End of the Age of Obama

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“No one should have doubted that the forces of white supremacy would regroup after the 2008 anomaly.”

Let us pray (figuratively or literally) for gridlock, because all else is disaster. The best outcome that could result from Tuesday’s Democratic debacle is that the Republicans overreach and, in their white nationalist triumphalism, make it impossible for President Obama and congressional Democrats to reach an accommodation with rampaging reaction and racism.

The phony racial narrative of 2008 has been undone with the abrupt termination of the Age of Obama. After two short years, the illusion of a post-racial society has gone the way of all mirages – poof! – and we are forced to behold the United
States as it actually exists.

Barack Obama’s totally predictable failure to lead the nation on a transformative path all but guaranteed that the United States would revert to default mode: rule by a plutocracy backed by a white electoral base intent on cutting off their own noses to spite Black and brown faces. The white nationalist backlash to the actual reality of a Black-led government – exemplified by but much larger than the Tea Party – was a reversion to type.

Only 43 percent of whites voted for Obama in 2008, despite general recoil at what the Republicans had wrought under George Bush. In large swaths of the Deep South, the white vote for Obama registered in the single digits and low teens. No one should have doubted that the forces of white supremacy would regroup after the 2008 anomaly, or that the Republicans, the White Man’s Party, would employ the racist tools and strategies that have kept them in the White House for 20 of the last 30 years.

“After two short years, the illusion of a post-racial society has gone the way of all mirages.”

There was every reason to expect that many whites would reflexively scapegoat Blacks and browns in the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008 unless there were some countervailing rallying call for mobilization around a larger, socially cohesive national mission: a massive jobs and public works program. President Obama, the corporate Democrat, chose instead to transfer trillions in public wealth to Wall Street, the salient act of his tenure that overwhelmed – and, in much of the public’s perception, was conflated with – his wholly inadequate stimulus effort. The long and revelatory health care grind showed Obama’s eagerness to deal in the dark with the hated insurance and drug companies, to concoct a plan that essentially requires everyone to pay for private insurance. Even in friendly quarters, the glow was gone from his presidency, while the billionaire Koch brothers and Rupert Murdock fanned the flames of race hatred through their Tea Party “movement.” Progressives, of course, had no movement, having opted to become Obama’s groveling left flank, instead.

The corporate media wonder what will become of any future Obama initiatives with the House under firm Republican control and the Senate only nominally in Democratic hands. But, from a progressive standpoint, any new Obama initiatives should be feared like the plague. Even with Democrats in charge of both chambers of Congress, Obama persisted in attempting to forge a grand coalition with Republicans, which they steadfastly rebuffed. If he continues true to form in the next, much more troglodyte Congress – and there is no reason to think Obama won’t try – we will witness a repeat of the Clinton years, when a Democratic president oversaw passage of NAFTA, welfare “reform,” vast expansion of the prison Gulag, and deregulation of Wall Street.

“From a progressive standpoint, any new Obama initiatives should be dreaded like the plague.”

Obama had his own plans to go down in history as the president that “reined in” so-called entitlements: Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. On his own initiative, he caused the creation of a deficit cutting commission whose recommendations are due, next month. The president planned for commission members to threaten entitlements, whereupon he would position himself as the Great Compromiser and Conciliator, further weakening the safety net while pretending to salvage portions of it. But that was before Tuesday’s Republican tidal wave. In the new relationship of forces, an Obama attempt at triangulation on entitlements would invite utter catastrophe. We can only hope that the Republicans are so consumed with destroy-Obama fervor that they reject his entreaties to bipartisan collaboration. The people’s interests would best be served with the GOP charging ahead with their own Neanderthal agenda, forcing Obama to respond with vetoes, if necessary. The people have no champion in the White House or the Congress. The best we can hope for is that the two evils cancel each other out. Let there be gridlock.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=print/content/end-age-obama

Letter to the Boston Globe

How patriotic of the Globe to feature the stress encountered by Harvard ROTC students (Racketeers for Capitalism in gestation) in having to get up a half-hour early to get to MIT for training; two T-Stops to Kendall I believe. Interestingly the Globe noted that none of the cadets offered, or indeed had an opinion as to their being barred from the Harvard Campus because of the policy of “Don’t ask – Don’t tell.” Perhaps such mental indolence may be preferable to that of the innumerable political policy sycophants on the campus vigorously supporting unconscionable, illegal, immoral wars of empire throughout the world; policy-makers, incidentally, historically unaccountable. Meanwhile our jails are filled with the poor, and growing numbers of women guilty of
bouncing checks to feed their children, while illustrious Harvardians enjoy the fruits of empire-building slaughter worldwide. Marvelous your suppression of history and sense of priority for front-page news.

