Israel's wages a holocaust..a shoah against Hamas

A few years ago the UN abrogated a vote which it had passed in the General Assembly equating Zionism with racism. This rankled Israel's overlord the US as much as it unsettled Israeli's and Jews in the Diaspora, claiming as they do special privilege as a people almost exterminated by the Nazis.
Today can Tel Aviv under Olmert proffer such a claim? Can Israel under Olmert wear the badge of sorrow and the sanctity and the exceptionalism that the Holocaust confers on Israelis? How can Olmert seriously remind the world of Jewish suffering in the 20 century when he himself boldly announces a holocaust or ha shoah against Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza? Sorry to say, he cannot, for he is the heir and willing descendent of the logic of Zionism which is racialist to the core. Olmert and his Kadima party are the fruit of right wing Zionism which claims a land which was 'empty before the yishuv or the implantation of Jewish settlers at the turn of the 20 century. No one is fooled by the very misused biblical analogy that Israel is a young David, unarmed but walking in the glory of god, facing a heavily armed Goliath Arab. That doesn't fare well. Israel is the Goliath in today's Middle East, armed to the teeth and possessor of hundreds of nuclear weapons; it's an aggressive and expansive state, funded and backed by Washington. It is turning Palestine or the Samaria and Judea as Israeli love to call it into bantustans, hardly viable but enfueodated to the Israeli army and subject to its dranconian will. It's murderous policy towards Hamas, which, by the by it funded heavily as a foil to the then much hated Yasir Arafat, dared to not recognise the Zionist state and dared to riposte against Israeli agression against Gaza. We shouldn't forget the blowing up of the Zionist wall, a Warsaw ghetto like tactic which had but one aim to enslave and to starve the people of Gaza. It didn't work. Olmert and even the wolf in sheep's clothing the soft spoken Shimoun Peres believe in the Zionist ideology of if not driving Palestinians off the land to enslave them in a 21 century way that has an echo of the bondage the Hebrews bore in Pharoah's Egypt. Hamas, and to its credit has much in common with Judah Maccabee for its fierce and daring resistance to a racist state with imperial pretension and the unwaving support of US taxpayers monies. Yes, read Jabotinsky, yes read even Herzl...Israel is a rabid racist state that has run amok!

William F. Buckley

The granpappy of America's modern conservatism is dead. He who thought of himself as a re incarnation of Gilbert Keith Chesterton is no more. His fingers will no long grace the harpsichord, nor would his honeyed false words resound in the media. Today he's thought of as cutting an avuncular figure, but despite his growing old till his early 80's, scratch the surface, well, the hate of his younger years remains...the insinuated racialism, the anti Semitism, the appeal for the authoritarian. And his fear of his own sexuality threatening to punch that queer Gore Vidal in the face in 1968.
The press cry at his passing but Buckley was a willing tool of the FBI and espoused the arch conservatism of his oil baron father who followed in the footsteps of a Father Coughlin, and admired Spain's Franco and stood as a bulwark in funding and ideas against the godless.
Buckley got one thing right. He was against Herr Bush's war in Iraq. He remained loyal to the Roman church of his birthright, and this could be clearly seen as he welcomed week after week on the public telly audiences who turned into to see Evelyn Waugh's ho hum novel 'Brideshead Revisited'. He now joins his likes in a circle in Dante's Hell.

Washington hits a sour note

No one can deny the significance and the high musical quality of the New York Philharmonics concert in Pyongyang. No one but Herr Bush & co. The Philharmonic maestro Loren Maazel hit all the high notes in his conducting and in his few, but savvy phrases in Korean. He says he was not engaging in politics but he needn't have said this. Everything carried the weight of a political and cultural breakthrough, even at one point during a 'master's class' with superbly trained North Korean musicians, he had the group of Americans and Koreans played unrehearsed a composition by a 12 year old New York school girl Farah Taslima, who had offered her music as a gift from a child's heart to overcome the barrier of hostility and discord between the US and North Korea.
The sour note Washington played, was its unwillingness to welcome the North Korean Philharmonic to play in the US. The New York based Korea Society has done much to midwife better relations with Pyongyang. Its influence reach to the highest instance of government, the intelligence community, business and high finance, and yet, it is strange, this society which has found funding for North Koreans to come study computer science at Cornell, has not the clout to raise money or matching funds for the North Korea's excellent classical orchestra to tour America. This orchestra mere presence on US soil would be well received, the hostile hecklers notwithstanding. It would draw the Americans of Korean origin and other Americans the melomane and the curious to see live and in human form Korean from the North which the US has long demonised.
Obviously Herr Bush hasn't the courage of his conviction, for the sending of the New York Philharmonic had at least his tacit approval. He always does things halfway, and as a result, he looks inept and a bumbler, to be charitable. Yet, he had the opportunity to mark the right beat but instead he settled for a false note.

