley, a professor of international law at Ohio State has written,

The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the country.

This prohibition is found in the Convention’s Article 49, which states:

The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies

Here’s what former President Jimmy Carter wrote in the Washington Post at the beginning of the current intifada:

An underlying reason that years of US diplomacy have failed and violence in the Middle East persists is that some Israeli leaders continue to create facts by building settlements in occupied territory…it is unlikely that real progress can be made…as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations.

In fact, on December 5, 2001, Switzerland convened a conference of 114 nations that have signed the Fourth Geneva Convention (a conference boycotted by the US and Israel). The assembled nations decided unanimously that the Convention did indeed apply to the occupied territories, that Israel was in gross violation of their obligations under that Convention, that Jewish-only settlements in those territories were illegal under the rules of the Convention, and that it was the responsibility of the other contracting parties to stop these violations of international law. To be in such flagrant violation of the norms of international behavior is bad for Israel’s standing in the world, bad for the Jewish people as a whole and, as we shall see, totally unnecessary. 3. ISRAEL’S SECURITY It is sometimes argued that the settlements are necessary for Israel’s security, to protect Israel from terrorism and the threat of violence. But the reality is that the settlements are a major cause of Israel’s current security problems, not the cure for them. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis pointed out the aggressive nature of the settlements as follows:

It is false to see the settlements as ordinary villages or towns where Israelis only want to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. They are in fact imposed by force—superior Israeli military force—on Palestinian territory.

Many have been built precisely to assert Israeli power and ownership. They are not peaceful villages but militarized encampments. . .The settlement policy is not just a political but a moral danger to the character of the state. “But wouldn’t the Palestinians use their own state as a base for even more attacks against Israel?”, it might be asked. For one, the Palestinians have long agreed that their future state would be non-militarized, no foreign forces hostile to Israel would be allowed in, and international monitors could be stationed on Palestinian land in order to verify these conditions. As for individual acts of terrorism, there is an historical precedent that gives a realistic answer to this question. During the first years after the Oslo agreements were signed, Hamas tried to disrupt the peace process but, because of the prevailing optimism, their influence in Palestinian society diminished and their armed attacks fell off sharply. What that means for the future is that if the Palestinian people feel that even a rough version of justice has been done, they will not support the more extreme elements in their political spectrum. This is not just guesswork; it already happened with just the hope of justice being done. Another aspect of this is that if Israel had internationally recognized borders, then they could be defended much more easily than the current situation where every hill in Palestine is a potential bone of contention because of Jewish settlements encroaching on Palestinian land. If the settlements and their settlers and the military apparatus they require were gone, and the Palestinians were given enough aid by the international community to create a viable economy in their own state, they would naturally be overjoyed and a positive turn of events would be the inevitable result. 4. “BUT DON’T THEY JUST WANT TO DRIVE THE JEWS INTO THE SEA?” Officially since 1988, and unofficially for years before that, the Palestinian position has been that they recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace and security within their 1967 borders. Period. At the same time, they expect to be allowed to establish a truly independent, viable, contiguous, non-militarized state in all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This is what UN Resolution 242 says: “Land for Peace” – and the Palestinian Authority has stated repeatedly that UN Resolution 242 has to be the basis for any long-lasting solution to the conflict. It is true that some Palestinians advocate that all of historic Palestine should be under Arab control, but there is no support for this position, either in the international community, nor among most Palestinians. Statements to that effect are just hyperbole and do not represent the official Palestinian position. Similarly, statements by some Palestinians inciting people to violence against Israelis can easily be matched by statements from Orthodox rabbis and fundamentalist settlers calling for death to the Arabs. There are meshuganahs aplenty on both sides. But since the Palestinians’ official position is clear, why shouldn’t Israel take the Palestinians up on this offer and withdraw from the occupied territories? Israel is far stronger militarily than all the Arab armies combined and would face no credible military threat from a Palestinian state. And the threat of individual terrorist acts would, of necessity, be much less once the Palestinians felt that they had received a modicum of justice. What would Israel lose by this obvious solution of just ending the occupation, which they could do tomorrow if they wanted to (or if the US insisted that they do)? The only thing it would “lose” is the dream of some of its citizens for a “Greater Israel”, where Israel’s boundaries are expanded to its biblical borders. The problem with that dream is that it totally ignores the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and the will of virtually the entire international community. As long as the right-wing settlers and their supporters in the Israeli government insist on pursuing this dream, there will be nothing but bloodshed forever. The Palestinian people have lived in Palestine for thousands of years and they are not going away. Israel must conclude a just peace with them or innocent blood will continue to be shed indefinitely. 5. NEGOTIATIONS LEADING UP TO THE CURRENT INTIFADA It has often been asked, “But didn’t Barak offer 9 Similarly, the offer Barak made at Camp David II would have left the main settlement blocks and their Jewish-only bypass roads in place. Along with the extensive areas Israel planned on retaining indefinitely for its military use, this would have dissected Palestinian territory into separate bantustans (“native reservations”), isolated from each other, each surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory and having no common borders with each other or other Arab nations. The territories would have had no control over their own air space; their main water aquifers (underneath the settlement blocs) would have been taken by Israel; and the Israeli military would have able to surround and blockade each enclave at will. See this map courtesy of the Foundation for Middle East Peace for a bird’s eye view of the problems of Barak’s plan. Jerusalem would have been similarly dissected so that each Palestinian island would be surrounded by an Israeli sea. This wouldn’t be an acceptable “end of the conflict” if you were Palestinian, would it? (Israel actually presented no maps at Camp David itself, but this was their offer of two months previous, and only marginal additional territory was theoretically offered at Camp David.) The other important question here is 9 The international community has never recognized Israeli sovereignty over “Greater Jerusalem” and has repeatedly declared that Israel should withdraw from this and all territories it conquered by force of arms in 1967. Barak’s offer also excluded large swaths of the Jordan Valley which the Israeli military would control indefinitely. Thus the Foundation for Middle East Peace estimates that the actual percentage of occupied land offered to the Palestinians was more like 8 After the Camp David talks ended without an agreement, did Arafat refuse to negotiate? In a word, no. At the end of Camp David, it was Barak who said that his offers there would not be the basis for further discussions, that they were now “null and void”, and that Camp David was an “all or nothing” summit. The Palestinians were willing to continue serious negotiations, and did at Taba, even after the current intifada had started. According to Ron Pundak, an Israeli diplomat who was a key architect of the Oslo Accords:

The negotiations in Taba, which took place moments before Barak’s government lost the elections, proved that a permanent status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians was within reach. (It) led to dramatic progress on all issues on the agenda.

But meanwhile, Sharon had gone to the Temple Mount with 1000 Israeli soldiers in tow, followed the next day by a demonstration of Palestinians (who had no firearms), which was met with totally unnecessary lethal force by the Israeli police, resulting in at least four Palestinians being shot and killed. This demonstration, which could have been contained by nonlethal means if the Israeli government had wanted to, was the beginning of the current cycle of violence. 6. LOOKING AT CAUSE AND EFFECT “What about Palestinian crimes? Why don’t you lay equal blame on them?” Certainly, Palestinians have committed grave crimes, and in any process of reconciliation, both sides will have much to answer for. But as Jews, we are responsible to look at Israel objectively, and not just when Israelis are victims of violence. In order to understand why there is the level of violence we see today, it is necessary to understand how we got to this point. a) Before the 1967 war. Before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there was little organized Palestinian resistance. The majority of the tension was between Israel and the neighboring states. For the most part, violence between Israel and the Palestinians was limited to isolated Palestinian “infiltrations”, as Israel generally referred to them. The Israeli population may certainly have believed that they were in mortal danger from the armies of their Arab neighbors. But by the mid-1960s, Israeli leaders had a good deal of confidence that they could defeat a combination of Arab forces similar to what they accomplished in 1948, and with greater ease. History, of course, proved them correct, which calls into question the myth that Israel was fighting a self-defensive war for its very existence in 1967. b) The 1967 war itself. The myth that the 1967 war was a purely defensive one is further weakened by statements of Israeli leaders themselves. For example, the New York Times published an article on May 11, 1997 quoting Moshe Dayan’s own diaries, in which he admits that the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights in 1967 did so less for security than for the farmland. Dayan wrote:

They didn’t even try to hide their greed for that land…The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.

Or again from Prof. John Quigley’s landmark book, Palestine And Israel:

Mordecai Bentov, a cabinet minister who attended the June 4 (1967) cabinet meeting and supported the decision to invade Egypt, said Israel’s ‘entire story’ about ‘the danger of extermination’ was ‘invented of whole cloth and exaggerated after the fact to justify the annexation of new Arab territories’.

Even Menachem Begin said:

The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.

In short, the argument of self-defense does not stand up to a close examination of the historical record. c) Peace Proposals after the 1967 war. In 1969, Nixon’s Secretary of State, William Rogers, proposed a peace plan based on UN Resolution 242, which would have guaranteed Israel’s security within her pre-1967 borders. Israel rejected it out-of-hand. In 1971, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat offered Israel a similar proposal (which did not mention Palestinian rights at all). This was also rejected by Israel. In 1976, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the PLO supported a resolution in the UN Security Council affirming Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, as in UN Resolution 242, but with a Palestinian state created alongside Israel. Israel opposed it and the US vetoed it. Arafat personally reaffirmed his support of a two-state solution in statements made to Senator Adlai Stevenson in 1976, and Rep. Paul Findley and New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in 1978. The Saudis made similar proposals in 1979 and 1981, which were reiterated in their 2002 peace proposal, adopted by the entire Arab League. Yet Israel rejected all these peace proposals, and more, even though Israel’s security was guaranteed in each one of them. Why? The historical record is clear that Israel’s desire for additional land has been the single most important factor behind its expansionist policies. As David Ben-Gurion said in 1938:

I favor partition of the country because when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine.

In sum, the 1967 war was not a purely defensive war on Israel’s part, as Begin told us. The Israeli army met very little Palestinian resistance during the early years of the occupation. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, most Palestinian violence came from groups outside of the Occupied Territories. It is the Israeli desire to retain control over the West Bank, its expanding settlements and land appropriations that have sown the seeds of the situation we have today. d) The Israeli occupation as the root cause of the violence. The main hallmark of the Israeli occupation has been the forcible expropriation of over half of the West Bank and Gaza for Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only by-pass roads and Israeli closed military areas. These expropriations are possible only because of overwhelming Israeli military might and are, in and of themselves, acts of violence—just as armed robbery is an act of violence, even if no one is hurt. Can we really expect that no violent reaction to it would have occurred? Israel’s former Attorney General, Michael Ben-Yair stated point-blank in Ha’aretz (3/3/02):

We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. . . In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.

e) How did the current level of violence come about? Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are well documented in our own media. And, while major Israeli incursions have gotten a good deal of attention, day-to-day excesses of the Israeli military have not been so widely reported. To get an accurate picture of the chain of events, let’s look at the reports issued by human rights groups near the beginning of the current intifada. Human Rights Watch, for example, stated:

Israeli security forces have committed by far the most serious and systematic violations. We documented excessive and indiscriminate use of lethal force, arbitrary killings, and collective punishment, including willful destruction of property and severe restrictions on movement that far exceed any possible military necessity.

B’Tselem is Israel’s leading human rights group and their detailed analyses of the current intifada can be found at their website. They concluded early on:

In spite of claims to the contrary, Israel has not adopted a policy of restraint in its response to events in the Occupied Territories…Israel uses excessive and disproportionate force in dispersing demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians…Collective punishment, in the form of Israel’s severe restrictions on Palestinians’ movement in the Occupied Territories, makes life unbearable for hundreds of thousands with no justification.

Collective punishment is illegal under international law. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported the following:

There is considerable evidence of indiscriminate firing at civilians in the proximity of demonstrations and elsewhere (by Israeli troops)…The live ammunition employed includes high-velocity bullets which splinter on impact and cause the maximum harm.

