Yves here. If you think “unhinged” is an overstatement, here is a longer version of what the Israel ambassador said regarding the General Assembly vote to find that Palestine qualified for membership, which passed by a large majority:
As Lambert put it, “Israeli ambassador completely loses his shit, [family blogging] childish and cringe.”
This gives me an excuse to use one of my favorite lines from film. In the must-see The Lives of Others, the lead character Georg Dreymann replies to a particularly offensive and proof-of-power-abusing remark by a former senior official in the GDR: “To think that men like you once ran a country.”
Sadly, that remark applies to most Western leaders, absent the use of past tense.
By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
“Shame on you,” said Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan shortly before the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution supporting full membership for Palestine.
Shortly before the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution Friday supporting full U.N. membership for Palestine, Israel’s ambassador took to the podium and put a prop copy of the U.N.’s founding document through a handheld paper shredder.
In a speech that one journalist described as “unhinged,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan described Palestinians as “modern-day Nazis” and condemned the U.N. General Assembly for choosing to “reward” them with “rights and privileges.”
“You are shredding the U.N. Charter with your own hands,” Erdan said as he fed a small copy of the document through a miniature paper shredder. “Shame on you.”
Watch:
Watch: Israeli ambassador to the UN @giladerdan1 used a paper shredder to shred the UN charter on the podium of the UN general assembly ahead of a vote that will give new privileges to the Palestinians at the UN pic.twitter.com/mWQ85c8uwK
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) May 10, 2024
Erdan’s bizarre performance came just before the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution urging the Security Council to reconsider Palestine’s request to become a full U.N. member following a U.S. veto last month. Palestine is currently a nonmember observer state of the U.N.
The General Assembly voted by a margin of 143 to 9—with 25 abstentions—in support of the resolution. The nine countries that voted no were the United States, Israel, Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Papua New Guinea.
In addition to backing its bid for full U.N. membership, the resolution gives Palestine “the right to introduce and co-sponsor proposals as well as amendments within the assembly,” The Guardianreported.
Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s permanent observer at the U.N., said ahead of Friday’s vote that support for the resolution “is a vote for Palestinian existence.”
“I stand before you as lives continue falling apart in the Gaza Strip,” said Mansour, noting that “more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, 80,000 have been maimed, 2 million have been displaced, and everything has been destroyed” by Israeli forces over the past seven months.
“No words can capture what such loss and trauma signifies for Palestinians,” Mansour added.
“The U.S. and Israel are isolated and the world is on the side of Palestine.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, called the U.N. General Assembly’s passage of the resolution “an unprecedented move that shows once again how unbelievably isolated [U.S. President Joe] Biden has made the U.S.”
In anticipation of Friday’s vote, a group of Republican U.S. senators led by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) introduced legislation that would halt U.S. funding for any entity—including the U.N.—that gives Palestine “any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status.”
Current law requires the U.S. to “cut off funding to U.N. agencies that give full membership to a Palestinian state—which could mean a cutoff in dues and voluntary contributions to the U.N. from its largest contributor,” The Associated Pressreported Friday.
Craig Mokhiber, a former U.N. official who resigned in October over the body’s failure to act in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, wrote that Friday’s vote further shows that “the U.S. and Israel are isolated and the world is on the side of Palestine.”
135 comments
Comments are closed.
Re Palestinian rights the Israelis like to say “one man one vote one time” but clearly one vote one time has always been their attitude to the UN. The UN voted to partition and create Israel but that seems to be the last UN decision they have respected. Perhaps democracy really does die in darkness since the true motives and intentions of the country’s founders have always been opaque. In such an environment open discussion must be blocked and censored and here we are.
Not that the USA has been a great paragon of sincerity either but history seems to show that the truth does come out eventually and on this issue we are on the wrong side of it.
“The UN voted to partition and create Israel but that seems to be the last UN decision they have respected.”
This sentence expresses two misconceptions that seem nearly universally-held, at least in the West.
The UN partition plan was a proposal. It could never be anything more than a proposal (and there are no UN documents or actions treating it as anything else), because the United Nations has absolutely no authority to “create” nation states. And there isn’t a chance in the real world that it would ever be granted such power.
Neither is it the case that Israel ever meaningfully accepted the borders of the partition plan. There were a few moments of diplomatic dodging and feinting, when something like lip service to the plan was bandied about to ease Israel’s path to membership, but never real acceptance. And during the Nakba/War of Independence, Israeli forces moved relentlessly — and successfully — to take and hold much more territory than it would have had under the plan.
The Arab neighbor states, of course, rejected the partition plan outright, and the Palestinians themselves never had a meaningful say in the proceeding.
That guy must be a giant if the UN Charter can fit in the palm of his hand. I bet he couldn’t even read what’s written in it, which would explain the way Israel have been acting all along.
Pretty underwhelming performance. That guy couldn’t sell Banksys for Sothebys.
“You are shredding the U.N. charter”, he said, while shredding the U.N. charter. Nothing could better symbolize the hypocrisy of the government and state he represents. Calling Palestinians (all of them, presumably) “genocidal” when it remains unclear whether or not officials from his country will rot in the Hague for that crime. To the emotionally and intellectually dishonest, criticism is projection.
