COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Israel, the New Rhodesia - “At the top of the racist pyramid was Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion”




Israeli IDF thugs attack journalists

The dark narrative of Israel's Rhodesia fantasy


The Rhodesia fantasy sees an Israel that can be controlled by a very small elite, what they refer to as a ‘villa in the jungle.’ At the heart of the delusion is an imagined community of ‘founders’ and an imagined majority status for what was always a minority.
By Seth J. Frantzman 972 MAG
Hagana militants training in the Yizrael Valley, January 3, 1948. (Photo by Zoltan Kluger/GPO)
Members of the pre-state Hagana militia, predecessor to the IDF, training in the Yizrael Valley, January 3, 1948. (Photo by Zoltan Kluger/GPO)
Earlier this month the editor of a major newspaper in Israel complained that the “non-Zionist tribes” were gaining ground in Israel. “There is no consensus on a joint, unifying national ethos…Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs, who do not wave the flag or sing the national anthem, reject the ‘Jewish and democratic’ formula. As long as they were weak, small minorities, the center ignored them and moved on. But when half the first-graders belong to the non-Zionist tribes, the national anthem and flag have a problem.”
This narrative has a history that stretches back to the 1950s. Every decade voices have risen in Israel that have discussed the demographic threat. Haaretzeditor Aluf Benn writes: “more ultra-Orthodox, Arabs and religious Jews and fewer secular Jews, the impact of demographic changes on Israeli society will only get stronger.” Ari Shavit writes about the capital of the country: “The battle for Jerusalem is almost lost. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) students currently account for 39 percent of all the capital’s school children. Arab students account for 37 percent of the capital’s school children. Zionists account for only 24 percent of the capital’s school children and, of those, only half are secular.”
The demographic narrative is particularly interesting in Israel because it unites most streams of “Zionism,” from left to right. At the heart of the equation is “how many others are there” and “how many of us.” The definition of what is “us” changes depending on where one stands on the political spectrum. For the “Liberal Zionist left” it is about being secular and “liberal.” These kinds of debates were at the heart of the recent series of columns by Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog and Gideon Levy about whether Levy was “inside” the Zionist Camp or outside of it.
At a speech to the Herzliya Conference Herzog told the audience:

In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem.
A fellow traveller in the Zionist-demographic narrative, S. Daniel Abraham writes, “Within its current borders, Israel is not a Jewish state. But the vast majority of Israeli Jews want to live in a Jewish state; most Jews worldwide want Israel to remain a Jewish state. Is Netanyahu listening at all?”
Border police officers stands in front of Palestinians as they wait to cross from Qalandiya checkpoint outside Ramallah, West Bank, into Jerusalem to attend the Ramadan Friday Prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, July 26, 2013.
Border police officers hold back Palestinians waiting to cross through the Qalandiya checkpoint from Ramallah into Jerusalem to attend the Ramadan Friday Prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, July 26, 2013.
There are four primary threats to the concept of the “core” Zionist Israel and the “others” who threaten it. First come those the Israeli press and politicians refer to as Arabs in Israel and as Palestinians over the Green Line. Then come the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews. After them are the various groups portrayed as “immigrants,” such as Ethiopians, Russians, Mizrahim, and non-Jewish “converts.” Articles highlight the numerous “non-Jews” in Israel. Headlines shout, “new law could open Israel to millions of non-Jews”, the “wannabe Jews” and “fake Jews” who are casted as threatening the “Zionist core.” Even the ostensibly “liberal” Gideon Levy who rejects Herzog’s “Zionist core,” writes of “a million immigrants from Russia, a third of them non-Jews, some of whom…have a degree of alcohol and crime in their blood.
At the heart of the concept of “Zionist core” is an imagined community of “founders” of Israel and an imagined majority status for what was always a minority. Avigail Shaham writes of the kibbutz movement: “the fact that members were mostly Jewish doesn’t make it an ethnic community, if you meant that in the excluding sense. Just as it makes sense for a family to aspire to be a part of the same culture, heritage and language, it also makes sense for an intentional community, which in many ways is an extended version of a family.”
The concept of “intentional” community underpins “core Zionism,” which views Zionism as an exclusive preserve of a very small elite of European Jewish immigrants who came to Israel from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. In the period before Israel was created, these immigrants to Ottoman Palestine and then British Mandate Palestine, formed small communities of Jewish-Europeans only. Most of them were infused with communist and socialist ideas and blended that with Judaism and secular nationalism for a toxic mix of creating totally homogenous communities that they saw as the foundation for a national movement. When they founded a state based on their view, anyone who was not a member of the narrow movement became an “other.”
Old Jaffa
To solve the “problem” of having too many others in the country, barriers of acceptance were erected around the “intentional” communities, and the “others” were settled elsewhere. Arabs in Arab villages, immigrants from Morocco in Moroccan areas, immigrants from Yemen in their own moshavim or towns. During the Moroccan immigration, for instance, new “medical tests” were put in place to import only the strong “human material” for the young state, Avi Picard documented: “A host of medical and social restrictions were imposed on this wave of immigration. Candidates had to submit to medical examinations. Failure to appear for said examinations, or exhibiting negative behavior during them, constituted sufficient grounds for disqualifying the would-be immigrant.”
In 1951 Maj. Ezra Aaronson wrote a report on the nascent Israeli army and found the same sense of “othering” of non-Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. “The new Israeli elite – composed almost entirely of European-born Jews – firmly held on to the view that Mizrahim were inferior.”
At the top of the racist pyramid was Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion. In 1950 he noted, “The ingathering of the exiles is bringing us a rabble…Putting that rabble through a melting pot, reconstructing it in a human, Jewish, Israeli and afterward military way – that is the basis of soldiering.” But he had a dim view of all Jews who were not from his background, in 1965 he noted:

