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Cross posted from AcronymTV.com
Setting aside the statistically significant portion of those who would defend Israel’s Rumsfeldian named “Pillar of Defense” who think that the Old Testament is a real estate deed, those attempting to answer the question of whether Israel should be considered a terrorist state fall into roughly 3 categories:
1. Those who support Israel’s right to um, “defend” itself.
2. Those who think Israel should vacate their occupations and settlements and allow Palestinians the right to self-determination
3. Those who just think that violence is all so awful and it should just all go away.
To those of you in category #3, yes: the violence is awful, and it should all go away but please stop pretending the U.S. is an uninvolved, helpless party in the Israeli assault on Gaza. Or, as Glenn Greenwald wrote recently in a his piece Stop pretending the US is an uninvolved, helpless party in the Israeli assault on Gaza:
A central premise of US media coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza — beyond the claim that Israel is justifiably ‘defending itself’ — is that this is some endless conflict between two foreign entitles, and Americans can simply sit by helplessly and lament the tragedy of it all. The reality is precisely the opposite: Israeli aggression is possible only because of direct, affirmative, unstinting US diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does.
Should you swim against the main stream and sympathize with the people in Gaza, Gilad Sharon, the son of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, wants you to consider this:
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.
One must tip their cap to the sophisticated rhetorical device Sharon employees in equating the way forward for Isreal with the grandest and most dramatic expression of US foreign policy. How can flattening Gaza be wrong, if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so right? Flattening Gaza could even be viewed as humane, the way one kills a horse with a broken leg, by the portion of the world’s population that already accepts as matter of fact and morally justified the slow asphyxiation imposed on the 1.6 million Palestinians by Israel.
As Chris Hedges writes in his article Elites will make Gazans of us all:
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege.
What is happening in Gaza is not a war. You can call it apartheid, genocide, and you could certainly, and correctly in my book, call Israel, as they defy International law and almost 100 UN security resolutions calling for them to withdraw from occupied land — a terrorist state.
You could, and perhaps you should, go further in labeling the United States as not only as the Alpha terrorist state herself, but as a sponsor of the state terrorism of Israel for supplying military arms, aid, and a philosophy of Imperialism that gives birth to a double speak turning offense into defense quicker than the Israeli defense forces turn Palestinian children into corpses.
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Israel is an outpost of the Pentagon, a kind of giant US military base.
Israel has long played the crucial role of regional enforcer for US corporate interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, a strategic asset that serves as a staging ground for the deployment of American power. In the US war for global hegemony Israel has repeatedly served as conduit and facilitator when US militarists wanted to bypass Congressional bans such as the Arms Export Control Act and provide weapons and other material resources to nations engaged in the most horrific human rights violations.
Israel has served as a US mercenary state for decades. Since the 60′s, with CIA supervision and support, Israel has been used to train, arm, and provide intelligence to pro-US dictators and terrorist groups all over the world.
Israel was the primary contact and intermediary between the US and apartheid South Africa for years (where it also trained the death-squad security forces and helped develop their nuclear program). Israel has provided weapons and other military assistance to UNITA and RENAMO terrorists in Angola and Mozambique, to Papa Doc Duvalier, to Zaire during Mobutu’s reign, to Liberia under Charles Taylor, to the Burmese generals, to Pinochet’s Chile, to Somoza in Nicaragua, and to Argentina during the “Dirty War”. Israel delivered military aircraft to Indonesia’s Suharto during the massacres in East Timor and supplied the napalm dropped on impoverished peasant communities by the Air Force of El Salvador. In Guatemala, under the Rios Montt dictatorship, Israel taught terrorism techniques, assassination, and a “counterinsurgency” program based on the Strategic Hamlet operations that the US used in Vietnam. Israel sold arms to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In Rwanda it supplied the Hutu butchers with small arms before and during the genocide, and began arming the Tutsis immediately afterwards. And this is by no means a complete list.
I can only conclude that American and Israeli leaders wholeheartedly agree with the late Pol Pot: human beings are nothing but disposable animate objects, and concepts such as morality and justice are useful for propaganda purposes only.
Imperialism by proxy.
A rogue state.
mfi
Thank you Dennis Trainor Jr.. Needs to be seen and said.
Recommended
Accurate survey of current and historical post WW2 role of what the Imperial Capital of USA — WashingtonDC — condones and practices.
What has taken place in and around I/P Conflict from 1940′s onward to abide within a 65 year timeline altho it is not out of line to go back several decades prior to 1940′s can be made to look very complex and tangled or can be rendered down to simplicity of what took place and why this I/P Conflict resists being solved or putting in place any genuine solution.