It’s really the perfect encapsulation of everything Israel stands for and had stood for since 1948.
I hope the young campus protesters will dig a little deeper into American history and discover that nearly everything they’ve been taught here is also a lie.
Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Papua New Guinea. That’s our team? Oh boy.
Our team consists of the Habsburgs and the Hapless Burgs.
My understanding is that the ‘compacts of free association’ between the USA and Micronesia and Palau (and also the Marshall Islands) give the US remarkable suasion over these former colonies which the US took over from Japan (and Japan from Germany) and, to some extent, go even beyond anything France agreed with its erstwhile west/central African colonies. A country like Palau is critically dependent upon US economic support (which is dependent upon annual congressional approval), so votes against US interests – or what Congress and the Biden Administration perceive to be US interests – at its peril.
But isn’t that basically the same with Liechtenstein and San Marino? But Switzerland and Italy still let them vote Yes on things like this, to give them a feeling of independence.
What’s motivating .cz and .hu?
Slovakia should be under Czech boots and the territories Hu lost to Serbians, Romanians, Slovaks should be by rights Hungarian?!
For .cz, part of it is the appeal of Israel being colonial/semi-fascist state. Liberals really need some release valve to not explode from all the pretending how they care about diversity, Muslims, democracy, freedoms, etc. But the bigger part would be the complete intellectual subordination to the US. Where US goes, Czechia follows, or rather tries to guess the current direction and then runs there first, expecting pat on the head. Last year, when UN passed one of the useless non-binding resolutions demanding ceasefire in Gaza, Minister of War lost her mind and threatened that Czechia will quit the UN in protest.
I wonder how Radetzky (or other prominent Czechs who served the Habsburgs loyally) is regarded in Czechia today… Or, for that matter, King John the Blind.
Strange sense of history they must have, given the weirdness of Czech history …
> pretending how they care about diversity,
A Japanese friend who visited some small towns in the Czech Republic (as it was then called) didn’t think that they pretended very well
Surprised that Poland and the UK didn’t follow faithfully along. I’m sure they asked permission first.
Or Canada, France, or Germany (which all abstained). The US is at least as isolated as it was with the Iraq War.
Abstained:
Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Fiji, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malawi, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Paraguay, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Sweden, Switzeland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vanuatu.
Cowards.
The only major-ish country on the list is Argentina and their president is the laughingstock of the Western Hemisphere…
But he thinks that the Malvinas are British, so of course he considers Gaza as Israeli.
Now do the Kurds.
And the Catalans and Scots…And the South Ossetians and Abkhazians…and Western Sahara…
You forgot the Navajo, Roma, and Prussians….
The Kurds claim ownership of land where they were never the majority and never worked in good faith to work with regional powers to establish a workable solution. Just look at how they behaved in Iran and Syria. They’re just a bunch of mobbed up mercenaries for the West. They chose this fate for themselves after doing the Ottoman Empire’s dirty work against Armenians. They chose badly because the Western powers that they work for will never regard them as anything other than more dirty Arabs.
The Kurds are not Arabs. There was a proposal for a Kurdistan with the Treaty of Sèvres but that was rejected by the Turks who then fought a war. Sèvres was replaced with the Treaty of Lausanne which left the Kurds out. I don’t see how one can blame them for their situation.
I have just seen a clip, he even regurgitated the debunked claim that Israeli babies were burned alive in crematoria on 7 October, and how dare the UN consider this in Holocaust rememberance week that is so holy to Israelis blah blah. Even when their lies are shown to be demonstrably false, they simply double down and lie more and more. When will someone in the US finally stand up and say to to their faces, Have you no shame, as happened to McCarthy and that finally broke that spell in the 1950s.
Mossad likely has reams of kompromat on the whole of Congress and Pentagon, perhaps even plans for assassinations should the need arise.
That’s what Epstein, Maxwell, and Brunel were up to. The real question is how many honeypots was Mossad running? Consider that Epstein was ‘pals’ w/ Bill Richardson, George Mitchell as well as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. A few more would really fill the files. Plus Mossad has a back-door into a s/w package used in many org’s. Was owned by Maxwell Group. Mossad is the Dark Triad of international intelligence agencies.
> Brunel
Jeffrey Epstein associate Jean Luc Brunel found dead by suicide in prison ABC (2002). Oh.
I can only think that in Israeli politics, that there must be a lot of performative theater. That shredder stunt just looked stupid and so has the Israeli’s Ambassador to the UN wearing of a yellow star on his chest like something out of a WW2 concentration camp. And then you think back how Netanyahu went to the UN armed with a cartoon of a bomb with a burning fuse like something out of Road Runner. There is no gravitas there at all and seemingly no awareness at how these stunts make them look just stupid. That Gilad Erdan certainly has not endeared himself with his fellow Ambassadors. So is this the sort of thing that goes on in political life in the Israeli Knesset itself? And they carry this sort of thinking to the international stage?