the young person from those countries has to be educated to sit on the toilet like a person, to wash, not to steal, not to grab an Arab girl and rape her and murder her – all this precedes the other things. Without it, the military training and education they receive is worthless…[Jews] from Morocco had no education. Their customs are those of Arabs. They love their wives, but they beat them… Maybe in the third generation something will appear from the Oriental Jew that is a little different. But I don’t see it yet. The Moroccan Jew took a lot from the Moroccan Arab, and I don’t see much we can learn from the Moroccan Arabs. The culture of Morocco I would not like to have here.
Jewish immigrants from Yemen at a camp near Rosh Ha’ayin. (Photo: GPO)
Jewish immigrants from Yemen at a camp near Rosh Ha’ayin. (Photo: GPO) The Israeli government placed immigrants from Arab countries into camps and later in peripheral ‘development towns’ instead of seeking to integrate them.
The basis of this view of non-Europeans was very much rooted in the European education and concepts of social Darwinism and eugenics that many leading Zionist “experts” in the 1950s had brought with them. For instance, German-born Col. Yehuda Wallach wrote: 

I have met three major types of Moroccans. For example, the educated urban Moroccan who was schooled in France and digested certain cultural values. There’s the urban Moroccan who came into contact with culture but did not digest it – he’s the Levantine type whom we know from the Beirut, Damascus or Jaffa Arab. And the Moroccan who comes from rural areas, who is ignorant and is at least a thousand years behind in terms of civilization.
In a sense this imagined community of “core Zionism” that was being constructed in the 1950s sought to rationalize the country along the same racial-ethnic ladder theories that had been common in Europe through the 1950s. Similar racial views of the “inherent” inferiority of other groups tarred U.S. thought in the Old South and in the South Africa of the 1960s and Henrick Verwoerd’s “rational” racism.
The “fathers” of Israeli sociology such as Arthur Ruppin were deeply involved in training entire generations of Israelis that anyone who was not European was inferior. For instance Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, who influenced Israeli sociology from his perch at Hebrew University “developed a process for the socialization of the Mizrahim, which he termed ‘desocialization’ and ‘resocialization.’ First, the state must divest the immigrants of the Oriental cultural baggage with which they arrived in Israel; in the second stage they would be refashioned according to European cultural values.” When I studied at Hebrew University for my PhD in 2006, his views were still worshipped and accepted.
Members of Kibbutz Amir, June 30, 1940. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO)
Members of Kibbutz Amir, June 30, 1940. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO)
The long affect of these views was to inculcate a view of what is called a “white tribe” in Israel. Even in the last Israeli elections of 2015 the concept of the struggle between the “white tribe” and the rest of Israel was very paramount. Nehemia Shtrasler defined this group as “an amorphous group comprising Jews of Ashkenazi origin who live in north Tel Aviv.” This is the same group that refers to itself as “core Zionism.” This is the “core” that is threatened by Arabs, haredim and everyone else. This is the “center” that is threatened by the “periphery.” Carlo Strenger sums this up neatly:

