Operation Iraqi "INVASION"

See two articles to confirm all of the info 'next door': "The Pentagon's Dynamic Duo: Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz" by Richard H. Curtiss, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2003 and "Perle, Interrupted" by Eric Alterman, The Nation, April 7, 200)

I urge you to verify the $94 billion in "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs" [they keep a running total] and the $1.6 trillion in the article by David R. Francis, "Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US" in the "Christian Science Monitor," Dec.8,'02.

< ARABSONG

On Being an Arab in America: Chapter 1

by Ron David

Click below to see

Barbara Nimri Aziz's

"Baghdad Bulletins"

Talk about Propaganda!

Sometimes Propaganda is so insulting it's obscene. Take for example the violent insult to the truth in calling our blatant invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom." We are "freeing" the people of Iraq in exactly the same sense as Hitler "freed" Europe of Jews. It really isn't fair that the people of Iraq should be the sole beneficiaries of all that freedom. I think we should share our altruism with a country that deserves it at least as much as Iraq--like Israel. Let's go free Israel next. After all, we don't want any complaints of favoritism. Why should the poor Israelis be deprived of all those wonderful "smart bombs? The city of Tel Aviv is less than 60 years old (hell, I'm older than ancient Israel), so it might not look quite as resplendent all lit up as the 5000 year old city of Baghdad--but is that sufficient reason to deprive it of American fireworks?

Nobody on earth would look better with one of those 5000 lb bunker busters in his lap than Ariel Sharon. The fat general-slash-prime-minister-slash-terrorist-slash-throat-slasher has been begging for one of those suppositories of mass destruction for 50 years. (Vegas is giving two-to-one odds that if the Americans drop one of those bombs that leave buildings intact and kill only human beings, Sharon will emerge without a scratch.)

Yes, but what's the REAL Reason

Every sane person knows that the U.S. did not invade Iraq because we were worried about being zapped with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is not now, not has it ever been, a threat to America in any way. So why, my darlin's, has America invaded Iraq? The Iraqis, as it turns out, are as smart and enterprising a people as anyone on earth. They were not in love with the idea of being totally defenseless sitting ducks, so inside sources report that the Iraqis held several underground brainstorming sessions to decide what kinds of bombs would be most useful in the Real World. They didn't see the point of making Smart Bombs because the damn things would miss President Bush by a mile! The word around Washington was that the clever Iraqis were only a year or so away from developing a Moral Bomb. So Bush and Rumsfeld, skeptical though they were, decided not to take any chances at getting analized by one of those Moral Bombs. (That's not a misspelling.)

Whose War Is This?

As you probably already know, six rabbis from Virginia asked for the resignation of Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) after he told constituents that the Jewish community was behind the Bush administration's push for a war with Iraq.

Should one point the finger at the Jewish community in-general merely because Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, is a war profiteer who has made a career out of deflecting attention from Israel's brutality by finding Washington new enemies, even if he has to create them himself, Richard Perle was a former lobbyist for Israeli arms manufacturers before he became Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a job from which he recently resigned three seconds before he was fingered for conflict of interest--i.e., making money off the war in Iraq, which he helped start, Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, did help Perle do a study for "Bibi" Netanyahu on whacking Iraq for ISRAEL!, Lewis Libby, Perle's former Israel-obsessed flunky, is now V.P. Cheny's Chief of Staff (i.e., Israel-obsessed flunky), Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller is severely tilted-toward-Israel, 'Lon' Cheney, Vice-President-in-Hiding, may very well be the Mother of All War Profiteers (front man for companies that got rich destroying Iraq and other companies that will get rich reconstructing it), which is made even more disgusting by the fact that Cheney is an advisor to the Jewish Institute for Advanced Strategic Affairs, Daniel Pipes is the dickwad who originated "Campus Watch," a Web site devoted to torpedoing university Middle Eastern programs that don't suck up to Israel, Michael Rubin could fairly be described as Israel's American Op-Ed Hit Man...etc., etc., etc.

