image above: Religious Zionist head Bezalel Smotrich attends a discussion in the Israeli parliament on the TV-show “Shtula” (Double agent), airing on Israeli TV, November 21, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
WN: Compare Smotrich and Hitler:
The antisemitism of reason must lead to a struggle for the legal battle to abrogate laws giving [Jews] favoured positions, differentiating the Jew from other foreigners. The final goal must be the uncompromising removal of Jews altogether. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable, and never a government of national weakness.–Adolf Hitler (Gemlich letter, 1919, emphasis added)
President Joe Biden faced immediate backlash Thursday for characterizing pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have erupted on university campuses across the country as lawless and violent, a narrative likely to further alienate the thousands of students who have joined peaceful protests against Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza in recent weeks.
In brief, unscheduled remarks delivered from the White House, Biden acknowledged that “peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”
But he then proceeded to cast recent campus demonstrations as abhorrent, using instances of property damage to broadly paint student protesters as out of control—giving a pass to police forces and pro-Israel mobs that have brutally attacked peaceful encampments.
Biden, who has armed Israel’s military to the hilt, also conflated trespassing and disruptions of day-to-day campus activities—including classes and graduations—with violence, saying, “None of this is a peaceful protest.”
“Dissent must never lead to disorder,” the president said, ignoring the long history of disruptive civil rights and anti-war protests in the U.S. “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.”
Watch Biden’s remarks in full:
Wait a minute! Did Biden say above that after free speech as a fundamental American principle, the second is the rule of law? Hmmm. Let’s see, by consulting this article: How the U.S. violates international law in plain sight. We read by Margot Patterson, October 12, 2016, with my highlighting:
The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, led the United States to embrace military force in a way it had not done before. Along with that came indefinite detention, torture and the kidnapping of terrorism suspects and their rendition to secret black-box sites. But some of those abuses go back before President George W. Bush, to the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
“The Clinton administration had some vaunted notions of what you could do with military force,” O’Connell said. “They thought you could use military force to promote human rights, so they regularly bombed Iraq to help the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south. In the views of other countries, France and Russia in particular, that constant bombing was unlawful and counterproductive. The British unfortunately, did not [share this view]. Already the mindset was coming into the United Kingdom that you could use military force to help persecuted minority groups. That led to a great deal of unnecessary and counterproductive violence in Yugoslavia. It was the beginning of this mindset that military force could be used with no regard for the U.N. Charter.”
U.S. violations of international law continue. You would never know it listening to our president, our politicians or our news media, but the U.S. intervention in Syria is one of them. In 2013, Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, described it as “an illegal use of force” and “a crime of aggression.” “It’s a war crime. It’s the kind of crime that the Germans were tried for at Nuremberg,” he told the Real News Network.
President Obama’s actions in Syria have been described as the legal equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s in Ukraine—both arming rebels and conducting air strikes.
U.S. drone attacks around the world also constitute an unlawful use of force. We have not been attacked, nor do we have U.N. approval for our targeted killings in Libya, Yemen, Somalia and other countries.
Will these acts of war ever cease? Many Americans seem to forget they are even going on.Discussions of their justice, their legality and necessity, even their cost or effectiveness are almost entirely absent from our politics. To the extent they consider them at all, Americans assume might makes right. The evidence points elsewhere: to the millions of refugees fleeing war, instability and the breakdown of law and order in the world.
Of course, to the contrary of the above writer, the history of the United States besides post-911 has been “one long embrace [of] military force in a way it [has always been] done before[!]” In other words, it has ever been the embrace of “Might makes right!” Besides my website abounding in an understanding of the Gospel as Counter-Narrative to Empire, of which the U.S. is ultimate in world history, just look at, for starters, my two “Open Letters,” with overlapping content:An Open Letter to Michelle Obama, 10-13-2016 ; and An Open Letter To Joe Biden 06-11-2020. In other words again, to cite the article above:
Many Americans seem to forget they [American military atrocities] are even [and have always been] going on. [I add: Or never knew! One must ask: Just what has been taught about this in public schools and private the last two-and-a-half centuries?!]
Then please see the next post: Palestine: The Ultimate Maximum Security PrisonMay 4, 2024. In it are highlighted the following video and trailer. Biden could not abide watching the highlighted video, “The Law and the Prophets.” He would be haunted by seeing his own face in the mirror throughout the film. . . “The film’s the MO to catch the conscience of The Joe.” (Sorry, Shakespeare.)