I think it is direct proof that religious fanatics do not understand governance. They just blindly fight for what they think is their God revealed righteous path. Not very different from the Evangelicals here in the US. They are just completely illiterate.
I dunno. My impression is Iran’s Supreme Leaders understand the virtue of not saying anything unless necessary or desirable. That’s a component of gravitas.
You read my mind – I was actually thinking of Khameini when I wrote that comment but the Ahamadinijad memory overpowered it. I wonder if Khomeini was a good leader who had the original virtue of not saying anything unless necessary and passed it on to Khameini
Ahamadinijad did seem to play the role that Medvedev does Russia, saying things that are pointed to the extent of being provocative. I assume you know that his most famous quote is a shameless mistranslation flogged by Israel as propaganda. He never said that Israel should be wiped from the map. He used the conditional and said something like “It would be better if Israel had never come into existence.”
A kind of political good cop bad cop play on the overton window?
There seems to be something about the insularity of language and media there. I’ve noticed that Zionists seem to say the most barbarous things on twitter so long as they are writing in Hebrew. The “translate” button has done it’s fair work to show how unhinged they are.
Can you imagine the outcry if anyone had called the Israelis “modern day Nazi’s” Oh! The impunity of Israel!
However as long as the US sticks by them, and this has something to do with the equally deranged Armageddon /Evangelical vote the rather sick joke that Palestinians are supposed to get their state through “negotiation” with Israel remains. How has that worked so far?
Yeshayahu Leibowitz did so. He even applied Grillparzer’s famous epigram (“Der Weg der neuern Bildung”) to Israel.
I watched it with the sound muted. When he’s holding up the itty bitty shredder, it looks exactly like a Billy Mays infomercial. I found one on Alibaba for $7.00. heh
“It slices, it dices, it makes freedom fries in ten different sizes” to paraphrase a funny turtle.
Einstein was no Einstein.
Why is that funny or useful?
It’s funny for highlighting the clash between stereotypical genius (Einstein) and geopolitical foolishness (Zionism).
It’s useful for disabusing normies of illusions regarding the latter, more accurately (and provocatively) called Zionazism imho.
It’s so reminiscent of the bully caught out realizing that the game is over and his only tactic to avoid the consequences of his actions is whining and crying about how he only did it because he himself was abused. It’s puerile and sickening behavior. Their prime Hasbara days are over and we’re going to hopefully see some payback.
I do worry about the terrorist incidents to come for the West because there are a lot of loose weapons out there and a lot of really, really (justifiably) angry people.
The world is getting tired of these histrionics.
The Zionists think that the rest of the world is stupid (too much dealing only with US?!) and is ‘xplaining in simple terms so the dum-dums can understand…
Pat Lang spoke about this over-the-top behavior in the past when briefings and presentations were held. Not sure how effective it is to speak down to your audience.
Time to shred Israel’s UN membership perhaps. They are certainly doing a great job of shredding their own credibility and any semblance of humanity. To hark back to terminology from the Vietnam War – isn’t a kill ratio in excess of 20:1 enough to satisfy their genocidal arrogance?
I’d say their credibility has already been pretty thoroughly shredded.
So far, foreign policy of Israel was AIPAC writ large, and, so far, it works. UN by design is effective ONLY when great powers are unanimous, as what can be enforced otherwise? For that reason, Israel is more worried about student protests in USA than UN. However, the reaction to student protests is at least as unhinged.
Israel may well succeed in razing Gaza, destroying all its schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure, and killing/starving its population. But they will win the battle and lose the war. After this it will be harder to play the Holocaust card, and they will at best treated with ridicule and at worst as the pariah state they have chosen to become (with full US Uniparty support, of course).
What a sad world. Such a tragedy for all concerned.
There is a story about an encounter between General Giap and an American officer at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the US war on Vietnam. I cannot find a reference so the story may simply be apocryphal. Anyway, the officer (a colonial or so) is supposed to have said to the general, “You know sir, you never won a major battle against us,” to which Giap replied, “We didn’t have to.”
That US officer was telling a lie as there were battles that the US lost against the North Vietnamese. I’m not sure but I think that Giap’s reply was more along the lines that it was irrelevant.
Never interrupt the enemy when they are destroying themselves?
Yes, they destroy Gaza at the cost of destroying themselves. Can the US underwrite that? It’s clear that we cannot.
My memory of that is that is that it was Colonel Harry Summers who said to General Giap that North Vietnam had never won a single batter against US forces. And General Giap replied, ” that may be true, but it is also irrelevant”.
Here is a link to an article based on and following on from that statement and counterstatement.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/winning-battles-losing-wars
And still USA tries to MBA warfare…
Comprehensive list of engagements the US lost in Vietnam
The only way “the US never lost a battle” is… to redefine the definition of “battle” until you’ve created something that never happened in Vietnam.
And some 60 years later, many of the same stories could be written about Iraq and Afghanistan…
The Vietnamese interlocutor was a Colonel Tu, not General Giap. I could never find out much about Colonel Tu, though.