Much of Mizrahi voting patterns are therefore due to the fact that Mizrahim constitute the overwhelming majority of Israel’s lower socioeconomic percentiles and of Israel’s periphery…Israel’s left has tried to tackle the animosity of socioeconomically disadvantaged Mizrahim in the wrong way. It has desperately tried to show how socially minded it is, implicitly trying to ingratiate itself to the lower socioeconomic classes… we care about Israel’s remaining a liberal democracy, and our deepest concern is that Israel’s political right is undermining core liberal values.
+972’s Larry Derfner writes the same way, “I want to stress that I am referring only to poor, generally under-educated Mizrahim who make up the base of Likud supporters…Israeli leftists say we have to treat the poor Mizrahim as equals, we have to stop patronizing them.” He claims though that not all “Mizrahim” deserve to be outcast; “don’t turn your backs on the Mizrahim poor. They’re not all fascists by any means, and the ones who are have children, and those children need our solidarity.”

You want people like me to stay [in Israel]? You want the almost one million citizens who voted for Zionist Union and Meretz, whose form of Zionism and Judaism don’t align with yours, to not disengage from the rest of Israel? Prove to me that we are not outside the fence – because that is how it feels at the moment… Why should we feel extra responsibility for the education, health and welfare of all Israelis?
birthing-the-nationHe was wondering why the “Zionist core” that he is a part of, his “form of Zionism” should have to continue to pay for the “others,” those outside the “core.” When other members of this group speak of Jerusalem being “lost” because of “demographics” because of “too many first graders” from other groups, this is when we see the concept of Israel’s Rhodesia fantasy emerging.
The Rhodesia fantasy sees an Israel that can be controlled by a very small elite, what they refer to as a “villa in the jungle.” They pretend sometimes that their “Zionism” is being threatened or they are “outside the fence,” but the real fence is the one they erected in 1948. They erected fence after fence to keep “others” out. Whether it was restricting immigration, or the fences to keep the Arab minority from “infiltrating” or the curfews imposed until 1966 on Arabs in Israel, or the fences of the acceptance committees that keep all minorities out of rural communities, or the concept of center and periphery, development town and kibbutz, from 1948 to 2015 the concept has been to at once and the same time, fence out the “other” but maintain a Rhodesia concept of control of the majority by a tiny minority.
There has been no real attempt to impose a full Rhodesia solution to “save core Zionism” from the others, because of the 1977 elections and the decision by the military elite not to impose a coup on the solution. But you can hear in the voices of this angry group how much they fear their Rhodesia being eroded. It is “lost” they say, it is being “taken” from them, they complain. The children in schools no longer are “theirs” and no longer wave the right flag. The national “ethos” is gone.
It is interesting that they have self-defined the national “Zionist” ethos as their own, when they worked so hard to prevent Arabs, haredim, Mizrahim and everyone from partaking of that ethos. When you build an acceptance committee and only allow “your kind,” it is hard to then complain that the others didn’t embrace your values. How can the colonized embrace the values of the colonizer when they are the second-class citizens, Memmi would have wondered. Israel’s others are not exactly colonized, but they are unwanted. They are the vast majority of the country, some 80 percent, but they are seen as a threat to the “villa.”
The Rhodesia fantasy of “core Zionism” and the core being “eaten away” is precisely due to the failure to have created an inclusive society in Israel. Instead of viewing all the groups as a “threat” they should have been viewed as part of the country and included. Parties should be diverse, not ethnically homogenous. It isn’t just a problem of the 1950s, it is a problem of 2015 because those voices nurtured on Ruppin are now adults and view the country the same way: they were in the same youth group, raised in the same closed society, in the same units in the army, and their view of most of the country is that it is a threat and that it doesn’t even belong in the country. Mizrahim, Arabs and haredim are viewed as “foreigners” in a country that they are native to. When the first “core Zionists” got off the boats they were greeted by Sephardic families, Arab stevedores, and haredim. Those were the majority groups in the country and especially in places like Jerusalem. When people claim Jerusalem is “lost” because it has Arabs and haredim, it isn’t lost — they are the native inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Secular “core Zionism” has imagined itself as an indigenous national ethos which is entirely an imagined community. Had it wanted to be a core ethos it would have been more open and welcoming. It wasn’t and that is why it has failed and why its “core” is crumbling.
The author is a Jerusalem-based journalist and academic who holds a PhD from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This article was first published on his website.
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28 comments:

  1. Ahab, Captain of the web whaler Pequod Bar, continues his monomaniacal quest of revenge on a White Whale that was, after all, just an ordinary whale........