Tony Flaherty, LT, USN
South Boston Residents for Peace

To the Boston Globe

I never cease to be amazed how low the Globe, and particularly its parent organization, can stoop with respect to what purports to be journalism. Ginger Thompson’s, NYTimes, demonization of Bradley Manning’s exposure of an American helicopter attack on innocent civilians, could well have been written by the CIA. Would that this hypocritical media giant looked within and did such a piercing expose of its treasonous reporter Judith Miller, and the New York Times’ editorial promotion of the war in Iraq responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands men, women and children in Iraq, and duped American service personnel. The propaganda machine of Nazi Germany pales to insignificance in the face of your capacity.

Tony Flaherty, LT, USN
South Boston Residents for Peace
A former subscriber.

At noon today, at the Ironworkers Hall in South Boston, former President Clinton arrived to extol the virtue of Congressmen Lynch, former President Bush’s most vigorous supporter of an illegal/immoral war, militarization of youth, who was silenced at the recent Labor Day Breakfast, and booed to silence on the Commons because of his failure to support the health care initiative. And just this week, he was the only member of the nine-member Congressional delegation to vote to continue funding the disaster in Afghanistan.

For several days, various peace entities called for demonstration. Ken Doll Clinton, who essentially destroyed what there was of any real Democratic party by moving it to Center right, was hailed, and I would say there was a remarkable crowd in support of Lynch, with many young persons waving his placards. Where were the anti-war proponents?

In my twenty years of peace activism, this display had to be the most depressing of all. If anyone thinks we have made progress, you are truly among the ranks of the deluded, which unfortunately included a few stalwarts today, K. Flaherty, L. Hickey, Joe Kebartas, Rob Morris, and R. Ajamian who came in from Bridgewater. It was very clear, at least to me, that entrenched power has nothing to fear, particularly when cumulatively those who are advocating peace, in fact, mirror so much the political establishment they have bought and paid for, an ineffective Congress of Blowhards. It has been said that in France the government fears the people, and in America the people fear the Government – in the last analysis we are a joke, a last-nighter on the off-Broadway stage or as an entity to be afforded ANY consideration whatsoever.

Sadly –

Tony Flaherty

BP Welcomes You to the Apocalypse

By Mark Morford,

June 25, 2010 “SF Gate” — Please do not worry. Please do not fret about that one thing you always fret about, or that other thing, or even that third thing that might have something to do with erupting oil, dead pelicans and that sickening feeling in your gut that Something is Very Wrong Indeed.

I come bearing fabulous news. There is no longer any need to concern yourself with pesky trifles like love, a mortgage, child rearing, planting a garden, dreams, money, shoes, wristwatches, parking spaces, mysterious rashes, foreign policy, baseball, bridge tolls or generally caring about much of anything in particular.

I am delighted to report it will all be over soon. If not sooner. It’s true.

And it’s a good thing, too, because I was just reading up on six of the worst-case scenarios resulting from the BP spill, all sorts of horrors and tragedies, abuses and unspeakables, from dire seafood shortages to horrifying ecosystem destruction, wildlife mutilation to all the years and decades before the gulf region will be anywhere near recovered. These scenarios all were, in a word, bleak. They were, in three more, thoroughly f–ing depressing.

They were also, whoops, from about two months ago. So I clicked around and quickly found another, far more recent worst-case scenario article, and boy, were its scenarios worse indeed. So awful that they effectively made the earlier batch seem meek and laughable and even sort of quaint.

So it’s come to this. Every day in the media, a sort of deranged, comical footrace to figure out which worst-case scenario is really the worst, because every day comes a new stat, prediction, photo, possibility for abject horror we hadn’t even conceptualized yet because, well, we’ve never exactly been here before, not at this scale. How bad can it all get, really? No one has a clue. Joy!