The same exchange could have taken place between Hannibal or King Pyrrhus and some Roman general (I think I came across a variant of this between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus somewhere, in fact…)
https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/SummersObitText.htm
Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., was a soldier, scholar, military analyst, writer, editor and friend.
By David T. Zabecki
Following Vietnam, Harry attended the Army Command and General Staff College, where one of his classmates was Colin Powell. After Harry completed the course, he remained at Fort Leavenworth for several more years as an instructor. It was during that period that Harry Summers first began to acquire a reputation within the Army as a military writer and analyst of the first rank. This led to successive assignments as a strategic planner at the office of the deputy chief of staff for operations and then at the office of the chief of staff of the Army.
In July 1974 he returned to Vietnam as chief of the Negotiations Division of the Four Party Joint Military Team (FPJMT). The main task of the U.S. delegation was to resolve the status of those Americans still listed as missing. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Harry had his now-famous exchange with his North Vietnamese counterpart. When Harry told him, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,” Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/SummersObitText.htm
Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr (May 6, 1932 – November 14, 1999)
Yes, they are destroying Gaza so at the cost of destroying themselves. That seems to be the shape of it.
“In anticipation of Friday’s vote, a group of Republican U.S. senators led by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) introduced legislation that would halt U.S. funding for any entity—including the U.N.—that gives Palestine “any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status.”
Romney, who has occasionally posed as slightly more moderate than his Republican brethren, has really been out there among the leaders in fighting for Israel’s right to genocide. Is there something in Mormonism about the Apocalypse that I’m missing?
It’s something in Mormonism about Jews. Mormon teaching is that the Jews are indeed God’s chosen people and also that Mormons share with the Jews a common (“Israelite”) ancestry.
Mormons likewise speak of Outsiders as Gentiles.
One can hope that eventually Mitt comes to an “I’ve been brainwashed” (but on Israel) moment that his father George did on the Vietnam war.
https://michiganadvance.com/briefs/on-this-day-in-1967-gov-george-romney-says-he-was-brainwashed-on-vietnam-war/
““When I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get,” said Romney on The Lou Gordon Program broadcast that would air on Sept. 4, 1967 on WKBD-TV 50 in Detroit. ”
““And since returning from Vietnam, I’ve gone into the history of Vietnam, all the way back into World War II and before. And as a result, I have changed my mind. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression.””
However, I would not hold my breath.
Mitt’s father’s honesty irreparably damaged his Presidential campaign and may have helped institute the “never admit one was ever wrong” tactic for US politicians.
Mitt may exemplify the evolution of the current USA elite.
His father headed up a significant manufacturing company (American Motors) while Mitt is in the private equity/financial strip mining business.
We had a Rambler station wagon when I was young. That was a very good car. Here is a bunch of images of Rambler station wagons down through time.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrEmuPt1T9mPAQARCNXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=rambler+station+wagon+image&fr=sfp#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-EUx2L3_hcxk%2FUtobUslUm4I%2FAAAAAAAAU7E%2FQwtAzkV1LNg%2Fs1600%2F1.jpg&action=click
My dad bought a 1960 Rambler Station wagon and we had it for many years.
To their credit, American Motors did have dual master cylinders in their brake systems before others (except Cadillac) were forced to by the US government.
Before that, a hydraulic leak could cause the entire brake system to fail, with dual master cylinders half the brake system would still work.
I experienced this “quick – reach for the handbrake” hydraulic system failure on a 1958 VW Van I owned,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Motors_Corporation
“For example, the Rambler Classic was equipped with a standard tandem master cylinder in 1962 that provided stopping ability even if there was a failure in the brake system. Only Cadillac also included this safety feature six years before U.S. safety regulations required it on all cars.”
George Romney was president of American motors in 1962, so perhaps he had a hand in this decision,
Re one not as late as that ’63 model I don’t think, but close–it hauled us to off campus in 5th grade to b-ball games. I hadn’t aspired to play that much, but luckily was impressed into service. Loved sitting in the thing riding along, but terrified a bit when we got to wherever and it was time to get out. Upshot was I had a ton of circumstances to be thankful for.
The only reason that Mittens is portrayed as “slightly more moderate” is that he came out against Trump–full stop. What’s ironic is that private equity vampires like Mittens, who was a partner at Bain Capital, helped create the economic devastation that made a Trump presidency possible
Romney and Bibi worked together at Boston Consulting Group.
I find it refreshing to view Bibi as the sleaziest sort of management consultant possible.
I was amazed that when Romney was campaigning for president he went to England first and then Israel, and stayed at the King David Hotel. Kinda tone-deaf, don’tcha think?
Was his dog tied onto the top of the plane?
Imagine being so desperate for the Rapture that you are trying to hurry it along.
Mormons larp as Jews, basically.
Time is long overdue for the UN to move from Switzerland and USA.
Virtual meetings instead? Make it harder to corrupt the delegates.
