The resolution, Finkelstein points out, annuls decades of precedent established under international law on Palestine — erasing its entire legal history.
Pretty horrific times, and hard to read Finkelstein's perspective on the fate of Gaza.....but I read it to the end. The worst is what he says about the people of Israel, though its not the first time I've heard of the great support Neten yahoo has for his genocidal policies....its still chilling. And terribly tragic.
It's hard not to despair....but I don't despair. I'm lucky. I have a history in the Canadian left....and a life given to teaching and working for social justice. We can't give up. But I totally agree with Finklestein...let's watch Mamdani, support Mamdani, and encourage other Mamdani's to rise wherever possible.
Given what neoliberal globalism has allowed to happen on the planet, given the rising climate emergency, given an Empire that has twice elected a deranged egomaniac...........it would seem obvious that its time for something new, something better........something other, than more militarized capitalism, fantasizing how it will rebuild Gaza as a resort for the criminally insane.
Courage is needed. Truth telling is needed. And yes...backbone, backbone, backbone.
But the sad part is for me, I don't think America ever was America...........for any but the well off. The story of your frontier??? We know now those were genocidal times, though I bet the white majority were ignorant of that.........or, like Israel today, largely in favour of the genocide.
Everyone wants to believe they're on the side of the angels. Everyone wants to believe their country is a good land..........l know, Canadians get off thinking they are better somehow, more democratic, than their American cousins.
In order to maintain that belief, they make sure to keep themselves ignorant of the simple fact our government has seconded everry illegal regime change you've done over the years...........Cuba being an exception under our Pierre Eliot Trudeau....but now???
I get BS from Canadians about how Cuba is a failed state. I know that's a lie. I have relatives there...........but under no circumstances will the bigots and supporters of illegal sanctions, admit that they are on the side of the oppressor.
In fact.......the degree to which we in the west can be on the side of the oppressor and think we're flying with the angels............IS THE MOST SICKENING THING ABOUT US.
I thought the poem spoke to a number of things that are as relevant now as they were when the poem was written.
America never lived up to the promise envisioned for it by the Founders, who were steeped in the Enlightenment philosophy of Locke and Rousseau and Smith. But I do feel that what they did was revolutionary, and one giant leap for mankind, considering it was the first step in the direction of democracy that had been taken in centuries. Not bad for a bunch of rich white guys. A lot of American mythology was concocted to put a veneer of American exceptionalism over atrocities, and to fill in gaps where the promise of the Founders wasn't fulfilled. When I see recognition and acknowledgement of that, I'm encouraged.
The hubris and perversion of righteousness in the American regime, and the love of money woven through the American zeitgeist sicken me. Dissenting is my medicine. Good for the backbone...
What we would be required to believe to stand with the American right wing majority would be a form of brain damage. The intellect alone rebels at the thought..........and the heart? It heartily agrees with the intellect.
Add a bit of spirit to that agreement, and you have a human being.
" . . . the degree to which we in the west can be on the side of the oppressor and think we're flying with the angels............IS THE MOST SICKENING THING ABOUT US." Thank you for stating this truth.
Let's all do it. And say loud what we know rather than what we've been programmed to believe without any study. Hugo Chavez is the Tommy Douglas of Venezuela........American progressives!!!!
FIND OUT WHY CANADA HAS SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE AND YOU DON'T!!! We had a socialist Babtist minister who worked his butt off to give us single payer health care. Our "liberals' fought it with money from your American Medical Association. Don't completely trust the expensive suits worn by central bankers. Fight them, as we did in Saskatchewan, Canada. Sometimes, the people do win.
Inspite of what banker money tries to do to defeat us.
Israeli Jews are chilling in direct proportion to the knowledge we have about Jewish history, Jewish Nationalism, and Jewish Zionism. The latter is especially dangerous as neither Israeli nor US Jews appear willing to limit its geographic scope, as they always find an antisemitic or existential threat around every corner.
If their current determination to destroy the Palestinians is in any way connected to the genocide they faced at the hands of the Nazi's........then heaven help the future when the Palestinian survivors find a way to survive.
The grave of the United Nations has been dug, right beside the one where the rotting corpse of its predecessor, the League of Nations, has lain purifying for nine decades or so.
My heart just aches with such anguish at the magnitude of morality depraved people - devoid of plain decency. Aches for the Palestinians. Really aches for the Palestinians. Where are the Good Samaritans today? Among the world’s governors?
What to do about it? Speak about it openly as often as possible but be braced for personal attack as those who you'd tell would attack you for speaking a truth they are unwilling to hear and acknowledge. Thanks FF.
Professor Finkelstein's analysis of the American plan for Gaza, though accurate left me with no hope. Is there anyway or any international body that can remedy the situation for the people of Gaza at all.