Equally disturbing is the evidence that many of the deaths and injuries inflicted were the result of head wounds and wounds to the upper body, which suggests an intention to cause serious bodily injury rather than restrain demonstrations…The measures of closure, curfew or destruction of property constitute violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention and human rights obligations binding upon Israel. Amnesty International has also made numerous statements on the current intifada, including the following:

Amnesty International reiterated its long-standing calls to Israel to end its policy of liquidations and other arbitrary killings and urged the international community to send international observers…In these state assassinations the Israeli authorities offer no proof of guilt, no right to defense. Extrajudicial executions are absolutely prohibited by international law.

This attitude of the disposability of Palestinian life has now filtered down to the ordinary soldier. An IDF reservist interviewed on prime-time First Channel Israeli TV (12/14/01) stated:

Nowadays, there is much less of a dilemma. We more or less got a clearance from both the military and the political echelons. Nowadays, we shoot them in the head and no questions asked.

Is this what we want our Jewish legacy to be? The overwhelming consensus of these reports means that Israeli demands for the Palestinians to “stop the violence” turn reality on its head. The Palestinians have suffered almost four times the fatalities that Israel has in the current fighting, as well as tens of thousands of serious injuries. Furthermore, answering stone throwing with M-16 military weapons designed for battlefield use, or responding to ineffective Molotov cocktails with very effective armored tanks and attack helicopters is simply not morally justifiable. It is also important to keep in mind that many of Israel’s current actions have been going on, in various degrees, for the last 35 years – systematic torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails, the forcible and illegal appropriation of over half the West Bank and Gaza by Israel for Jewish-only uses, daily humiliations and abuse at Israeli military checkpoints all over Palestinian land—these have combined to bring Palestinian anger to a boiling point. In sum, we have seen that Israeli actions have served to seriously escalate the violence, and that Israel’s stubborn refusal to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even to the extent of just stopping its settlement activity, has been a major obstacle to any progress towards peace. To be sure, Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians have also been major obstacles towards such progress. Occupation and repression can never justify terrorism against civilians, but neither do terrorist acts by a few negate the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. The best way to address these crimes is to end the occupation which inspires the Palestinians to commit them. Recent history has demonstrated clearly that support for such crimes, and the number of Palestinians willing to commit them, drops precipitously when the Palestinians have had hope for independence, and risen sharply in response to the intensifying occupation and expansion of settlements. We must also bear in mind that we are not morally responsible for Palestinian crimes, although we must work to prevent them. But we are morally responsible for Israeli actions taken in our name and with our tax dollars. 7. THE JEWISH PEACE MOVEMENT One’s opinion on the Israel/Palestine conflict need not be a black or white question; you can support the Israeli people but still criticize their government’s illegal and ultimately self-destructive policies. We believe that the Jewish peace movement, both in Israel and around the world, has a far better plan to ensure Israel’s security. That plan is to create real peace as a consequence of real justice being done, not a “peace” of victor and vanquished. We recommend that you go to Gush Shalom, Btselem, and Batshalom and read for yourself what thinking Israelis demand of their own government. Thousands of Israelis, including hundreds of Israel’s top university professors, are convinced their government is committing unpardonable acts and have taken public stands against them. For example, over 400 reserve combat officers and soldiers in the IDF have publicly stated their moral opposition to Sharon’s increasingly brutal use of force during the current intifada. These “refuseniks” have the sympathy of a growing portion of the Israeli public, now up to 2

We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country… hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight in this War of the Settlements.

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people. We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense. The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose—and we shall take no part in them. Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet (Israel’s equivalent to the FBI), recently stated in Le Monde:

I favor unconditional withdrawal from the Territories, preferably in the context of an agreement, but not necessarily. What needs to be done, urgently, is to withdraw from the Territories, a true withdrawal which gives the Palestinians territorial continuity.

So if disagreement with the Israeli government is kosher in Israel, shouldn’t it also be a topic of discussion among American Jews? For just one example, a recent survey of American Jewish attitudes showed that 3 Our community does not, and should not, have just one opinion on these questions. What is needed is more discussion, not less, on these crucial matters. The intifada is not primarily the result of the religious fanaticism, the blind anti-Semitism or the “inherent violent tendencies” of the Arabs. Rather, in our view, it is the inevitable result of the most basic human emotions – their need to be free and to live with dignity in the land of their ancestors. A Palestinian child who is awakened at dawn by Israeli soldiers demolishing his home and uprooting the family’s olive grove does not need anyone to tell him to hate. The Israeli Occupation has seriously eroded the Jewish people’s proud moral heritage, developed over the centuries; and, in any case, we are convinced it will never work, even in the most pragmatic terms. The Palestinians will always resist being under military occupation, and have the right, under international law, to do so. As a result, there will never be real security for Israel until there is a reasonable version of justice for the Palestinians. How could it be otherwise? 8. ISRAEL’S SECURITY – Continued “But doesn’t Israel have to do something to stop the suicide bombers?” A reasonable question, and here is a most reasonable answer from Gush Shalom’s founder, Uri Avnery:

When tanks run amok in the center of a town, crushing cars and destroying walls, tearing up roads, shooting indiscriminately in all directions, causing panic to a whole population —it induces helpless rage.

When soldiers crush through a wall into the living room of a family, causing shock to children and adults, ransacking their belongings, destroying the fruits of a life of hard work, and then break the wall to the next apartment to wreck havoc there—it induces helpless rage. When officers order to shoot at ambulances, killing doctors and paramedics engaged in saving the lives of the wounded, bleeding to death—it induces helpless rage. And then it appears that the rage is not helpless after all. The suicide bombers go forward to avenge… Anyone who believes that Arafat can push a button and stop this is living in a dream world…At best, the pressure cooker can cool off slowly, if the majority of the people are persuaded that their honor has been restored and their liberation guaranteed. Then public support for the ‘terrorists’ will diminish, they will be isolated and wither away. That was what happened in the past. 9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION A major cause of misunderstanding between the Jewish peace movement and other American Jews is that we rely on different sources of information. If what you know about Israel and Palestine comes from the US corporate press, TV news and/or the mainstream US Jewish press, then your perception of events will be determined by their worldview. As Jewish media critic Norman Solomon wrote in 2001:

Searching the Nexis database of U.S. media coverage during the first 100 days of this year, I found several dozen stories using the phrase ‘Israeli retaliation’ or ‘Israel retaliated.’

During the same period, how many stories used the phrase ‘Palestinian retaliation’ or ‘Palestinians retaliated’? One. Both sides of the conflict, of course, describe their violence as retaliatory. But only one side routinely benefits from having its violent moves depicted that way by major American media. If, however, you supplement your information by reading the Israeli press, progressive magazines like Tikkun or The Nation, internet sites like Common Dreams and radio stations of the Pacifica network, then a very different picture of what is going on emerges. In particular, we suggest that you sign up for our free email news service, the Jewish Peace News , which gives you the latest news and most cogent analyses of Middle East events, much of it from the Israeli press. You can subscribe by sending an e-mail to: jewishpeacenews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. 10. SHARON’S CURRENT POLICIES Ariel Sharon has always opposed real negotiations with the Palestinians, preferring instead to try to defeat them militarily. He has vehemently opposed all Palestinian/Israel agreements and has repeatedly stated that he has no intention of returning a single settlement to Palestinian rule. Even the editors of the Washington Post (2/22/02) wrote:

During lulls in the conflict, Mr. Sharon frequently has been the first to renew the fight; during three weeks in December (2001) and early January (2002) when the Palestinians responded to a call from Mr. Arafat and stopped almost all attacks, Israeli forces killed a dozen Palestinians.

The obvious conclusion to draw is that Sharon does not want peace or real negotiations, just a vanquishing of his sworn enemies. Indeed, if Sharon really wanted Arafat to arrest Palestinian militants, then why has he systematically destroyed the Palestinian Authority’s ability to do so? According to the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom:

The Palestinian police and security services have hardly any premises or prisons left in which to put terrorists, even if the decision was taken to arrest them; the bombardments were all too thorough.

Most crucially, in the spring of 2002, Israel commenced its most severe armed attacks yet in the West Bank, involving the following “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions— some of them rising to the level of war crimes, according to Human Rights Watch and other monitoring groups.

  • Israeli snipers on the tops of buildings, shooting anything that moves.
  • Ambulances shot at, medical personnel unable to evacuate the wounded, who have then died needlessly from their wounds.
  • Civilian neighborhoods bombed by U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships, F-16 fighter jets and Israeli tanks, causing widespread devastation and, inevitably, many civilian casualties.
  • Palestinian homes crushed by military bulldozers—sometimes, as in Jenin, with the occupants still inside.
  • Wanton destruction of the infrastructure of Palestinian civil society—water pipes and pumping stations, electrical power poles and plants, medical facilities, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches, public buildings, etc., in addition to massive looting and gratuitous vandalization of homes, businesses and governmental offices.
  • The use of “human shields” for Israeli military actions.
  • Journalists shot at who try to document the above gross violations of international law.

And Israel is now constructing a “buffer zone” that will de facto annex about 1 In other words, eight big open-air prisons, which Palestinians cannot get out of, except at the whim of the Israeli authorities. Again, this kind of collective punishment is specifically outlawed by the Fourth Geneva Convention. A joint statement by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists (4/07/02) stated:

We strongly deplore actions by the state of Israel that harm persons protected by international humanitarian law. . . Such actions violate international standards and transcend any justification of military necessity.

Even in practical terms, these Israeli actions are counterproductive. As Gush Shalom writes:

The retaliatory and punitive raids by the army do manage to intercept some potential suicide bombers—but the very same raids and incursions, by demonstrating the brutality of the Occupation, also increase on the Palestinian side, the motivation for retribution, and help the recruitment of new suicide bombers.

Only an end to the Occupation by political means, allowing a fair expression of the basic Palestinian aspirations, can dry up the suicide bombing phenomenon at its source, and provide new hope to the desperate young Palestinians from whose ranks the bombers are recruited. The recent upsurge in anti-Semitism worldwide is clearly connected with escalated Israeli aggression. As Israel has succeeded in convincing many people that it represents World Jewry, many supporters of Palestinians have directed their anger at Israeli actions against Jewish institutions in their own countries. Right-wing white supremacist forces have also seized this opportunity to give their anti-Semitic venom legitimacy. Thus all Jews have a stake in seeing the sorts of human rights violations we have just described stopped. CONCLUSION Any country has the right and the responsibility to protect its citizens, and Israel is no exception. But its policies for the last 35 years, and especially during the current intifada, have been based on the old adage, “The best defense is a good offense”. While that’s OK in football, in Israel that has translated into systematic torture or ill-treatment of literally hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, according to B’Tselem and other reputable groups. It means wanton cruelty being inflicted every day at military checkpoints, wanton destruction of Palestinian homes, and illegal strangling of Palestinian economic life, leading to extreme deprivation. And there is no other phrase than “war crimes” to accurately describe many of the actions of the IDF during the attacks against the Palestinian civilian population in the spring of 2002. In short, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is simply wrong—brutal, illegal and unnecessary. We do agree that both sides have done poorly in advancing the cause of peace. As Jews, however, it is incumbent upon us to put our own house in order, above all else. As Americans, our responsibility is doubled. Our government has, through unprecedented financial and political support, allowed Israel to maintain its occupation and commit human rights violations with complete impunity. Thus, we are both responsible for the escalation and in a unique position to do something about it. In the long-run, the only hope for a normal, peaceful life for the people of Israel is for their government to end their occupation of Palestinian land, allow the creation of a viable Palestinian state, and live and let live. The only other alternative is the current situation of endless bloodshed, which our silence, among other things, makes possible. HOW TO DO YOUR PART FOR PEACE If you have found this paper enlightening, please join A Jewish Voice For Peace and help us in our work. We have been organizing and educating people about the real causes of the unrest in Israel and Palestine since 1996. Among our many useful projects, we make available to people, free of charge, an e-news service that delivers daily to its readers the best articles on the current conflict, largely from the Israeli press. To sign up for the Jewish Peace News, simply send an e-mail to jewishpeacenewssubscribe@yahoogroups.com. A Jewish Voice For Peace has made great strides in the past year. In order for us to continue to grow and expand our services and our reach, we need your help. Your donations will make it possible for us to hire new staff members, increase our educational services and vastly expand our media reach. All contributions are tax-deductible. To get in touch with us, write us at P.O. Box 13286, Berkeley, CA.

Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan"

Here. Incredibly great music by one of the most underrated musicians of the rock era. Hardly anyone has ever heard of him here in the US, and he’s never had a big hit, but he’s a glorious poet and a singer-songwriter. I always thought he was American, but it turns out he’s Canadian, and he’s quite famous in Canada, though certainly not in the US. Sort of an aging beatnik type. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen – two great Jewish singer-songwriters of the rock era. But Cohen is much darker than Dylan. Not that Dylan can’t be dark. “Desolation Row” is virtually punk rock already in 1965! Dig the Black chicks in the background, LOL. Check him out live. Old guy in fedora, he could be William S. Burroughs. He belongs in a Paris hotel full of Beat painters are writers. In the afternoons, after he wakes at noon, he’s lounging in Paris cafes on the sidewalk. In the evening, there’s always a bar in Paris if you have two legs and an extra five minutes.

Natural Born Killers

Here. With “Future” by Leonard Cohen as the soundtrack. It was very hard to watch this sequence, but I do love Leonard Cohen! I had to admit that this was some great artistic work that Oliver Stone did in this movie, like he does in nearly all of his fantastic movies. There is beauty here amidst all the horror. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino. What was the point of this movie anyway? Was he trying to make some sort of a point? Apparently Stone was making some sort of a statement about the media glorifying violence for marketing purposes. After this movie came out, a disturbing number of copycat crimes were committed by various maniacs. Some of these were famous incidents like the Columbine Massacre and the Heath School Shootings. 30 people were killed and 27 wounded in these incidents in total. A number of lawsuits were brought against Stone for provoking the crimes with his movie but all were tossed on free speech grounds.

India Is Hell: A Dust Over India

Here. Excellent article by a good writer who is peripherally part of the manosphere. This guy has traveled all over the world, and he says India is by far the worst place on Earth he has ever been to. I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, it’s filthy. It’s the filthiest country he’s ever been to. Worse, no one seems to care about the filth – no one gives a damn. It’s also horrifically polluted, and no one cares about this either. The poverty is simply insane. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s the worst poverty he’s ever seen in any land he’s ever been to. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Boys covered in shit try to pry open a closed store to grab hot dog scraps. Kids covered in shit play in massive garbage heaps as big as houses. A beggar lies on the sidewalk, half his leg eaten off, maggots visibly gnawing on the rest. Emaciated old people with sunken, hopeless eyes sit on the sidewalk and beg for food. People frantically dig through garbage to try to get food to eat. There are people everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. It’s worse than New York, Mexico City or Hong Kong. You take off outside the city and the masses of humans don’t lessen, nor does the incessant filth. He goes to eat in a Pizza Hut and the Indian middle class is in there, fat and happy. Outside kids covered in shit wallow on the sidewalk and the bourgeois don’t give two flying fucks. Everywhere he goes, Indians try to steal from him. Even his own taxi driver tries to rip him off, and threatens to call the police when he doesn’t go along with the attempted theft. Cons and scams are everywhere. He falls for an elaborate scam to buy a fancy rug and have it shipped to his mother in the US. There are fake shops, fake businesses, fake travel agencies, fake everything, everywhere, all run by scammers, all set up to rip you off. One man on his tour is ripped off for $2,000 by a fake travel agency. As you walk along the sidewalk, Indians swarm alongside you, begging for this or that, trying to sell you this or that, or trying to scam you in some way. After a while, you resolve to speak to as few Indians as possible. He meets Western hippies at tourist hangouts, some to indulge in the solipsism of Hinduism and Buddhism, but they don’t see that these solipsistic religions may have created the very Hell of the India they are visiting. Charity seems hopeless. Where would you even begin. The beggars are ingrates. You give them food, and they don’t even care. And if Indians see you giving to a beggar, they swarm all over you begging for themselves. Better to give to no one. He tries to come up with a meaning for India, but can come up with none. India is meaningless; nothing has any meaning or value there. It’s an entropic panorama of Chaos Theory in action. The comments are interesting. I read them all. Mostly the usual Indian nationalist and Hindutva fanboys ranting on and on about shining India, and “just give us time.” And others attacking the “racist” article.

Racial Testosterone Differentiations Caused by the Environment?

Is it possible that the higher average in “Black” in early age and higher average higher count in older “White” men could be explained by environmental causes, and not genetic predetermined ones? That maybe this could explain itself as an alternative? “Black” culture in America at least has a definitive ‘machismo’ streak to it that often values and commands certain traits where you could say testosterone friendly traits are often expounded more. I wouldn’t say changing their culture would lowers these levels – perhaps they are more likely shaped in teenage years – but they are far more hypersocial and leave “Black” individuals vulnerable to cultural and environmental traits. I know at least our urge to take risks has been shown by neurologists to shape hormonal levels in men’s teenage years that determine our ability to take risks for the rest of men’s lives. While White culture often is more forgiving of anti-competitive males – in fact it is arguably the source of concepts like transgenderism and feminism. Feminism itself could be argued to be still in a process of osmosis in American culture. I think of psychologists like Steven Pinker who describe the ‘feminization’ of modern males when I think of such things, and how this allows for greater (or “feminizing”) social organization and success, something ideologically ‘Eurocentric’ in origin. Whenever we talk generally about this ‘modern male’, one should further consider, measuring this from norms and averages, we are de facto talking about “White” men, who represent the vast majority. Testosterone I would also say has been shown to be effected by environment in some way or another – stress is known to reduce it for example – as is stamina related exercise. I guess I’m saying whatever factor that might be might be inherent to a “black” teenagers testosterone and hence future young adult level might be as inherent as is his increased propensity to be from a lower economic status or listen to hip hop music and watch BET. My explanation would be some cause and effect exhaustion of the male capacity to produce testosterone, perhaps some aging effect on the “Black man’s” thyroid, or some other such physiological explanation. While my explanation may not be correct, what has to be considered moreover is that nevertheless there may be some other ‘secondary explanation’. And to implement such measures as a pill for “Blacks” could have arbitrary effect – misinformation about things that determine their whole physical existence is touchy stuff – where mistaken belief can leave to acts such as the Holocaust (not to go Hitler ad reductium on you, you are far from Hitler!) or even the unnecessary sterilization of criminals, disabled and such individuals in the western world during the earlier half of the last century. Whether you are right or not, you have to consider the ‘what if’ of such suggestions, the what if I’m wrong would there be any consequences in any case. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong in acting on assumptions like yours, but the consequences you have to consider.

I had a hard time understanding some of this comment, but the gist of it is clear. My understanding is that the racial differentials in testosterone scores are worldwide. That is, Blacks have higher levels in their early lives the world over, Asians have lower levels their whole lives the world over, and Whites are in between the world over. I am not sure how true that is, but that’s how I understand it. If this hasn’t been proven yet, we ought to do some studies to see if it is true or not. Personally, I doubt if environment is causing racial differentials in testosterone scores. As far as my thought experiment about giving Blacks a testosterone lowering pill, it’s just that – a thought experiment. We already give men pills and shots to raise their levels with few known ill effects. It stands to reason we could lower men’s levels without ill effects either. At any rate, such things ought to be rigorously studied.

New Interview with Me Up

Here. Talking Bigfoot and a few other things. These guys are mostly 9-11 Conspiracy buffs, and I am not into that stuff, but they do seem to be coming from a progressive POV, but a weird American hybridized one, as is so often the case. Interview with me starts at 15 minutes into the show. You might want to skip the rest depending on your tastes. I am terrified of the sound of my own recorded voice, but I am going to listen to it anyway.

Black – White IQ Gap in the US

Here. From Chuck’s excellent Occidentalist site which lately has been dealing a lot with the issue of race realism and IQ. He spends an incredible amount of time and research dealing with these questions and he’s smart as all get out. I dare say he might even be smarter than I am. At any rate, I have a hard time keeping up with him. He had several extremely long articles about the Black-White IQ gap in the US. Since he generally takes an anti-HBD stance when it comes to race and IQ, I figured that was his take on this issue too. But you see in the above post that he thinks the B-W Q gap in the US is probably more a result of genetics than anything else. That was a pretty amazing admission for an anti-HBD IQ guy. I have been studying the B-W IQ gap for at least 30 years now. I started in the 1970’s and never quit. Lately I don’t read much about it because I pretty much made up my mind a long time ago. I still hold out hope that it might be amenable to a closing of the gap, but I get less and less certain over time. If you spend as much time researching the gap as I have, after a while, the conclusion that it must be generally keeps on punching you in the face. It knocks you down over and over. People who study it that much and still say it’s environmental have pretty much been KO’d 1000’s of times and are standing up once again to fight George Foreman and lose. I don’t talk about much on here, and officially, my line is only that at the moment in the US, Whites are more intelligent than Blacks by about 13.2 points. Through a lot of fancy messing around with statistics and some journalistic license, I was able to shave a couple of points off the standard 1 SD gap, but I realize that’s not particularly scientific, only that one can make the case by choosing certain tests. Chuck agrees with me that adult Blacks have shaved ~1.5 points off the gap, we both agree that Black kids have shaved ~5-6 points off the gap. I would argue that IQ tests are a valid measure of intelligence, and that at the moment, Whites are smarter than Blacks on average. Officially, I am not saying what is causing the gap, but we ought to be discussing the fact that it’s real. Whites are smarter. Blacks are not as smart or dumber or however you put it. That’s the important question, and the one society ought to be talking about. Instead, once you say that, you get an instant derail into whether the gap is genetic or environmental. Frankly, I could care less, and I am not even sure if it’s an important question! We need to stop those derails on move back to the question that one privileged group is much smarter than a group that has a ton of problems. I am afraid that a lot of the problems of Blacks, though not all of them, flow directly from that IQ gap itself. People (racists) say we need to quit spending so much money trying to close the IQ gap, but society doesn’t spend a dime on this endeavor. Nor do we spend a dime on trying to close the testing gap which mysteriously mirrors the IQ gap. Educators try their best to educate both Whites and Blacks, and there’s not one single penny spent on trying to close any gaps, nor should there by. Educational resources instead should be distributed equitably. Racists also say that the gap means that Blacks cannot be educated. This is not true. Any person above 70 IQ can be educated, and even the retarded can be educated to some extent. A person with an 85 IQ can and should be educated to the maximum of their potential, and this is what we can or should do. Saying that an 85 IQ human being cannot be taught a single thing in life is the most utter nonsense. One thing that unfortunately flows from this fact is that once folks figure there’s an IQ gap set in stone, they typically decide that Whites therefore must separate from Blacks. But this makes no sense. 5 In White society, people of all IQ’s live happily together, and there’s no reason to think that races with differential IQ’s cannot also live happily together. Please feel free to discuss…

Pulp Fiction Soundtrack – Opening Theme (Dick Dale and His Del Tones – Miserlou)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5OHrQYwRac] A good overview here:

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino, who cowrote its screenplay with Roger Avary. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references. The film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture; Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. It was also awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. A major critical and commercial success, it revitalized the career of its leading man, John Travolta, who received an Academy Award nomination, as did costars Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters’ senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film’s title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of “pulp”. The plot, in keeping with most of Tarantino’s other works, is presented out of chronological sequence. The picture’s self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film. Considered by some critics a black comedy, the film is also frequently labeled a “neo-noir”. Critic Geoffrey O’Brien argues otherwise: “The old-time noir passions, the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes, would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up. [It is] neither neo-noir nor a parody of noir”. Similarly, Nicholas Christopher calls it “more gangland camp than neo-noir”, and Foster Hirsch suggests that its “trippy fantasy landscape” characterizes it more definitively than any genre label. Pulp Fiction is viewed as the inspiration for many later movies that adopted various elements of its style. The nature of its development, marketing, and distribution and its consequent profitability had a sweeping effect on the field of independent cinema. A cultural watershed, Pulp Fiction’s influence has been felt in several other popular media.

