Yeah well, talking about injustice in Palestine is always a thankless task. But we still gotta do it because Palestine is still a big thorn in the foot of the Middle East and if the Middle East ain’t happy, then ain’t nobody happy — at least nobody who likes to drive cars.
If you want Middle Eastern gas in your tank without having to spend a bunch of trillions of dollars more on war toys in order to steal it at gunpoint, then you are gonna have to come to terms with ending the illegal Palestine occupation.
“But Palestinians send rockets into Israel! And they have suicide bombers! We have to support the occupation because Palestinians are violent!” you might say. But are they? Violent? Not really. Not any more. That’s just old-skool thinking.
For approximately the last ten years, more and more Palestinians have become non-violent in the tactics they have used to protest against being illegally occupied by one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world. But are Palestinians getting any kind of recognition, kudos or rewards at all for having gone all non-violent? No. Hell no. Nothing, zip, nada.
For over fifty years, Palestinians had already tried the old “Red Dawn” armed-resistance scenario and it hadn’t been working. And so in approximately the last ten years they have noticeably changed their tactics and given non-violent protests a try instead. But so far the only results that have resulted from Palestinians’ non-violent protests have been to get shot at — and shot at and shot at — by one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q7RQGuOzvw.
Bummer.
So. If Americans truly want peace in the Middle East and cheap gas in their tanks, perhaps instead of continuing to give billions of dollars in military aid to one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world as it illegally occupies Palestine, perhaps we should try something else and actually start REWARDING Palestinians for their efforts to be non-violent — while still trying to express their deep frustration with being constantly under the thumb of a violent and illegal occupation force.
And if we truly want to reward and encourage Palestinians for trying to be the next Gandhis, then what can we do?
“Order Pizza!”
Hey, it worked in Wisconsin.
I have friends in the small Palestinian town of Ni’lin and every Friday for the last several years, they have bravely gone out and non-violently protested the seizure of their small quiet town by one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world — and these ordinary towns-people are getting gassed, shot at and killed one by one. However, non-violence, while heroic as hell and very New Testament and all that, isn’t really working for them so far because one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world clearly doesn’t give a rat’s behind about Palestinians.
So I am suggesting that you do to my friends in Ni’lin the same thing that the people of Egypt did for the people of Wisconsin. “Order Pizza.”
Is there a pizza place in Ni’lin that takes credit cards? If so, give me its e-mail address and, instead of waiting patiently for Hillary Clinton to do it, I’ll reward these non-violent protesters myself — and order them pizza.
And imagine if everyone else in the world who could afford to spare a few dollars also barraged one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world with pizzas as well? Problem solved. Cheap gas for all.
And then what if we also barraged Wall Street, K Street, the Federal Reserve and even the Taliban with pizzas? It’s the volume that counts.
PS: Everyone’s always talking about ending America’s huge deficit. Hey that’s easy to do. Just make major cuts in our out-of-control military spending, duh. And then let’s replace all those pricey Bradley tanks and luxurious F16s with pizzas.
Let’s build a huge wall of pizza (deep-dish Chicago-style with anchovies and olives) all around our shores and forget about the rest of America’s “empire”. And then let’s turn America back into a country that is self-sufficient in manufacturing again. And let’s start by manufacturing pizzas.
“But Jane, that’s just crazy!” Not as crazy as wasting our country’s resources and patrimony on manufacturing weapons — cold merciless steel weapons designed only to kill, maim and hurt.
PPS: In his recent article on US polices toward Israel, Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper stated that, “Israel is the number-two supplier of arms [in the world].” http://mondoweiss.net/2011/02/working-around-america-a-new-strategy-on-israelpalestine.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d30ed960da-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email#respond.
And of course we all know who is the Number One supplier of arms.
So why is everyone relying on the United States and Israel to be in charge of keeping the peace — both in the Occupied Territories and in the rest of the world?
Isn’t that a bit like expecting two very hungry bears to be in charge of guarding a honey tree?
