Onward Christian soldiers

Onward Christian soldiers

The hopefuls in the Democrat camp really believed victory in the US election was within their grasp. How did they get it so wrong? They failed to appreciate, says Simon Schama, that their country is now in fact two nations that loathe and fear each other – Godly and Worldly America

Friday November 5, 2004
The Guardian

In the wee small hours of November 3 2004, a new country appeared on the map of the modern world: the DSA, the Divided States of America. Oh yes, I know, the obligatory pieties about “healing” have begun; not least from the lips of the noble Loser. This is music to the ears of the Victor of course, who wants nothing better than for us all to Come Together, a position otherwise known as unconditional surrender. Please, fellow curmudgeons and last ditchers, can someone on the losing side just for once not roll over and fall into a warm bath of patriotic platitudes at such moments, but toot the flute of battle instead; yell and holler and snarl just a wee bit? I don’t want to heal the wound, I want to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds – and then maybe we’ll have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation in 1964, wanted to share? Don’t think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And now, by God, he has.
“We are one nation,” the newborn star of Democrats, Senator-elect Barack Obama, exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political life belied him. Well might he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil war has the fault line between its two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially (with the exception of Florida, its peninsular finger pointing expectantly at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are topographically coherent and almost contiguous. One of those Americas is a perimeter, lying on the oceans or athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian lakes, and is necessarily porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether montagnard or prairie, is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of obstinate self-belief buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and Worldly America?

Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a massive landslide, faces, well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts and freely engages, commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in the easy understanding that those continents are a dynamic synthesis of ancient cultures and modern social and economic practices. This truism is unthreatening to Worldly America, not least because so many of its people, in the crowded cities, are themselves products of the old-new ways of Korea, Japan, Ireland or Italy. In Worldly America – in San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego, New York – the foreigner is not an anxiety, but rather a necessity. Its America is polycultural, not Pollyanna.

Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in **** Cheney’s Wyoming, stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya’s deeply drilled Texas, turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world and proclaims to high heaven the indestructible endurance of the American Difference. If Worldly America is, beyond anything else, a city, a street, and a port, Godly America is, at its heart (the organ whose bidding invariably determines its votes over the cooler instructions of the head), a church, a farm and a barracks; places that are walled, fenced and consecrated. Worldly America is about finding civil ways to share crowded space, from a metro-bus to the planet; Godly America is about making over space in its image. One America makes room, the other America muscles in.

Worldly America is pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical. In California it passed Proposition 71, funding embryonic stem cell research beyond the restrictions imposed by Bush’s federal policy. Godly America is mythic, messianic, conversionary, given to acts of public witness, hence the need – in Utah and Montana and a handful of other states – to poll the voters on amendments to their state constitution defining marriage as a union between the opposite sexes. But then Worldly America is said to feed the carnal vanities; Godly America banishes and punishes them. From time to time Godly America will descend on the fleshpots of Worldly America, from Gotham (it had its citadel-like Convention there after all) to Californication, will shop for T-shirts, take a sniff at the local pagans and then return to base-camp more convinced than ever that a time of Redemption and Repentance must be at hand. But if the stiff-necked transgressors cannot be persuaded, they can be cowed and conquered.

No wonder so many of us got the election so fabulously wrong even into the early hours of Tuesday evening, when the exit polls were apparently giving John Kerry a two- or three-point lead in both Florida and Ohio. For most of us purblind writers spend our days in Worldly America and think that Godly America is some sort of quaint anachronism, doomed to atrophy and disappear as the hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky or Montana it might still circle its wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to discover that Godly America is its modernity; that so far from it withering before the advance of the blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by them. The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that – a theory – with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis did, in fact, bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the digital pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are expedited and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists ornament their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for all I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the Lord right to your Godpod.

Nor, it transpires, is the exercise of the franchise a sure-fire way for the Democrats to prevail. The received wisdom in these Worldly parts (subscribed to by yours truly; mea culpa) was that a massively higher turn out would necessarily favour Kerry. P Diddy’s “Vote or Die” campaign was credited with getting out young voters en masse who ignored the polls in 2000. We saw a lot of Springsteen and Bon Jovi and ecstatic upturned faces. Who could possibly match their mobilisation, we thought? Answer: Jehovah and his Faithful Servant St Karl the Rove. The biggest story of all in 2004 is the astounding success of the Republicans in shipping millions of white evangelicals to the polls who had also stayed at home four years earlier. We thought we were fired up with righteous indignation – against the deceits of the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war, against the gross inequities of the tax cuts – but our fire was just hot air compared to the jihad launched by the Godlies against the infamy of a tax rollback, of merely presuming to diss the Dear Leader in a time of war. And the battalions of Christian soldiers made the telling difference in the few critical places where Godly and Worldly America do actually rub shoulders (or at least share a state), Ohio above all.