This is really a fantastic movie. It’s violent as Hell, and I don’t necessarily like movies like that, but it’s still excellent. Personally I think it is one of the finest movies ever made, and Tarantino is a genius. Travolta plays his best role ever, Samuel Jackson is incredible, the little known Uma Thurman was amazing. I could watch it again and again. Like all great movies, it operates on all sorts of different levels, from quite lowbrow to the highest of highbrows. I also love Dick Dale. I am not sure if he is still alive. He was arrested in his 50’s for screwing a 15 year old girl, but I don’t think he did much time. He was always a real surfer, I believe, and I think he was a pretty good one. I spent many years of my life in Huntington Beach, and I think Dale may have lived here. He was a legend, and his is music is as great as Pulp Fiction is in film. There is a punk rock version of Miserlou out in the mid 1980’s by one of those antisocial beach punk bands that is totally kick-ass! I used to have it on tape. I was sort of into the Orange County beach punk scene, but it was awfully violent and antisocial. I got jumped at a Black Flag concert by some maniacs wearing Nazi swastikas, but I didn’t get very hurt. The Alleycats were also at that show. If you can find any pictures of that hot Chinese chick and her husband from Redondo Beach who were the leaders of that band, check them out. I know that Oriental lead singer. She was nuts. She would slam dance at that Hong Kong cafe, and the bitch would actually break tables when she did it. She completely came onto me at that Black Flag show even though her husband was there, but she gave me only seconds to make a move. I didn’t, and she moved right along. Class femme fatale. Later in the show, she saw me get jumped and she lost all respect for me after that. She would have been an interesting fuck, too bad I didn’t go for it! That was one badass scene! It was really dangerous, but it was also one of the most exciting scenes I have ever been involved in. Danger and exhilaration = rush! Great fun for adrenaline addicts.

Potential Psycho Completely Cured

I am reading about the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker on forums and I ran across this fascinating post. I can’t really relate to it at all, I must say, though I do understand the feeling of wanting to kill people in general, unfortunately. But that’s as far as I’ve ever gone – feeling that way – and that may not even be a fantasy but instead it may be something else altogether. Raping women? Nah, not my fantasy. Prowling? Never done it, don’t have it in me, and don’t even like the idea. I think the very idea of prowling and enjoying it is a bit sick. Fascinated with fire and ways of killing? No. My friends and I did use to make non-shrapnel bombs and detonate them. We used one to blow up an enemy’s car windshield, and another was tossed onto an enemy’s lawn and burned a large hole in the lawn. Animal abuse? Not mammals, no way. My friends and siblings and I devised all sorts of fascinating ways to kill insect pests until our parents put a stop to it. We used to go fishing and catch smelts and the salt marsh. We would catch up to 100 in a day. We got so bored of catching smelts that we devised methods of killing them. We played, “Acapulco Cliff Divers” and cast the smelts, still on the hooks, onto shore rocks and then quickly reeled them in over the rocks. We tied live smelts to the backs of our bikes and dragged them to their deaths part of the way home. But torturing fish and bugs and ain’t killing mammals. Screw that. And I never tortured or killed reptiles either and certainly not birds. I never fantasized about being a criminal really. It doesn’t really appeal to me to be a creep as it’s not part of my self-image, and I just don’t think I have it in me to do these things. But I get why people do this stuff. I get it. I know how their minds work. This guy went way beyond that. He had actual fantasies of rape starting at puberty (a very bad time for intense rape fantasies to start in a male), he tortured and abused animals, researched killing methods and ways of getting away with the crimes he wanted to commit, spent countless hours in the woods being weird when he wasn’t prowling around residential areas at night plotting crimes, was fascinated with bombs and fire, had intense feelings of rage, etc, was unable to control his feelings on his own because they were so powerful that they had an intense hold on him, etc. His mother recognized that he was one sick puppy as a child and put him in therapy at an early age. He received professional help was eventually able to become completely free of all such feelings and behaviors.

Typing on smart phones is hard for me. As I was saying, my father was nonexistent in my upbringing. My mother did the best she could but was unable to have a lasting relationship with a man. The area we lived in was a middle class area on the edge of town. A levee wound through the woods and behind my home as well. I spent a great deal of time in the woods as well as prowling the neighborhood at night. I started to have rape fantasies during puberty and would find myself engaged in working through the best M.O. to avoid detection. I’ve always had rage issues. I used to abuse animals and was fascinated with explosives, fires, and killing methods. My mother put me in counseling at an early age, and I have been in and out ever since. I as well as others am lucky that I had the help in place to learn to think in better ways. Perhaps my sense of shame for having these thoughts coupled with my conscience kept me from acting on these feelings. I could not help having these compulsions anymore than I could choose my eye or skin color, but it was my responsibility to everyone around me to not give in. When I learned of the EAR/ONS, it sent shivers down my spine. Here was someone who had put into action an M.O. VERY similar to what I was thinking during those times. I guess part of the reason I came here was to find more about myself. Perhaps remember things I can’t (blocks of my childhood I can’t remember). Those reading this that have never had these issues can never understand. You can’t just turn it off and without professional help – it may be too much to overcome. If you have no regard for anyone but yourself as EAR/ONS did/does, then my guess is you won’t. I do know wanting these thoughts to go is not enough to make it so. Based on my background, there are some things I am convinced EAR was and what he was not. I don’t think anyone is a “monster” or “pervert” or “sicko”. I think people just are. It’s when “The selected route will unmask Character when plans take action”. I look at my situation as a re-birth having come close to hurting innocent people but got help. I urge all of you to view offenders as broken people WHO SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS. Perhaps if there was less of a stigma attached to such urges, more people would seek help. I’m a recovering alcoholic and don’t tell everyone, but I’ve told far more about my drinking than about my other issues. Some family know, and I have shared all with my wife. If anyone reading this wishes to label me, you may. That would be your problem, not mine. If there are those out there that are feeling urges 1.) You’re human, and it’s ok 2.) It is NEVER ok to act on them 3.) Acknowledge you are not feeling “Excitment’s Crave” – you wish to hurt others as you are hurt, and you must treat it as the sickness it is 4.) There is hope and you can succeed in taking the right path. I don’t know if I have done anything here, but I have shared what I can. I cannot speak to those like EAR that crossed that line and CHOSE to live out their fantasies and wallow in the rage and pain and pull others into it. I don’t understand that, and I doubt I ever will. Perhaps he did have a conscience and was haunted to the point of suicide.

What is absolutely fascinating to me is that someone can get this twisted and then be completely rehabilitated from these thoughts, urges and feelings. I figured that once you get this far gone at that early of an age, you’re basically history. Even if never act on this stuff, I never thought you could get over of it simply because it seems that you’re already wired up in a very twisted way. Perhaps one way he was able to get over this so well is that he had not yet started offending. He says that he had moral values that kept him from acting on these feelings, and this is what kept him from offending. He had kept himself in check. And having some base level of morality is perhaps what helped him to recover so well. Once you start offending, you’re pretty far down the road and without a base level of morality, there’s no reason to get better. At the end of the day, this is a very hopeful post. It shows that perhaps with early enough intervention, a lot of potential psychos can be arrested in their development, converted into moral humans and a lot of crimes and victims can be prevented from ever occurring and existing. There is more hope for humans than I thought.

The East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker

Voice recording from the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker.

His known criminal career ranged from 1976-1986, though he was also the Visalia Ransacker active in Visalia in 1973-4. The Ransacker also committed a homicide. The EAR mostly raped, but he did kill one couple who were out for a walk in the Sacramento area. The crimes began with a rape spree in the Sacramento area in 1976-78. Then he moved around to Modesto, Davis, and the Bay Area for more attacks in 1978-79. During his wild spree in the Sacramento area, community meetings were held. He went to at least one of these community meetings and sat in the audience. We know this because a man spoke at the meeting and said, “What kind of man would sit back and let his wife get raped like that without doing something about it?” Three months later, this man and his wife were attacked in their home. The man was tied up, and the woman was bound and raped. EAR was at the meeting, and somehow he knew who the man was or he followed him home from the meeting. Creepy as Hell! He left the Sacramento area after two composites were released of possible attackers in the killing of the couple out for a walk, so those composites are probably good. He was 31 years old when he started as EAR. He may have been in the military at the time of the original rapes. He drove a dark colored VW. His career as EAR ended when he moved to Southern California in 1979 where he turned into the Original Night Stalker and escalated to homicides of both males and females in the Santa Barbara and Irvine/Laguna Niguel area from 1979-1986. In a number of these cases, via prowling, he noticed a couple having sex. Then he quickly broke in and blitzed them while they were having sex. In these later homicides, he tied people with ligatures but removed the ligatures before he left to remove evidence. During this phase, he was 34-41 years old. He was still on the loose as of 1991, when the extremely creepy voice recording above was made. The recording is of the suspect making a taunting call to one of his original EAR rape victims who survived. He made these calls to several of his previous victims, but this is the only one that was recorded. The drawing at the beginning of the video is how he looked in his attacks. The gritted teeth are correct because he typically spoke through gritted teeth. At the time of the phone call, he was 46 years old. The EAR MO was to stalk and maybe even burglarize in the area and gain a great deal of intelligence about the victims through break-ins and prowling. He often targeted areas that had homes for sale. He probably looked at a couple of homes for sale, posing as a prospective buyer and/or a fake real estate agent. He would later return to the area, sometimes by vehicle, sometimes on a bicycle, and sometimes on foot. Attacks were typically made next to an open area from which he could make his escape. Telephone lines were usually cut before entering. The woman was bound with special knots and raped over a period ranging over up to three hours. During this period, she would be raped, sodomized, and forced to have oral sex. He also wandered the house, eating and drinking items from the fridge. He wandered in and out of the house, eating and drinking, apparently looking for people to come home. He ransacked through the house, only taking a few items of value. If a male was in the house, he was bound and gagged and placed on the bed face down with a plate on his back and told that if he moved, he would die. At some point, EAR left, but the victim often could not tell when he left because he was wandering around so much. It often took the woman half an hour or so to get free of her bonds and get help, and by that time, he was long gone. In some cases, he was seen fleeing and pursued, but he always got away somehow. One time police saw him on a bicycle with a ski mask and pursued him, but he escaped once again. Several composites were made but they do not look much alike. The original attacks were by a young White male aged 18-33, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes, 5’11 tall, muscled but with a thin body like a swimmer. He favored military green clothing but had a wide variety of clothes that he wore. He always wore tennis shoes with a herringbone pattern. He used a new ski mask in every crime and sometimes made his own masks. He had a wide variety of handguns and knives which he used in his attacks. He was 72 years old when he was finally caught. Up until then though, he definitely got away with an incredible crime spree – countless break-ins and burglaries, over 50 rapes, and 13 homicides. He was very, very good. Good at what he did that is, one of the best. One of the best at getting away with his evil crimes. He’s one sick man right though. This site is an excellent resource on this master criminal.