We have found ourselves referencing “The Lives of Others” frequently of late…
It CAN happen here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/the-lives-of-others-by-neel-mukherjee.html
December 28, 2014
‘The Lives of Others,’ by Neel Mukherjee
By Hirsh Sawhney
Technological innovation and economic development have brought great wealth to a few parts of India, but they have further marginalized the country’s adivasis, or tribals, the aboriginal communities of forest dwellers and farmers who live outside of mainstream society. These groups were systematically victimized under colonial rule, when the British Raj passed legislation that classified them as criminals. The British-Indian government subjected adivasis to police brutality, herded them into reformatory settlements and forced them to perform hard labor.
Adivasis — whose fate resembles that of North America’s indigenous populations — have fared little better in independent India. Quasi-feudal agricultural systems have kept many of them in debt and poverty. Multinational corporations and government agencies have displaced them to build dams and extract valuable minerals, without providing adequate compensation. Their protests are often ignored, and in some cases have been met with violence. Frustrated, some tribals have embraced India’s Maoist uprising, which seeks to overthrow the government…
Hirsh Sawhney teaches at Wesleyan University.
No, that is not at all the one I meant. I was referring to the German movie that won a Best Foreign Film Oscar.
“I was referring to the German movie that won a Best Foreign Film Oscar.
– Yves Smith”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/movies/09live.html
February 9, 2007
A Fugue for Good German Men
By A.O. Scott
“The Lives of Others” is haunted by a piece of music called “Sonata for a Good Man,” composed for the film by Gabriel Yared and, at the same time, magically familiar to some of its characters. Like the story that surrounds it — a suspenseful, ethically exacting drama, beautifully realized by the writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck — Mr. Yared’s piece is melancholy, elegant and complicated.
Goodness, as a subject for art, risks falling prey to piety and wishful thinking, but “The Lives of Others,” one of the nominees for this year’s best foreign-language film Oscar, never sacrifices clarity for easy feeling. Posing a stark, difficult question — how does a good man act in circumstances that seem to rule out the very possibility of decent behavior? — it illuminates not only a shadowy period in recent German history, but also the moral no man’s land where base impulses and high principles converge. Mr. von Donnersmarck, born in West Germany in 1973 and making his feature film debut, demonstrates astonishing visual and narrative rigor. Even more remarkably, he is able to reach back into the totalitarian past and over the Berlin Wall into the grim, brutal absurdity of the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic, and lay bare the anxious, cruel psychology of socialism as it once existed.
There are two good men in “The Lives of Others,” which starts in Berlin in 1984, and they are presented in counterpoint, never on screen at the same time. One, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), is a successful playwright; the other, Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), is the Stasi officer who spies on him. Georg, tall and handsome, with a mane of brown hair and a natural grace that stops just short of arrogance, leads something of a charmed life, enjoying a measure of official favor without losing the respect of his fellow artists, who are not all as lucky, or as circumspect, as he is. He shares a roomy apartment in an old building (the kind a capitalist real estate agent would describe as “full of character”) with his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a tall, lovely actress who also stars in his plays.
Wiesler, in contrast, appears at first to be a virtual caricature of the unsmiling Stalinist bureaucrat, with a touch of the old Gestapo thrown in for good measure. Wiry and bald, he lives alone in a drab, brutalist high-rise apartment building, distracting himself with state-run television (which reports on chicken farming and declares that “the 10th Party Conference economic policy is solid”) and a quick visit from a prostitute.
He is first seen lecturing a room full of aspiring secret policemen in the techniques of interrogation, and he addresses this task and his surveillance of Georg with the proud discipline of a professional and the zeal of a true believer. (To imply that “our humanistic system” would persecute an innocent person, he tells one of his prisoners, is itself potentially grounds for arrest.) …
The Lives of Others IMDB
I’ve had it up to here with Israelis. If they and their backers (our country being the number one enabler) had chosen in 1948 to establish a nation where Jews and Palestinians were citizens with equal rights, we wouldn’t have such a blood-soak mess for 78 years. Instead we have an apartheid nation whose current government is committing genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and detaining near a thousand Palestinians in horrific conditions—-torturing them—without any charges being brought. So, this Israeli UN ambassador can take his shredder and shove it you know where. As a US citizen I will not vote for one politician that supports the course the Israeli government is on.
‘
I agree, but sadly the US has no functioning democracy and there is no way to vote against the interests of the oligarchy. The only pres. candidate that opposes US imperialism is Jill Stein. But she has no chance of winning the BigMoney MassMedia spectacle called “elections”. Folks should still vote for her because voting for the DT, JB or RFK is to support the US-funded atrocities.
The British did not give Palestinians equal rights either during the mandate period and were guilty of atrocities against Palestinians as well, but that has largely been erased from history.
Yep. Jill Stein has my vote.
I think we should stop saying “Jill Stein is great but…”. She’s not campaigning as a protest candidate but as the only candidate who represent the positions of the majority of Americans, while the other three are dividing the pro-genocide, pro-imperialist votes.
Now I admit that she probably won’t win due to chicanery by ‘our masters’ up to and including locking her up or assassination. But she’s going for it and so should we.