Is president Trump aware of the existence of abundant natural gas under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza that can help Gazans reconstruct their country. Is that why he wants to own Gaza?
Of course. That was one of the number one goals from the start. To steal those oil fields. And they succeeded. Egypt and Britain were also players in that. I think that the consciousness rising in millions of people all around the world witnessing the utter barbarity and degradation of the Empire, USrael, et al towards the beautiful people of Palestine is cause for hope, and ultimately another death knell of a dying Empire in which very tragically the ideal of the UN as it was crafted with the fail safe "Security Council" with its veto power is a part. Hopefully next time that lesson will have been learned.
Thank you both for this reporting and these harsh truths. A devil's bargain. I imagine many of those who voted do not sleep as well at night. I wonder, too, if Congress just passing the Bill HR 7006 with 188 Republicans and 153 Democrats, including Jasmine Crockett, voting yes to giving billions more to Israel, cutting UNRWA, prohibiting funding International agencies investigating Israel's actions, and punishing Palestinians seeking international justice, was the result of a similar devil's bargain? Pure gangsterism. And a call to the World for backbone, backbone, backbone!
Maybe the UN has to go, even though founded on some of the best principles and attracting many good people, but it's still embedded in the Colonial Empire and the Security Council with its veto power is a complete fail safe set up for exactly the power plays we are witnessing.
Prior to 2016, I was generally ignorant of the Zionist, Israeli lobby / US oppression of the Palestinians. Like so many others, I believed that the Holocaust defined Israel's history.
Thanks to Norman Finkelstein, Francesca Albanese, Chris Hedges, John Pilger and others for the education.
Lying by ommission is within the bedrock of the industrialized media that is owned and operated by the same corporate forces that constitutes the American government.
It's a singular arrangement, composed of numerous aligning forces.
It's fair to say that the majority of US citizens have little, if any understanding of how the world works. Mention US imperialism, its predatory global entanglements and brace yourself.
What percentage of US adults can ingest the fundamental concept of US Empire?
To do so requires us as individuals to confront the lie we have been taught to cultivate. And that's a difficult internal conflict to come to grips with.
For some, when new evidence dethrones previous conventions, the more rational is adopted.
While in others, reality tends to in short order, ricochet off their heads. Sorry...no admittance.
And no wonder, after all who was Edward Bernays?
The cult of the self exploits the shortcomings of the human brain. Emotional cravings, too often than not, override the competing rational thoughts within us. With reality downwind, our journey begins.
Underneath, the myth of economic growth hurdles the machine along doubling in mass every 2-3 decades. This is bio- physically impossible to maintain.
The inertia of this collosal mass of expanding civilization has increased so abruptly we fail to notice that it's collapsing under its own weight.
We may have wanted to begin tapping the brakes when designing a system pegged to indefinite economic growth at the end of WW11.
Thank you for understanding the shortcomings of the Security Council, the plight of the Palestinians, and for describing them in a positive way, as beautiful people.. May the world see them through your eyes.
A mob boss yanked the rubber dentures out of the UN Security Council. All that's left is a pack of toothless, cowed, whimpering lap dogs. And the mob boss left any semblance of high ground to Russia and China. What a lowly state we've sunk to.
Here's a run-on sentence whose time seems to have run out:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
Call me naive, unsophisticated, and a hopelessly optimistic dreamer, but I believed, and I still believe, in the words spoken by Dr Martin Luther King: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
Pretty horrific times, and hard to read Finkelstein's perspective on the fate of Gaza.....but I read it to the end. The worst is what he says about the people of Israel, though its not the first time I've heard of the great support Neten yahoo has for his genocidal policies....its still chilling. And terribly tragic.
It's hard not to despair....but I don't despair. I'm lucky. I have a history in the Canadian left....and a life given to teaching and working for social justice. We can't give up. But I totally agree with Finklestein...let's watch Mamdani, support Mamdani, and encourage other Mamdani's to rise wherever possible.
Given what neoliberal globalism has allowed to happen on the planet, given the rising climate emergency, given an Empire that has twice elected a deranged egomaniac...........it would seem obvious that its time for something new, something better........something other, than more militarized capitalism, fantasizing how it will rebuild Gaza as a resort for the criminally insane.
Courage is needed. Truth telling is needed. And yes...backbone, backbone, backbone.
Backbone, backbone, backbone...
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
1901 –1967
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where everyman is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
I'm a student of literature, I read him long ago.
But the sad part is for me, I don't think America ever was America...........for any but the well off. The story of your frontier??? We know now those were genocidal times, though I bet the white majority were ignorant of that.........or, like Israel today, largely in favour of the genocide.
Everyone wants to believe they're on the side of the angels. Everyone wants to believe their country is a good land..........l know, Canadians get off thinking they are better somehow, more democratic, than their American cousins.