But I’m not at all worried. Because the fact is, almost none of those worst-case scenarios will actually come to pass. Do you know why? Because there are two or three even worse worst-case scenarios that easily trump any you might be reading about anywhere. Ultra, mega, super worst-case scenarios that make all the rest seem like a little splotch on your pretty new iPhone 4.

So, just what are these supermegaworst-case scenarios? They all have one thing in common: Each one of them, all by itself, spells the end of modern life as we know it. Utter annihilation. The End. I am so not kidding. OK, maybe a little. But only until we all die. After that, not kidding at all.

BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #1: Everyone knows that, early on in the spill, BP was thoughtful enough to pump millions of gallons of a horrible chemical dispersant called Corexit 9500 into the gusher, a violently toxic compound so notoriously lethal it’s been banned for years by the European union. Obama & Co finally caught on to BP’s tactic and told them to knock it off.

Too late. Obscure Russian scientists tell us Corexit’s deadly compounds are now breaking up and evaporating into North American rainclouds, which will shortly begin raining down complete toxic hell on us all, poisoning all crops, babies, cats, Christians, Starbucks baristas and none-too-bright redneck videographers — though it will somehow magically spare the really good jazz clubs in Louisiana and that one guy who scored the goal for the USA in the World Cup, because he’s a freakin’ hero.

These scientists say the toxic rain could be so poisonous, it will destroy the entire food chain and plunge North America into chaos, rendering the entire region unlivable, with any straggling survivors crawling desperately up to Canada, where they will be promptly made into slave labor to build hockey arenas and drink lager and fade into the woods.

Does that sound dubious? Totally implausible? Fine. No problem. For there is another, even better backup apocalypse scenario, even more melodramatic and wickedly cinematic, and therefore much more likely to come to pass.

BP Will Kill Us All Scenario #2: Apparently, deep in the ocean floor, just beneath the gushing oil, lives a massive bubble of methane gas the size of… oh, let’s just say Texas. Maybe Oklahoma. South Carolina. Someplace gassy and slightly rancid and always ready to explode at the poke of a big phallic stick.

This is the drama: All our mucking around on the ocean floor could trigger a methane explosion so gargantuan, it will cause a tsunami. Not just any tsunami, mind you, but a “supersonic tsunami” so ultra-awesomely massive it will effortlessly wipe out the much of the gulf coast states, killing millions and completely destabilizing the nation and inducing zombie riots in the streets as everyone wails over the loss of Florida. Or, you know, not.

So there you have it. Toxic rain and supersonic tsunamis, the end of North America as we know it. Done. Finished. Certainly, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to come to pass, right? Maybe, if we’re really lucky, even both?

All right, fine. In the off-off chance that invisible Russian scientists and nutball doomsayers are wrong (impossible!), well, there is one more glorious mega scenario to consider. There is a backup to the backup to the backup. Hey, we’re Americans. When it comes to dorky apocalyptic visions, we got you covered.

Here is your grand finale: A new survey says that a disturbingly large percentage of Americans — 40 percent, to be exact — actually believe Jesus will return by 2050, likely riding on the back of a flaming asteroid (30 percent think one will hit us by then), waving a cowboy hat and yodeling as he careens toward our hapless blue dot of inequity, pain and lousy AT&T reception.

Jesus will then crash land in Texas, wink at Dubya and Sarah Palin, and then sweep up all the True Believers in their beige Dodge minivans just as the earth shudders and implodes, just like one of those swirling black holes in “Star Trek.”

How cool will that be? Answer: It will be very cool indeed. It is so cool, in fact, it totally wipes out the need to care much about anything at all. See how easy? Now, who wants pie?

Mark Morford’s new book, ‘The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism,’ is now available at daringspectacle.com, Amazon, BN.com, and beyond. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com.

WHO says swine flu “was vastlyover-rated”

http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

Swine flu risk ‘was vastly over-rated’ by World Health Organisation 25 Jun 2010 Threats of a swine flu pandemic were ‘vastly over-rated’ by the World Health Organisation, an inquiry has concluded. The Council of Europe last night also accused the UN’s health arm of ‘grave shortcomings’ in the process that led it to declare a pandemic last year. Plummeting confidence in health advice could prove ‘disastrous’ in the event of a severe future pandemic, parliamentarians at the Strasbourg-based senate said.

