Do you-all read the Free Thought Project? They do heroic work every day. [warning: bring ad blockers.]
Blog
Time To Break The Silence On Palestine
“To hold fast to the image of God in every person is to insist that the Palestinian child is as precious as the Jewish child.”
From an excellent op-ed at The New York Times by Michelle Alexander.
Rabbi Brian Walt, who has spoken publicly about the reasons that he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, liberal Zionism meant that he believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a desperately needed safe haven and cultural center for Jewish people around the world, “a state that would reflect as well as honor the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist, until his experiences in the occupied territories forever changed him.
During more than 20 visits to the West Bank and Gaza, he saw horrific human rights abuses, including Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children’s toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands being confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidized by the Israeli government. He was forced to reckon with the reality that these demolitions, settlements and acts of violent dispossession were not rogue moves, but fully supported and enabled by the Israeli military. For him, the turning point was witnessing legalized discrimination against Palestinians — including streets for Jews only — which, he said, was worse in some ways than what he had witnessed as a boy in South Africa.
Benjamin Ferencz: The Immoral Killing Of The Iranian General
The New York Times has published a letter from former war crime prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz.
Ferencz was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials. His website is here. From his Bio.
The U.S. had decided to prosecute a broad cross section of Nazi criminals once the trial against Goering and his henchmen was over. General Telford Taylor was assigned as Chief of Counsel for 12 subsequent trials. Ferencz was sent with about fifty researchers to Berlin to scour Nazi offices and archives. In their hands lay overwhelming evidence of Nazi genocide by German doctors, lawyers, judges, generals, industrialists, and others who played leading roles in organizing or perpetrating Nazi brutalities. Without pity or remorse, the SS murder squads killed every Jewish man, woman, and child they could lay their hands on. Gypsies, communist functionaries, and Soviet intellectuals suffered the same fate. It was tabulated that over a million persons were deliberately murdered by these special “action groups.
Ferencz became Chief Prosecutor for the United States in The Einsatzgruppen Case, which the Associated Press called “the biggest murder trial in history.” Twenty-two defendants were charged with murdering over a million people. He was only twenty-seven years old. It was his first case.
All of the defendants were convicted. Thirteen were sentenced to death. The verdict was hailed as a great success for the prosecution. Ferencz’s primary objective had been to establish a legal precedent that would encourage a more humane and secure world in the future.
Court Orders FBI to Expunge Website Records Under Privacy Act
In late November, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to expunge certain records relating to Eric Garris, an editor of the website Antiwar.com, which describes itself as promoting “non-interventionism” and posts related news and opinions.
The move comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in September that federal law prohibits law enforcement agencies from maintaining records describing First Amendment activity, unless the record “is pertinent to and within the scope of an ongoing law enforcement activity.” The case marked the first time the Ninth Circuit has considered that question.
Garris v. FBI involved the FBI’s collection and maintenance of records on the editors of Antiwar.com. The site’s editors and co-founders, Garris and Justin Raimondo, challenged the bureau’s preservation of records describing their work and sought to have the records expunged under the Privacy Act of 1974. The court of appeals agreed with their arguments related to a detailed post-9/11 “threat assessment” memorandum, noting that the FBI did not demonstrate that the memo at issue was “pertinent” to ongoing law enforcement activity.
US in Somalia
Rick writes:
I’m looking for a podcast where you describe the origins of Al Shabaab.
I know that Somalia was coming along well under the Islamic courts Union, then we screwed it up when GW asked Ethiopia to invade.
Any help is much appreciated.
Me:
Concerned Veterans For America Launch Campaign To Bring Our Troops Home
Concerned Veterans For America is running an $1.5 million dollar ad campaign on TV in key states and digitally nationwide calling for a complete withdrawal of US forces in Afghanistan.
Sign the letter of support that will be forwarded to the White House and your congressional representative here
Dear Officials:
I’m writing today to ask that you support withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.
As tensions continue to rise in the Middle East, our troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are put in dangerous positions they don’t need to be in.
Our service members accomplished their original objectives in Afghanistan long ago. Maintaining a large presence on the ground does not meet any legitimate national interest.
Continuing to deploy troops to Afghanistan puts them in unnecessary danger.
Please do all that you can to protect our troops and withdraw forces from Afghanistan.
See the ad here
The Stable Genius Is Good at Names
So, Trump wants to add Middle Eastern nations (so far unspecified) to NATO so that the alliance can be more involved in the region. We need another obligation to go to war there like a hole in the head. That’s very peculiar for a Putin marionette who supposedly dislikes NATO, which by the way has grown already during his tenure. One always proposes larger missions for useless organizations. Such is the incoherence we’ve come to expect for the 45th occupant of the White House.
According to Politico, Trump said to reporters while describing in a call with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:
I think that NATO should be expanded, and we should include the Middle East. Absolutely … because this is an international problem…. And we can come home, or largely come home and use NATO. It’s an international problem. We caught ISIS. We did Europe a big favor.
So, I have actually said that I think the scope of NATO should be increased. And they should be looking for ISIS. We will help. But right now the burden is on us, and that has not been fair.
He went on:
NATO, right, and then you have M-E, Middle East. You call it NATO-ME. What a beautiful name. I’m good at names.
No, uh, if you add the two words, Middle East, at the end of it, because that’s a big problem. That’s a big source of problems. And NATO-ME, doesn’t that work beautifully, Jon? “NATO” plus “ME.”
NATO-ME — as though America hasn’t done enough damage in the region. This is our “stable genius” at work in the White House. Heaven help us.
The Ripple Effect
Podcasts