In order to maintain that belief, they make sure to keep themselves ignorant of the simple fact our government has seconded everry illegal regime change you've done over the years...........Cuba being an exception under our Pierre Eliot Trudeau....but now???
I get BS from Canadians about how Cuba is a failed state. I know that's a lie. I have relatives there...........but under no circumstances will the bigots and supporters of illegal sanctions, admit that they are on the side of the oppressor.
In fact.......the degree to which we in the west can be on the side of the oppressor and think we're flying with the angels............IS THE MOST SICKENING THING ABOUT US.
I thought the poem spoke to a number of things that are as relevant now as they were when the poem was written.
America never lived up to the promise envisioned for it by the Founders, who were steeped in the Enlightenment philosophy of Locke and Rousseau and Smith. But I do feel that what they did was revolutionary, and one giant leap for mankind, considering it was the first step in the direction of democracy that had been taken in centuries. Not bad for a bunch of rich white guys. A lot of American mythology was concocted to put a veneer of American exceptionalism over atrocities, and to fill in gaps where the promise of the Founders wasn't fulfilled. When I see recognition and acknowledgement of that, I'm encouraged.
The hubris and perversion of righteousness in the American regime, and the love of money woven through the American zeitgeist sicken me. Dissenting is my medicine. Good for the backbone...
What we would be required to believe to stand with the American right wing majority would be a form of brain damage. The intellect alone rebels at the thought..........and the heart? It heartily agrees with the intellect.
Add a bit of spirit to that agreement, and you have a human being.
" . . . the degree to which we in the west can be on the side of the oppressor and think we're flying with the angels............IS THE MOST SICKENING THING ABOUT US." Thank you for stating this truth.
Let's all do it. And say loud what we know rather than what we've been programmed to believe without any study. Hugo Chavez is the Tommy Douglas of Venezuela........American progressives!!!!
FIND OUT WHY CANADA HAS SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE AND YOU DON'T!!! We had a socialist Babtist minister who worked his butt off to give us single payer health care. Our "liberals' fought it with money from your American Medical Association. Don't completely trust the expensive suits worn by central bankers. Fight them, as we did in Saskatchewan, Canada. Sometimes, the people do win.
Inspite of what banker money tries to do to defeat us.
Israeli Jews are chilling in direct proportion to the knowledge we have about Jewish history, Jewish Nationalism, and Jewish Zionism. The latter is especially dangerous as neither Israeli nor US Jews appear willing to limit its geographic scope, as they always find an antisemitic or existential threat around every corner.
If their current determination to destroy the Palestinians is in any way connected to the genocide they faced at the hands of the Nazi's........then heaven help the future when the Palestinian survivors find a way to survive.
The grave of the United Nations has been dug, right beside the one where the rotting corpse of its predecessor, the League of Nations, has lain purifying for nine decades or so.
And that grave was dug by the Disunited States of Amerika.
Should be "putrifying".
Yeah, looks like Amerika is digging its own grave. The rest of us just wish they'd hurry up and get into it.
To quote the last line of Bob Dylans' Masters of War: "I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead".
Not you personally of course.
My heart just aches with such anguish at the magnitude of morality depraved people - devoid of plain decency. Aches for the Palestinians. Really aches for the Palestinians. Where are the Good Samaritans today? Among the world’s governors?
Of course the United States is lawless. The strong always are.
What does anyone propose to do about it?
What to do about it? Speak about it openly as often as possible but be braced for personal attack as those who you'd tell would attack you for speaking a truth they are unwilling to hear and acknowledge. Thanks FF.
Professor Finkelstein's analysis of the American plan for Gaza, though accurate left me with no hope. Is there anyway or any international body that can remedy the situation for the people of Gaza at all.
Is president Trump aware of the existence of abundant natural gas under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza that can help Gazans reconstruct their country. Is that why he wants to own Gaza?
Of course. That was one of the number one goals from the start. To steal those oil fields. And they succeeded. Egypt and Britain were also players in that. I think that the consciousness rising in millions of people all around the world witnessing the utter barbarity and degradation of the Empire, USrael, et al towards the beautiful people of Palestine is cause for hope, and ultimately another death knell of a dying Empire in which very tragically the ideal of the UN as it was crafted with the fail safe "Security Council" with its veto power is a part. Hopefully next time that lesson will have been learned.
Thank you both for this reporting and these harsh truths. A devil's bargain. I imagine many of those who voted do not sleep as well at night. I wonder, too, if Congress just passing the Bill HR 7006 with 188 Republicans and 153 Democrats, including Jasmine Crockett, voting yes to giving billions more to Israel, cutting UNRWA, prohibiting funding International agencies investigating Israel's actions, and punishing Palestinians seeking international justice, was the result of a similar devil's bargain? Pure gangsterism. And a call to the World for backbone, backbone, backbone!