The bestselling author and activist “has delivered another impressive argument that the U.S. flouts international law when it finds it convenient to do so” (Publishers Weekly).
In this still-timely classic, Noam Chomsky argues that the real “rogue” states are the United States and its allies. Chomsky turns his penetrating gaze toward US involvement in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America to trace the enduring combined effects of military domination and economic imperialism on these regions.
“Noam Chomsky is like a medic attempting to cure a national epidemic of selective amnesia . . . [Rogue States is] a timely guide to the tactics that the powerful employ to keep power concentrated and people compliant . . . Chomsky’s work is crucial at a time when our empire perpetually disguises its pursuit of power under the banners of ‘aid,’ ‘humanitarian intervention,’ and ‘globalization.’ Americans have to begin deciphering the rhetoric. Chomsky’s a good place to start.” —The Village Voice
“World-famous MIT linguist Chomsky has long kept up a second career as a cogent voice of the hard left, excoriating American imperialism, critiquing blinkered journalists and attacking global economic injustice.” —Publishers Weekly
“Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The conscience of the American people.” —New Statesman
“One of the radical heroes of our age . . . a towering intellect . . . powerful, always provocative.” —The Guardian
Finally, please see Pete Seeger‘s “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?”:
We read this from Seeger:
In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997, reissued in 2009), Seeger wrote, “Should I apologize for all this? I think so.” He went on to put his thinking in context:
How could Hitler have been stopped? Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in ’36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger‘s book, From Yale to Jail … [75] At any rate, today I’ll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a “hard driver” and not a “supremely cruel misleader”. I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She’s part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let’s look ahead.[76][77]— Wikipedia
…
He told a New York Times reporter that “working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side of a large scale, trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the opposite side.” He went on to say, “Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons … It’s leaking out as fast as it goes in and they’re all laughing at us. But we’re still getting people with teaspoons. I get letters from people saying, ‘I’m still on the teaspoon brigade.'”[112]
Back for a moment to Biden: He is a classic Presidential bullshitter! He seems throughout his career blinded to the horror story of American history–himself perpetuating some of that terrorism in his long service in public life. (I have no idea just who Biden’s “Christ” is–definitely an anti-Christ of who is portrayed in the Gospels.) I write in part on the Front Page:
American public intellectual Edward Said wrote in the Preface of Orientalism (1978):
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest ‘mission civilisatrice.’
American Empire has always and supremely been about “plundering, butchering, and stealing,” “the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation,” leaving “desolation,” “destruction and misery and death” in its wake (while calling it “peace and freedom”), and long since has been in voracious bid for worldwide domination, in order to extract maximum wealth from all peoples and the Planet. Our call is simply to practise insurrection against Empire in all its avaricious, brutal and horribly destructive ways. (No small order!)
In this historical moment that supreme manifestation of Empire is the United States – to which the entire Western world is tied in various supportive ways; under which domination the rest of the world suffers: in the Greater Middle East as only one example, which endures brutal will to domination and oppression at the hands of American Empire. I reflect on this in an introduction to a posting here. An expanding list of postings on American Empire may be accessed here.2
The Vietnam War is classic instance of what it means for America to be “leader of the free world”. It was prosecuted under five Presidents: from Eisenhower to Nixon, 1955 to 1975. The New York Times ran an article in 2003 about a series published by The Toledo Blade, based upon accounts of several Vietnam War veterans, entitled “Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories.” The article reads in part:
The report, published in October [2003] and titled ‘Rogue G.I.’s Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands,’ said that in 1967, an elite unit, a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as ‘the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War.3
There is “no honour among thieves”? There is no honour among American leadership—with rare exceptions throughout its history. Expressed differently, American leadership has been for centuries made up of thieves, brigands and murderers of the highest order.
One American scholar asks: Was America Great When It Burned Native American Babies? That question with its implicit answer (detailed in a book the article tells about) can be asked of any historical period of the United States.
In the middle of the Vietnam War President Lyndon Johnson made a speech about America “The Great Society” to a group of university students. He said in part, while fully aware of the supreme atrocity that was the Vietnam War–one he was vigorously waging:
Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace — as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.
Thank you. Good-bye.
