It is a common headline, it has been for some time. The new media and technology makes it impossible to cover up most of it. A black teenager or a black man, almost always unarmed, is shot or killed otherwise by the police who are on-duty or off-duty. It is never one bullet, it is never two bullets. Mostly a whole magazine of a gun is emptied in a living body, sometimes more. Occasionally some civilian idiot takes the law into his own hands and follows and shoots an unarmed black man for being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood. Or a black child is riddled with many police bullets while playing with a toy gun in a park. In all cases, at least those cases that are publicized, the killer(s) get off free. Always. We are told that ‘race’ has nothing to do with it. So what then? Is it the economic class that dehumanizes some? Which brings us to the same point. Soon after every killing, Republicans, at least those who express an opinion, and their media side with the police or with the vigilante who killed the unarmed black boy or man. Democrats wait briefly before jumping in by obliquely criticizing the police. There are protests, complaints, handwringing, bluster, investigations, even some singing of kumbaya……… Then bang! It happens again, the widely-accepted modern equivalent of lynching………
Haim Saban Sheldon Adelson “Major Democratic donor Haim Saban said on Sunday that if he were running Israel he would “bomb the living daylights” out of Iran if the current nuclear negotiations produce a bad deal for Israel. Speaking at a conference of the Israeli American Council at the Washington Hilton opposite Republican casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Saban said that if he were in the shoes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the event of a deal with Iran that he judged to be dangerous with Israel, “I would bomb the living daylights out of these sons of bitches.” Saban, a major Obama donor in 2012 and Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008, also expressed deep skepticism of Obama’s policy towards Iran………..“
I hadwritten, just minutes ago, that: “Even the wildest of the Iranian mullahs never say ‘bomb the hell out of Israel’, except maybe as retaliation’. These are two not-so-new faces of fascism in America: the new phenomenon of ‘ethnic’ fascists. They are jingoistic and racist and they don’t belong to any one political party. They are bi-Partisan”. Of course just after penning this eloquent comment of mine, and before posting it, who should intervene but the big banana of Iran? I saw the following ‘inconvenient’ tweet by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei: “Why should & how can Israel be eliminated? Ayatollah Khamenei’s answer to 9 key questions……….”
Which makes you wonder which side are all these guys on, and do they deserve each other? Blogging can be frustrating sometimes, no? No further comment for now……….. Cheers Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
Speaking of Ferguson, Missouri: How many white boys would be should shot with at least six bullets after lifting a box of cigars from, say, Seven Eleven, and the killer gets away with it (which he will in Ferguson)? How many white teenagers would be shot to death by a punk self-appointed vigilante (who acts against police order) in Sanford, Florida, just for wearing a hoodie and walking the street peacefully at night (and the killer gets freed by a jury as happened in the case of George Zimmerman)?
“A Greek court’s decision to acquit farmers who admitted shooting 28 Bangladeshi strawberry pickers when they asked for months of back pay has sparked outrage in the country. Politicians, unions and anti-racist groups condemned the verdicts, describing them as a black day for justice in a case that had shone a light on the appalling conditions in which migrant workers are often kept in Greece. “I feel shame as a Greek,”………….”
Who would have thunk it. Even the Greeks, usually mellow and not into racist stuff, are changing. Tsk, tsk. A terrible ugly sign of the bad economic and political times.
“In additional case of discriminatory practices, Yesh Atid MK Pnina Tamano-Shata barred from donating blood because she has “special kind of Jewish-Ethiopian blood”……………….” Magen David Adom refused to allow MK Pnina Tamano-Shata (Yesh Atid) to donate blood, saying she had “the special kind of Jewish-Ethiopian blood.” The staff then told her that she could donate blood, but her donation would be frozen, not used. In the past, the MDA’s refusal to use blood donated from resident of Ethiopian descent has inspired claims of racism, the MDA in response claim they are only trying to minimize risks to blood recipients…………….”
Magen David Adom is supposed to be the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. It is not supposed to be some ‘institute’ created by some Heinrich Himmler from Moldova or thereabouts to distinguish superior blood for tainted blood.
This Nazi-style irrational racism is apparently something that happens often, refusing blood donations from blacks, be they Jews or others, in order to minimize risks. And these are the most educated people in the Middle East! Even we Muslims know better than discriminate between sources of blood, know that it makes no difference. Cheers
mhg
“Nelson Mandela helped popularize use of sanctions. His greatest impact was as a moral leader, but Nelson Mandela also left a legacy in diplomacy by helping popularize the use of international sanctions to pressure a government to change its policies. Since sanctions were imposed in an effort to end apartheid and bring down South Africa’s white-minority government, they have been used hundreds of times, especially by Western countries. President Clinton, who ordered sanctions against Cuba, Libya, Iran and Pakistan, mused near the end of his second term that the United States had become “sanctions-happy.”…………..”