Maybe the UN has to go, even though founded on some of the best principles and attracting many good people, but it's still embedded in the Colonial Empire and the Security Council with its veto power is a complete fail safe set up for exactly the power plays we are witnessing.
Prior to 2016, I was generally ignorant of the Zionist, Israeli lobby / US oppression of the Palestinians. Like so many others, I believed that the Holocaust defined Israel's history.
Thanks to Norman Finkelstein, Francesca Albanese, Chris Hedges, John Pilger and others for the education.
Lying by ommission is within the bedrock of the industrialized media that is owned and operated by the same corporate forces that constitutes the American government.
It's a singular arrangement, composed of numerous aligning forces.
It's fair to say that the majority of US citizens have little, if any understanding of how the world works. Mention US imperialism, its predatory global entanglements and brace yourself.
What percentage of US adults can ingest the fundamental concept of US Empire?
To do so requires us as individuals to confront the lie we have been taught to cultivate. And that's a difficult internal conflict to come to grips with.
For some, when new evidence dethrones previous conventions, the more rational is adopted.
While in others, reality tends to in short order, ricochet off their heads. Sorry...no admittance.
And no wonder, after all who was Edward Bernays?
The cult of the self exploits the shortcomings of the human brain. Emotional cravings, too often than not, override the competing rational thoughts within us. With reality downwind, our journey begins.
Underneath, the myth of economic growth hurdles the machine along doubling in mass every 2-3 decades. This is bio- physically impossible to maintain.
The inertia of this collosal mass of expanding civilization has increased so abruptly we fail to notice that it's collapsing under its own weight.
We may have wanted to begin tapping the brakes when designing a system pegged to indefinite economic growth at the end of WW11.
In the meantime the slaughter continues.
Liana,
Thank you for understanding the shortcomings of the Security Council, the plight of the Palestinians, and for describing them in a positive way, as beautiful people.. May the world see them through your eyes.
A mob boss yanked the rubber dentures out of the UN Security Council. All that's left is a pack of toothless, cowed, whimpering lap dogs. And the mob boss left any semblance of high ground to Russia and China. What a lowly state we've sunk to.
Here's a run-on sentence whose time seems to have run out:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
Call me naive, unsophisticated, and a hopelessly optimistic dreamer, but I believed, and I still believe, in the words spoken by Dr Martin Luther King: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
Backbone, backbone, backbone. Organize organize, organize. It's possible to get through this. Thank you Chris and Norm.
At this point, the Pope could go to Gaza to intervene, and the IOF would kill the Pope. It's insane and tragic.
The human ego-mind
That ghoulish specter
Of the imaginative false self
IS ALWAYS CORNERED
The Being Consciousness
The foundational True Self
IS NEVER CORNERED
Every Being is awaiting
Just one Just one
Security Council head-master
To Vote from their heart center
Since the vote
The Yellow Line Genocide
Has not subsided
It’s a rolling Thunder
Pressing the death clamp
Of it’s ethnic cleansing vice
Squishing the life from Palestine
Through whatever necessary means
Present themselves
Every member of the SC
Is a fakery void of truth
Never trust opponents of honesty
Every time their calculations
Within their ego mind command it
That ghoulish false presence
Will switch wavering in the wind
Of every selfish doctrine
Double minded leaders
Unstable in all their way
Purveyors of false promises
Dying in the webs that they weave
Cowardly vessels full of fear
Unfit to grace Creations stage
See your leadership clearly
They are the ones adorned
With the millstone round their neck
✌🏼❤️🙏🕉
It May....May finally lead to a credible pathway
Where no credibility exists ...
How will a pathway ever exist
No credible pathway will ever exist
Through .....
The bombed out concentration camp
Through....
Rubble strewn countryside of Palestine 🇵🇸
It’s been clear since the first
Nightmarish occupiers’s dream
This pathway led to crucifixion upon the cross
At the end of the Yellow Brick Line road....
I don’t think we’re in God’s Country Anymore
✌🏼🇵🇸🇱🇧🇸🇾🇮🇷🇮🇶🇾🇪❤️🙏🕉
God’s country is Nature. Beauteous and ever Mysterious. So many humans betray the Nature within.
The ghoulish ego mind
Is the great betrayal
Being consciousness shines eternal
Until the mind clouds of confusion
Cast a shadow and steal away
Happiness doomed by relative choices
Imagined others wrapped in inclinations
Desire’s spoils will soon decay
Off with this false head
The queen of hearts cried
To the false self all must die
Dissolving into the solution
Of stillness mind sinks
Deep within where Being’s Heart beats
✌🏼❤️🙏🕉