Council of Europe calls for WHO flu handling probe 24 Jun 2010 The Council of Europe called Thursday for a probe into the World Health Organisation’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak, which it said led to unjustified scares and waste of public money. A council parliamentary assembly identified “grave shortcomings” about WHO transparency about its position on the flu, “generating concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on decisions taken,” a statement said. The session adopted a text that says there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”. Paul Flynn, British author of a report endorsed by the assembly, told the session that the WHO’s June 11, 2009 declaration of a H1N1 pandemic had enabled the pharmaceutical industry to reap large profits

We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

There’s a Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign
Sitting there by the left turn line
One leg missing and both hands free
No one’s paying much mind to him
The VA budget’s just stretched too thin
And now there’s more coming back from the mideast war
We can’t make it here any more

The big ol’ building was the textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and then closed the doors
We can’t make it here any more

See those pallets piled up on the loading dock
they’re just gonna set there til they rot
cause there’s nothing to ship, nothing to pack
just busted concrete and rusted tracks
empty storefronts around the square
there’s a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
you don’t come down here unless you’re looking to score
we can’t make it here anymore

The bar’s still open but man it’s slow
the tip jar’s light and the register’s low
the bartender don’t have much to say
the regular crowd gets thinner each day
some have maxed out all their credit cards
some are working two jobs and livin’ in cars
minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for drink
if you gotta have proof just try it yourself mr CEO
see how far $5.15 an hour will go
take a part time job at one of your stores
bet you can’t make it here anymore

There’s a high school girl with bourgeois dream
just like the pictuers in the magazine
she found on the floor of the laundromat
a woman with kids can forget all that
if she comes up pregnant what’ll she do?
forget the career, forget about school
can she live on faith? live on hope?
high on jesus or hooked on dope
when its way too late to just say no
you can’t make it here anymore

Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart stores
just like the ones we made before
‘cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
or the shape of their eyes or the shape i’m in
should i hate em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
all lily white and squeaky clean
they’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids don’t bleed
their kids don’t bleed in their damn little war
and we can’t make it here anymore

will work for food and die for oil
will kill for power and to us the spoils
the billionaires get to pay less tax
the working poor get to fall through the cracks
so let ’em eat jellybeans let ’em eat cake
let em eat shit, whatever it takes
they can join the Air Force or join the Corps
if they can’t make here anymore

So that’s how it is, that’s what we got
if the president wants to admit it or not
you can read it in the papers, read it on the wall
hear it on the wind if you’re listening at all
get out of that limo, look us in the eye
call us on the cell phone tell us all why

In Dayton Ohio or Portland Maine
or on a cotton gin out on the great high plains
that’s done closed down along with the school
and the hospital and the swimming pool
dust devils dance in the noonday heat
there’s rats in the alley and trash in the street
gang graffiti on a boxcar door
we can’t make it here anymore

James McMurty

Parenting In Sweden

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

SPOLAND, SWEDEN — Mikael Karlsson owns a snowmobile, two hunting dogs and five guns. In his spare time, this soldier-turned-game warden shoots moose and trades potty-training tips with other fathers. Cradling 2-month-old Siri in his arms, he can’t imagine not taking baby leave. “Everyone does.”

From trendy central Stockholm to this village in the rugged forest south of the Arctic Circle, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future.

In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.

Swedish mothers still take more time off with children — almost four times as much. And some who thought they wanted their men to help raise baby now find themselves coveting more time at home.

But laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change.

Companies have come to expect employees to take leave irrespective of gender, and not to penalize fathers at promotion time. Women’s paychecks are benefiting and the shift in fathers’ roles is perceived as playing a part in lower divorce rates and increasing joint custody of children.

In perhaps the most striking example of social engineering, a new definition of masculinity is emerging. . . .

see the whole article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html?ref=homepage&src=me&pagewanted=print

Israeli Pirates Shot Their Victims In The Back

by David Lindorf

You want to know why we need independent journalism, and why those of you who are reading this article need to support the publication in which it is appearing and the article in which it originally appeared? Because if you rely for your news on the US corporate media, whether ad-supported or underwriter-supported, you won’t learn that Furkan Dogan, the 19-year-old American citizen slain by Israeli commandos in the raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla May 31, was shot in the back and in the back of the head, as well as multiple times in the face.