Any connection between Israel, the above mentioned well-connected gentlemen, and the war against Iraq was categorically denied by Whitehouse Spokesman Ari Fleischer, who many are convinced is a citizen of Israel.

What Is My Opinion in the Matter?

Instead of trying to get Moran fired, the American Jewish community could prove the falsity of those charges by demanding that ALL of the above named gentlemen resign from their positions and by putting leashes on knee-busters like Pipes and Rubin.

And one other thing: they could dismantle AIPAC, the Israel lobby that robs the American people of approximately ten billion dollars a year. And as a matter of good faith to the American people, they could set up a plan to repay all that money--estimated at somewhere between $94 billion and $1.6 trillion.

And one other thing: they could make it very clear to Israel that unless they throw Ariel Sharon out of ANY government position and honor the pre-1967 Israel-Palestine boundaries and agree to a free, completely autonomous Palestinian state immediately, the American Jewish community will make certain that the U.S. cuts off all aid to Israel permanently.

That's all it would take to convince me.

Do You Believe the Polls?

Every Talking Head on TV, every pencil pundit, every pontificator on What the American people really want, thanks largely to Polls that are treated as if they were handed down from God, tells us that the American people's only objections to war are: a) that it doesn't last too long; b) that we have a clear cut victory; c) that we don't see too many Americans carried home in body bags. In other words, we don't give a flying fruitcake how many innocent people we kill, just so they aren't Americans.

I know quite a few American people and NONE of them feel that way

Right offhand, I can't think of a single person that I know who is that indifferent to the lives of non-American human beings. In fact, the ONLY Americans that I have ever seen who are that indifferent to the lives of non-American human beings are our Politicians and the Talking Heads who serve as their public relations wimps while pretending to give us the news.

No matter what your polls say, I doubt that more than ten percent of the people in America are as indifferent to the slaughter of non-Americans as your jive ass polls say we are. But if you are right and I am wrong --if the only things that trouble us about war are how long it lasts, winning and how many Americans die-- how can we blame anyone for considering us the most dangerous country on earth? In case you haven't noticed, the rest of the world reads your polls. If we are the people in your polls--we're a bunch of sociopaths--whoever wipes us out is doing the world a favor.

The only way we can "tell" the rest of the world that we are NOT the soulless creeps in your polls is to stop our Government from trampling people in the rest of the world.

America can begin to reclaim its humanity by stopping the invasion of Iraq.

The Real Soul of Islam

Barbara Nimri Aziz interviewed Muhammad Abdul Ghani shortly before the 1990-91 Gulf War for her radio show, "Tahrir: Voices of the Arab World." (See "Short Takes" for that interview.) Aziz interviewed Mr. Abdul Ghani again some months after the war. Aziz introduces the interview by saying that Muhammad Abdul Ghani is Baghdad's pre-eminent sculptor, that he studied for years in Italy, visited and loved New York. Aziz briefly describes his studio, then she speaks to the sculptor.

Barbara Nimri Aziz: They can hear your voice, they can hear your spirit as an artist and as an Iraqi. You are clearly not a person who is just going to lie down and go away. We are here in your studio. You have a new project underway. I see models and drawings.

Muhammad Abdul Ghani: Yes, it came at a perfect time for me. We have many churches in Iraq, especially in Baghdad.

Aziz: You have a Christian population here in the city?

Abdul Ghani: Of course. We have them as friends. They live here for thousands of years and we live together in a good way. They are building a Catholic new church and the architect choose me. It is very interesting that they choose me as a Muslim man to do this subject for the Christian Church. We have no problem really. I imagine to do murals about the story of Jesus Christ. I put lots of people around the religious subjects. I was very sad about what happened to Jesus Christ—very sad—as a human being...but I made all these people around him…they were very sad, too, very sad. Maybe on the inside of myself I am presenting the people around me. Very very sad.