    Casino Time !

    ReplyDelete
  2. ALL Religions lead, eventually, to "otherization," war, and suffering.

    It should be illegal.

    ReplyDelete
  3. They're having a big Mass at Madison Square Garden." Waving cannisters of smoke, around, telling fairy tales, wearing expensive robes, and being seen by others. For the money they're pissing off, they could feed a thousand homeless for a year (at least.)

    total bullshit, and nonsense.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The fat, blond-headed girl can sing, though.

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
  4. The Pope offered to take Republicans to see The Exorcist.

    Obama said "That's a really scary movie!"

    The Pope said "What Movie?"

    ReplyDelete
  5. I added a released video of Israel IDF thugs attacking a French camera crew recording the IDF at a protest march. Quite in the theme of the post.

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    1. They've lost their soul, and we'll be damned lucky if we don't lose ours.

      Delete
    2. You have no soul.

      Remember America used atomic bombs on women and babies. Kept blacks as slaves. Only gave women the right to vote after 100 years.

      America used live fire at Kent State.

      Remember the sins of America and it's treatment of the veterans in Washington DC after ww2?

      What Israel does is NOTHING compared to what America has done to the Indians, or what Rizzo did to the press in Philadelphia, or what happened to MOVE!

      LOL

      Israel rules compared to us in America.

      Pity Deuce, you have never been to Israel.

      You don't know shit.

      Delete
    3. I know the difference between WWI and WWII:

      Remember the sins of America and it’s treatment of the veterans in Washington DC after ww2?

      Delete
    4. LET ME HELP:

      Six years after the end of World War I Congress enacted a bill that would reward veterans of the conflict a cash bonus for their service. However, the legislation stipulated that the veterans would not collect their bonus until 1945.

      July 28, 1932 This delayed gratification was acceptable to the World War I veterans during the prosperous '20s but the onslaught of the Great Depression changed their attitude. Out of work, destitute, and with families to feed, the veterans organized a march on Washington in May of 1932 to force Congress to immediately pay their bonus. An estimated 15,000 made their way to the nation's capital and dubbed themselves the "Bonus Expeditionary Force."

      Using scrap wood, iron and any other loose materials they could find, the veterans set up ramshackle camps throughout the city. The largest housed an estimated 10,000 people. They waited in vain for Congress to act. On June 17 the Senate voted against the House-passed bill that would have given the Bonus Marchers immediate payment of their benefit.

      Having no other place to go, the majority of the Bonus Army remained encamped in the city, despite the fact that Congress had adjourned for the summer. Finally, President Hoover ordered the Army to forcibly remove the veterans. On July 28 a force of tanks and cavalry under the command of General Douglas MacArthur stormed the camps and drove the veterans out. Their makeshift houses were then set ablaze.

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    5. I WILL ALSO REMIND THE FLAG WAVERS

      President Wilson could not get enough volunteers to fill the US Army. He couldn’t even get close. The oligarchs had to resort to the draft to get a citizen army to do their dirty work. The Bonus Army were veterans of WWI. The mercenaries under General Douglas MacArthur had no problem attacking them. (OUR MERCENARY ARMY WOULD DO THE SAME TODAY)

      Delete
    6. BUT READ ON PLEASE:

      Former president Calvin Coolidge proclaimed that America was a country of businessmen and it must conduct itself in a businesslike manner. Automobile tycoon Henry Ford said that if the government started paying unemployment insurance, loafers would quit their jobs to collect the checks and the level of unemployment would rise. Silas Strawn, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, warned everyone that “the dole” would undermine the enterprising, can-do spirit of America. “If this country ever votes the dole,” Strawn said, “we’ve hit the toboggan as a nation.” Hoover believed these men, and so when the Democratic Congress passed a $2 billion relief bill, he vetoed it.

      The arrival in Washington of perhaps as many as 20,000 World War I veterans and their families in spring 1932 was an embarrassment to Hoover and his administration, but it was not a conversion experience. The president remained unmoved, but Congress was more receptive.