By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to have been a natural for the Democrats: ageing industrial cities such as Akron and Dayton, with big concentrations of minorities, suffering prolonged economic pain from out sourced industries. Cleveland and Cincinnati are classic cities of the Worldly plain: half-decayed, incompletely revived; great art museums, a rock’n’roll hall of fame, a terrific symphony orchestra. But drive a bit and you’re in deep Zion, where the Holsteins graze by billboards urging the sinful to return to the bosom of the Almighty, the church of Friday night high school football shouts its hosannas at the touchdowns, and Support Our Troops signs grow as thick as the rutabaga. At first sight there’s not much distance between this world and western Pennsylvania, but were the state line to be marked in 20ft-high electrified fences the frontier between the two Americas couldn’t be sharper. The voters of the “Buckeye State” cities did care about their jobs; they did listen when Kerry told them the rich had done disproportionately nicely from Bush’s tax cut. But they were also listening when their preachers (both black and white) fulminated against the uncleanliness of Sodom and the murder of the unborn. In the end, those whose most serious anxieties were the state of the economy and the Mess-o-potamia were outvoted by those who told exit pollers their greatest concern in 2004 was “moral values”.

Faith-driven politics may even have had a hand in delivering Florida to Bush by a surprising margin, since it seems possible that Jewish voters there who voted for “my son the vice-president” Joe Lieberman (not to mention Hadassah, oy what nachas) in 2000, actually switched sides as a result of the president’s support for Ariel Sharon. It wasn’t that the Kerry campaign didn’t notice the confessional effect. It was just that they didn’t know what to do about it. Making the candidate over as some sort of altar boy (notwithstanding directives from Rome instructing the faithful on the abhorrence of his position on abortion) would have been about as persuasive as kitting him out with gun, camouflage and dead Canada geese; a laboriously transparent exercise in damning insincerity.

In Godly America the politics of impassioned conviction inevitably trumped the politics of logical argument. On CNN a fuming James Carville wondered out loud how a candidate declared by the voting public to have decisively won at least two of the three televised debates could have still been defeated. But the “victory” in those debates was one of body language rather than reasoned discourse. It registered more deeply with the public that the president looked hunched and peevish than that he had been called by Kerry on the irrelevance of the war in Iraq to the threat of terror. And since the insight was one of appearance not essence, it could just as easily be replaced by countless photo-ops of the president restored to soundbite affability. The charge that Bush and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with the majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns.

Why? Because, the president had “acted”, meaning he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong place – as Kerry said over and over – was simply too complicated a truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate was saying (for the popular commitment to altruistic democratic reconstruction on the Tigris is, whatever the White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it’s all sand and towelheads anyway, right? Just smash “them” (as one ardent Bush supporter put it on talk radio the other morning) “like a ripe cantaloupe”. Who them? Who gives a ****? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to the polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised as vacillating compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers who had sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic levantine makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound up by next summer (the isolationists in the administration having routed the neocons), got off scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops.

Well, the autumn leaves have, just this week, fallen from the trees up here in the Hudson Valley and the scales from the eyes of us deluded worldlies. If there is to be any sort of serious political future for the Democrats, they have to do far more than merely trade on the shortcomings of the incumbents – and there will be opportunities galore in the witching years ahead (a military mire, a fiscal China syndrome and, hullo, right before inauguration, a visit from al-Qaida). The real challenge is to voice an alternative social gospel to the political liturgy of the Godlies; one that redefines patriotism as an American community, not just a collection of wealth-seeking individuals; one that refuses to play a zero-sum game between freedom and justice; one in which, as the last populist president put it just a week ago, thought and hope are not mutually exclusive. You want moral values? So do we, but let them come from the street, not the pulpit. And if a fresh beginning must be made – and it must – let it not begin with a healing, but with a fight.

Really? I didn’t realise there was that much of a persecution of them… I thought the “freedom fries” and embargoes of fine wine was as far as it went.
hehe.

Take away the red states, and see the impact on the global food supply. Fact is, there is simply more of a population density in the blue states. that’s it. Not more educated, innovative, or productive. Just more in a smaller area. by the way, how are they disenfranchised?

You need only look at the way the whole California (5th largest economy in the world) energy crisis unfolded to realize how Californians are disenfrenchised, the way Dubya’s big energy supporters, the Ken Lays of Enrons gouged the Californians not only to make enormous profits but also to stick it to the state that did not vote for Dubya.

With the way things are moving, all the blue states as well economically productive red states, a la Ohio are either already in the process of disenfrenchisement or soon will be, due to Dubya’s and democrats to an extent (at least you can invoke a sense of social justice in them) complete selling out to big corporations, enabling them to shift their capital and economic activity out of america.