Yet another waste of ratepayers money on why Johnny cannot learn

A panel of the learned carried out a study on why young Americans know little or nothing about history or literature. A lot of taxpayer monies have gone down the drain to fund a blue ribbon panel to state the obvious. Yes, brothers and sisters the word has come down from on high about the sorry state of education in an America which proclaims to the world that there won't be one child left behind. And yes, survey after survey, dollars misspent, draw the same conclusions. In fact some say, cirricula favour more time for reading and for mathematics, and yet on the whole in math Americans fare worse than Asians and Europeans. As for reading, don't get 18Brumaire started. Newspapers, the boob tube aka the television...the media in general dumb down. Reading books is not a top priority if we judge by the stinginess of the public purse for libraries. Publishers looking for unrealistic returns on a us$ spent shot for a profit margin of say 30 per cent when 3 per cent would make an old fashioned bookseller's day. Of course Americans do read, but read what is the question which is not truly answered. Casting an eye on a broad range of vision reveals an historical short term memory for history...it's unimportant...and as such, misreading or ignorance of Clio's art sinks the US into foreign wars without issue. Look at Herr Bush's lying war in Iraq. And speaking of Herr Bush, he may be a closet reader, but he puts on an image that brains and thinking are of a single thread. He projects a 'What me worry' persona, so why should anyone give a tinker's damn when the country's powerful show a disdain for learning and reading but for children's books...remember Bush reading about a goat to a kindergarten class whilst the World Trade Centre towers were collapsing. And he a proud Eli who got into Yale on the shirt tails of the Bushes who went before him to that Ivy League school, and which gives preferential treatment to the offsprings of alumni. As for literature post modernism partly shares the blame for dampening the art of reading; pomo showed a disdain for the classics by labelling them the works of dead white European males, and by definition worthy of our disgust and our willful righteousness by casting them on the dung heap. So education is cheapend...but there's more which has to do with the change in capitalist economics which hold a dictatorial grip on streaming education. Gone is vocational training; gone is serious learning period. The market rules all save when a national disaster or shame happens. Remember Sputnik! Then the US forced march the training of engineers, scientists, Russian language and area studies...and so the old music keeps playing on, and the country may be turning out 'smart' businessmen and women but on a more general level, the patch of ignorant cabbages extend to the horizon and is symptomatic of the decline of America's leading role in world affairs.

Condelezza Rice misses a step

Condelezza Rice has bad timing. She was in Seoul for the inauguration of the new president Lee Hyung-bek. She's now in Beijing trying to soft soap China into applying more pressure on Kim Jong-il to give a full accounting of North Korea's nuclear programme which is now two months overdue. Like a timid child hovering in the background, with eyes wide open in amazement, she took refuge in Herr Bush's on again off again engagement with Pyongyang at the very moment the New York Philharmonic with Loren Maazel baton in hand were about to perform an 'American' programme including the clash of cymbals and loud roar of bombs bursting in air of musical instruements of the Star Spangled Banner in North Korea. She kept her distance and thus once again missed a breakthrough in diplomacy with a country the US is technically at war with.
So here we are, yet another example of the split personality of the Bush administration. A carrot and a stick which has on one hand brought more flexibility in approaching North Korea, and on the other, a harshness which drives it back into its tough carapace of a turtle's defence.
By distancing herself from the negotations the US government allowed for this music interlude of cultural diplomacy, Herr Bush & co. have shown for the nth time its true colours...like a hollow drum, it booms loudly, but for results, it sets itself up for failure. Even the 'New York Times' which never misses an opportunity to lambaste Kim Jong-il's Korea, if the reader has the courage to wade through its concrete prose and read to the very end of its reporting on Pyongyang, will have an epiphany as to why North Korea is dragging its feets on fully complying with an agreement it put its chop on. An agreement in this case is with two parties. North Korea met its obligations for the most part, but Herr Bush tried his old scam by trying to weasel out of his. He & his gang never caught the drift of dealing with a proud, fiercely nationalist North Korea. It believes in a quid pro quo, to wit, you do this, we do that. Washington promised aid which Washington stinted on; Herr Bush gave the impression that he would take North Korea off the terrorist list he keeps in his desk top draw; he didn't. So it is easier to understand Pyongyang's stalling, yet openness to the visit of the New York Philharmonic. Had secretary Rice got on an aeroplane to Pyongyang to be on hand for America's finest orchestra, she would've signalled that Herr Bush was open for a breakthrough. He isn't, nor is she. Given how insouciante is she when she was his national security advisor, she dismissed out of hand the danger of a terrorist attack in 2001 in the US, as well as her joining the bandwagon for a dumb war in Iraq which is bringing America to its knees financially.
Kim Jong-il is biding his time for a change of the guard at the White House for a better ear to speak to. He's not sitting on his hands either. Today's 'Financial Times' [26 February 2008] had a front page account of an invitation Eric Clapton has accepted to come and play in the 'hermit kingdom of the Kims' next year. Not only that the British will hear North Korea's national orchestra perform in London. One wonders why the dead weight of frozen American diplomacy hadn't thought of inviting that orchestra to come play in the US. It doesn't take much imagination to guess why. Herr Bush has what in Spanish is called 'huevos secos', meaning he has no balls.