      In 1924 Congress had passed the Adjusted Compensation Act which promised World War I veterans a bonus of about $500 a piece. The legislation stipulated, however, that the payment would not be made until 1945. The thousands who had come to Washington in summer 1932—out of work, out of luck, hungry, and in many cases homeless—wanted Congress to dispense the bonus now. Newspaper writers christened the veterans “the Bonus Army,” although the veterans called themselves “the Bonus Expeditionary Force.”

      Washington, D.C., police chief Major Pelham Glassford inspecting the camp of the Bonus Army in 1932. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

      On June 15 the House passed a bill to pay the veterans the promised $500 immediately. The bill was sent to the Senate, and on June 17, as 10,000 veterans and their families gathered around the Capitol building, the senators debated the question. After hours of tense anticipation Walter Waters, a former Army sergeant from Oregon and the leader of the Bonus Army, announced to a stunned, silent crowd that the Senate had defeated the bill by a vote of 62 to 18. “Sing ‘America,’” Waters said, “and go back to your billets.” And that’s what the 10,000 did.

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    7. THAN YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

      As the sweltering summer dragged on and the Bonus Army showed no signs of leaving town, Hoover decided to act. He ordered Major General Douglas MacArthur to clear out Bonus City, a ramshackle camp of huts and tents where the veterans and their families had been living. In the sweltering heat of a July night, 600 crack troops of the U.S. Army, supported by a detachment of cavalry and five Renault tanks—ungainly, seven-ton dinosaurs left over from World War I—marched across Washington, D.C.’s, 11th Street Bridge to the camp in Anacostia Flats.

      The infantry and cavalry deployed through the camp, rousting out the inhabitants then setting fire to the shacks. Eugene King, seven years old, taxed a soldier’s patience when he stopped to rescue his pet rabbit; the trooper plunged his bayonet through the child’s leg. It was not an isolated incident—there would be more than one hundred casualties that night, including an infant whose body was found among the smoldering ruins the next morning.

      By midnight the veterans and their families were in full flight, and the camp was a raging inferno that six city fire companies could not contain.

      The year 1932 was a presidential election year, and for millions of American voters—those in terrible straits, those barely hanging on, those frightened that they would lose what little they had left—Hoover’s treatment of the Bonus Army was the last straw. There are accounts of theater audiences booing as the projectors played newsreel footage of the expulsion of the Bonus Army.

      As Election Day drew near one resident of Washington sent a letter to the editor of the Washington Daily News. “I voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928,” she wrote. “God forgive me and keep me alive at least until the polls open!” It was people like the angry woman and the booing crowds in the theaters who elected as President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

      Delete
  6. Israel = Rhodesia ?

    hmmm

    When Rhodesia still was Rhodesia it was known as 'the bread basket of Africa'.

    It had some hard working white farmers.

    These days it is known as Zimbabwe.......the basket case of Africa.......starvation, currency totally broken down, disfunctions everywhere, extra-judicial killings...... some of the older blacks even longing for the good old days of white rule.....

    The only similarity I can see between the two is that Israel also has great farmers, made the desert bloom, just as Rhodesia used to have great farmers.

    **********************

    Why does Rufus watch the Pope ?

    Everyone needs a grumpy old laugh once in a while, a sad grumpy old laugh.

    One thing about this Pope.....he certainly doesn't look as if he's ever missed a meal......

    Maybe he should share his food with the poor, practice what he preaches......

    I think it's humorous....how Quirk manifests a primordial emotional gut reaction against anyone who criticizes his dear Mother Church and its all male priesthood......one might almost say:

    The Catholic Church is engaged in a "war on women".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am immune to any criticism of my Lutheran heritage, having given it up so, so long ago.....

      One thing I can say in its defense:

      The Lutheran Church is not engaged in a "war on women".

      And, Lutherans make up their own minds......no hierarchy does Lutheran thinking for the folks in the pews....

      Delete
    2. Let me know when you want me to do a thread on treatment of women.

      Delete
  7. Where or where is the thread, longed for by many, about the slaughter of Christians (and others) in moslem lands ?

    This is going on RIGHT NOW but you wouldn't know it reading these pages...

    Hell, I don't recall The Pope even mentioning it......it was all about global warming, accepting 'refugees' and ruining societies in the process, 'redistribution' and other horse shit....