———————————————-
And the man that was arrested was a real big time terrorist, oh yeah, if thats how Asscroft and his evengelical nutcases gauge how their righteous war against terrorism is by arresting some poor darky who was taping the surroundings to show his kids who had not visited their place of birth in a long time, then no wonder OBL is still out loose.

Fact of the matter is that there has not been a single arrest, prosecution and sentencing of a bona fide terrorist looking to harm america, nor have any sleeper cells been discovered.

No wonder the Fox news watching right wing residents of Hickville America are so profoundly ignorant……Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 nor OBL……All those poor souls (a large percentage of them are minorities and from Urban areas btw, its not all hicks) dying in Iraq, as if dying to protect US energy interest in a colonial war is profoundly noble cause to die for.

Pluto,

Agreed. I also agree that only educated people should vote. Only people who understand the consequences of their choice. However I doubt that it si the case of many americans who (according to the US polls) receive their information from TV propaganda.

Sadly, that would exclude Dubya’s hill billy bible belting fantatical right wing extremist, teeth missing y’all, base…..

American is turning into the Taliban-like fanatical theocracy of the West. Dubya’s re-election, which would also pave the way for the election of another Republican rapturist after this term ends, would truly put the icing on the cake vis-a-vis the strenghtening of the Christian fundamentalist stranglehold of all institution and aspects of american society.

With the disenfrenchisement of the more educated, productive, and innovative folks residing in the west coast and the northeast, the driving force behind the economic powerhouse the US has been in the past, would hasten the economic, hence the military demise of the US empire.

I say let the republican and their armageddon-wishing evengelical supporters run their once a great country into ground.

And now for the conservative American perspective:

Kerry’s the One

By Scott McConnell

There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.

But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.

It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.

Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.

These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.

Sun, October 17, 2004

Yankees are blind to blundering Bush

By Eric Margolis — Contributing Foreign Editor

Why do so many Americans still support George W. Bush after all those damning revelations about Iraq? That’s the question I’m invariably asked when abroad.

Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, in his superb, must-read new book, Where the Right Went Wrong, provides some answers.

“In 2003,” he writes, “the U.S. invaded a country that did not threaten us, had not attacked us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have.”

White House assurances that U.S. troops would be greeted in Iraq with flowers were as laughable as its pledges Mideast peace and democracy would ensue.

Chief U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer’s recent, 960-page report contradicted almost every Bush administration prewar claim about Iraq, which were used to justify an illegal war that has killed 20,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 Americans, caused 14,000 U.S. casualties and will soon have cost $200 billion US — when Washington can’t even supply flu vaccine.

No administration official has accepted blame for this needless conflict, lying to Congress and the public, blundering into a no-win war, condoning torture, and provoking worldwide disgust at the once admired United States.

Either the self-proclaimed “war president” and his men committed the worst set of blunders overseas since Vietnam, or they lied the nation into an imperial war to grab oil and boost Israel’s fortunes.

Republicans don’t care. Amazingly, a recent CNN/USA Today poll showed 62% of Republicans still believe Iraq was behind 9/11. This is after a flood of contrary evidence and Duelfer’s report.

How can Republicans remain so blinkered? Part of the fault lies with the sycophantic national media, which collaborated with the Bush administration in whipping up war fever. The media still are not telling people the truth about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the so-called war on terrorism.

The media utterly failed to remind Americans that Bush, who loves to play war leader, actually claimed Iraqi drone aircraft were poised to fly off ships in the North Atlantic and bombard America with germs. Bush should have been laughed out of office for believing and promoting this comic-book nonsense.

Many Republicans simply don’t see what the rest of the world does. So what if Iraq was no threat? Don’t bother these golf club Rambos with details. They’re delighted to see the U.S. pounding Arabs in revenge for 9/11.

Bush’s core Republican support lies in the suburbs and Bible-belt rural areas, where many people rely on TV sound bites for their world view, and have little understanding of history, geography or foreign affairs. This is the new “dumbed-down Republicans Party,” fertile ground for nationalist hysteria, religious extremism, and anti-foreign xenophobia.

Surplus-turned-deficit

Buchanan identifies the real secret of the Republican Party’s current success: “Cut taxes and don’t let the Democrats outspend us.”

No matter that Bush’s policies have created millions of jobs in China instead of the U.S., or that he turned a $236-billion US surplus into a $521-billion deficit. His tax cuts and spending win elections.

As the real president, v-p **** Cheney, observed to a horrified U.S. Treasurer Paul O’Neill, “deficits don’t matter.” This kind of liberal-left Democrat economic voodoo used to be anathema to Republicans.

Today, there’s no real conservative party left in Washington, says Buchanan. Only in tax-cutting do Republicans still hew to their principles. Otherwise, they are just like the wildest-spending liberal Democrats.

“Historically, Republicans have been the party of conservative virtues — balanced budgets, healthy skepticism towards foreign wars, fierce resistance to the growth of government power.