Idle mutterings about the Oscars

This year's 80 Oscar presentation showed how dull Jon Stewart can be without writers. The strike has left him poorer in material. Yet, 18Brumaire in a coffee shop this morning heard a chorus of moiling and roiling by the man on the high street that foreigners have taken over our industry. And the voices broke in accented English which all goes to show how quickly the US absorbs immigrants who then wrap themselves in the American flag. Two Brits, a Spaniard, and a French actor coped the top acting awards, yet the best film, best director, and best producer Oscars went to the American film makers the Coen Brothers and Mark Rudin a well known producer for the realisation on the screen of Cormac McCarthy's 'No country for old men'. The disconnect should offer little surprise since the provinciality of the ordinary guy and gal in America is almost legendary.
Today's mutters had nothing untoward to say against the Irish Daniel Day Lewis nor the British Tilda Swinson but oh the poor Spanish Javier Bardem and the French Marion Coutillard got it in the neck! Give me a break! The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which are overwhelmingly American voted them top honours. But that meant nothing for these coffee drinkers to turn a voice of dissatisfaction against the foreigner and not at the causes of the country's discontent--the war in Iraq and the subprime scandal and the bad behaviour of Herr Bush & co.

The New York Philaharmonic in Pyongyang

Ping-pong diplomacy it ain't! But it will do very well, thank you very much. Tomorrow evening [26 February 2008] in Pyongyang and on the television screens of public television in the US, viewers will be witnessing history in the making. For the first time since the armistice which put war in Korea on a hold in 1953, the presence of a world class American orchestra will play in North Korea. Zubin Mehta, interviewed by the BBC reporter who is part of a bevy of 50 journalists who came with the New York Philaharmonic, has gracefully dismissed the political import of the event. We play music, not politics. That is the alpha and the omega of his words. We will hold workshops with North Korean musicians. Music is an international language which speaks above and beyond politics. And yet, his words belie the obvious. Tight negotiations have worked out a strictly American like programme. It is bruited that the Starspangled Banner, the American national anthem will be played along with the North Korea's. Dvorak's 'New World Symphony' followed by Gershwin's 'American in Paris', ending with a distinctly un American note of Wagner's 'Lohengrin'. Kim Jong il will attend but will he be in the vast auditorium for American's national hymn?
Plain as the nose on one's face, the orchestra's physical presence in the North Korean capitol says something of how far diplomatic negotiations are in Washington's quest to silence Pyongyang's nuclearn programme, and Pyongyang's desire to renew ties and diplomatic recognition by Washington.
Are we to believe secretary of state Condelezza Rice's dismissive comment that playing Dvorak will not lead anywhere. It might, and probably shall. Will she turn up in Pyongyang for the concert?
Protracted, face to face negotiations have made a good deal with North Korea by that country's leader Kim Jong il willingness to shut down Yongban, the site of its nuclear industry and where a nuclear device was exploded! And yet, Washington is reluctant to go a step further in pursuing a denouement of the crisis by a political solution which will put an end to the state of war between the US, South Korea, China, and North Korea, and extending diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. Herr Bush decisive in his public utterings is a timid in resolution of the Korean problem. Whatever transpires hereafter, the ice has been broken, and like Humpty Dumpty the war factions in Herr Bush's circle can never put a broken policy together nor can they turn the clock back.