    The only place Christians are safe any longer in the Middle East is in Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Watermelon Pope: Green on the Outside, Red Within
    The Neo-Communist core of Pope Francis' environmentalism campaign.
    September 25, 2015
    John Perazzo
    1
    35915

    In his address to a joint meeting of Congress, Pope Francis delivered the latest installment of his ongoing environmental lecture series to the West—reminding us yet again that the “environmental challenge” called “climate change” has “human roots” – a contentious hypothesis at best. The pope's message echoed that of his recently published climate-change encyclical, where he pronounced that “plenty of scientific studies” have already attributed “the bulk of global warming” to “the great concentration of greenhouse gases” generated by “human action” in industrialized societies that make extensive use of “highly polluting fossil fuels—especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas.” The pope's encyclical also frames environmental concerns as legitimate justifications for requiring industrialized nations to transfer trillions of dollars to poorer countries, as penance for having released a disproportionate share of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution – this despite the fact that far and away the biggest polluter nations on the planet are China and India.

    The pope's environmental positions, which the New York Times has euphemistically described as “liberal,” are in total accord with those of President Obama, who has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to pursuing “green energy” while waging a relentless assault on the oil and coal industries. The partnership between them is a parody of that of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. While Reagan and JPII collaborated in putting communist totalitarianism on the ash heap of history, Francis has joined Obama in rendering unto Caesar by attacking capitalism and the development that is the last best hope of the poor.

    Obama’s guru has been Saul Alinisky. Who has been Pope Francis’ guru in his environmental activism? Clearly the Pope and the Vatican nomenklatura had a predetermined conclusion in mind when they began their inquiry into the environment because they picked Naomi Klein for a major role. This past summer, Klein was asked not only to speak at a Vatican press conference on the pope's climate-change encyclical, but also to co-chair a Vatican conference on climate change alongside Cardinal Peter Turkson.

    Klein has no formal training in the field of climatology. In fact, she never even finished college. Her major qualification is that she is a die-hard socialist who, like Pope Francis, views capitalism as the scourge of both the human soul and the natural environment.

    Klein's leftist ideology has deep and enduring roots. Her paternal grandparents were longtime Communist Party members whom Klein has described in an anodyne way as “pretty hard-core Marxists [who] in the thirties and forties ... believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism that the Soviet Union represented.”...........................

    http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260249/watermelon-pope-green-outside-red-within-john-perazzo


    Fraud
    Farce
    Foolery

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism that the Soviet Union represented"

      What an absolute farce.

      Soviet stores had no goods.

      Agriculture collapsed.

      There were Party Members, and everybody else.....

      And if you complained it was the Gulag Archipelago for you.....

      Even Putin has warned us about going that route......

      Delete
    2. Despite the Francis’ charisma and the way he has galvanized portions of the Catholic community and even more groups that are otherwise harshly critical of Catholicism and of religion in general, his Papacy has generated concerns because of its constant anti-capitalism and anti-development themes. Does he seriously believe, critics have wondered, that the evil and bankrupt creed of socialism, which has murdered more than a hundred million people and condemned hundreds of millions to unimaginable and unnecessary poverty, actually offers a solution for the poor of the world? Does the Pope, in other words, actually believe that the Communists were right? The central presence of someone like Naomi Klein in the Vatican climate-change conference indicates the Pope's antipathy for free markets is not merely rhetorical, but a deeply held bias that proceeds from a neo-Communist view of the world that can only bring grief and suffering to the very poor he professes to champion.

      The Watermelon Pope......that's got it......and it's a watermelon from the days before watermelons were genetically modified so the Pope's Watermelon is chuck full of seeds, too.....

      I used to hate those melons......the new ones are great....

      Delete
  9. POLL: Most U.S. Muslims would trade Constitution for Shariah.......Drudge

    You people here that want to bring in millions of moslems for 'compassion's sake' don't know what the hell you are thinking......


    All you are doing is letting in people with totally foreign ways of thinking that wish to destroy our way of life.

    This is not 'compassion'.

    It is abject stupidity.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Good luck in economy! Air India proposes world's longest non-stop flight - an 18-hour, 8,700mile marathon between Bengaluru and San Francisco

    This rumoured flight route would link IT hotspots Silicon Valley and India
    The journey would be the world's longest non-stop commercial flight
    Currently, Qantas operates the longest flight between Dallas and Sydney

    By Katie Amey for MailOnline

    Published: 06:57 EST, 25 September 2015 | Updated: 08:13 EST, 25 September 2015

    In a statement to the Times of India, a spokesperson for Air India said: 'We are planning to have a nonstop from either Delhi or Bengaluru to San Francisco on our Boeing 777-200 long range aircraft.