I couldn’t agree more, Emma. This Lesser of Two Evils bull . . . . needs to end here. We should all vote for the Best Candidate, the one who represents our values, and let the cards fall where they will. We have been manipulated into supporting a duopoly that is undemocratic and hypocritical to the max. If we had grabbed out chance to support Nader instead of allowing ourselves to be Nader Traitors, we might actually have a viable Third Party. Our Congress is beyond corrupt.
There are a handful of decent men and women running for Congress who need our financial and voting support – and we should all coalesce behind the only anti-war, pro-democracy candidates on our ballots.
I thought the US did not become number-one enabler of Israel until after the Yom Kippur War of 1973? At founding it was UK, USSR, and France.
It’s complicated. The US certainly pushed for the creation of Israel via the UN. It supplied the Israeli Army (though often through third-parties, as when it supplied Israel with M48 tanks from West Germany). It even undermined Israel’s wonderful plan to destroy Egypt with the British and French doing the heavy lifting. However, the Kennedy administration looked the other way when the French supplied Israel with the wherewithal to get nukes (Dimona).
But after 1967 the French started rolling back support for Israel (they had previously provided its air force and a lot of its navy) and that was when Israel started getting Phantom fighters, so you can probably say that not Yom Kippur but the Six-Day War was the crucial one. Israel became one of the two US local thugs in the Middle East (the other being Iran) and of course after 1979 Israel became much more important.
I felt the need to learn more about the founding of Israel, below is plain vanilla history. Even though there have been Jews in Palestine for thousands of years, the creation of Israel as a project of the Allies was always going to cause very serious problems. This may be a mistaken view, but I see “Israel” as an entity Britain could control, until it couldn’t.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel#:~:text=On%20May%2014%2C%201948%2C%20David,nation%20on%20the%20same%20day.
And
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war
The British approach when leaving former colonies was to adopt a divide and create mayhem strategy. Such as importing protestants from Scotland into Ireland to create 2 opposing religious forces, India and Pakistan, are classic examples. So they wanted a similar scenario with jews and muslims in the middle east. The brits did not want peace, they wanted friction.
This event is not without precedent. Some people here probably remember Netanyahu’s Wile E Cayote Acme Bomb poster. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/netanyahus-bomb-chart-steals-the-show-in-his-un-speech/
I think his message wasn’t that the UN Charter was being shredded, it’s that in the eyes of Israel, the UN and the UN charter are small and insignificant. “This is you, the UN, you are a tiny speck, this is your tiny eensyweensy insiginficant charter, and you are putting your eensyweensy miniature charter through this eensyweensy miniature shredder.” I don’t think we should treat it as unhinged, the Israelis love to say things without actually saying things, just as Ben Gurion gave the order to ethnic cleanse with a hand signal for push them all out, I think this signal should be taken seriously.
> Ben Gurion gave the order to ethnic cleanse with a hand signal
Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ‘48 Eviction of Arabs New York Times, October 23, 1979:
Innocent times….
And the British-trained officer refused to expel the Arabs from Nazareth without a written order, which never came.
Israel – probably talking out of the side of its mouth – agreed to a two state solution. A two state solution means that Israel agrees Palestine is a state thus should be a full member of the UN, no ifs nor buts.
The only ones who are modern day Nazis are the Israeli’s who have gone the route of a holocaust:
“Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government … based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation.” source Wikipedia Holocaust victims [my slight edit].
The USA stand side by side with the Israeli’s in this despicable action, but killing has never been one of the things that worry the US as they killed 500,000 Iragi children and that country still suffers from the stupid invasion 20+ years ago.
When did Israel agree to a two state solution? I am not aware of it.
Umm…the Oslo Accords in 1993? Which they violated again and again and again and again and…
In all sincerity, it worth looking at the background of the conflict in the 20th century because it basically set the table of what is possible today. 10 minutes on Wikipedia clears up a lot. It answers a lot of questions about why things are the way they are and why the Palestinians are distrustful of negotiations.
I believe accords have pretty much no force and are at the most a plan to have a plan. See also Paris Accords, Minsk Accords.
I was wrong so sorry.
Many nations including USA, China, Germany and G7 have agreed to a two state and many prominent Israelis, but not Israel so you are correct on this.
What is happening in Gaza is not just genocide but extermination!
Wiki can be ok, but sins can be of omission. For instance, in the piece on the UN resolution 181 of November 1947, the Partition Plan, it omits the Zionist violence between the resolution and the declaration of statehood in May 1948. That was central to what is known as the Nakba. Something I tried to address here.
Oslo was about setting up the Palestinian Authority as a successor to the PLO, which didn’t quite work. The PA became the Zionist enforcer. As Yves notes, Oslo was vaporware, as far as two states would go.
Israelis also assassinated their PM that signed those accords…
It was Prime Minister Rabin who supported the Oslo Accords from the Israel side. Was he merely intending to wear out and rope-a-dope the Palestine side from the beginning? Many left wing intellectuals believe that was always the intention. Professor Edward Said said that was the intention. Is there any reason to think they were wrong about that?