Cute but poisonous distortion of history in the L.A. Times. It says: “Nelson Mandela helped popularize use of sanctions”, and I haven’t read a pile of dung (caca, if you prefer) that smelled worse than this one today. Mandela inspired starving out the peoples of Cuba and Iran? This piece somehow ties American and Western sanctions against Third World peoples to Mandela. The cruel Western blockades of Cuba and Iran were apparently inspired by Nelson Mandela, according to this twisted logic.
Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, applied sanctions exclusively to several third world countries, but refused to apply sanctions against the worst offender of the time, the apartheid White supremacist regime of what was called (with a straight face) the “Republic of South Africa”. AS did much of the U.S. Congress. After all, it ain’t kosher (nor halal) to blockade white folks, even in Africa.
“Jewish and Arab MKs exchanged fiery words during a special Knesset hearing on Wednesday to discuss the resettling of Bedouin communities, accusing each other of deliberately thwarting plans to solve the ongoing land ownership crises in Israel’s south. The hearing, led by Likud MK Miri Regev, was interrupted several times by MKs on both sides of the debate, leading to the removal of some participates from the Knesset hall. The “Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev,” on which debate was held during the hearing, is based on a plan drawn up by former Likud minister Benny Begin………… MK Dov Khenin of Hadash also expressed his concern about the law and said that it sets the stage for the evictions of entire communities ona nationalist basis.………..”
This sounds vaguely but eerily familiar. It evokes a terrible part of history, with words like Lebensraum, Resettlement, etc. Of course I am exaggerating here to make a point: the scale is tiny, the fate of the victims is not as dire, and the issue is being debated openly. But the victims are “selected”, and you see what I mean, or do you?
“Well, that’s awkward: A white supremacist who made headlines worldwide for plotting to take over a town in North Dakota received the results of a DNA test — and the results say he’s 14 percent black. And this all happened while cameras were rolling. Craig Cobb, 61, who has tried to create a white enclave in tiny Leith, N.D., submitted a DNA sample to Trisha Goddard’s talk show and got the results back during a recent taping…….. “Eighty-six percent European and,” Goddard said, pausing as the audience started to cheer before she continued, “14 percent sub-Saharan African!”……… Cobb told the Bismarck Tribune on Monday that he doubted the validity of the test and said he planned to take up to three more DNA tests………………”
Serves the mother right. I wonder if his brown-shirt (some used to secretly call them shit-shirts in Germany) ‘brothers’ will kick him out of the organization. That would improve the quality of both.
“In a day of provocations and incendiary language at Tea Party-type protests Saturday in Washington D.C., WorldNetDaily.com author and Birther attorney Larry Klayman stands out. “I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town,” said Klayman, a founder of the conservative Freedom Watch political advocacy group. Before a crowd at the “Million Vets March on the Memorials” Klayman demanded that President Barack Obama “… get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”…………..”
He is a lawyer and he sounds somewhat like Josef Goebbels in his approach to people of other faiths. Which makes me wonder, whatever happened to that famed female Israeli-Russian-American lawyer-dentist-entertainer and birther? Maybe the Canadian-Texan Ted Cruz is looking for a running mate, his own Sarah Palin, to share the electoral fires with.
The Republican Party, an important segment of it, has taken the mantle of racism well beyond Nixon’s original Southern Strategy. They have made it international, dabbling in anti-Muslim wars abroad and crass open racism at home. Like the good old fashioned European fascists of the last century, this newest version of the GOP German-American Bund is true to form. They always end up focusing on a minority. It used to be the Jews in the last century. Now it is cooler to target Muslims directly and “others” not so directly. Cheers
mhg
“A spokesman for President Mohamed Morsi said on Wednesday that inflammatory comments that he made about Jews before taking office had been intended as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but had been taken out of context. The spokesman said that Mr. Morsi respected all monotheistic religions and religious freedom. It was Mr. Morsi’s first public response to news reports that as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood he had made anti-Semitic statements about Jews and Zionists. A recently resurfaced video of a speech that Mr. Morsi gave at a rally in his hometown in the Nile Delta nearly three years ago shows him urging his listeners “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” In another video of a television interview he gave the same year, Mr. Morsi criticized Zionists in recognizably anti-Semitic terms, as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs….……….”
Nothing was taken out of context: it is what he said. Morsi said it some time ago, before the presidency was even a dream for him. I posted on this last month. But to put it in perspective: calling Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs” is common among most of the Muslim Brotherhood and all Salafis. Egyptian-Qatari Muslim Brother cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi once famously added in a video clip that Hitler was “God’s instrument to punish the Jews”. Everybody does it; that is almost everybody who is Muslim Brother and Salafi. I am not sure where it came from: I have not seen it in the Holy Quran or Hadith. Somewhere along the way these fundamentalist baboons created this term to refer to the Jewish people.
(FYI: This reminds me of a true story. When I first came to study in the USA as a teenager, I had colleagues and a few friends at my school back East who were Jewish. We used to kid each other. They used to ask me what we thought of Jews back home. I used to tell them that we thought they had tails, but it was something I made up. I had never heard of this “descendants of apes and pigs” thing. That was before the fundamentalist virus spread across our region and into our once-tolerant societies. The term must be something exclusive to these clowns. ). Cheers
mhg