Comrade Kiran's Answers to Journalists During the Press Conference on June 19, 2012

The Nepalese Maoists have been very successful. After waging a long revolutionary war, they hung it up with a peace settlement in an effort to try to obtain power peacefully. In recent elections, they got 4 However, since then, their leaders have been engaged in some major sellout activity, especially Prachandra, their leader. He has aligned himself with the US and India, and has praised unequal treaties signed by Nepal and India in the past in addition to supporting new treaties that India has lined up for its neo-colony called Nepal. India has always treated Nepal like dirt, used and abused it in a neocolonial fashion. The traitor Nepali Congress Party went along with this treason by aligning itself with the establishment India Congress Party. What this really is is Indian imperialism. In addition to being a reactionary state, we need to think long and hard about the extent to which India is also an imperialist power. India’s actions in the Northeast and in Kashmir nearly smack of imperialism. These are arguably occupied territories of Indian imperialism and Indian ultranationalism. As a regional hegemon and a large capitalist state with a huge army, it was only a matter of time before India would start acting as an imperialist power. As Lenin pointed out in his seminal essay, modern capitalism is necessarily imperialist. A large modern capitalist state must be an imperialist state, and modern capitalism must inevitably lead to imperialism. This is where the antiwar Libertarians have it all wrong. They envision a large ultracapitalist US or even world in which all states would be isolationist and noninterventionist. But if modern large state capitalism cannot be anything other than imperialist, this is simply not possible. Large capitalist states will not sit idly by while other nations take actions against corporate capitalist interests and in favor of their peoples. The US has supported repeated coups and coup attempts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras, Bolivia and most recently in Paraguay. There were recent imperialist interventions in Libya and now in Syria mostly to secure the interests of Western capital and Zionism. Zionism itself has profound links with imperialism, and some argue that the Israeli state itself, while obviously a s colonial power, is also an imperialist power. I am not certain if Israel is actually a regional imperialist power. I do not know what the BIPPA is, but it sounds like globalist World Bank IMF bullshit designed to privilege corporations and capital at the expense of sovereign nations, people and the Earth itself. It’s mind-boggling to think that Prachandra has gone along with this. This split in Maoist parties is not a bad thing and was a long time coming. Let’s see where it all leads. These questions and answers are from the press conference that was organized on the 19th of June 2012 by the newly formed Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, which finally ruptured from the then Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) after a 2 day long National Convention held in Kathmandu, Nepal. Chairman of the newly formed CPN-M, Comrade Kiran (Mohan Baidya) answered the questions raised by journalists during the press conference. Thanks to Comrade Pooja for taking her time to make this speech available in English. Q: – How do you justify the formation of the new party? How should general people understand this? A: – Communist party is a party for the benefit of the proletariat and the people. In the case of Nepal, the aim of a communist party remains to move forward, raising the issues of safeguarding national sovereignty; people’s democracy and livelihood then ultimately leap towards socialism and communism. This is self-proven. In the process of attaining this aim we went through people’s war, and did considerable amount of work among and with the people. We built our base areas, practiced our newly formed people’s power but then conciliation took place amidst as we moved forward to build a new Nepal. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t compromise, we should, but while compromising, the act of abandoning our entire basis (achievements) has happened. The act of slipping down from our mission and objectives has happened. The dream we carried was of a constitutional assembly, but where is the constitution? How did the constituent assembly function? Talking about people’s livelihood, how has the corruption been mounting-up? That fact is clearer. In the process of making a constitution there was an agreement to move forward institutionalizing the rights of the working class, indigenous people, ethnic minorities, women & Dalits; including the rights of all oppressed class, region and gender but ditching all these primary issues of constitutional thematic committees it is apparent that ex-chairman, Prachanda surrendered everything to Congress & UML by forming a dispute resolution sub-committee under the constitutional committee. In the process of making a constitution the question of ethnic-identity-based federalism is extremely important. Our party takes the decision of an ethnic-identity-based federalism while in process of restructuring the state Prachanda & Baburam joined their necks together with Congress-UML and agreed up on eleven anonymous federal states. The situation was that they were forced to take their decision back, as we and all others in the constituent assembly carried-out a signature collection campaign against their decision. They have failed to institutionalize ethnic-identity, it is important for us to do it. Where are the perquisites for women and Dalits? There have been serious betrayals on these issues. That is why we want to raise all these issues again. Not only that, we are also talking about issues of national sovereignty. Since the bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement (BIPPA) was signed, now the issues of water resources agreement and extradition treaty have come to surface. The main thing is that there has been a wrong tendency to maneuver our party as a puppet of imperialism and expansionism; along with this all the core concept of the party including the guiding principal has been distorted. We are against this. We cannot let our party function as a puppet of imperialism, expansionism and feudalism. We had to revolt in order to safeguard people’s rights, interests and benefit. This is the main justification of the split. Q: – In the past we have witnessed vicious confrontations between two factions after the split of Naxalite struggle in India. How are you cautious about bloodshed happening after the party split? What is your view on the question of the government? A: – You raised the question of possible confrontation between two parties and the question of the Naxalite struggle in India; we are very cautious about this. There won’t be any such confrontation from our side. We won’t go into confrontation. It has been proven even in the course of history of our two-line struggle that we never exerted any physical force anywhere. Instead we have heard many cases of exertion of force by Prachanda’s group in places. During that time we alerted the concerned party to be serious on the matter. Therefore, firstly what I want to assure you is that we will not be exerting any physical force anywhere from our side. Secondly, we have to be extremely aware. There has been talk with Prachanda and other people within his circle that we have to be very serious in these matters after separation of the party. Therefore, how to move forward is primarily dependent on Prachanda’s group. Not to become serious in this matter and exert physical force is against  democratic norms; it is a dictatorship to exert force instead of seeking a solution to the problem through discussions and debates in a communist party. That is fascism. No one accept dictatorship and fascism, including us. In such a situation the masses will resist these acts. There are two things on the issues of how to move forward with other parties. Firstly we have to initiate talks with all the parties and reach an agreement in any issue that can be agreed upon. If anybody raises an issue that is in favor of the nation and the people, we must have to support that. We have been supportive so far, and that will continue. It doesn’t matter whether the Congress-UML or a neo-revisionist camp, if they raise similar issues as we do, we support that, but again the other important thing is that we should neither merge in the coalition of Congress-UML nor in the coalition of Baburam-Prachanda’s coalition of neo-revisionism. We will carry forward an independent revolutionary line of Nepalese politics. Q: – There are allegations that the monarchy assisted you to split the party, and you have close ties with Gyanendra, do you have RIM’s support or not? Who played the role from the international community to split the party? Has the president the right to dismiss the prime-minister, what is your say on this? A: – Firstly, you raised the question of collaboration with Gyanendra, who told you this and where? Reveal the factual basis of this, substantiate and tell me. Secondly, in the process of a two-line struggle, Baburam accused Prachanda as pro-king, and Prachanda had accused Baburam as pro-expansionist. This was documented in writing. Have you studied that written document or not? Did you understand that the pro-king and the pro-expansionist forces united together to attack us in the process of the two-line struggle? Thirdly, each and every political party has to have a capacity. That capacity means capacity of logical argument. When it’s not possible to annihilate someone through the means of factual arguments and debates, then there will be malevolent attempts to label them as corrupt, to denigrate them through the means of conspiracy and deception. Fourthly, if you look at our programs, we ask for establishment of a people’s federal republican state, emphasis on safeguarding the achievements of the ten years of the great people’s war. Let us look at things from a factual basis; when we look from this basis, those baseless allegations bear no truth at all. This isn’t anything but false allegations hatched by the pro-Indian-expansionist elements. Yes, we are in the RIM. There are many different parties in the RIM. You may even know what sort of discussions there are. Do you raise a question with the knowledge or without? We used to be involved in decision making in the RIM. The RIM is actually not operative at this moment. Perhaps you are trying to point to a particular party, but we had fraternal relationships with all the parties involved in RIM, and that continues. Fraternal parties reserve some rights. Our communist party is a proletarian internationalist party. If any party involved in such an umbrella organization slips into the quagmire of opportunism, then the other parties oppose this, and the international community has clearly said that the Prachanda-Baburam gang has slipped into the quagmire of revisionism. Therefore, let’s forget about RIM – any other genuine communist parties do not acknowledge that this gang is Marxist anymore. So, the issue of RIM etc. is total nonsense. Again, power & greed; look at the agenda– the only and one agenda of Congress-UML is that Baburam has to step down from the government. Probably this is a major cause of the dissolution of the constituent assembly without forging any political resolution. On the other hand, the only agenda of Baburam is that he has to retain power. So, these two camps are ready to abandon anything and will abandon everything for power. Therefore, we are not in this controversy. We are not in the row of their greed of power. As a tactic we have forwarded the agenda of multilateral roundtable conference. The so-called top leaders of these parties have become incapable of solving people’s problems. We have put forward the agenda of the United Interim Government, and we have said that the problem can be solved from there. Therefore, we won’t involve ourselves in the corrupt power play of the government. Q: – How will you make the constitution, you have claimed that there has been massive intervention by India, how have you scrutinized the new developments? In the past you formed COMPOSA, will it be continued? A: – In the process of making the constitution the issue of Indian intervention has always been there since B.S 2007 (1951). Firstly, making a people’s constitution is not possible by collaborating and wrangling day and night with feudalists, compradors and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie class. Secondly, making a new constitution involves the participation of all oppressed people. Now this has been clearly proven. Therefore, in such a situation, the constitution cannot be made. So whether the agenda is of reinstating the constituent assembly or yet again another election, this is all incorrect. Now the political outlet has to be forged by conducting discussions and debates through a roundtable conference in a multilateral convention. Even if this process fails to make a new constitution, then those who are in the line of federalism should begin the process of establishing people’s government at a local level. We have to move forward with the concept of establishing a people’s government even at the central level. It is complete nonsense to talk about making a constitution without forming a pro-people government. We are very clear in this issue. We are also very clear about what we should do on the question of Indian intervention. Basically, it won’t be wrong to say Nepal is a neo-colony of India. The act of destroying border-pillars by the Indian side has been talking place on a daily basis, and the border has been encroached in many places including Sustaa, Maheshpur and Kalapanee. Forget the other governments – even Prachanda and Baburam who led the government from our own Maoist party could do nothing to stop it from happening but instead just became hopeless spectators. The intervention of Indian expansionism in all sectors – economic, political, social and strategic has been rapidly gearing up. Indian expansionism is fulfilling its self-interest by providing space to the Indian puppets in Nepal. Indian expansionism has no respect for the Nepalese. We respect Indian people, but the Indian government points its evil eyes on the Nepalese on a regular basis. There have been many unequal treaties with India since 1950. Instead of nullifying these unequal treaties, arrangements are being made to sign even more unequal treaties including Upper-Karnalee and Arun-III. Baburam’s government has signed another water resource agreement with India. Therefore, we have been relentlessly insisting on the nullification of all these unequal treaties. In an interview with The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, Prachanda claimed that we (Nepalese) have an exceptional relationship with India. Those who have exceptional relationship with India are parties like the Nepali Congress. Now, Prachanda has also started to follow Nepali Congress. Therefore, we rigorously oppose all these trends. What we have said is that all the unequal treaties signed so far in this 21st century between India and Nepal have to be nullified, and new arrangements to sign new coequal treaties that benefits Indian and the Nepalese people need to be made. If the intervention doesn’t stop, as we have been saying– we also have principal contradiction with Indian expansionism, we will target our struggle of national sovereignty against the bureaucratic bourgeoisie in Nepal as well as Indian expansionism. Finally, you asked about COMPOSA (Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia), COMPOSA is not something to fear! This is an umbrella organization to struggle in the interest of patriots, leftists and all other pro-people elements in the South-Asian region. This organization has been weakened for sometimes now. We think about the ways to strengthen it again and carry on with it. The main thing is that if the imperialists, expansionists and opportunists conspire to weaken the people of any countries, and then the people and the pro-people forces also have to unite in tactics and form a united front to struggle. Q: – In the process of forming a new party there are allegations that the new party is reminiscent of old alcohol in a new bottle, what do you want to say on this? And, what is the assurance that you will also not deviate from the revolutionary line? What do you think of a unity with Prachanda? Now, what will be your relationship with the existing state, will you divorce with it and begin to declare people’s governments as in the past? A: – You indicted the new party as an old alcohol, on this what I want to say is – please at least look at our decisions carefully. If you examine our decisions carefully, then you will be able to discern whether the new party is old or new alcohol. I think the word alcohol here has been fairly tainted, but it would be better to understand the crux of the matter. We didn’t separate without valid reasons. Many things justify the reasons for this divorce. I have already said a lot about the issue of Indian expansionism– think about it, can patriots and genuine republicans progress work together with those who sign treaties like the bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement (BIPPA) and those who claim an exceptional relationship with India? Can revolutionaries progress together with those who renounced all of the promises that were made to people in the process of the great people’s war and who cremated the constituent assembly by joining their necks together with the reactionaries and opportunists? We have to look at things from this prospective. Talking about unity with Prachanda – unity is not feasible in such a situation. It is not possible at all. We have kept the door open if someone transforms themselves and comes to unite. This is the main thing. Even under this condition we will not go to Prachanda – he has to come to us. On the question of separation with the old state, even a person with a very basic knowledge of Marxism knows that communists want to smash the old reactionary state and replace that with new people’s government. The great people’s war we fought, the agenda of socialism, the journey to communism – all this means smashing the old reactionary state and replacing that with new people’s government. Not just this, beyond here we aim to abolish the existence of the state as a whole to establish a new world of humanism by creating a stateless, classless society that is completely free of all forms of exploitation and oppression. Our politics is fairly farsighted. We won’t stick to the government as a leech like other rulers here do. We will continue to struggle to establish a new state – this is our main goal. In the current situation, we will carefully think about what can be done for the benefit the people and the country by restricting ourselves within the limitations of the current state and the existing law. Proletarians have utilized parliaments and elections in the past. We cannot detach ourselves entirely from the principals of Marxism. We will decide what to do and where by formulating policies through analysis of the concrete situation. Q: – What is the decision of the National Convention on the question of dissolution of the constituent assembly? Now that the party has ruptured, which faction has the majority, the new party or the establishment faction? You have mentioned about united front, who would you unite with in united front? A: – We have already said a lot about the dissolution of the constituent assembly. There is a direct conspiracy of national and foreign reactionaries in dissolving the constituent assembly. The greediness of Baburam and the Nepali Congress to hold on to the power has also played some role here. It is well known to all that the autocratic behavior of those who have been proclaiming themselves as top leaders of the main four political parties has played a vital role in dissolving the constituent assembly. The autocratic behavior of these top leaders which completely mismatched with democratic practices and also bypassed the dignity of the 601 members of the constituent assembly is a major cause of the dissolution of the constituent assembly. While talking about which party is smaller and which is bigger, the world knows who is in the majority and how. Firstly, the issue of majority is transparent, those who came in the party through the unification process, some of the comrades are fine, no argument there, but the majority of them are total rubbish. We would be in the majority in the Maoist Party– in this situation; the fact is that there had been malevolent attempt to change the color of the party through absolute unification. Secondly, talking about which party is larger– we can evidently claim that even though we are in the minority in the central committee we have parallel party committees throughout the nation. If necessary we can demonstrate our strength. Thirdly, the issue of which party is bigger and which is smaller– perhaps this issue is not very significant. Throughout history smaller parties have become bigger, and the big ones have diminished. This is the way we have to understand the dialecticism of party unity. We have come thorough a long history. UCPN (Maoist) was also tiny in the initial phase. The issue of smaller and bigger– the party with correct thought, politics, ideology, which can substantiate politics in practice advancing resolutely in capacity of a genuine revolutionary communist party, acting in the interest of the country, people and proletarians expands. Those who betray the country and the people gradually evaporate. I have already clarified with whom we need to form a united front. A united front has to be formed. And we advance ahead forming a united front including the patriotic republicans, leftists, federalists, women, workers and Dalits. Another thing, the issue of party registration is the issue of conditional necessity. We will think about whether we should register the party and if we deem it is important then, we may register. If not we may not register at all because we are resolutely convinced that through parliamentarianism the people’s problems cannot be put to an end. Therefore, whether to register the party depends upon the situation. On the question of comradeship with Prachanda and Baburam, we came throughout our life in comradeship with them. Now, we did not leave Prachanda and Baburam but they left us. We did not separate from the party as well but they split themselves ditching the political ideological line of the party. Therefore, now the issue of their class categorization is a real bizarre. An independent political line of Prachanda and Baburam has come to an end. What should we label those who are the puppets of foreign reactionaries and expansionism? It is not possible to join neck together with the puppets. We cannot join our necks together with class capitulationists. Our desire and proposal to them is that they have to break all ties with all sort of reactionaries, only then we can go ahead together. As long as they have ties with those reactionaries, we don’t trust them. Q: – As heard, you are ambiguous about whether to go for people’s war or people’s revolt? What is your say on the question of corruption thought have been taken place in cantonments? How will you treat the journalists? A: – We are not ambiguous about whether to go for People’s War or People’s Revolt. Firstly, we will revolt for new democracy against parliamentarianism. We don’t acknowledge parliamentarianism. The democratic republic, the aged-decayed parliamentarianism of which all the parties here sing the retro song of democracy deafeningly, that democracy has completely failed, the Constituent Assembly has also failed. Therefore, as an alternative, in the interest of the country and the people we move ahead to establish New Democratic Republic in Nepal against Feudalism, Imperialism and Neo-Colonialism. This is our key agenda. To attain this goal, if asked how we move ahead, both ways, legal and underground, a revolutionary party can utilize every essential method. We came to the peace negotiation honestly. When we arrived only the Maoists had to make all the compromises but now we don’t compromise up to this excess. So, that is beyond doubt, if necessary – People’s War or People’s Revolt, anything can happen, this is the key issue. And you talk about money and corruption in the cantonments; I’m not here to talk about that. This is not a place to investigate corruption. So lets not talk about these things here. People are finding out where there has been mischief; most definitely the revolutionary members of the people’s liberation army are investigating it. That space is there. On your query about the role of Baburam-Prachanda while our arrest took place in India, but these are not things that only we look into. This can be a case of a serious investigation. This is also something that the masses and you people (journalists) can look at. Our journalist friends are very far-sighted, introspective and detail oriented. I am convinced that you will help us through this. We want to respect the media on how media is being treated. We will continue to fight for the rights of working class journalists; we will fight for the rights of the working class people. What we are worried about is that in the veil of professional journalism, mission journalism happens, and that is not a good thing. Let this not be the main issue, and we will respect you. If any shortcomings on our part we are committed to self-criticism.