China and the Sudan and Dafur

China bristles at the mention of Dafur. It disdains any hint that it is supporting directly or indirectly Sudan's punative war against its own Muslims in Dafur. It is going to great length to show that it isn't. But it is now matter which way they cut the deck of what's happening in the Sudan. Beijing is there with the aims of any imperialist nation, greedy for resources and markets and influence. Nominally China is a Communist country, but subjectively and realistically it is capitalist to its soul. It is behaving, as its economy is red hot, in a manner which V.I. Lenin wouldn't find out of the ordinary. Has it forgotten the lessons of his 'Imperialism: the highest state of capitalism'? Apparently, it has. China's hunger for raw materials and markets make Africa the gods' given gift to the Chinese. Hitching its wagon to the global economy based on oppression and plunder, China has found Sudan a good partner for there it is developing and funding its oil wealth, and by doing so, arms Khartoum in ways many and multiple, in its 'genocidal' war against the people of Dafur. In consequent, having a heavy hand and presence in Sudan, unwittingly Communist China is fragilising the instability that war is causing not only in the Sudan but in its neighbours to its southeast. So in true capitalist fashion, Xinhua or New China is nothing but an old capitalist whore and exploiter tarted up in gaudy new dress and red lipstick but conveying the veneral diseases of capitalism.

Waterboarding--as American as mom's apple pie!

'The New Yorker' has a feature 'annals of American history'. In the current issue [25 February 2008], appears Paul Kramer's instructive article on 'the water cure'. It has nothing to do with the current contraversy in the courts about America's use of waterboarding in Guantanemo or Iraq or Afghanistan or numerous black holes of prisons the CIA maintain in friendly countries. It clears away the cobwebs about a slice of America's imperialist past. And the use of the water cure or torture in the US war against Filipino guerrilla fighting for independence and against America's eagle's talon grip on the Philippines as a colony.
Kramer's story is something out of America's shameful past which is hardly ever mentioned in history texts, and never in polite company. He documents the uproar the use of the water cure on Filipinos which has a contemporary flavour to it. The arguments the government and military used back then are the same old twaddle that Herr Bush's minions use today, and the uproar of protest recycle the same old humanitarian concerns. And there it lies this sad story which is hardly resolved today. That waterboarding violates the Geneva conventions has no buyers with Herr Bush, but the brutality of the American military and the effect it has on troops and how it affects the public's psyche remain under the surface. Americans like to be loved, to be cosseted abroad, but they are increasingly disliked if not hated for the punch 'em in the face policies of a little man who shirked his duties to his country during America's war in Vietnam.
So saying this, it would do readers a good turn to buy a copy of this week's 'New York' and turn to page 38 and begin reading this sorry cut of history from America's past, which is no moment or shouldn't be of great pride. For the pattern there was set for America's war in Vietnam and Iraq.

Hillary Clinton

Bill O'Reilly is not a lovable man; he's strong views; he's a big mouth, some say. Nonetheless he may peddle bad breath, he does some things at times that make good sense. On a Jay Leno show he stated the obvious which bears repeating: Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama have very similar views, and the meteoric rise of Obama and the declining fortunes of Hillary show the seesaw effect of a populartiy contest. And a popularity contest the race to the Democratic party's nod for the presidency, it has become. Yet, Hillary Clinton is riding a ebb of a bad mouthing. No one cuts her slack, it seems. On a listner sponsor radio station in New York on Saturday morning [22 February 2006], a programme host suggested, she withdraw from the race in Obama's favour. He put it terms that were condescending in the extreme, suggesting as a woman she has made her mark on history. She stands as a model for little girls and young women who may want to become an astronaut, a prison warden!, a politician, so on and on. Well this snotty little man who would bristle were the same said of a 'person of a duskier hue' as he would put it, is talking to the wind. Doesn't he know that there are women prison wardens, women astronaut [hasn't he heard of Sally Rudd?], women politicians? and the like? Well yes, let's give him the benefit of the doubt, but he harbours the typical male chauvinist view that a strong woman in any field should retire in favour of a man!
This host would deny it; he would read off a long laundry list of liberal causes he defends, but subjectively, he reflects what a legion of men and yes women too say when it comes to Hillary Clinton. They wear no velvet glove these high minded folk, they simply transmit the centuries old prejudice against ambitious women, and in Hillary Clinton's case they think they've the freedom to smear her or whack her where it hurts at every turn in the press, over the air waves, through rumour, and grafetti on walls. And they do it with a clear conscience of the righteous who have a place in a ring in Dante's Hell.