Aletho News

Let Them Eat Cake – Chelsea’s Wedding

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | July 31, 2010

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.

The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.

Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.

The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them. Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?

How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.

While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.

The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US–one in six of the population–were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps. The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.

The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.

And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

July 31, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Let the apologies to Goldstone begin

By Philip Weiss on July 25, 2010

I missed this. After the Israelis came out with their lame investigation saying that they would indict several officers and soldiers in four cases arising from the Gaza conflict of ’08-’09, a fairminded South African columnist, Allister Sparks, published an important piece a few days ago, calling on South African rabbis to apologize to Judge Richard Goldstone for slamming Goldstone’s report last year.

The significance of the piece was explained to me by a friend: “This is an important statement recognizing that even the Israeli Gov’t is finding truth to the report’s findings—–it’s the beginning of a vindication of Goldstone… So why isn’t it all over the place that some of the findings in the report–a report that had been totally trashed by the Israeli gov’t and friends–are proving to be true? …Shouldn’t we challenge the overall attack on Goldstone and the report — like the SA rabbi being called to make a public apology?”

Great point. Here is Sparks’s case. Beautiful story about Naude, beautiful writing:

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein… chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.

I have had difficulty understanding what the chief rabbi meant by this.

Goldstein is a trained lawyer as well as a rabbi. Did he mean that no Jew, however professionally disciplined — and Judge Goldstone’s legal reputation is among the highest in the world — can be objective when it comes to a matter involving Israel?

And if so, does that involve Jews individually or collectively as well, or just the interests of the state of Israel? Or did he mean that it is a Jewish person’s inherent duty either to set aside his professional ethics and find in favour of the state of Israel regardless of the merits of a case or, if that is unacceptable, to recuse himself? But that for a Jew to find against Israel is traitorous?

…I am reminded here of the conflict between the Dutch Reformed Church and Beyers Naude over the issue of apartheid.

I attended the Dutch Reformed Church service in Linden, Johannesburg, at which Naude had to respond to the church leaders’ demand that he choose between the church’s doctrine of support for apartheid and his commitment to the nonracial Christian Institute he had founded.

In other words, Naude was forced to choose between his moral principles and his loyalty to his own people and their church.

I heard Naude announce his decision that memorable day before the glitterati of Afrikaner nationalism in the packed pews before him. Smilingly, boldly, he told them simply: “I choose God before man.”

In other words, principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty. It was the defining moment of that great man’s life.

So I ask the chief rabbi that same question today: what is your choice? Then, at the level of plain human decency, don’t you think, Chief Rabbi Goldstein and those members of the Orthodox Jewish community and the South African Zionist Federation whom you lead, that you owe Judge Goldstone an apology? A public, abject apology.

July 25, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Israel celebrates Irgun hotel bombers

July 24, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Non-violence or surrender

By Hasan Abu Nimah | Ammon News | July 21, 2010

One major item on Israel’s menu for agreeing to talk to its enemies has always been “renunciation of violence”.

Under Yasser Arafat, the PLO had to commit to renouncing violence, in addition, of course, to other harsh conditions, before it qualified to exit Israel’s rejection list.

Among the many other conditions put by the so-called international community to Hamas nowadays is “renunciation of violence”. Because Hamas has refused so far to meet such a condition, it remains boycotted by almost every state regionally and internationally, including Arab states.

Currently Hamas is not engaging in any form of anti-Israel violence. In fact, the organisation that controls Gaza is strictly observing a unilateral ceasefire with Israel despite the siege and the sporadic Israeli air raids often killing innocent people and destroying private property. Hamas is now often blamed by its Fateh opponents for preventing other resistance groups from attacking Israel.

The Arab states, just less than a decade ago, also collectively renounced violence. That was when they pronounced peace as their strategic choice, through their 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

That was one of the most unusual policy statements in history. Did the Arabs have other choices until they made that declaration? Were they engaged in wars and conquests against other nations before they decided to so drastically change course and have peace as their strategic choice? And with the specific reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict, was it the Arabs or the Israelis who started it?

The facts of history are still there for any verification. During the six-decade-long Arab-Israeli conflict, whose roots are in the Zionist project to turn Palestine into a national home for Europe’s persecuted Jews, in flagrant defiance of Arab objection, the Arab states only started one war against Israel, Egypt’s and Syria’s 1973 attempt to recover their occupied territories.