PPPS: Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has a few unkind words to say about Israel, believe it or not: “Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!)” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/opinion/02friedman.html?_r=1
Perhaps we should be sending the Israelis some pizza too.
PPPPS: What if all of us little people from all over the world who are sick and tired of being bossed around by military thugs, bullies and sadists for the sole reason that their, er, guns are bigger than our guns — what if we all got together and refused? Refused to be soldiers, refused to make weapons, refused to murder, refused to…just refused. Then what would happen?
Ultimately it’s all in the numbers.
For every one of the bullies, sadists and thugs that hide behind the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world, there are at least 99 more of us who are sick of all this bloodshed.
Tunisia, India, Egypt, South Africa, Jesus and the American South have all shown us that non-violent tactics really do bring about peace — if you have the numbers. In fact, Tunisia and Egypt apparently even consciously took a leaf from Ni’lin’s non-violent playbook. So. Let’s put all of the world’s largest and most combat-ready armies on notice. “Chill out now — or else risk ending up like Mubarak, Bull Connor, apartheid and the British Raj.”
We’re armed and dangerous too — we’ve got pizza!
“Get the card!”
“Smoke,” by Hollywood actress Meili Cady, tells the story of a young lady who had some success in Hollywood as an actress and subsequentially got accused of smuggling seven tons of pot into the USA. This new book came to our attention right after we viewed “The Big High” 1968 episode of Dragnet and a colorized version of “Reefer Madness.” On Thursday May 28, we heard one of the Getty and Armstrong (which one is Costello, which one is Laurel?) duo did a segment which urged American military veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to “get the card,” which is to say they should do the paper work that would give them access to medical marijuana rather than seek relief via consuming alcoholic drinks. We knew that it was time to do another column on a topic that permits us to use the old cliché: “we don’t have a dog in that fight.” Th
e World’s Laziest Journalist doss not care if Pot is classified as a capital offense or if it becomes a product available in (irony alert!) drug stores and/or is sold at the corner news stand (do they still exist?).
Doing fact checking to see why the boys at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory voted the rumors surrounding the reason why pot was original classified as a dangerous narcotic as an explanation of why pot was voted into the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame (located on the super-secret campus somewhere in the Sierra foothills, near Berkeley) was a myth of Sisyphus assignment.
Back when “Reefer Madness” was a sensationalistic new movie it helped (propaganda alert?) convince the public that one puff for pleasure could lead, inexorably, to a life as a demented dope fiend. The 1968“Big High” episode of Dragnet (it’s available for viewing on Youtube), seconded the motion.
Could it be that capitalists, allegedly from both the booze and paper industries, as a way of diminishing a threat of competition, somehow (bribe alert?) convinced politicians to overreact and blacklisted a product with medicinal effects that would be very therapeutic for G. I.’s with battle fatigue? If so, why then would altruistic minded Republican politicians continue their misguided efforts after the doctors presented them with documentation that strongly endorsed the controversial PTSD treatment?
We considered doing a column detailing how, today, the voters in the USA seem to be as much the victims of lies, distortion, and propaganda as were the citizens of Germany, in the Thirties. Ein Volk got all their news only from officially sanction sources of information such as the Volkisher Brobachter newspaper. Is Fox News following in that tradition?
Denny Hastert did something and made mistakes in withdrawing the hush money from his bank account. Republicans want to go on record as saying the persecution of Hastert is an example of government overreach and not worth the effort and concomitant media circus. When Bill Clinton got a blowjob from a consenting adult woman, it was a basis for a group with lynch mob mentality to urge that impeachment proceedings should begin immediately. What’s not to love about strong, opposing partisanship reactions to the two stories?
Last December, when some of the citizens staged some “Black Lives Matter” protests in Berkeley, a low-flying single engine airplane was pointed out to us and the assertion was made that it was intercepting and monitoring cell phone calls being made below them as a way to do crowd control. During this past week, Newsweek provided confirmation of those rumors. Do a Google News search for “Operation Stingray.”
We were also tipped to the assertion that a rich pair of brothers bankrolled an effort to discredit the “Black Lives Matter” political protests by paying thugs to commit vandalism and to incite violence. Then when it was time for the hooligans to collect the promised cash, they were stiffed. That allegedly precipitated new riots with a more pragmatic rationale. That topic was accessible via a Google News search, but perhaps all traces of that story have been scrubbed off the Internet by now.
If true, this hypothesis has some very disconcerting implications. If hoodlums were paid to add vandalism and violence to a legitimate free speech protest, then one must make one of two conclusions. If the American Homeland Security agency was fully informed and complicit with what was happening, then fascism and Gestapo tactics have become an ingredient in American life. If, on the other hand, the Homeland Security did not know ahead of time about the payments to aggravate the situation, then their reasons for surveillance of all American citizens is a farce. They were either complicit or derelict in their mission if some of the protesters were paid agent provocateurs. With that ominous binary choice, it becomes evident why management of the news might be an integral part of the charade.
These days all the news seems to have a conspiracy theory aspect to it. Have you heard the assertion that B. B. King might have been the victim of foul play?
The latest hacking scandal causes us to ask again: “Why didn’t the system that was hacked use the security program that makes the electronic voting machines immune from all attempts to get hacked?
The hot rumor making the rounds this week on the digital counter-culture websites is that the John Kerry broken leg story was not a bike accident but was a fib designed to draw attention away from an assassination attempt by Isis.
Does the slump in confidence in American Journalism imply a concomitant spike in credibility for various and sundry Conspiracy Theories?
Speaking of de facto censorship, is it true that the website RevolutionbooksNYC dot org is promoting the use of a graphic symbol illustrating the concept that citizens should fear the police assigned to protect and serve them? Will media owned by conservative millionaires permit the staff to give any publicity to that concept?
The World’s Laziest Journalist will skip this week’s transvestite story. (Is that story that most folks, even those in the liberal San Francisco Bay Area, find boring and thus want it banished from the airwaves, an example of managed news?) Are any American pundits asking if the failure of the TSA screenings indicates that the actual purpose of the hassle is to wean Americans on to fascism?
Since Saturday June 6 will be the 71st anniversary of D-Day, we need to ask a question: “If the soldiers who were killed in WWII were fighting for The Four Freedoms, does it show disrespect for their sacrifices if Sen. Lindsey Graham rolls his eyes when the concept of fighting for America’s liberties, is mentioned?”
[Note from the photo editor: Pot, pizza and psychedelic tie-die t-shirts can always be lumped together in the San Francisco Bay Area and hence legitimize this week’s photo illustration.]
Some analysts are baffled by the fact that Republicans, who were very enthusiastic about invading Iraq and Afghanistan, seem willing to renege on their promise to take care of wounded veterans by denying them access to medical marijuana to treat PTSD.
Since many pundits ignore the controversy over the use of pot treatment, any suggestion which attempts to explain why the Republicans continue to endorse the restrictions on the use of cannabis sativa rather than approve its use, we will (speculation alert!) offer our unique explanation.
The fable of the scorpion and the frog was used in two movies. It was told in Orson Welles’ “Mr. Arkadin,” and also in “The Crying Game.”
A scorpion wanted to cross a river. He asked a frog if he could hitch a ride. The frog vehemently objected saying: “When we get in the middle of the river, you will sting me and we will both drown.” The scorpion used his highly developed debating skill to convince the frog to ignore his objections to the proposal. The scorpion hopped on the frog’s back and they began to cross the river. When they got to the middle of the river, sure enough, the scorpion stung the frog. The perplexed frog asked the scorpion why he had broken his promise and thereby signed both of their death warrants. The scorpion’s response possibly explains the Republicans’ attitude and provides us with the column’s closing quote: “Because it’s in my nature!”
Now the disk jockey will play the Platters 1958 hit “Smoke gets in your eyes,” “Puff the magic dragon,” and Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson’s new song “It’s all going to pot.” We have to go see if the film rights to the “Smoke” book have been sold. Have a “Go Warriors!” type of week.