This Is So Not Right

Here. I realize that this kid is severe bad news all the way around, but no way in Hell can I see giving a kid an 85 year prison term for a crime he committed when he 13 years old. No way, no way, no way, no way. Put him in the youth authority until he is 25 years old. If he’s too dangerous to be in youth authority, put him in adult prison in some special wing. No way on Earth can you give someone life for a crime they committed when they were a 13 year old boy. Forget it. By the way, I also do not believe in preventive detention, which is possibly what’s going on here. You can’t lock someone up just for being dangerous. It’s not illegal to be dangerous or even to be dangerous as Hell. That’s the price you pay for living in a free society. You have to live with dangerous people and take your chances with them.

"No Longer in Service," by Alpha Unit

When I was a kid I loved it when we were riding in the car and had to stop to let freight trains pass. We would lean across the front seat to watch the rail cars go by, chattering about them or just watching and getting that weird sensation that our car was moving…instead of the train. (I kind of liked that.) I still remember some of the names painted on the sides of the rail cars. COTTON BELT – the St. Louis Southwestern Railway, that is. SOUTHERN. That was the Southern Railway (“Serves the South”). FRISCO. Also known as the St. Louis – San Francisco Railway. But we were also waiting to see the caboose – that gave us something to look forward to, even though I was kind of sad to see it. That meant the show was over! The caboose is a thing of the past. Cabooses were once used on nearly all freight trains, by law. But advances in technology made the caboose unnecessary and undesirable, according to the railroads. The caboose was originally just a makeshift shack built over an empty flat car, assigned to the conductor for his exclusive use – a kind of home away from home. Over time it became the quarters for the train crew and took on a utilitarian role. Railroads found that the caboose offered a good vantage point to keep an eye on trains as they got longer; to improve the view they added a cupola, a lookout post on top of the car. For most of the 19th century and early 20th century, most cabooses carried a conductor, brakeman and a flagman. A second brakeman accompanied the engineer. (The conductor oversaw the safe operation of the train; the engineer oversaw operation of the locomotive.) Before the era of automatic air brakes, the engineer signaled by whistle when he needed to slow down or stop. This was when the rear-end and head-end brakemen went to work. Each car had its own brake wheel, and the two brakemen, having climbed on top of this moving train, would move from car to car, from opposite ends, applying hand brakes until the train stopped. Once the train stopped, the flagman would get off the train and walk back a prescribed distance to signal approaching trains that a stopped train was ahead. Once underway again, the caboose crew would sit in the cupola and watch for smoke from overheated axle bearings (this situation was called a hot box and was a serious fire and derailment hazard), smoke from stuck brakes, or other signs of trouble. In the 1880s the automatic air brake system invented by George Westinghouse eliminated the need for brakemen to set brakes manually. Eventually electric track circuits were implemented to activate signals, eliminating the need for flagmen. Friction bearings were replaced by roller bearings, reducing the likelihood of a hot box. Today the ends of freight trains are monitored by remote radio devices called End of Train devices, or EOTs. The EOT fits over the rear coupler and is also coupled into the air brake line. The EOT radios information to the engineer regarding the brake pressure at the rear of the train, whether or not the last car is moving and whether or not the flashing red light on the car is working. The EOT also allows the engineer to set the air brakes from the rear of the train in the event the train breaks in two. In such an emergency the engineer could set the brakes on both halves of the train. With the introduction of these devices, the conductor moved to the front of the train with the engineer. A lot of the cabooses were sold for their scrap value. But you can still see them in use in and around railyards sometimes. They are brought out for special events, too, such as historical tours. You’ll also find them in railroad museums across the country and in private use by individual owners. The United Transportation Union is the largest railroad operating union in North America, representing workers on every Class I railroad and many of the workers on regional and shortline railroads. The union initially protested the phasing out of cabooses. It pushed for legislation to require that trains have cabooses if they exceeded a certain length or if they were carrying hazardous materials. Several states did pass such laws, but as the railroads argued, the federal government no longer requires cabooses on trains. The caboose was obsolete as far as they were concerned. In 1982 the union signed an agreement with the rail carriers that permitted the elimination of the caboose. A freight train just isn’t what a freight train used to be.

References

Phillips, J. A. October 1998. A Caboose of Our Own. White River Journal. TrainWeb. The History of the Caboose.

The Man Who Thought He Was a Cat

Repost from the old site. While I was at the university getting my Master’s Degree, I used to read a lot of journals. I really liked this one journal called the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In one issue I found a case study of a man who suffered from the delusion that he was a cat! As a cat lover, I kind of enjoyed this case. I don’t think I’m a cat or anything like that, but sometimes I wonder if my two female cats make better companions than the women in my life. He was a 40 year old man who worked as a technician in a laboratory. Considering his delusion, one of the most peculiar things about him was that he actually looked like a cat! He was kind of thick and heavyset and had a big full beard. All of this contributed to a rather strange appearance somewhat like the Lion Man in the Wizard of Oz. The man stated flat out that he was actually a cat and not a human being. All attempts to disabuse him of this notion were met with airy dismissals. He had believed that he was a cat for a long time, possibly since childhood. He said that as as child and young man, he had spent a lot of time playing with cats, especially in open fields. He got down on all fours and walked around in fields and spent hours socializing with the cats out there. He continued to engage in this behavior to this day. He said that cats had a special affinity for him, because they realized that he was actually a cat and not a human. Hence, he said that cats accepted him as a fellow cat and treated him as such. He said that cats are actually very intelligent – much more intelligent than people think they are. Over the years rolling around in fields with cats, he learned that cats actually had a spoken language in their meows. He had finally learned this language over time and could now communicate with cats in their language. He also said that he had had sex with cats on many occasions out in the fields (How does one do this?). Over time, he had learned that most people did not want to hear about the fact that he was a cat, so he had learned to stop talking about it. He was diagnosed with Delusional Disorder and it was recommended that he take an anti-psychotic. I am not sure of how the case resolved. I believe that he did not see any problem in being a cat and refused treatment.