“No more,” Buchanan says. “To win and hold office, many have sold their souls to the very devil they were baptized to do battle with.”

As for Bush’s vow to wage unceasing war on America’s enemies around the globe, Buchanan quotes President James Madison: “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Next Column: Into ‘Living Hell’

I hardly think putting a retired pop singer on a “Do not enter” list justifies the comparison of U.S. actions with the Gestapo!!!
To even say such a thing belittles the memory of those killed in fighting the Nazi regime.

You make it sound as if you in the christian west hold an exclusive monopoly on not only imparting what is good and dispensing democracy around the globe, but also an exclusive right to victimhood. Only those who are Christians and zionists in the west are liable to suffer, however, not those sub-human darkies, they are evil and should always be dealt with utmost ruthlessness

And here is an alien concept for you, “comparison”, which are made when there is a semblance of something….do read up on its holistic meaning.

Also do ask the hundreds of immigrants and their families who have been rounded up, locked away and abused (in some fortunate cases deported), if their suffering is any less then suffered by others in similar circumstances. Their lives are completely shattered and many still languish in the jails in this land of the free and not one has been formally charged. Reminds me a lot a of the modus operandi of the gestapo — round up the usual suspects, the jews — in our case those rag heads. Since we live in the modern times, the tactics may not be that harsh, fortunately no gas chambers, but the concept and intention of the perpetrators is the same.

Since we are a paragon of tolerance, the light for the rest of the world, the custodian of democracy and human rights, where all men are created [some are created more equal], any trangression a la the Asscroft’s complete circumventing of the constitution should be considered a microcosm of what preceded in the history and condemned as such.

Get rid of those driven by fanatical right wing ideology and go about dealing with the issue of terrorism and other ills in more judicious and inclusive manner and the comparison to gestapo would drop.

Hey Che,
How do you know the film was trurthful? Most films are fiction and even documentaries, reflect the filmmaker’s viewpoint. Ask Michael Moore. Even he will admit to having an agenda and telling the “afcts” as he sees them to make a point.

Let me get this straight, you want to convince me the media lies by showing me a story done by someone else. If you don’t trust journalists, why would you trust a film maker? Does’t a film director shift facts to suit the story?
It seems a cynical viewpooint like yours (and your friends who are always ranting about the US media being a puppet of…choose one: 1. The government,2. “big business” or 3. “the Jews”), you’d be better off not trusting, or listening to anyone.

Remember, your namesake knew how to spin a story.
The American media brought down a President (Nixon) and have crippled several others. I defy you to prove your Eurocentric impression about the American media when all you know about it is what your are told by people with axes to grind.

Yeah Michael Moore’s 9/11 was a farce to say the least, I’d be the first one to admit it. He made it look like Saudi Arabia has a massive juggernaut over all aspects of US society and policy, hardly truthful. But do catch Control Room, you’ll be surprised.

First, bigots don’t deserve a break.
Second, I took the article from cat stevens’s own web site http://catstevens.com/
Ironic that he never denies giving money to Hamas backed charities, yet you deny it for him.
Third, Perhaps Israel supreme court is flowed because it is infested with so many left wing socialist and arabs?
I said it before and i said it again. For Israel to defeat terror it has to do the same as Syria did to get rid of it’s terror problem; and since no one protested
and no Humen right or any other one of those fake organizations even made a statement against it, then maybe it’s the way to deal with all terrorist (and those who admire them) :dev2: ?

I should be relieved you did’nt prototypicaly accuse me of being an anti-semite. Still ironic coming from somebody who sees the biggest exponent of bigotry in modern times, the venerable Asscroft as the savior who would protect americans from the evil of Islam.

Ever wondered why Israel has not been able to eliminate terror in the past 40 years? Of all its brutal, genocidal, draconian and repressive tactics, none have been able to eradicate Palestinian terror?

Thats because there would not be any terror if Israel made up its mind whether it should outrightly annex all of the territories (which it wants all along, just cant figure out what to do of those pesky excuse of the animals, i.e. Palestinians, though measures are in place to completely eradicate them) or whether it should give them freedom and resolve the whole conflict once and for all.

The fact that Zionists in Israel and their base the Christian Zionist in the US continue in their messianic and dogmatic pursuit of restoring Israel’s border to its biblical glory, so that the messiah can return, the suffering on both sides, far more acutely on Palestinian side will continue until the armageddon. All the shenaigan of road map to peace, unilateral withdrawal, token dismantling of a few unoccupied settlements would continue on the side, while portrayal of the stone throwing palestinians against the poor hapless F-16s and Apache armed Israelis in western media would continue along with the gullible and highly ignorant western populace buying the whole farce line hook and sinker.

There would never be any peace in middle east, until Israel and its fanatic supporters a la Alex in the US wanton of it.