In 1948, there had been months of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population by Zionist militias before the Arab states belatedly intervened, in May of that year.

While Israel was moving from one war to another, expanding beyond the historical lands of Palestine, the Arab states often responded with verbal condemnations and empty threats, along with appeals to the ineffective United Nations.

Large areas of Syrian land have remained under Israeli occupation since 1967, in addition to the West Bank and Jerusalem, and parts of Lebanon. Since 1973, there has been total quiet – and that during a state of “war”.

For all Israel’s propaganda against them, the Arab states have been accommodating, some of them signing peace treaties with Israel even while their neighbours remained technically at war. Israel continues to build settlements and create irreversible facts on the ground, and the Arabs continue to protest and issue statements.

In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority, which is widely recognised, by the Arab League as well, as the official voice of the Palestinian people, continues to reassure Israel that whatever it does, the Palestinian people will never use violence to defend themselves, their rights or their existence. Moreover, the armed forces, created for the Palestinian Authority under the supervision of US General Keith Dayton with donor money, are there to suppress any Palestinian attempt to oppose the occupation or resist its practices.

So what has been so un-peaceful in the Arab, or Palestinian, behaviour towards Israel that requires another declaration of peace?

Unquestionably, peace and non-violence are, and should always be, the rule in governing peoples’ relations with each other. Nevertheless, neither our assumed civilised behaviour nor international law have succeeded so far in eliminating violence from our conduct as states or people.

As a last resort, violence could be used in self-defence, according to international law. The instinct of survival automatically drives all creatures to defend themselves when under attack. All states and peoples do the same. But besides that, there is the violence of choice. Warmongering remains a very active sentiment driving democratic leaders to wars against easier targets, with accountability hardly demanded when such adventures turn wrong, illegal, costly, counterproductive and disastrous.

The peculiar case of the Arab states and Arab peoples is that they volunteered to drop their intrinsic right to legitimate self-defence while under attack and while their lands are under occupation and their rights are repeatedly violated.

Calls for non-violence could not be but noble and right. Even in the most legitimate cases, resorting to violence should only be considered when every other option for a peaceful settlement has been tried. This is not what world powers themselves do when they use force to deal with disputes. Under no circumstance, however, should such calls require that a nation, a group or an individual renounce their right to defend their legitimate rights or to compromise their dignity.

This is precisely what Israel means when it requires its enemies to renounce violence.

While in most cases parties locked in conflict agree to mutually renounce violence as part of a dispute settlement, Israel requires renunciation of violence to enable its continued aggression unchallenged. This is exactly what happened with the PLO, and this is why the Arab states’ positions, including the generous Arab Peace Initiative, are never taken seriously by Israel.

Diplomacy can only be effective when supported by force, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan used to say to justify superpower threats to vulnerable countries like Iraq. But he was right. States have armies and they stock weapons not because they necessarily prepare for war, but because they prepare themselves to go to war or to respond to threat if necessary.

If they don’t do that, they would become vulnerable and invite aggression. States or organisations that declare in advance that they will drop violence from their political dictionary under any circumstances have shown that they expose themselves to all kinds of aggression.

July 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

He impersonated a human

Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian.

By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | July 22, 2010

Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too.

He knew that he had no chance with the Jews, so he adopted another name for himself, Dudu. He didn’t have curly hair, but he went by Dudu just the same. That’s how everyone knew him. That’s how you know a few other Arabs too: the car-wash guy you call Rafi, the stairwell cleaner who goes by Yossi, the supermarket deliveryman you know as Moshe.

What’s wrong? Is it only fearsome Shin Bet interrogators like “Capt. George” and “Abu Faraj” who are allowed to adopt names from other peoples? Are only Israelis who emigrate allowed to invent new identities? Only the Yossi from Hadera who became Joe in Miami, the Avraham from Bat Yam who became Abe in Los Angeles?

No longer a youth, Sabbar/Dudu worked as a deliveryman for a lawyer’s office, rode his scooter around Jerusalem and delivered documents, affidavits and sworn testimonies, swearing to everyone that he was Dudu. Two years ago he met a woman by chance. Nice to meet you, my name is Dudu. He claims that she came on to him, but let’s leave the details aside. Soon enough they went where they went and what happened happened, all by consent of the parties concerned. One fine day, a month and a half after an afternoon quickie, he was summoned to the police on suspicion of rape.