Democratic Underground's Censorship Rules on Debating Israel

Repost from the old site. I’ve had a lot of requests for the 149-page directory of hate sites that was referenced in my previous post. The 149-page site is called The Hate Directory, and it is linked below. In general, it lists Holocaust Denial, anti-Semitic, White Supremacist and neo-Nazi sites (A lot of overlap there! Are there any anti-Semites on this Earth who are not also Holocaust Deniers?!) I didn’t go over The Hate Directory with a fine tooth comb, but there were a few problematic sites on there. One of them is The Jewish Tribal Review. The JTR is a very problematic site, but their fantastic critique of the Jews, running to 3,000 pages, When Victims Rule, is often well-worth the read and is not really anti-Semitic at all. In other places, JTR is anti-Semitic. They criticize Jews for various things, but often don’t offer suggestions on what Jews should do instead of the critiqued behaviors. And in the news section, they just seem to go through the news listing any Jew who ever did anything bad and reprinting the article about him. What’s the point of that? Other than sheer bigotry. Alabaster’s Archive is also linked as a hate site. This is an excellent site and 9 The Hamas webpage is also listed. Other than the Hamas charter, what exactly on the Hamas webpage (mostly just a collection of news stories from Palestine about Israeli transgressions and Palestinian resistance actions) is hate propaganda? Here is a mail I received from the original poster describing the rules in DU about Jews and Israel: Here’s an excerpted sample of Democratic Underground Israel/Palestine forum rules: “If you feel great affinity to groups who are promoting hate in the Middle East such as Kahane, or Hamas; feel there is a Jewish conspiracy governing US foreign policy or control of the media; or believe supporters of Islam or Palestinian Nationalism are terrorists, then you are probably likely to be banned. Do not discuss the truthfulness and/or stupidity of various religions. Do not assume you know what someone believes simply because they practice a certain religion. Do not make over-sweeping or stereotypical generalizations of any group or individual. This includes making statements, either overtly or subtly, which are Anti-Semitic or Anti-Muslim. Please avoid posting “information” from overtly racist websites. A good, but not exhaustive, guide is Franklin’s Hate Directory. Posting from Whatreallyhappened, Chronwatch or Debka is specifically not allowed. Please exercise extreme caution and sensitivity when using the words “anti-Semitism” or “Zionism.” There is a wide range of opinion on the meaning of these words. If you must use them, please make sure your intended meaning is clear. Do not use the term “Zionist” to mean “Jew” or “Israeli.” [RL: This is despicable. I remember this from the Internet forums. Whenever we said anything about Jews, Zionist or Israel the disgusting, belligerent militant Jews on there would jump all over the post and demand that we put qualifiers in front of the nouns. Jews? How about “some Jews”? Israelis? How about “some Israelis”? Israel? Do you think that Israelis are monolithic? They are not! So you may not “generalize” about them. At that point, once all “stereotyping” and “generalization” has been banned, all debate on this subject becomes impossible. There’s more crap. Complaining about Israel or Jews? You must be “obsessed” with the Jews or Israel. Well, Hell, we can focus on whatever we want! Anyway, most Jews are “obsessed” with their tribe and their state, so why can’t others be that way too? Complaining about Israel but not about all other myriad shitty little countries (and shitty big countries) all over the world? Bigot! What nonsense. We can talk about whatever we want. We don’t need to juxtapose every anti-Israel comment with a comment slamming Peru, Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco or Colombia. Yeah! The world is full of shitty countries! And Israel is one of them!] Do not use the term “Jew” to mean “Israeli”. Do not call Palestinians “terrorists” unless you are actually talking about people who blow up cafes or buses filled with civilians. Do not compare Middle East regional leaders and parties to Hitler or the Nazis. Use of these terms is considered inflammatory and should be avoided. Do not call other members of this message board “terror apologist,” “Palestinian apologist,” “Israeli apologist,” “Nazi,” “Fascist,” “Sharonist,” “Likudnik”, etc.” ______________________________ The DU reporter notes: It’s notable that pro-Israel poster accusations of antisemitism, both overt and thinly-veiled, routinely go untouched. That’s of course fine, but any accusations of pro-Israel bias, blind support for Israel, hyper-sensitivity, or twisting facts to put Israel in the best light, are deleted, and often the author is never heard from again. No announcements that a poster has been banned are offered. They just disappear. Often the “disappeared” are mentioned on Prosemite Undercover, where they boast of their successful efforts in a behind-the-scenes swarm attack to “tombstone” the Israel-critic. They even have a standard tombstone graphic with the legend “Here lies “insert name”. [RL: I have spent some time over at Prosemite Undercover getting nauseous while reading about the nasty militant Jews and their deplorable behaviors. That is really a horrible site.] A sample of the moderator’s (Lithos) views: “Why these two distinctions are important is that there is a form of anti-Semitism where bigots use a stereotypical form of the term Zionist as a way to attack Jews. Zionism carries at some level a notion of struggle in much the same way as the real definition of jihad which is a word which also is abused and often serving as part of a code word for bigots.” ———————————– “The reason why I will disagree with you about equivalencing post 9/11’s bigotry with the multi-millenia of anti-Semitism has to do with the complicated nature of bigotry against Jews versus the highly simplistic one in the mainstream against Muslims. In contrast, Jews have had several thousand years of officially sponsored bigotry aimed at them. [RL: Down with the Jewish Pogrom and Persecution Masochism-Fest!] First there were many official pogroms against the Jewish religion by the Romans, Persians and the Muslims where they were blamed and accused of fomenting rebellion [RL: The Romans “blamed” the Jews for fomenting rebellion because that is exactly what the Jews were doing – fomenting rebellion!] and Deicide. Later with the rise of nation states along ethnic lines, Jews being ubiquitous and for the most part culturally distinct from the host population were accused first of being unpatriotic and seditious to ultimately masterminds of a great cabal a la The International Jew and The Protocols.” ———————————— “I totally agree that 9/11 fueled the spread of many tailored answers designed to provide simple easily to digest answers to an extremely complicated reality and that this included a rise in anti-Muslim fear, but I also think that there are many examples out now where it fueled a rise in anti-Semitism.” ————————————- “One problem that Israel has always had is a lack of resources, this includes political resources to affect policy and opinion. Given that their limited tool set includes a very strong and efficient military, it is not surprising they tend to rely on it when perhaps they shouldn’t.” ———————————— Poster writes: “If Jews, Zionism, and Israel are coming up in 911 over and over it’s sure not the conspiracy theorists that are looking to make connections where there are not.” Lithos responds: “So, if a lie is repeated enough, it becomes true? Isn’t that the issue behind Bush’s claims of WMD? Isn’t this the primary complaint by the 9/11 truth side the government and media are repeating a lie? Your comment is absurd given your basis of assumption.” ———————————— “The focus on AIPAC and Israel has always been interesting in that people place such singular focus on AIPAC as being an influential lobbying group, but make no mention of other groups with far more influence on US foreign policy, namely the energy and defense concerns? Why the focus when the ties, corruption and conspiracies to Iraq, Afghanistan, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Bin Ladin have far more to do with these groups than with Israel or AIPAC? [RL: Chomskian, Western Leftist bullshit. See Jeff Blankfort’s articles on Chomsky and the Israeli Lobby for more. Blankfort is Jewish.] About all Israel seems to be guaranteed by US policy is existence which results not from Jewish influence, but rather that of the Millennial Dispensationalist crowd. [RL: This is a typical lie of those who are trying very hard to avoid the anti-Semite label. There is no Jewish Lobby! The Israeli Lobby is…just a bunch of…Christians! Jeff Blankfort has done a good job of tearing apart this nonsense. The Christian Zionists do very little lobbying for Israel, and that is what really counts, not their inner political views. However, I recently received a mail noting that whenever the US criticizes Israel in the slightest, the White House gets bombarded with mails from the Christian Right telling them to knock it off. So the Christian Zionists do have some influence, but observation shows that the influence of the Jewish aspect of the Israeli Lobby is greater, in particular the Lobby’s power in the US media, which strikes terror into the hearts of US politicians.] Also, you find no issue that the original sources claiming Israeli involvement came from sites and operation well known and heavily associated with holocaust denial activities and the proponents of it?” [RL: Logical fallacy! Holocaust Denier idiots of course blamed Israel for 9-11, therefore…what? Anyone who suggests Israeli 9-11 involvement is a Holocaust Denier? It can’t possibly be true, because the initial purveyors of the theory were a bunch of virulently anti-Semitic White Supremacist morons?] ————————————- “As for sources, most of what is not allowed here for these types of biased thinking such as anti-Semitism sites are usually Paleo-Libertarian and generally Far Right in bent. Of the Libertarian (where most of the anti-Semitic sites seem to be associated), the main reason they’ve garnered any coin among the left is that they are jealous/in competition with the Neocons for control of the Right and leftists are sometimes over-eager to believe “an enemy of my enemy is my ally” without realizing this other group is also an enemy.” Update: I would like to point out that it is not only the Democratic Underground and the Liberal Underground sites that censor the Israel – Palestine issue. The same sort of pro-Israeli thuggery can be seen at the , or at least in the Arizona section anyway. It’s actually often an overt conspiracy: From an old webpage of the disgusting and foul brownshirts at the Jewish Internet Association:

Shut down offensive websites: If you spot an offensive web site — antisemitic, terrorist supporting, anti-Israel, or just hateful — you may be able to shut it down. By following simple procedures, you can determine who owns the site and what web hosting company is giving them access to the Internet.

Often the offensive site is not actually known to the web hosting company and is probably in violation of their rules of conduct. A simple letter of complaint can force the site to move, a considerable inconvenience and possibly the end of them. Haganah B’Internet, an online self-defense force, has prepared a site research How-to/Checklist along with other tools, advice and news on their website.