Netanyahu and the Lidudists and the various Kach-Kahane fringe-at-the-time parties certainly thought and think that Professor Said and etc. were wrong about that. Netanyahu and etc. certainly thought that Rabin and the Rabinists really meant it. That is why Netanyahu and Likud and those parts of the Israeli domestic intelligence establishment worked as hard as they did to get Rabin assassinated. Here is a link to a blogpost about that.
https://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/violent-bear-it-away.html
So, yesterday I encountered this interview with Ahmed Paul Keeler. It is most informative. He discusses the formation of of Zionism, first as secular and then as religious. He goes on to explain the stages of colonial projects in general and the Israeli example in particular. He reads excerpts from Baron Montagu’s letter to the British government on the proposals of Balfour. I found it highly worthwhile. Be careful with the machine transcription as it is sometimes faulty.
How Zionism Indoctrinated the West with Ahmed Paul Keeler
It is comforting and convenient for some Anglo-Americans to blame it all on Zionism, which is just another flavor of ethno-nationalism and imperialism, as if they had to be indoctrinated. I find that a specious argument at best. The British were already deeply indoctrinated, Cecil Rhodes, Kipling, Disraeli et al. with the imperialist mindset.
The US and Israel are products of British imperialism, go figure. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Israel policy can be seen as a continuation of British policy that was already established. The Anglo-Americans did not need to be indoctrinated to mass murder and destroy: Kenya, Malaya, India, South Africa, etc.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/israels-brutality-against-palestinians-draws-on-british-rule/
~It is comforting and convenient for some Anglo-Americans to blame it all on Zionism, which is just another flavor of ethno-nationalism and imperialism, as if they had to be indoctrinated.
If you watch the piece, you will find that Keeler lays out quite clearly how Zionism was a product of the same imperial nationalist settler colonial thinking of the time. But yes, Zionism has (re)-indoctrinated the West which has given so much lip service to self-determination, but just not for Palestinians.
Rule of thumb, don’t just read the headline, the editor who writes it could be missing a larger point.
I hear you, but the headline/title is misleading all the same. Since Keeler outlines how this is part of the settler-colonial imperialist mindset, the West did and does not need to be indoctrinated for that. Why would that be necessary if the ideology already existed?
To play devil’s advocate: We could argue the opposite as well: Zionists were indoctrinated by Western nationalist ideology and imperialism in the first place. Zionism and Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe after all.
The Torah Judaism Twitter account vehemently objects to the idea that Zionism is a bona fide religious project. They see it as a multi-faceted misuse of the religion.
https://twitter.com/TorahJudaism
In the interview Keeler recounts how Judaism’s initial reaction to the notion of an (initially secular) Zionism was that it was an abomination.
This because mainstream Judaism believed that it was a fundamental tenet that “there can be no return of the people of Israel to the Promised Land until the coming of the Messiah, so for the Jews to return in a political manner is the worse sin that they can commit.”
From 10:05
https://youtu.be/C2tKwj4GNYI?si=J4bVqq3D8AyOQpMM&t=605
He later adds that what was once mainstream Jewish tradition was subsequently marginalized by by the Zionists by being categorised as ‘Ultra Orthodox’, ie their lunatic fringe.
The Israeli ambassador is right. Since 1988, Palestine has been barred from the UN because it is (still) being ran by dictate under the PLO / FATAH and Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas). FATAH is (still) a terrorist organization according to the UN; it seized power through violence. Transitions of political power by UN members must be “peaceful”.
Indonesia got booted from the UN from 1965-1966 because it could not uphold its obligations to the UN for peaceful transition of power during crisis. It happens. The bar for UN membership is low. The UN should not get rid of the bar just because it feels good.
Palestine is unable to get investment from its neighbors because FATAH is openly referred to as “thieves”. A common lament in Arab capitals is any help offered to the Palestinians will just be stolen by Abu Mazen. So, he’s free to steal from the UN all he wants but not us. Thereby, Palestine continues to suffer from utter neglect. But there are always fools in European capitals to aide and abet FATAH because it feels cool to do so.
You hasbarists need to do better. It’s pretty embarrassing when Wikipedia disproves your lies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organization
As to the investment part, Norman Finkelstein has described, at exhaustive length, the many devices that Israel has deployed to destroy economic life among the Palestinian territories, which were intensified greatly afer 2006. There are no viable investment opportunities, period. So stop blame-shifting.
“Indonesia got booted from the UN from 1965-1966 because it could not uphold its obligations to the UN for peaceful transition of power during crisis.”
This is, of course, incorrect and the language is mean-spirited:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states/indonesia
Clearly your logic that seizing power through violence precludes a state from being granted UN membership is in error. Were it true, Israel would never have been allowed in.
https://www.un.org/en/video/mideast-mediators-murder-palestine-1948
“Palestine is unable to get investment from its neighbors because FATAH is openly referred to as ‘——-‘ ”.
This is, of course, incorrect and the language is mean-spirited.