WashingtonDC is deeply involved in what allows Tel Aviv to be what it is and do what it does. The history of the I/P Conflict at United Nations is Exhibit #1 regarding this being so. At this point here in late 2012 and going back ten,twenty-five or fifty- five years there is little evidence of WashingtonDC having done to Tel Aviv what it was/is so eager to do to Hanoi,Baghdad,Kabul or Tripoli or so fervently now seeks to do to Tehran again (count 1953 as first time). The political schizophrenia/binary imperial/neocolonial conduct of WashingtonDC in all this is now so unmoored from fact,truth and action/reaction awareness it is likely only a event some might choose to call WW3 will unwind it.
American Militarism is as virulent as any that preceded it.
The propaganda that is served with American Militarism is World Class and is underestimated at great peril. See 9/11/2001. See Late 2008. See what current POTUS Barack Obama approves,condones and seeks to impose via American Empire across the planet.
This is what is happening. It is happening now. Who will stop it? Who can stop it? Those who will and those who can. Until then? Try to survive — for the Gazans this is the real game.
For the Iraqis,Afghans,Pakistanis,Libyans,Yemenis,Syrians and Iranians this is the real game now.
Americans should be made to feel what they inflict on others so easily. War and Death and Destruction and Suffering and Great Loss and Ruin are genuine outcomes for those who see,feel and know them firsthand. Americans may not want to face what Americans have done,do or permit others to do while claiming USA to be exceptional and indispensable doing it but that does not make it all A-OK. It is not A-OK. Dead children because of what an American President says is OK to do/keep doing is not A-OK.
If these were your children would you say it is OK? Would you?
Basic human compassion and empathy needs to inform at this point.
If it does not then a monstrous truth leads to dark places.
U.S. – #1 threat to the peace and security of the world.
IMHO
#1 threat to the world – spent fuel pools at reactors, nuclear waste and nuclear weapons, in that order
#2 human-induced climate change, particularly coastal devastation and ocean acidification
#3 depletion of arable land by industrial and other intensely wasteful farming practices
#4 US and other military machines operating with impunity. Israel is at the top of that mix
If Israel is a terrorist state what does that make the US? – A benefactor?
However, historically speaking Israel have a lot of experience in terms of war and being slaves. So, I believed they merely avoiding whatever bad consequences they experienced before and this is their way in defending their country.
I was thinking of nation states only, but I appreciate your answer. 8>)
“Terrorist state” is an oxymoron. What do you think the monopoly of force that any state holds is about but terror to enforce its conception of order.
“What do you think the monopoly of force that any state holds is about but terror to enforce its conception of order.”
Oops! Now that’s what I call one hell of a slippery slope.
Why?
Well then per your above statement, every Middle Eastern Islamic State is by your definition a ‘terrorist state’.
Oops! That makes the ‘Palestinians’ a fledgling, want-to-be terrorist state,
Which now has joined the big leagues and is a terrorist state before being recognized as a sovereign state.
Therefore, those who label Israel alone as a terrorist state are practicing the not too subtle art of hypocrisy.
Now what was that about Israel?
Emergency Global Actions for Gaza
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Iq4XZx9Vj0BDIiWzlHi2mUS0VUOn_t-prgtGGCzatQw/edit?pli=1
This is a shallow post. It repeats the old and tiresome Chomsky line, one that admits no details and that amounts to little more than a childish assertion of hypocrisy. For 40 years Chomsky has repeated it as though it somehow proved a great deal. But whatever it proved in the beginning, it proves a lot less now. These days, just about anybody who is willing to call Israel a terrorist state will call the US a terrorist state. So why does Chomsky repeat it so often? Well, he wants or believes it necessary to exculpate Israel or silence some of its critics. By repeating it so often, he treats this line as the end of a discussion when it is only a beginning of one. Americans are supposed to suck in the guilt which conveniently leads to giving them pause in criticizing Isreal. After all, hypocrites have no right to judge. How convenient. How tiresome. Chomsky’s specialty is syntax, but surely he is not so ignorant of semantics and pragmatics to grasp that the main upshot of this kind of line is to shut people up. Hypocrites don’t get to criticize Israeli terror in Gaza. Greenwald and Hedges repeat it often. But surely they must know that there is not some huge split on the Left between those who admit one proposition, but not the other. So again we are left with the question of who they think they are addressing exactly? Given all that, it is an open question why all three of them bring it up as often as they do?
What about this post that repeats the Chomsky line. While it might be the beginning of a discussion on a more typical day in I/P, on a day when the Israeli terror machine is in high gear, the only purpose it can serve is to exculpate Israel or silence some of its critics. If we studied the details we might be compelled to declare India a terror state for its cooperation with Israel. And if you can show that India is a terror state, then a fortiori the US is. And it might give us an even better grasp on the criteria for a “terror state”. But of course that would be a rather ridiculous subject on Nov. 20. And wouldn’t give Americans pause before they criticize Israel on Nov. 20.
Hypocrites shouldn’t criticize. How convenient. What bullshit.
The term “terrorist state” is a meaningless national propaganda term that has not definitional meaning and attempts to attain a non-existent moral high ground.