This is the conclusion of the autopsy conducted by the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine, which also did autopsies on the eight other Turkish citizens killed in the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara ferry and five other smaller boats in the so-called Freedom Flotilla. Of the other eight dead, the medical examiners found that five had been shot in the back, or in the back of the head.

This critically important information has not appeared in US news reports. Some American news organizations have left out the autopsy information entirely from their reports as of Saturday. CNN, in its report on Friday, did note that five of the nine were shot in the head, and at close range, but the all-important fact that most of the victims were shot from behind was left out. ABC had the same information on Thursday, again without mentioning the shots from behind. In its article on Friday, the NY Times had yet to even name Dogan, the American victim, much less mention the bullets that hit him or how he was shot.

And yet, if you’re trying to establish what happened on that ship, the direction of the firing, not just the number of bullets, or the distance from which they were fired, is crucial.

I had some experience with this as a reporter in Los Angeles, back in the 1970s. There was a story that ran in all the local papers, including the LA Times, and my paper, the LA Daily News, about a 14-year-old kid killed by police while he was burglarizing an empty house in the San Fernando Valley. All the papers reported the police story that he had been shot and killed when police entered the house on a call of a burglary, and he “turned and appeared to be carrying a gun” (it turned out to be some camera equipment he was trying to cart off).

On a hunch, I decided to look more into the story, and as my beat was county government, I went to visit the coroner’s office. There I was shown, at my request, the drawings and report on the boy’s autopsy. What I discovered was that all the police bullets entered the boy’s back. He was shot while fleeing the police, not while turning to face them.

If you’re a real reporter, not a stenographer to power, you’ve got to ask. A reporter from the Guardian did ask. US reporters did not ask. Or if they did ask, they didn’t put the answer in their reports. Or if they did put the answer in their reports, editors removed the answer. And so far, no reporter has come forward to protest this news blackout, even anonymously.

In this current case of the Israeli commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, if victims were shot in the back or in the back of the head, then one is left really with only two possible conclusions: either the shooters, who were the Israeli commandos (according to Israel, no Israeli soldiers were themselves shot, plus all the recovered bullets were 9 mm, the type of shells in the Israeli weapons, making it clear who had the guns), fired at people who were fleeing from them, or alternatively they shot people from the front, and later executed them with shots to the back of the head, which is maybe even worse (certainly a war crime).

There aren’t many other possible explanations, and either way we’re talking about criminal behavior on the high seas in what many are calling an act of piracy, or else an act of war against a NATO nation.

I suppose if only one of the nine victims had exhibited a rear head wound, one might at least theorize a scenario in which he might have spun around upon being shot in the face, and the commando, firing rapidly, might have gotten off one unneeded extra round that caught the victim from the rear. But for that to happen five times requires a tremendous suspension of disbelief.

So much for the Israeli government propaganda about its poor and unprepared commandos being surprised and set upon by vicious “terrorists” on the boat, armed with kitchen knives, sticks and metal rods, when they were anticipating nothing but peaceful resistance. (This absurd story line was contradicted by Israel’s other story line, that it considered the organizer of the flotilla, the Turkish IHH charity, to be linked to Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it “knew” that Palestinian terrorists had insinuated themselves among the boat’s activists–a claim which, if true, means the commandos would have been, and surely were, well-armed and prepared for a truly violent reception.)

In any event, what the autopsies reveal is a massacre, with commandos deliberately murdering activists on the boats–either directly, or after initially wounding them.

What they also reveal is the shameless pro-Israel bias of the US media, which has simply decided that facts uncomfortable to Israel and its US government backer are not news that’s “fit to print.”

You can read about the autopsies in the U.K. Guardian newspaper, or in Switzerland (SwissInfo) or in Australia (the Melbourne Age), and you can even read it in a Reuters report (which is a news service that most American news organizations subscribe to, but which they actually show their readers only selectively), but you cannot read it or hear about it in the mainstream US media, where most Americans unfortunately still turn for their information.

That is unacceptable.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

http://counterpunch.com/lindorff06072010.html

Obomber Is Guilty Of Israel’s Latest Barbarism

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

As I write at 5pm on Monday, May 31, all day has passed since the early morning reports of the Israeli commando attack on the unarmed ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and there has been no response from President Obama except to say that he needed to learn “all the facts about this morning’s tragic events” and that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu had canceled his plans to meet with him at the White House. Thus has Obama made America complicit once again in Israel’s barbaric war crimes. Just as the US Congress voted to deep-six Judge Goldstone’s report on Israel’s war crimes committed in Israel’s January 2009 invasion of Gaza, Obama has deep-sixed Israel’s latest act of barbarism by pretending that he doesn’t know what has happened.