His temporary lover discovered that her Dudu wasn’t a Dudu after all, that the Jew is (gasp!) an Arab, and so she filed a complaint against the impostor. Her body was violated by an Arab. From then on Kashur was placed under house arrest for two years, an electronic cuff on his ankle. This week his sentence was pronounced: 18 months in jail.

Judge Zvi Segal waxed dramatic to the point of absurdity: “It is incumbent on the court to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth, sweet-talking offenders who can mislead naive victims into paying an unbearable price: the sanctity of their bodies and souls.” Sophisticated offenders? It is doubtful that Dudu even knew he was one. Sweet talk? He says that even his wife calls him Dudu.

The court relied, as usual, on precedents: the man who posed as a senior Housing Ministry official and promised his lover an apartment and an increased National Insurance pension, and the man who posed as a wealthy neurosurgeon who promised free medical care and other perks. Dudu had nothing to offer but his good name, Dudu, and still his fate was sealed, just like those who promise apartments and perks. Not only fraud, but rape, almost like the convicted serial rapist Benny Sela.

Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein had, after all, defined the test of conviction for rape on “false pretenses”: “if in the view of an ordinary person this woman would have agreed to have sexual relations with a man who did not have the identity he invented.”

In tune with the public, Kashur’s judges assumed, rightly, that the woman would not have gotten into bed with Dudu were it not for the identity he invented. She also might not have gotten into bed with him if he had told her in vain that he was available, that he was younger than he really is or even that he is madly in love with her. But people are not prosecuted for that, certainly not on rape charges.

Now the respected judges have to be asked: If the man was really Dudu posing as Sabbar, a Jew pretending to be an Arab so he could sleep with an Arab woman, would he then be convicted of rape? And do the eminent judges understand the social and racist meaning of their florid verdict? Don’t they realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of “don’t touch our daughters”? That it expresses the yearning of the extensive segments of society that would like to ban sexual relations between Arabs and Jews?

It was no coincidence that this verdict attracted the attention of foreign correspondents in Israel, temporary visitors who see every blemish. Yes, in German or Afrikaans this disgraceful verdict would have sounded much worse.

July 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Lieberman’s settlement bars Russian-Israeli families from buying homes

By Chaim Levinson | Haaretz | July 11, 2010

The Nokdim secretariat ruled two weeks ago to bar non-Jewish Russian-Israelis from buying homes in the small Bethlehem-area settlement where Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman makes his home. The decision came after a frenzied debate between residents over whether the entry of individuals not considered Jewish by religious law would lead to “assimilation” or improper behavior on the part of veteran residents and their children.

The current fracas was sparked after a number of families of Russian origin applied to be accepted in the community. In each of the families, at least one member is not Jewish according to halakha, or religious law. Nokdim is a mixed community of religious and secular Israelis, both native and Russian-speaking, in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc southeast of Jerusalem.

After several residents expressed opposition to admitting the families, the settlement’s absorption committee decided to bring up the issue at a secretariat meeting. Two weeks ago the panel decided the families’ applications would be rejected.

Nokdim’s secretary, Yossi Heiman, told Haaretz: “If there were an easy solution to this issue, we wouldn’t have to hold hearings on it. There are many considerations both ways; there are also strong arguments in favor of accepting these families. But, ultimately, the majority decided they were opposed to such a high number of these families coming in and changing the community’s demographics.

“The biggest problem is that if you accept 10 families in which the mother isn’t Jewish, then soon there will be 30 children, and tomorrow your son could fall in love with the good-looking girl next door. It’s a real problem,” Heiman said.

“It’s difficult enough with the dozens of terrorists who enter each morning,” added Nokdim resident Amit Gruen, in apparent reference to Palestinians employed in home construction in the settlement.

“We have to separate ourselves from the gentiles in commerce and everything else – particularly when it comes to living with them. It could lead to assimilation or idol worship; it opens the door to all kinds of trouble. They might lead us into committing offenses that Jews normally don’t do, like idolatry and incest and all kinds of other perversions. That’s why we have no place for them here,” he said.

“In principle, the fact that they serve in the army is a problem. They must not serve in the army – the fact that the state brought them over doesn’t mean a thing. Just as it brought them over, it can send them back to their own countries,” Gruen said.

Gil Gan-Mor, an attorney heading the branch on housing rights at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said any decision not to accept a family as residents in a community on the basis of race, religion or sex is illegal discrimination.

July 11, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment