Fluent in Arabic

I quote below the last paragraph in an article I found today on the Mondoweiss weblog. Aubrey Farber, a Jewish girl from Maine visiting Israel, wrote the piece. She is astonished (I'm not quite sure why) to find two Israeli brothers entirely fluent in Arabic and describing themselves as Palestinians. She goes in for an extended meditation on "identities," etc. Aubrey belongs to the younger Jewish-American cohort who are getting set to ditch the racist Zionist agenda and the Israeli government that implements it. I say "getting set to." They haven't done it yet, but it looks promising, at least on Philip Weiss's M0ndoweiss site.


I must say I enjoy the thought that a mere 30 years might bring this change. Although I question whether we will all have 30 years to wait for it. The quote: 


“We are the future” one boy says jokingly. “It's not a joke,” says his brother. The only liveable future is one in which the us vs. them mentality dissolves into the shameful recesses of history. They believe that soon – maybe in thirty years – Israel as we know it will be gone, and they'll be prepared. They will already be rid of the mentality in which everyone is everyone else's enemy. By internalizing both sides of a divisive dichotomy, they are the future. I, too, am a part of this future; we are dismantling divisive rhetoric, imposed and perpetuated by the mainstream media and created by Israel's political needs, by taking these words, redefining them, and crafting our own identities to reflect who want to be, not who someone else told us we were."
End quote.

A Start on a Difficult Project

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was thinking of the wisdom and justice of forgiving Israel for its cruel and inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. 


I have put the proposition in the nerviest possible way, of course. How does a private citizen get away with "forgiving" an entire nation for its dreadful behavior? 


Well, the fact that things have to begin somewhere is my justification, and it is almost a sure thing that no such proposition is going to come out of government offices in this manvantara. "Forgiveness" ain't on their word list. Vindictiveness, intransigence, pride, high-handedness, hubris and a lot of other such words are.  We have had some six "known" millennia of relations between states based on the hubristic kind of thing. What would be so wrong about trying out at last the recommendations of the Lord Jesus Christ in his famous (and largely unheeded prayer): "Forgive us out trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."


You might rush to remind me that any common sense approach would require that the Israelis cut out the bad behavior before they can be forgiven, but that cannot be what the Lord meant, else he would have specifically said so when hanging on the cross: Not "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" but "Father forgive them when they come to their senses and realize what a crime they are committing in killing me, their Messiah."


That argument has just crashed to the ground based on the Lord's own witness.  There seems no place to hide so as to preserve the right to avenge against evil-doers before turning to the consideration of some mercy (some forgiveness) for them.  


And as a matter of fact, before I could begin to write this brief post I have had to practice what I was thinking of preaching. The fact is the I have forgiven "the Jews" not only for their ghastly wars against their own brethren, the Palestinians but also for the millennia-long practice of the trade of usury which their Torah tells them they may do against non-Jews, aka goys. I have had a head of steam up on that for better than 50 years and have repeatedly argued that the U.S. should take back the signal (and constitutional) privilege of a sovereign nation and issue its own money, telling the bankers now doing it at the Federal Reserve, a private institution, that their rule is now over, thank you very much. 


I sincerely hope that that eventuality, which is bound to happen or else we are headed as a nation for a total catastrophe and collapse, will come about without involving the Jews in another ghastly expulsion or its equivalent. I have no crystal ball on all this, revealing the future to me. I don't at all know what the future will be, but a primary element in my thinking things through to this point is my deep conviction that today's Jews are making a simply horrific mistake. I would entreat them to consider the possibility I am right.

Pollard Comeback?

Philip Weiss runs the blog Mondoweiss, the best one I know of by a Jew and against Zionism and against the horrible mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel. Today he posted a short note by Jeffrey Blankfort, also a Jew and a storied anti-Zionist, about the convicted Israeli spy now serving a sentence of life imprisonment in the U.S. 

"I think Pollard will be freed

by JEFFREY BLANKFORT on DECEMBER 25, 2010 · 

"It won't be as dramatic as Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox--after all, Lee and his men put up a fight--but if Obama hands Pollard to Netanyahu, as now I think he will, it will be a surrender of American sovereignty to Israel and his greatest humiliation yet.

"Although I predicted he would be a disaster as a president, he has been far, far worse, with even more betrayals of the public yet to come. By the summer he will have us in a full fledged war in Pakistan, with troops as well as planes, and no doubt, in Yemen, as well, and the others will keep going. 

"And, besides bailing out Wall Street and giving the finger to Main Street, he has miraculously cleansed the country of an anti-war movement. 

"Beam me up, Scotty? Wazzat, Scotty no longer works here? He's been fired? Than fix me up with a Jim Beam then, and after a few I'll pretend I'm up in space."

I put the above here to sort of check on what we can look forward to in this season of discontent as to the way of governmental performance. I have been most unwilling to give up on Pres. Obama, but it's getting harder and harder not to. So let this be a bellwether: if Obama frees Pollard, O. is one sort of fellow; if he doesn't, he's another.


I have intended to write pretty soon on our need as a people to forgive our enemies (an old Christian bill of goods), starting with the Zionists if you will, so I am not now willing to say much more. Let us just watch. This is indeed a test for O. 

Empire Anyone?

My this year's Christmas Day discovery is Sir John Glubb, aka Glubb Pasha, a British officer at 18 in WWI, and for nearly 20 years before WWII the leader of the Jordanian army. When he quit that, he took to writing books and did a number of them. I have only read the longish essay linked to below and am enormously impressed by it. It turns out Empires over the millennia have had eerily similar lifetimes and eerily similar cultural evolutions despite fantastically different kinds of people running them and utterly different physical circumstances. Below I quote from an email I sent today to someone I wanted to get to read Glubb, as I would very much like to have you, Dear Reader, to read him. All I'll permit myself to say beyond this is that the 250 years, which seem to be an Empire's lasting time, equal ten generations of people, a generation being 25 years in Glubb's reckoning. And I'll also say this: empires start out strong, militaristic, vigorous, crude, even barbaric and they come from nowhere places. They end up, after a number of clearly defined stages, sophisticated, dissolute, argumentative, variegated, weak, and incapable of defending themselves against the next "Empire."


Dear ______:

Here is the link to Glubb's essay. I've read a few commentaries on Glubb and can now say that Glubb is himself surprisingly more modern and "broad minded" (as 'twere) than his commentators. Worth reading. He says Br Emp lasted from 1700 to 1950. 1700 is a few years after the formation of the Bank of England, which made possible the whole thing. By 1950 the Empire was well along on becoming what a Russki named Panarin (qv on Wikipedia) calls the "New British Empire." I'd say that got its start in about 1914 to 1917 when the U.S. got itself into WWI, a horror we could (IMHO should) have stayed out of. In 1913 we went under the Br-Rothschild banking thing (Fed Res), which made possible WWII and has brought us to our present wonderful state.  So how long are we good for? We might last longer than most, because we are so technical and all, even though GLubb says all that kind of stuff is not determinative. Anyway 1700 to 1950 is 250 years. If we last till 2020 it will have been 320 years. I mean as an EMPIRE, God save the mark, which I would be utterly delighted to see us stop being ASAP. Of course the correct thing to say is, Who the hell knows what the future will bring?

O Night Divine

Christmas Eve. May your Christmas be joyful. I rarely see anything on TV or Internet better than this, IF the Irish are in decline, they are concealing it masterfully. God bless you each and everyone wherever you are or whoever you are.

http://worriersanonymous.org/Share/Christmas/Holynite.htm

Holbrooke Reconsidered

In my last post I was moved to speak I thought a little charitably about Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who died at 69 a couple of days ago after a long operation at a D.C. hospital. Today I read Justin Raimondo's evaluation of H.'s work on Raimondo's site Antiwar.com. Read it here.

Raimondo is not moved to let H. off the hook. He was, says Raimondo, a full-tilt warmonger and the guy who brought us the present crowd of Kosovo organ-traffickers in all their effulgent criminality. That may well be. H. was in cahoots with the Clintons back then, and he has been much supported by Hillary lately; in other words from an antiwar point of view he was running with a very bad, not to say criminal, crowd.