No one in the world will believe that Israel attacked ships in international waters carrying Israeli citizens, a Nobel Laureate, elected politicians, and noted humanitarians bringing medicines and building materials to Palestinians in Gaza, who have been living in the rubble of their homes without repairs or medicines since January 2009, without first clearing the crime with its American protector. Without America’s protection, Israel, a totally artificial state, could not exist. No one in the world will believe that America’s spy apparatus did not detect the movement of the Israeli attack force toward the aid ships in international waters in an act of piracy, killing 20, wounding 50, and kidnapping the rest. Obama’s pretense at ignorance confirms his complicity.

Once again the US government has permitted the Israeli state to murder good people known for their moral conscience. The Israeli state has declared that anyone with a moral conscience is an enemy of Israel, and every American president except Eisenhower and Carter has agreed.

Obama’s 12-hour silence in the face of extreme barbarity is his signal to the controlled corporate media to remain on the sidelines until Israeli propaganda sets the story.

The Israeli story, preposterous as always, is that the humanitarians on one of the ships took two pistols from Israeli commandos, highly trained troops armed with automatic weapons, and fired on the attack force. The Israeli government claims that the commandos’ response (70 casualties at last reporting) was justified self-defense. Israel was innocent. Israel did not do anything except drop commandos aboard from helicopters in order to intercept an arms shipment to Gazans being brought in by ships manned by terrorists.

Many Christian evangelicals, brainwashed by their pastors that it is God’s will for Americans to protect Israel, will believe the Israeli story, especially when it is unlikely they will ever hear any other. Conservative Americans, especially on Memorial Day when they are celebrating feats of American arms, will admire Israel for its toughness. Here in north Georgia where I am at the moment, I have heard several say, admiringly, “Them, Israelis, they don’t put up with nuthin.”

Conservative Americans want the US to be like Israel. They do not understand why the US doesn’t stop pissing around after nine years and just go ahead and defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. They don’t understand why the US didn’t defeat whoever was opposing American forces in Iraq. Conservatives are incensed that America had to “win” the war by buying off the Iraqis and putting them on the US payroll. Israel murders people and then blames its victims. This appeals to American conservatives, who want the US to do the same.

It is likely that Americans will accept Israeli propagandist Mark Regev’s story that Israelis were met by deadly fire when they tried to intercept an arms shipment to Palestinian terrorists from IHH, a radical Turkish Islamist organization hiding under the cover of humanitarian aid.

Americans will never hear from the US media that Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan declared that the aid ships were carefully inspected before departure from Turkey and that there were no terrorists or arms aboard: “I want to say to the world, to the heads of state and the governments, that these boats that left from Turkey and other countries were checked in a strict way under the framework of the rules of international navigation and were only loaded with humanitarian aid.”

Turkey is a US ally, a member of NATO. Turkey’s cooperation is important to American’s plan for world hegemony. Erdogan must wonder about the morality of Israel’s American protector. According to a report in antiwar.com, the Turkish government declared that “future aid ships will be dispatched with a military escort so as to prevent future Israeli attacks.” Will the CIA assassinate Erdogan or pay the Turkish military to overthrow him? Murat Mercan, head of Turkey’s foreign relations committee, said that Israel’s claim that there were terrorists aboard the aid ships was Israel’s way of covering up its crime.

Mercan declared: “Any allegation that the members of this ship is attached to al-Qaeda is a big lie because there are Israeli civilians, Israeli authorities, Israeli parliamentarians on board the ship.”

The criminal Israeli state does not deny its act of piracy. Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, confirmed that the attack took place in international waters: “This happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves.” Americans, and their Western European puppet states and the puppet state in Canada, will be persuaded by the servile media to buy the story fabricated by Israeli propaganda that the humanitarian aid ships were manned by terrorists bringing weapons to the Palestinians in Gaza, and that the terrorists posing as humanitarians attacked the force of Israeli commandos with two pistols, clubs, and knives. Many Americans will swallow this story without a hiccup.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

http://counterpunch.com/