Blacks Beat Whites – Film at 11

Repost from the old site. I see idiots. I see White Supremacists. I see White Supremacist idiots (there is no other kind). It’s fun to stroll over to American Renaissance once in a while. While there is a good understanding of race there and folks are not afraid to broach the subject, there is also a staggering amount of stupidity, mostly in the comments. What is hilarious about all this Dumbness is that this Dumbness is being scribbled by folks who are dedicated to the premise that they are members of the most intelligent race on the planet. Ho ho ho! I see this problem with nationalists, especially ethnic nationalists, and ethnic supremacists (of all varieties) all the time, although I confess that Chinese Supremacists are the least stupid of all, and sometimes I think there is no one dumber than an Afrocentrist. Gosh, is there something to the IQ thing after all? The problem is that once you become an ethnic supremacist, you have to construct a particularly insane and insipid worldview whereby your group did all the great things in the whole history of the world, is superior to all the other groups, and the competing groups all did nothing and are inferiors. Even if your group was not running around secretly doing all the great stuff, you need to put down all the achievements of the other groups (“The Aztecs and Maya were too stupid to invent wheels!”), while elevating the often meager achievements of your own group. Talk to a Nordicist sometime about the Germanic tribes running around with bearskins and spears and he will convince you that they were far beyond the Egyptians. This leads to some rather breathtaking displays of brain rot. Only in White Supremacist fora will you still find intelligent humans debating whether or not humans came out of Africa. It’s just so insulting! That the White Man came from niggers! How dare you say that? But really now, if you recognize that before that we came from frogs, it’s not so insulting. Only on these fora do you find folks insisting that Whites were the original settlers of the Americas (!) and that Amerindians are interlopers who need to be sent back home (!). Only here do you find serious discussion of whether or not Africans still retain an “ape gene” (!) that all the rest of us have lost, at least when we are not drunk. Only here do “White Historians” regale rapt listeners with tales of how stealth-Whites (probably disguised as other races) roamed around the world for 1000’s of years, secreting building all of the great civilizations on Earth (!) for only a consultant’s fee, and then slipping silently back to Europe or wherever while the Egyptians, Indians, Khmer, Maya, Inca, Chinese and all the rest of the inferiors got all the credit (!). Yes, White Nationalism is a fountain of stupidity that never dries up. Let us look at my latest finding from American Renaissance. It is from an article about fossils. The post has now been deleted by the editors (see here), probably because it makes White people look too stupid. About the article – I think it had something to with Neandertal. One of these WN guys’ favorite obsessions is with Neandertal. Every sensible human on Earth knows that Neadandertal lived and died in Europe, going extinct 29,000 years. Everyone except…White nationalists! ROTF. These slobbering morons still insist, against all scientific evidence, that Neandertal gave rise to Homo Europeanansis Superioris. Now why anyone would want to claim ancestry to this big-browed hulk is beyond me, but WN’s just love it. I suspect it is because they get to claim that they are not descended from niggers! Anyway, the comments section took off and all the usual WN droolers strolled in from their group homes waving their arms in weird ways and making animal noises. Soon the conversation degenerated as usual. These guys’ contempt for Blacks knows no bottom floor. In the comments, they insisted, against all evidence, that Blacks had never accomplished anything in Africa before Whites showed up and taught them how to eat with forks and walk standing up. First of all, let us note that African Blacks discovered iron (went through the Iron Age) before European Whites did. This fact is common knowledge in any anthropology department, but not one massive-brained WN European Supermen has either heard of it or will have anything of it. I certainly am not arguing that Africa was some cultural pacesetter. But the facts on the Iron Age are clear. Africa skipped over the Bronze Age (and the Copper Age for that matter) altogether and went straight to the Iron Age. That’s right, straight from Neolithic to Iron, how ’bout that? I dare WN’s can put a “Black ignoramus” spin on that one! It is true that two groups did beat the Africans to the punch. Iron was developed in Anatolia in the year 2000 BC. It was then independently developed by the Ganges civilization in India in the year 1800 BC. In third place, in the year 1500 BC, are the quite-Black Africans of Nigeria. And Cleotis done it all without Massa’s help! Iron Age Timeline: 1. Anatolia (Turks, WN’s insist that Turks are not even White) 2000 BC 2. India, Ganges Valley (Indian Caucasians, WN’s say they are not White) 1800 BC 3. Africa, Tok, Nigeria, and Termit, Niger 1500 BC (Dumb niggers!) 4. China 1300 BC 5. Middle East 1100 BC 6. Greeks (WN’s concede these folks are White?) 1100 BC 7, etc. Everyone else (Northern European “superiors”) The Iron Age in Black Africa, straight from Wikipedia. From the text:

Inhabitants at Termit, in eastern Niger became the first iron smelting people in West Africa and among the first in the world around 1500 BC.

Other sources put the onset of the Iron Age in central Nigeria at the same time, in Tok, Nigeria. The Africans at Tok and Termit could not possibly have learned iron smelting from Arabs, as Arabs did not get it until 1100. No way did Hittites or South Indians teach it to them either. They just figured it out on their own, those big Black dummies. The painful truth is that Blacks crushed Euro Whites in terms of beating them to the Iron Age. Whites were left pitifully in the dust by Africans. Oh God, how embarrassing. Along with all Black innovations, WN geniuses insist that this Iron Age thingie must have come by way of Arabs. Now, WN’s always insist that Arabs are non-Whites, but in a race between niggers and A-rabs, the Arabs automagically turn White for a day, if only to beat the Blacks and claim the gold for Whitey. Another common folly on almost all WN sites is so dumb it’s embarrassing. Did you know that African Blacks had no agriculture until Whites showed up and taught them how to grow stuff? Neither did I! Neither does anyone in any anthropology department on Earth! But this crap is Gospel on WN sites, where it is common dogma that niggers are so dumb, they can’t even figure out how to grow food! The truth is that agriculture in Africa goes all the way back to 5000 BC in the Sahel. That’s 7000 years ago, and it’s way before ag came to Europe. Once again, Euro Whites were completely creamed by African Blacks who beat them to agriculture. Agriculture occurred independently in West Africa, Egypt and the Sahel at around the same time. INDEPENDENTLY. Anthropologists do not agree that West African agriculture was a diffusion from North Africa. It is considered to be an independent development. Contrary to popular rumor, African Black folks (or niggers, as WN’s refer to these humans) are not too stupid to grow food. They were growing lots of food just fine before White folks even showed up. Growing food is called agriculture. That’s the word grownups use when they discuss growing food, WN kiddies. Agriculture. Say it slowly and repeat it until you can say it well. Sahelians today are racially the same as they were 7000 years ago when they independently developed agriculture. They have hardly changed one bit. The civilizational attributes of the Sahelians came from their own culture. There is no evidence at all that all of their achievements came from some mystery Arabs cruising on through. North Africa was all Black until 15-18,000 years ago, when some non-European looking Caucasians (minus that lovely White skin) moved down from Europe and pushed the Blacks south. No one knows what these proto-Europeans looked like, but they may have resembled Berbers. The resulting mix of mostly White, part Black in North Africa is the leftovers of this invasion.

References

UNESCO. 2002. Iron in Africa: Revisiting the History.

Muslim Polygamy = Woman Shortage?

Repost from the old site. A rightwing lie about Muslims. Polygamy is not even common in most of the Muslim World anymore, and it’s mostly found in either the Gulf or places like Afghanistan. Even there, I think it is not that common. In the rest of the Muslim World, it is rare to absent. A number of secular Muslim countries have even banned the practice with progressive laws. This nonsense is part of theory designed to explain why so many young Muslims are blowing themselves up. It’s because of all the polygamy, which means there is a woman shortage, so they can’t get married or laid. The resulting frustration turns them into auto-exploding human devices. Show me the evidence that there is any woman shortage at all in the Muslim World, much less one due to polygamy. The only places in the world that have woman shortages are in India and China, and in both places, it is due to abortion of females. No one is blowing themselves up because they can’t get a wife in those places. Riddle me that.

Update on National Bolshevism

Repost from the old site. There is something downright nasty about these guys, and I can’t even put my finger on it. National Bolshevism is some type of Third Positionism. Third Positionism is one strange beast all right, and I can’t figure out what to make of it. Their Celtic cross symbol gives me the creeps; it reminds me of the Zodiac killer, and it looks fascistic. It’s supposedly some species of fascism that combines unspecified elements of the Left and Right, in particular, Leftist and socialist economics. As they have never held power anywhere, no one really knows how this plays out IRL. I’m not necessarily going to oppose anyone that gets lumped into some Third Positionist “fascist” grab bag by political scientists, but so far, I don’t like what I see. The National Bolshevik Party is Russia is one strange beast. They support the Russian minorities in all of the former SSR’s, which is theoretically a valid cause, but in many cases probably reeks of national chauvinism. But there’s a lot of national chauvinist crap going on in those new states anyway, this time victimizing Russians. They supported, and apparently still support, the War on the Chechen People in Chechnya and now generalized across much of the Caucasus to Dagestan, Ingushetia, Southern Russia, North Ossetia-Alania (When did they change their name?! Ok, 1994. The history of the Alans, especially as relates to the peopling of Japan and NE Asia, is an interesting one, if you like strange theories), Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria. Originally, their project was the usual fascist imperialist expansionist crap, envisioning a vast state encompassing all of the former USSR (which would have to be reconquered in some way) and all of Europe (I guess this would have to conquered too), to be ruled by Russians. That’s actually kind of humorous. Well, since then, they have dropped that. They are also anti-Semites, accusing ultranationalist Zhirinovsky of being a Jew, as if that is a bad thing (he has a bit of Jewish heritage, but I don’t enough to go to Israel). They hate Putin and accuse him of being a fascist. That’s strange, but if you study fascists for a while, you realize that one of their fascist games is that fascists are always going around calling others fascists as a term of abuse. It doesn’t make sense until you are around them a long time. Lenin hated the precursors of the National Bolsheviks and said they were a class enemy, but he’s not a God to me. At the end of the day, I’m sorry, but I just can’t get behind these guys. Ultranationalism pretty much sucks just about everywhere, without many exceptions. National Bolshevik principles. Update: R.M. Schultz of the Soviet Overseas Trading Company News blog, author of the principles above, stopped by the comments section and made some interesting points.

Question

Repost from the old site. How many White Nationalists are not racists, at least against Black people? One thing that is weird about WN’s is that their real obsession is with Blacks. It’s Blacks that they hate more than anything else in the whole country. They don’t much care about Hispanics or Muslims all that much. As commenters on Amren say, “Blacks are our enemy.” I told this to some smart Blacks and they said, “Oh, we know.” They knew it all along. I guess I am some kind of an idiot. I am dubious, to say the least, about the Hispanicization of the US and I hate illegal immigration. I’d prefer not to live around lots of Hispanics. Here in California, we do not have to deal with Blacks all that much. You can always choose not to live around them. As such, Blacks have not done a whole lot to me in my life and they just don’t effect me. Hence, arguments about Black evil and perfidy, Black crime and Black crime against Whites just leave me cold. It doesn’t effect me at all. Further, Blacks are not going anywhere. They are not leaving and they have even more right to be here than most Whites. It’s understandable that they are a bit pissed off. This blog is even officially Black-friendly, just to encourage them to come around. The Hispanics can take off, at least the illegal ones. Then we can put up some sensible barriers to try to make sure that Hispanic immigrants who come here are likely to be beneficial and not drains or detriments to society. There is nothing to do with Blacks. They don’t immigrate here and can’t be sent packing. The future shows no significant increase in the Black percentage of the US. They are not a looming problem for the future. The fact that the WN movement is basically just a Hate Movement against Black people is something that needs to be publicized in a rational, non-name-calling manner. These guys mostly hate Blacks and we can prove it. Let them try to justify their racist bullshit rather than hiding behind fake rationales and subterfuges. Just come out and admit it, White nationalists! You don’t like Blacks!

Evil Jews Bleed Gentile to Death for Matzos

Repost from the old site. Take a look at this sordid spectacle here. A pack of vicious, feral, Asiatic Zionist Jews surround a poor Gentile, Lance Thruster, (actually a stand-in for Jesus) in the woods somewhere in the Pale of Russia, torture him to death by crucifixion, and are in the process of draining all of the blood out of his body with thousands of pricks with tiny knives. The blood is being collected as I write this, and Lance is still alive and typing somehow despite being nailed to the holy cross like our Savior. The blood will be collected and used to prepare matzo balls. The Blood Libel is no libel – it’s actual truth, and you can see it right here on the Internets. Seriously folks, I happen to know Lance, and I don’t really think he is an anti-Semite at all. I think he’s a college student at USC, my alma mater. He just hates Israel, that’s all. These Zionist Jews are torturing him and roasting him over their fire, calling him racist, fascist, anti-Semite, Nazi, KKK, Jew-hater, bigot, skinhead, on and on. They are also accusing him of being paranoid. Whenever you shine the light on any aspect of Jewish Power, you get accused by entire football fields of snarling Jews of suffering from a paranoid psychosis. Yeah, a paranoid psychosis called reality. Jewlicious, I believe, is a liberal to progressive Jewish site who take a relatively soft line, as Jews go, on Zionism. Mostly young, hip, leftwing funny Jewish guys on there with a few of their female counterparts. This just goes to show you that as far as Zionism goes, US Jewish society is just flat-out morally bankrupt these days. It’s also an object lesson in how to create anti-Semites. If poor Lance makes it through this session with hating Jews too much, he deserves a medal. Lots of folks are just plain human and don’t have such powers, so anti-Semitism grows while Israel cheers and urges the Diaspora to high-tail to Eretz Israel pronto. It’s not quite conspiracy, but it’s pretty squalid.

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