But I would prefer to let my mild words about H. stand. In recent years I have been mightily impressed by what seem to me the Lord's express formula for making it through the gates oneself: forgive others who have trespassed against you as you would be forgiven by God for your trespasses. In this as in everything else the Christ was a total revolutionary; he would have us all abandon our "usual (vindictive) ways."

Holbrooke's Jest (?)

I watched Charlie Rose on PBS last night. (Rose is a new addiction for me; Charlie is, I ,just discovered, a very classy guy, with his Ralph Lauren suits and all.) Rose mounted an impressive tribute to the late Richard Holbrooke. He had had H. on his program 55 times in some fourteen years (I think he said,) H.'s friends  on the program were monumentally complimentary to H. I had him filed away as just another dreadful neoconservative, but that now appears to me to have been some wrong and a bit blinded. More to the story, it appears. Anyway, on Rose there was no mention of H.'s last words, now so famous (280,000 hits on Google): a categorical "the Afghan war must be ended." We shall see whether these words become as famous as, say, Goethe's "Mehr licht!" They should. It is a central truth of our time: that war MUST be ended. NPR suggested H. was jesting with his Pakistani doctor before the 20-hour operation he did not survive. Some jest. God bless him and keep him and may we remember his last thought.

Gilad Atzmon on Zionist Carryings-On

The bold-face text below is by Gilad Atzmon, as you may know, a self-declared ex-Jew, a world class saxophonist, and a zealous anti-Zionist. And I might add, a hell of a great guy. He was interviewed on mycatbirdseat.com by Miriam Cotton, and the text I quote is a mere—but important and IMHO true—snippet from a much longer text well worth reading. (Click on snippet to get to the interview.)

“I actually think that the Zionist Lobby has managed to destroy the American empire. I argue that the Credit Crunch is in fact a Zio-Punch. I argue that Greenspan created an economy boom to divert attention from Wolfowitz’ wars. The Zionists in fact have managed to bring down every super power they cling to. Britain, France and now America. You have to allow yourself to admit that the ‘War on Terror’ was actually a Zionist led war against Islam, a battle that was there to serve Israeli interests.”


I would hope this would lead all readers to reconsider our slavish devotion to Zionist (aka neconservative) interests. We have been had long enough, and rather dreadfully at that.  

Larry Arnn and Imprimis

Larry P. Arnn, Ph.D., the current president of famous Hillsdale College in Michigan, is the author of the most recent edition of Imprimis, the Hillsdale college freebie (1.9 million readers get it in their postal mail boxes, gratis, every month). He has written a partly excellent argument for returning the govt. of the U.S. to its Constitutional basis. I say partly excellent because part of it (seems to me) horribly false and misleading. I may write the Hon. Dr. Arnn a letter, and if I do I may post it here, but meanwhile you might want to read the article, "Outline of a Platform for Constitutional Government" here. It's worth the trouble.

Imprimis was, I do believe, invented and made into a winner by Lew Rockwell, whose own website, lewrockwell,com  I wrote pieces for a couple of years back. Lew, a Libertarian in the Murray Rothbard mold, went on to become the founder of the von Mises Inst. in Auburn, Alabama. Arnn came to Hillsdale after the somewhat scandalous departure of a much lauded president who had got himself into a honey trap of a kind I won't and couldn't now detail, but it all ended with a much revamped Hillsdale with Arnn as the new leader.

That's  it for today.

Hang On. More's Coming. (I hope.)

I had to give up my iMac for a full week just after my last post so that my iMacman (my great Apple expert) could transfer my files to a new, that is, refurbished iMac. So now I have Intel rather than Motorola chips empowering me and am presumably equipped for the near future in tip-top shape. We'll hope so.

Meanwhile I have had a minor medical dust-up and that together with the iMac troubles has put me off stride. Now add a little sloth and you have an "equals no post" situation. And this new item is not much better than "no post today." It's just that I propose to be back soon with more musings, and so I urge you, my millions of faithful fans, not to give up hope but keep coming back to see what may have happened here.

I have discovered that the best and quickest way to find this blog is to search on Google for "tomasoblanco".