Sorry, I’m not going to remember anyone

There is a deplorable campaign in progress to “rehabilitate” World War I — to make us believe it was fought with a purity of purpose by gallant young men who wanted nothing more than a land “fit for heroes to live in” (in the words of Lloyd George). In reality, it was a squalid conflict that set the stage for World War II and created bitter rivalries in the Middle East that continue to this day.

It should be obvious to everyone that the claim that those who died at Gallipoli “laid down their lives” for our freedom is ludicrous. The Ottoman Empire never threatened our freedom in New Zealand, and its foolish alliance with Germany during World War I is neither here nor there. So those who died at Gallipoli — those who initially assumed the war would be a spiffing, four-month adventure — really did die for nothing. I see no more point in remembering them than in remembering those who died in the Crimean War.

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Paul McGeough attacked by Australia/Israel Review

“Of all the available footage [from the Mavi Marmara], including that of an activist stabbing an Israeli soldier, there is none of activists sheltering soldiers,” Bren Carlill writes in the January 2011 issue of Australia/Israel Review.

There are three things I would like to say about this: (1) We don’t know what a lot of the “available footage” shows, as it was seized by the Israelis and is held by them; (2) Where is the footage of an activist stabbing an Israeli soldier? Was it included in the Panorama documentary Death in the Med? I have watched this pro-Israel documentary twice, and don’t remember seeing it; (3) I think there is footage of activists sheltering soldiers. There are also several still photographs of “activists” treating injured soldiers, like the one above from the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

I, personally, doubt any Israeli soldier was stabbed. When the allegedly stabbed Israeli commando was interviewed on television, why didn’t he pull up his shirt and show us his wound? That’s what I would have done. I would have said: “Look, this is what they did to me!”

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Islam and the West: Column from Challenge Weekly

The above article appeared in the September 27, 2010, issue of Challenge Weekly, New Zealand’s Christian newspaper.

Contrary to Mark Keown’s assertion, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are primarily a result of the United States desire to achieve “full-spectrum” dominance. Plans for the invasion and occupation of these strategic areas were laid in the 1990s — long before 9/11 provided a convenient casus belli. (See Section V of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, a publication of the Project for the New American Century. This section is entitled Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force, and includes the sentence: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.) The destruction and dismemberment of Iraq (and soon of Iran?) also served the important purpose of removing yet another obstacle to Israel’s total dominance of the Middle East.

Later in the article, the reader’s interest is further piqued by the sentence: “One senses that the the future of the world is increased instability and perhaps in Europe, suppression of Islam, ethnic cleansing and dare I say it, ultimately even war.” Needless to say, there is no way in which Islam can be “suppressed”. (See the Telegraph article of March 25, 2008, which says: “The projections show that, if the Churches do not reverse their historical decline, there will be more active Muslims than Christians in Sunday services across Britain before the middle of the century.”) It’s already far too late for any program of “suppression” to be successful. And any attempt to remove the population of 2.4 million Muslims in Britain (which has grown by 500,000 in just the past four years) would result, quite simply, in the destruction of British society. Ditto the societies of France, Germany and other European countries with rapidly expanding Muslim minorities.

Keown is right when he says “we [should not] condemn all Muslims on the basis of the lunacy of a few”. But if he is seriously concerned about “lunacy”, he should examine United States foreign policy. He could begin by reading Robert Dreyfuss’ Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan Books, 2005). He will then realize that these people he describes as lunatics are, to a large extent, the creation of policies pursued by the US at the height of the Cold War, when it sought (a) to contain Arab nationalism and Russian communism , and (b) to nurture a Sunni radicalism that could be used as a “weapon” against its enemies — in much the same way as it used Saddam as a “weapon” against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Actually, the list of US/Israeli lunacies is far too long to be reproduced here. This incredibly destructive alliance has killed millions of people throughout the world during the past 50 years or so, and has also succeeded in poisoning large areas of the planet — with dioxins in the case of Vietnam, and with depleted uranium in the case of Iraq and other countries where DU munitions have been used. These toxins will remain teratogenic (i.e. a cause of hideous birth deformities) for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of years.

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Israel’s bullets have killed its credibility

The Dominion Post’s editorial of June 2, 2010. I’m interested to see that the headline writer (not necessarily the writer of the editorial) thinks that Israel, a congenital liar, once had credibility.

Standard says fire ‘exchanged’ on aid ship

As Robert Fisk said in The Independent on June 5, 2010, “The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists — and I’m including the BBC’s pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships — are writing like Israeli journalists…” (see http://ht.ly/1UCTk). Yes, it is amazing. I, for one, was staggered by the blurb above the Manawatu Standard’s main story on June 1, 2010, about the Israeli attack on the Turkish aid ship. Its statement that fire was “exchanged” between the Israeli commandos and the “pro-Palestinian activists” goes far beyond what even the Israelis were claiming. (I have cut off the rest of the headline and article because there is nothing in them that we haven’t read elsewhere. Besides, they are too big to fit into my scanner.)