Maybe someone from Canada can explain what it is about Stephen Harper that brings this out in Bieber. Also, too: this.
We’re Talking Real Money Here
I hadn’t been paying attention to the News International scandal, but this caught my eye:
Prosecutors have announced new criminal charges against the former News International editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, this time over alleged illegal payments to public officials.
The Crown Prosecution Service announced on Tuesday that four former News International employees, and a defence official alleged to have been paid £100,000 for information, should stand trial.
We’ve gone from phone hacking to $160K in bribes to a single defense official – just imagine if Robert Gibbs had slipped that kind of money to David Petraeus as part of his job before he worked for Obama. DC would screech to a halt, and Politico would start a whole new publication dedicated to just that scandal.
“We”
I guess our war is going OK so far:
4:25 P.M. U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking in Thailand, says he firmly supports Israel’s right to protect itself, but that it would be “preferable” to avoid a ground invasion in Gaza: “Israel has every right to expect that it does not have missiles fired onto its territory. If that can be accomplished without the ramping up of military activity in Gaza – that’s preferable. That’s not just preferable for the people of Gaza. It’s also preferable for Israelis, because if Israeli troops are in Gaza, they’re much more at risk of fatalities or being wounded. We’re going to have to see what kind of progress we can make in the next 24, 36, 48 hours”.
He might have meant diplomatic progress, but it’s pretty clear that Israel can do whatever the fuck they want and it’s “our” war.
Like Clockwork
As Operation Pillar of Defense enters its fourth day, the Israel Defense Forces continues to prepare for a ground invasion of Gaza, drafting thousands of army reservists.
The IDF struck dozens of targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, including the office building of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police building.
The only question was whether or not Israel would find a reason to attack before or after the election. Just like the last time.
BTW- the best part of this is we can expect the same predictable flame wars and series of events. I can be accused of siding with terrorists, when all I am saying is that leveling a region, killing thousands of innocents and bombing the region into the stone ages is overkill. Then the President will say something measured, like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the response has been too much,” and then AIPAC can have Congress and a bunch of Israel first Democrats condemn the President. The only thing different this time around is that Wexler and Weiner are no longer in Congress to lead the charge.
And this and this are just ghoulish. How long before the IDF commissions Zynga to create a Warville game for Facebook?
Turn and Face the Strain
Why does the New York Times start to sound like a teenage girl’s Facebook page whenever Israel gets into its next war? “You guys, Israel has it tough. That battlefield is changing, and the world is growing more dangerous. Leave Israel alone!”
I’m no expert in the Gaza conflict, and I certainly don’t know enough to have a judgment about which side is “in the right”. But I do know that that the minute Israel is involved in any military action, every US media outlet drops the guise of skeptical reporting and goes more all-in than some Israeli newspapers. That leaves me reading the Guardian, Al-Jazeera English and Haaretz to try to at least hear what Hamas has to say, and to see a few images of the hell that’s being rained down on the other side of the fence.
I have one question about Israel and Gaza. (by Emily L. Hauser)
*********
I am beside myself over the upsurge in violence between Israel and Gaza.
Israel says its strikes have been surgical and that it’s targeting terrorists — which is to say: Legitimate military targets, not civilians.
Given that the Kirya, one of Israel’s largest military bases, is located in the heart of Tel Aviv — literally downtown, surrounded by offices and businesses and schools and parks and vital roadways and apartment buildings and cultural institutions and falafel stands and kiosks and kids on bikes — I have one question:
If a Palestinian whose family has been killed in an Israeli airstrike bombs the Kirya — we’ll be cool with that, right?
Because, I mean, after all, what is Israel doing, hiding all those grunt soldiers and high ranking commanders and intelligence gathering infrastructure and so on among a civilian population? Why is Israel using Israeli civilians as a human shield?
Ok, my one question is really this: What happens if we switch the nouns around today?
What if this showed a “surgical strike” on an Israeli target?
What if this were on a street in Tel Aviv?
What if the place names were reversed in this snippet from the New York Times?