Aziz: The lower panel is a scene of Jesus taking up the cross. On the upper panel, many people, men, women and children, are looking down.

Abdul Ghani: I imagine that Jesus Christ carried the cross. At the same time, I imagine that the people on the street looking to him, looking to him. Standing, looking, crying, sad. Sad for him. This sadness are the people here, now, around me. What I am seeing here, now…all around me.

The Undertaker's Lament

Rumsfeld's suave graveside manner has crumbled and he is now revealed as the arrogant, petulant undertaker he is. How dare those Iraqis demonstrate courage that we Americans can't even imagine? How dare they stand up to the Biggest Baddest Army the world has ever known with nothing but Stone Age weapons. How dare they risk their lives to defend their own homeland?

People that crazy MUST be Terrorists.

Regarding the lame attempts to turn our invasion of Iraq into a replay of WWII: The parallel is a lot more accurate if let yourself remember that the Nazis had the Biggest Baddest Army in the world (like we do now) and the "appeaser" was the guy who sucked up to Biggest Baddest Army (like Tony Blair is now) and that the country that has the guts to stand up against the Biggest Baddest Army (like Great Britain did in WWII) is France.

I nominate Tony Blair the Meryl Streep of International Politics. He's a hell of an actress.

Neo-Linguistic Hogwashification

The fact that Americans understand our language puts us at a great disadvantage when it comes to understanding our country. People who don't speak English don't understand our words, so they don't judge us by what we say, they judge us by what we do.

That's why people in the rest of the world know that we are waging a war of pure aggression against a helpless country.

When all is said and done, the great distinction of language may not be its ability to communicate, but its ability to mis-communicate.

April 8: Dead Journalists and the Israelizing of America

You may not have noticed the Israelizing of America, it happened with so little fanfare. But here we are, without saying "May I" using Israel's famous strategy of "preemptive wars" (like the Tom Cruise movie: "I'm putting you under arrest for crimes you're going to commit in the future"). And here we are using Israel's famous strategy of fighting Wars on Terrorism that are guaranteed to increase Terrorism. And here we are, adopting Israel's racist/religious bias against Arabs & Muslims, slaughtering whole countries-full of them. And here we are, having almost verbatim "borrowed" Menachem Begin's 1981 newspaper articles about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction with prove to be so fake it would embarrass us if we had any sense of shame. And here we are, like Israel, ignoring international law because God told us that everything was ours.

We have even adapted the Israeli style of silencing snoopy reporters. The story below is an abridged version of Alexander Cockburn's Wall Street Journal article, 4/11/85.

On March 11, 1985, Israeli tanks rolled into the Lebanese town of Zrariya and killed 35 men, women and children. Reporters tried to talk to the survivors. The Israelis objected.

On March 21, NBC cameraman Tewfik Ghazawi and soundman Bahij Metni, both Lebanese employees of CBS, were killed by an Israeli tank shell. Ayyad Harakeh, their driver, lost both legs. Edward Joyce, President of CBS news was so furious he publicly accused the Israelis of murder. CBS sent news VP Ernest Leiser to Israel. Leiser came back and repeated the lies Israel had told him. Each time one lie was exposed, the Israelis would come up with a new one--exactly what is happening now with U.S. "accidental" attack on the Palestine Hotel, where all the un-in-bedded journalists stay and on the Al Jazeera TV broadcast building (same "accidental" bombing of Al Jazeera's studio had happened in Afghanistan). Three journalists were killed today. Our government's lies parallel the Israelis': soon as you catch them in one lie, they skip back to another without losing a beat.

CBS not only decided not NOT to charge Israel with murder for the 1985 intentional killing of CBS's cameramen, CBS has kept the event so well-hidden that it's virtually impossible for them to acknowledge it---"Oh, you mean THAT 1985 murder of two CBS cameramen?"

If Iraqi civilians are slaughtered and no journalist witnesses it, did it really happen?