In the end, he was only fooling himself! The United States has been above all else about “soulless wealth” almost since inception. Its way of enduring peace has ever been that often of the graveyard–of vast hordes of slaughtered victims over time and the world, multiple times in excess of the tally of The Nazi Holocaust. (It’s called deceptively “pacification” – “Pacification is an attempt to create or maintain peace. That can mean appeasing a hostile country through diplomacy or even just by settling an argument.” Or through mass slaughter! See my: Kipling, the ‘White Man’s Burden,’ and U.S. Imperialism 02-08-2018. The classic biblical text is of course: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9) In answer to the question posed, the majority of “settler” Americans simply do not know it–never have! One of my longstanding (American theology professor) friends has asked me over the years: Why are you so angry (about this)? To which I reply thunderously: THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE TRUTH ABOUT THE AMERICAN HALL OF HORRORS HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD (to average white Americans)! But there are they who have told it. One could start with Howard Zinn . . .
Yet even people who know me well do not want to hear this. Why?! Does The Truth hurt that much?! There is in this regard the ominous comment by Desmond Tutu about White South Africa during apartheid:
The former apartheid cabinet member Leon Wessels was closer to the mark when he said that they had not wanted to know [about brutal repression of Blacks and Coloureds], for there were those who tried to alert them (p. 269).
There are always “those who try to alert.” They are called prophets. They are generally ignored and worse. Jesus (Matthew 23:30 -32):
And you [Americans/Westerners] say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets/[Native Americans/Blacks/Etc./Etc./Etc.]’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets/[Native Americans/Blacks/Etc./Etc./Etc.] Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
And to this day America tragically has been doing exactly that!
excerpts:
“Finance MinisterBezalel Smotrich,a member of the security cabinet, ought to be fired immediately over his latest remarks,”read an editorial inHaaretzTuesday night that was published as police in New York were storming Columbia University to arrest students.
In just the latest example of a top Israeli official openly calling for the elimination of Gaza and the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday demanded the destruction of cities and refugee camps in the blockaded enclave.
“There are no half measures,” said Smotrich at a government meeting. “Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat—total annihilation.”
“‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven,'” he added, quoting the biblical story of the nation of Amalek, whose people God commanded the Israelites to exterminate and which right-wing Israeli leaders have long invoked to justify the killing of Palestinians.
…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also referenced Amalek in the first weeks of Israel’s current escalation against Gaza; Smotrich’s comments came as he and other government officials pushed Netanyahu to forge ahead with a planned attack on the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1.5 million people have been displaced as other cities across Gaza have been decimated by Israeli forces.
Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), called on President Joe Biden to stop condemning thousands of U.S. college students who have demanded a cease-fire and an end to military aid for Israel and direct his ire toward the Israeli government, which he has repeatedly insisted is targeting Hamas despite its genocidal statements and indiscriminate attacks.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan sardonically suggested that Smotrich’s comments will be deemed acceptable by the Biden administration, members of Congress, and the U.S. corporate media because he didn’t “say it on a college campus.”…
CAIR also pointed out Tuesday that five units of Israel’s security forces have been accused of committing a “gross violation of human rights,” according to a U.S. State Department analysis.
The Western allies never run dry of resources to support their global war of terror and aggression, ostensibly an integral part of their foreign policy. They dynamically legislate laws lest the people awaken. They have the unbending support of the corporate media, which skilfully distorts reality. When will they ever back down from their destructive quest for colonies? Read our selection below.[↩]
t continued:
‘For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians – in some cases torturing and mutilating them – in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public,’ the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.
‘Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers,’ The Blade said. ‘Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed – their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings.” The New York Times confirmed the claimed accuracy of the stories by contacting several of those interviewed. It reported: “But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a ‘rogue’ unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.
“Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops…
‘Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go,’ [one veteran] said in a recent telephone interview. ‘It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.’
Current likely Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry was also quoted giving evidence before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. He reported that American soldiers in Vietnam had “raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Nicholas Turse [later author of: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam], a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities.
”I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported,” Mr. Turse said by telephone. ”I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn’t stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That’s the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds.”
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
View all posts by Editor
Of course, to the contrary of the above writer, the history of the United States besides post-911 has been “one long embrace [of] military force in a way it [has always been] done before[!]” In other words, it has ever been the embrace of “Might makes right!” Besides my website abounding in an understanding of the Gospel as Counter-Narrative to Empire, of which the U.S. is ultimate in world history, just look at, for starters, my two “Open Letters,” with overlapping content: An Open Letter to Michelle Obama, 10-13-2016 ; and An Open Letter To Joe Biden 06-11-2020. In other words again, to cite the article above:
[↩]