    'And in addition, we are planning a direct service between Ahmedabad and London due to the huge demand for travel between these two cities.'

    It's expected that the official announcement of the flight path will take place when the Prime Minister of India visits Silicon Valley this week.


    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3248750/Good-luck-economy-Air-India-proposes-world-s-longest-non-stop-flight-18-hour-8-700mile-marathon-Bengaluru-San-Francisco.html


    :)

    The world is becoming one......

    ReplyDelete
  11. .

    American negotiator: US ready to discuss Syria with Iran

    Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman reiterates softened US position on Assad, saying US will tolerate him in ‘transitional’ role

    Sherman, who is stepping down from her post next month, echoed that, saying it may be possible for Assad to have a role in a transition.

    “We do not think it is credible for Assad to remain for any length of time as the leader of his country,” she said, adding: “We appreciate that there may be a political solution here where Assad is there for some period of time in some capacity while a transition takes place.”


    http://www.timesofisrael.com/american-negotiator-us-ready-to-discuss-syria-with-iran/


    Sounds good but I doubt Russia or Iran much less Assad would agree.

    Once Assad steps down, he is a dead-man walking.

    .

    ReplyDelete
  12. .

    US-trained Syrian rebels gave the al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front equipment in exchange for safe passage in Syria, a US spokesman said Friday, calling the development “very concerning.”

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    An unspecified number of New Syrian Forces (NSF) members gave up 6 trucks and some ammunition to Nusra Front members earlier this week to pass freely, Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for US Central Command, said in a statement quoted by Reuters Friday.

    “If accurate, the report of NSF members providing equipment to al-Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train and equip program guidelines,” he said.


    Ya Think?


    http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-military-us-trained-rebels-gave-equipment-to-al-qaeda-affiliate/

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  13. .

    In 1976 interview, Rabin likens settler ideologues to ‘cancer,’ warns of ‘apartheid’

    Never before heard comments show a prime minister frustrated with ‘one of the most acute dangers’ facing Israel.

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    Rabin’s famously imperturbable monotone betrays increasing anger as he complains about the settlements growing in number and size during his premiership.

    “I see in Gush Emunim [the ‘Bloc of the Faithful,’ the ideologically driven founders of the settlement movement,] one of the most acute dangers in the whole phenomenon of the State of Israel,” he confides.

    “What is ‘settlement’ anyway? What struggle is this? What methods? ‘Kadum’ [a settlement] is a bloated fart.”

    He adds: “Gush Emunim is not a settlement movement. It is comparable to a cancer in the tissue of Israel’s democratic society. It’s a phenomenon of an organization that takes the law into its own hands.”


    http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-1976-interview-rabin-likens-settlements-to-cancer-warns-of-apartheid/

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  14. World | Sat Sep 26, 2015 6:49am EDT Related: WORLD, SYRIA REUTERS

    U.S.-trained Syrian rebels gave equipment to Nusra: U.S. military


    Syrian rebels trained by the United States gave some of their equipment to the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in exchange for safe passage, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday, the latest blow to a troubled U.S. effort to train local partners to fight Islamic State militants.

    The rebels surrendered six pick-up trucks and some ammunition, or about one-quarter of their issued equipment, to a suspected Nusra intermediary on Sept. 21-22 in exchange for safe passage, said Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, in a statement.

    "If accurate, the report of NSF members providing equipment to al Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train and equip program guidelines," Ryder said, using an acronym for the rebels, called the New Syrian Forces.

    U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, was told of the equipment surrender around 1 p.m. on Friday, Ryder said. Earlier on Friday, Ryder had said all weapons and equipment issued to the rebels remained under their control.

    The news was the most recent sign of trouble in a fledgling military effort to train fighters to take on the Islamic State militant group in Syria, where a 4-1/2-year civil war has killed about 250,000 people and caused nearly half of Syria's prewar population of 23 million to flee.

    A top U.S. general told Congress last week that only a handful of the rebels are still fighting in Syria, though U.S. military officials said this week that dozens more have since joined them.

    U.S. officials have told Reuters that a review is underway that could result in scaling back and reenvisioning the program.

    (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Sandra Maler and Christian Plumb)

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