BartBlog

When I used to have a steady job at the law office, I could always travel in style — flying to places, using major airlines and even staying in actual hotels. Those days are long gone.

These days it’s all about taking the Greyhound or the MegaBus or using cheapo airlines that don’t allow luggage, and sleeping on couches. But still. It gets me there. Use it or lose it. Anything to get to New York.

On this trip I’m going to do some new things while I’m there — stay in Harlem, follow the trail of the Harlem Renaissance, relive my youth spent in the second balcony of the Apollo Theater and, hopefully, eat at the Red Rooster.

But I’m also going to do some things that are the same — attend the grand BookExpo America at the Javits Center, eat borsch and rice pudding at B&H Dairy on the Lower East Side and take a bus past the United nations building, giving it the one-finger salute for its role in enabling all those NATO/American/Saudi/Israeli brutal, inhumane and criminal massacres in the Middle East to go on and on and on and on and on. http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/Events/An-Evening-with-Senator-Bernie-Sanders/

At the BookExpo, I’m gonna once again attempt to peddle my four wonderful books to the publishers and attendees there. “Librarians! Listen up!” I’ve just finished re-reading my first book, “Bring your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips for Touring Today’s Middle East” — and it’s as funny and accurate and crucially important today as it was back in 2007. https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Your-Own-Flak-Jacket/dp/0978615719/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Yes, all of that shite that I wrote about back then is still going on today — and from Afghanistan to Gaza, America is still the biggest problem in the Middle East. And we Americans are still sleeping on couches and pinches pennies to pay for it too.

And New York City is still well worth a trip on the red-eye.

     Isn’t it amazing what a little propaganda can do.

Last week I attended an Al Awda conference in Long Beach and (mostly) had a wonderful time. Rode down there on the MegaBus, stopped in Burbank to visit Central Casting, was taken to dinner by friends and toured the historic Queen Mary — but then, once at the conference itself, we all got down to the sad business of listening to 70 years’ worth of Palestinian horror stories.

Right off the bat, we were shown a documentary film entitled “1948: Creation & Catastrophe”. It was scary. I’m still in shock. At the beginning of this film, we watched many happy images of European Jews arriving in Palestine — but these joyful scenes were soon followed by many brutal and horrific images of these same European Jews doing the exact same thing to Palestinians that the Nazis had done unto them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLPhGBPq38

“Throw your son into the oven,” one Jewish soldier screamed at a Palestinian father, a baker.

“I cannot,” said the father. And so the Jewish soldiers threw the son into the flames themselves — and then threw the father in after him for good measure.

Over 500 Palestinian villages were gutted and destroyed — even worse in scope than the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Jews arrived in overcrowded boats. The Palestinians left on overcrowded boats. The similarities were not lost on the film’s viewers. And the UN jumped into the mix too. Instead of splitting Palestine equally between Jews and Palestinians, the UN gave the European Jews all the good areas and herded the Palestinians into the scrubs. The Jews got Haifa and Tel Aviv. The Palestinians got the Negev desert.

What else can I say? The documentary showed us the faces of thousands of Palestinian refugees being driven from their homes (that is, the Palestinians that were not slaughtered). “Down all the roads they came…” carrying their babies and only taking the clothes on their backs. And these roadsides were littered with the corpses of dead babies.

So much for erasing the tainted memories of the Holocaust inflicted on European Jews by the Nazis. Now these very same Jews were deliberately creating a Palestinian Holocaust. Watching this film, I suddenly realized that the Nazis too had come to Palestine. The Jews hadn’t escaped the Nazis after all. The Nazis too had come to Palestine — hidden in the souls of the surviving European Jews.

And now, 70 long miserable years later, there seem to be hardly any Jews left in Israel today. “But how can that be,” you might ask. Because most Israelis appear to have turned into the same fascist types like their leaders Netanyahu and Lieberman — who will do anything for power and money. So much for Moses and the Torah.