One should be very circumspect in claiming the legacy of one’s ancestors merits, accomplishments, deeds or sins. The Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan is born in 1970, roughly a quarter of a century after the Shoah. His entitlement to the moral credit of a victim of the Nazi extermination program is void, inasmuch as a German person born in 1970 couldn’t be indicted for what the parents may have done in the 1940s. Enough of badgering us with the presumptuous appropriation of the Shoah, with a view to whitewash the crimes Israel is committing under our eyes!
Killing, maiming, plundering, harassing are typical features of terrorism. Let us see how Israel and Palestine do compare in this regard. From January 2008 through May 6, 2024, Israel killed 6,903, and injured 158,441 Palestinians in the Occupied territories and in Israel. During the same period, 326 Israelis were killed and 6,461 wounded. Casualties in the context of the ongoing hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel, which started on 7 October 2023 are not included.
In parallel, from 2009 through May 9, 2024, Israelis demolished 10,737 Palestinian structures, expelling 16,264 Palestinians from their homes. There are of course no records of neither a single Israeli house destroyed, nor a single Israeli displaced by Palestinians. (UN OCHA, https://www.ochaopt.org/data/)
The facts prove that the actual terrorists are Erdan’s buddies. I understand that this enlightened gentleman cannot but feel maddened in realizing that the abhorred Untermenschen, the barbarians, those primitive folks that Israel so actively tried to throw out of Palestine since 1948, do not just accept to fade away serenely. He’ll have to get accustomed to it.
It is my understanding that under international law:
1) The occupation of Palestine is illegal
2)The occupied have a right to resist the occupation
3) If they eventually have to choose armed resistance it is not considered terrorism.
Considering the Zionist’s periodic pogroms (“mowing the lawn”) it is understandable that the occupied would choose armed resistance since peaceful protests have been met with slaughter of the protesters.
Norman Finkelstein has discussed this at length. There were mass peaceful protests in 2018. Among the sordid details in the 250 UN report was that Israeli snipers, among other things, targeted handicapped people about 300 meters away, deliberately hitting them at the knee or lower, so as to further cripple them.
In Gaza protests, Israeli troops aim for the legs Associated Press (!!!).
Wait, you mean snipers shooting peacefully-demonstrating Palestinians in the legs isn’t a sign of Israel’s moral superiority, which I’ve been hearing about for decades?
Shredding and desecrating is in line with Netanyahu policy of declaring himself the new Moses. As such, he has edited the Ten Commandments and expunged the ones regarding murdering and coveting. He is also in the process of doing a rewrite of the Bible.
GDPR -> GDR?
Oopsie, fixing.
John F Kennedy in one of his last speeches stated the only country he’d defend is Israel. Now Americas out of ammo maybe the latter day dough boys will be ordered to defend Israel with shovels and fingers as Netanyhu claimed his lot would. Netanyhu’s motley bunch would go off to Goa to get high while Americas finest do there best.
Bet they’ll be wishing they’d never heard of the dubious Balfour ‘declaration’ then, would have saved them entering the first war as well.
Some things never change.
Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem (20 CE) Strabo reported that:
“it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by it.”61 Philo.
Where can I get that mini shredder?
Yeah, the dude should go on late night cable. He’d make a packet!
As I posted to Benny, but the post was lost (?) the shredders are readily available. I found them at Walmart! But perhaps this guy can get a govt volume discount. I’d suggested Alibaba. Imo, your description of this raging projective rant was too kind, Lambert. Smdh…
Israel sells them.
Let’s tune in on the other TV channel: UNGA Session On Palestine: China Slams US’s Repeated Use Of Veto
Ambassador Fu Cong of China said that Palestine should have the same status as Israel and that Palestinian people should enjoy the same rights as Israeli people.
I wonder will there be any side to be on if Israel escalates its ethnic cleansing massacre
Slowly but surely the world is turning against Israel. I think people are fed up with Israelis using the holocaust as a justification for their ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Unfortunately, full membership of a Palestinian state won’t exist anytime soon because, in this case, the UN General Assembly requires approval of the UN Security Council. Undoubtedly, the “One Nation under God” will veto any effort to create a Palestinian state.
Israel Ambassador Erdan is clearly unhinged. Then again, “though he be mad, there is method in it.” Erdan is hardly speaking to the UN members, he’s speaking to Americans and you can’t say enough about Hitler and Nazis when trying to hide your own crimes and convince Americans your fictional argument is valid.
It should be worth noting that the Palestinian delegation at the UN is associated with the Palestinian Authority, who received their funding from Israel (via Israel collected exercise taxes on their population) and have worked hand in glove with the IDF to oppress their own population while offering zero resistance to the illegal settlements and settlers operating in the West Bank. There have been recent talks between the PA and Hamas hosted by Russia and China, but then PA assassinated major resistance figures and removed Barghuti from their prisoner release list right after those talks, showing that they’re still working 100% for Israel and the US.
So the fact that Israel and the US would not allow any status for even this craven representative of the Palestinians, makes clear where they really stand on ‘two state solution’s.
black is white and up is down in the zionist west.
the nazis are the ones corraled into ghettoes and exterminated and shame is basic decency.