What has happened over the past 120 years is the evolution of international legal standards agreed upon in principle by most and in some cases all nation states. The US and Israel have violated those legal standards with respect to treatment of prisoners of war and occupied territories. Israel’s absolute embargo of Gaza is in violation of the Geneva Conventions on occupied territories even before the current attacks on civilians in Gaza began. This operation just adds another violation of those Conventions. Israel has been pretending that Gaza and Palestine are sovereign and at war without actually granting sovereignty in the international community. Among the many motives of the current attacks is to forestall the United Nations over Israel’s objection recognizing Palestinian sovereignty and seating it as a full member instead of an observer. If that was the case right now, Palestine could ask the UN Security Council for a Section 7 action to protect them and oppose Israel.
Instead of moral outrage, a practical step would be to join the thousands who are marching against the attacks and to demand of Congress that Israel’s 3.1 billion in US aid cease.
To deal with the US violations requires a major change in our national security structures, a product of 65 years of accretion of power and budget.
Diplomacy, “the art of lying on behalf of one’s country” is inherently hypocritical. Even a hundred or so years of jumping up and down and pointing hasn’t changed that at all.
Israel is an apartheid state that is oppressing to force Palestinians to accept the plan of “Greater Israel”. The US is an imperial state receeding from overextension of its oppression. Terror, the incitement of fear for political purposes, is one tactic among many of oppressive states.
them there’s a lot o’ words for sayin’ nothin’
how do you spell t-a-u-t-o-l-o-g-y?
This is an excellent article and many of the comments are excellent, also. I think that struggling over the definition of “terrorist state” uses too much energy. We have seen “terror” and “terrorism” use so much that we know what is meant and our govt, both at home and abroad, and israel qualify in the category of terrorist state.
Or never have to do penance at all. US/Israel terrorism means never having to say you’re sorry.
Uh, first of all, the Palestinians did not invite the Jewish folk from Europe to their homeland, and then decide that they could not get along with them. Rather, the major players, The USA and Great Britain, decided that it would be awfully nice to have a group of people they could count on in terms of being a buffer between their oil needs and the prickliness of the UAE rulers.
So the United Nations allowed the takeover of Palestine by the Jews, and the Jews celebrated by forcibly pushing the locals out of their homes, quite unwillingly, and sometimes killing them and cutting off their fingers to get their rings. So there has been quite a bit of resentment from those who were displaced, forced to live in camps, where they eked out a perilous living.
One time back in the early 1980′s (or perhaps late 1970′s,) one Walter Cronkite confronted our nation with a film clip he was about to play. The clip would reveal exactly the extend of what it meant to be a Palestine who was “occupied” by the Israelis. And he believed that it was important for people to watch it as he played it, because he didn’t believe the film clip would survive for a second playing. (It didn’t.)
What the clip showed was a group of Palestinians living inside a rather bleak building. These families were selecting which children would run against a line of snipers outside the building, to get to a market where they could procure food for everyone in the community. Usually the children who were chosen had a history of being fast on their feet, small and wiry, so they wouldn’t serve as good a target as an older, larger child. Then the chosen children slipped out of the building, and ran off, while the audience heard the snipers shooting. Eventually the kids came back with food. it was a happy moment, because now there was food, and the kids had all luckily survived their trip to the store.
If that wouldn’t make any group of people capable of becoming “terrorists” I don’t know what would.
My answer, Dennis, is that it makes the USA a masochistic and terrorist nation. Every penny for Israeli weaponry that is offered up by the Clinton/Bush/Obama Administrations was money that should have been spent here.
In the time period between Aug 2010 and late Sept 2011 alone, some 55 billions of dollars was given to Israel and various UAE states. (I imagine, to help with our coming war in Iran.) During this same period of time, Tim Geithner refused Arnold Schwartzenegger, then the governor of California, his request for a LOAN of some 20 billions of dollars. THis loan was needed so that the state could keep teachers employed, police employed, clinics up and running, and its social services safety net up and running. (It now takes over four months to get approved for such items as Food Stamps here in Calif.)
The reason that Gethner cited in refusing the loan was that the 20 billion dollar loan would hurt the Federal Government’s deficit situation. But money for Israel is where the Powers that Be want our money spent.
Gulp!
Read more history books!
Have a nice Thanksgiving holiday.
“Israel is an outpost of the Pentagon, a kind of giant US military base.”
This sounds like a reasonable definition to me.
When folks consider the link between Israeli violence, apartheid and their nuclear arsenal and the US, the place to start is US military aid, which has always been strong and has increased over the last decade or so.
One bit of data among the piles:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
Excerpt:
“In 2007, the Bush Administration and the Israeli government agreed to a 10-year, $30 billion military aid package that gradually would raise Israel’s annual Foreign Military Financing grant from a baseline of nearly $2.55 billion in FY2009 to approximately $3.1 billion for FY2013 through FY2018.”
Thank you for the excellent links.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33An6HotyuI