PS: Israeli neo-colonialists today are clearly biting off far more than they can chew — attacks on Syria, attacks on Lebanon, attacks on Gaza, attacks on Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, Ni’lin and Bethlehem. Nuclear weaponry, torture centers, gigantic jails, night raids. Imagine if Israelis had used all that $$$ for good. Imagine if they finally stopped behaving like Nazis. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/killing-gaza/

Am I being anti-Semitic here? Hell, no. I’m just being pro-justice. Old-school Jewish prophets such as Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah and even Moses all warned us that justice is really really really important, right? So were all of these great prophets being anti-Semitic when they said this? Hardly. And neither am I.

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And while you’re at it, please buy my books: https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

Now that Mothers Day is almost upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fine art of giving birth — and now have reached one seminal conclusion based on both experience and scientific research. “There is no way that it’s not gonna hurt.” Take myself for example.

Baby # 1: I was so totally naive before going into labor. Was at a late-night party in Greenwich Village (and unsuccessfully trying to chat with Bob Dylan) when my stomach suddenly started getting really bad menstrual cramps. Huh? I’m nine months pregnant. I’m not spozed to be having cramps! So I street-hiked off to the Women’s’ Infirmary, suffered through two hours of intense labor, fought off major attempts to give me anesthetics, screamed a lot and then gave birth to a girl.

Baby # 2: Moved back to California, got pregnant again, went into labor, finally recognized the symptoms, couldn’t find a ride to the hospital and ended up persuading my speed-freak neighbors to give me a lift. Why not. They were gonna be up all night anyway. Once at the hospital, I started screaming and hollering once again. The nurses told me to shut up. They were old-school. Two hours later, out popped another baby girl.

Baby # 3: While suffering from stage-nine pregnancy and looking as big as a house, I moved all my stuff into a new apartment in Berkeley, finished unpacking the last box, gave a deep sigh of relief — and went into labor. “Another girl?” I asked. When they told me it wasn’t, this unexpected announcement surprised me so much that I actually asked the nurse, “If it’s not a girl, then what could it be?”

“It’s a boy!” she replied. Who knew.

Baby #4: I was finally beginning to realize where babies come from — but too late. “You need a C-section,” stated the doctor. Over my dead body! “That can be arranged.” But I somehow managed to fight off the obstetrical team (literally) and three hours later yet another baby girl popped out — butt first.

And as my children grew up, I tried my very hardest to be a good mother. I really did. I honestly did. Must have done something right. I guess. Years later, all four of my adult children are alive and doing well. But how do other women manage to be so good at motherhood and take to it like a duck to water instead of almost drowning? Hats off to you. I salute you on Mothers Day. Good job!

And I have also discovered another way that childbirth can really hurt. As the British phrase it, I’d given birth to “One heir and three spares” — thinking that surely at least one of the four will come visit me when I finally get carted off to the rest home? But this is never to be. Just as I’m starting to get old, boring, needy and poor, they’ve all thought up some cheesy reason or other to bail. All that childbirth pain for nothing! Rats. Not even any Mothers Day cards for me. I warned you. I told you that childbirth hurt.

But still and all, I’m definitely not the worst mother in the world. I never gave birth to or raised any babies that grew up to be monsters. None of my kids have blown up the World Trade Center, covered up the plot to murder JFK or were personally responsible for the slaughter of over a million human beings in the Middle East! At least I’m not Barbara Bush.

PS: Will be spending Mothers Day in Long Beach of all places. Am going there to attend the Al Awda conference on Palestine http://al-awda.org/conference13/

What is happening in Gaza right now is totally painful too. And insanely criminal as well. In the past four weeks, Israeli snipers using high-powered rifles have deliberately succeeded in knee-capping and/or maiming approximately 7,000 non-violent Palestinian protesters. That’s just gotta hurt. If anyone needs some five-star mothering right now, it’s those poor wretched Palestinian rebels. Mothers Day in Gaza is gonna be painful for sure. Oy vey! https://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2018/05/horror-movie-in-gaza-theyre-eating-our.html

Americans really do love to watch classic old horror movies. Perhaps that is why they continue to let all those grim slaughters in the Middle East go on for so long.

For instance, it’s just like watching “Silence of the Lambs” in Gaza right now — where 100 highly-trained and sadistic Israeli snipers are happily picking off nonviolent protesters there one by one. Hannibal Lector himself couldn’t be doing a better job.

Syria has become yet another horror-movie classic — one where no one suspects those innocent-looking Americans of being the creepy guys supplying ISIS with chain saws. That great scene where a massive invasion of evil ISIS villains crosses the desert in Toyotas? No way that Americans could have avoided spotting all that spooky road dust on their Google satellite apps. “They’re coming! Hide in the basement!” Bad idea.

Afghanistan? Who first gave those Taliban wannabe-Freddy Kruegers their claw hands in the first place? It was America. “Charlie Wilson’s War” is the ultimate horror flick.

Yemen? Thanks to America and Saudi Arabia working together like the BFF zombies they are, Yemen is starting to look exactly like where they filmed that final scene in “Night of the Living Dead”. The monsters just keep on coming and coming and coming.

And how about that unarmed and vulnerable teenager Libya? Why the freak did Qaddafi stay alone in that cabin in the woods overnight when he knew that blood-sucking NATO was on the prowl? And now Iran is about to make that same mistake. Run for your life, Iran! America has a bloody hatchet — and knows how to use it too.

The only trouble with this classic-horror-film analogy is that, while Freddy and Hannibal are fun to watch on TV late at night, American hatchet murders and chain-saw-like dismemberments are real — and Americans have become experts on how to create millions of extremely life-like corpses. Or at least ones that used to be alive.

“Odor in the court! The judge is eating beans!” But something else also stinks about the American justice system — mainly that, for many of us, there is very little justice here. True justice is only achieved when laws are applied equally to all Americans. It is only after judicial equality is achieved that we can claim to be a civilized nation living under the all-important Rule of Law. Otherwise our courts are just merely farting around.

And this very same definition of justice also applies on an international level as well.

Since World War II, America has been given free reign to commit the most atrocious war crimes since Stalin, Hitler and Genghis Khan — and yet no international court of law has even attempted to stop the USA from committing these war crimes or even to slap its hand or give it a time-out. Murdering thousands of Christians at Sunday prayer at a church in Nagasaki, spreading Agent Orange all over Vietnam and carpet-bombing Cambodia? Not to mention the horrors of “wars” and proxy “wars” in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Honduras, Ukraine, Haiti, Yemen, etc. that violate almost every Geneva Convention there is. War-Crimes R Us. https://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/09/the-very-un-christian-nagasaki-bomb/

“He gassed his own people,” Americans were constantly told regarding Saddam Hussein. Huh? Saddam hardly didn’t even eat beans. And yet America has been gassing its own people since 1776 — from Wounded Knee and the New Orleans slave markets to Selma, Waco, Baltimore and beyond. That’s hypocrisy. That’s hubris. That’s cutting the cheese. But let’s move on.

Suppose Saddam Hussein had been brought before The Hague for judgment instead of Americans just assuming he was guilty enough to justify the slaughter a million Iraqis? Just think of the five or ten trillion $$$ we would have saved. https://www.icc-cpi.int/pages/situations.aspx

And then there’s Israel, the Saudis and the FUK-US coalition (France the United Kingdom and the US) who are still enthusiastically committing war crimes in the Middle East every single day — even as we speak. If only the world would put them on trial at The Hague instead of letting them murder and slaughter like Jack the Ripper on a rampage, then just think of all the money we would save there too. To paraphrase John Donne, “Send not to know for whom the gas was passed. It was FUK-US.” http://21stcenturywire.com/2018/05/02/in-honour-of-the-syrian-arab-army-and-allies-war-on-terror/

And think of this also — if all these American super-villain war criminals and their allies were caught and jailed, then we wouldn’t need to be scared in our beds every night, terrified that the world is a terrifying place. Why? Because it wouldn’t be. The bad guys would all be in jail.

Plus we could easily put all of our kids through college with the trillions of dollars we will have saved. Just think of The Hague as one gigantic 401-K.

We could also sleep better at night knowing that our country was not out there in Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Haiti, Yemen, Gaza, etc. committing war crimes and venting jockey-bombs in our name.

You get the idea, right?

Now go do something about it.