Health officials in Gaza quoted by news agencies said the Israeli attacks had killed at least nine people and wounded at least 40.
What if the toddler pictured here [graphic] were Israeli?
What if the shoe were on the other foot?
If Palestinians had somehow managed to get past one of the world’s mightiest military institutions and set off this kind of mayhem in Israel, killing (among, it should be noted, other children) an 11 month old — the world would be up in arms. Israel and America’s Jews would be rending their clothes. Fury and heartbreak and statements of support would be flooding the airwaves — and rightfully so.
But no. It’s just the Palestinians. Just the Palestinians in Gaza, no less. So the targeted assassination of (yes) a pretty awful person in the heart of a residential neighborhood, the deaths of civilians, the deaths of children, the relentless and endless pounding by air and sea of 1.7 million people who literally cannot even flee because Israel has them physically penned in on all sides (save for one small crossing into Egypt) — we’re really not terribly fussed about that. Because some of 1.7 million people have fired rockets into civilians areas of Israel.
Those rockets are horrifying, and living with that sort of fear (something I remember from the first Iraq War and from years of suicide bombings) is genuinely terrible. I ache for the people hiding in shelters now, told by their government that there will be no school or work in the days to come, because their government knows perfectly well what the consequences of bombing the hell out of Gaza will be.
But as Larry Derfner wrote yesterday (before it had gotten this hellish, back when it was merely really bad) in a piece entitled “The lesson Israel refuses to learn on Gaza”:
There is a proven road to security for the people of the Negev [Israel’s south] – a total end to Israeli rule over the people who are shooting at them. But nobody of influence in this country will suggest taking that road for fear of being derided as a pacifist, if not an anti-Semite, by the public, politicians and media. Most Israelis, especially in the government and army, are talking very hawkishly. They seem to think they’re keeping faith with the residents of the south who are under fire. In fact, by closing ranks on this continual march of folly, they are dooming the residents of the south, and not just them.
If you want to know more about what’s going on, I would recommend either the Palestinian Maan News Agency or the Israeli HaAretz. Both will be flawed, as all human endeavors are, but both do a pretty good job of reporting the facts from within a particular society.
Crossposted from Emily L. Hauser – In My Head.
I have one question about Israel and Gaza. (by Emily L. Hauser)Post + Comments (140)
“Nobody died in Iran-Contra”
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59124558@N06/8186301309/” title=”Iran-Contra-begins by dengre.bj, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8206/8186301309_39c3140df1.jpg” width=”485″ height=”500″ alt=”Iran-Contra-begins”></a>
That quote in the headline is something that John McCain actually said this week. Really.
We all know that McCain is a bitter, angry old man and perhaps the sorest loser in the history of American politics, but that does not obscure the fact that at his center he is an ignorant, lying asshole.
At least 30,000 folks died as a result a direct result of the Contras and their war in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra funded covert project spilled over into El Salvador where another 75,000 people lost their lives and to Guatemala where CIA funded death squads helped helped to push the body count to over 200,000. The Iraq-Iran war that Team Reagan was funding with the scandal added another 450,000 to the count. And then there was the death of the guy who disclosed Reagan’s partnership with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
I think it would be fair to add the death tolls from some of the other covert wars or the Reagan era as well. Angola is a good example of one them. To help prop up Apartheid South Africa, Reagan funded a civil war there where over 500,000 people were killed (and where hidden US funded land mines are still killing people every day).
Then there are the legacy/blowback body counts of the Iran-Contra scandal. It allowed Iran to promote the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon: which led to the bombing of a US Marine barracks in 1983 and other acts of terror throughout the 1980s that the Reagan Administration responded to with gross negligence and weakness. Then there was the covert funding of Afghan rebels which led to the creation of al-Qaeda, the attacks on 9-11, the decade of the Bush Wars and the attack on Benghazi that John McCain is pretending to care about.
I can’t think of any American politician who disgusts me more than John McCain (including Tom DeLay).
Let me fix his quote for him: “Nobody who was white that I need to pretend to care about died in Iran-Contra.”
Cheers