Politics & Stuff

[ZAPHOD2319 4,820]

One of the reasons our relations with Panama soured was our military bases there. I was there shortly after the over throw. The way that the US military treated Panamanians was appalling.

[Fernando 6,585]

27 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

One of the reasons our relations with Panama soured was our military bases there. I was there shortly after the over throw. The way that the US military treated Panamanians was appalling.

True, but I also spoken to a lot of Panamanians and they mentioned how things have gone worse since they left. 

But in the end my point stand, the only country that was not even a country and we help and still maintain a good relationship is Israel. 

Everywhere else USA has not had a fruit of a country like Israel. Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan are to name a few. So that is either a miracle or just coincidence if you don't believe in miracles...

 

 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Fernando

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

5 hours ago, Fernando said:

Another mass shooting in USA, this time in Maine. 

This is getting crazy. 

He could be anywhere too. Maine is pretty much wilderness.

[Fernando 6,585]

15 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

He could be anywhere too. Maine is pretty much wilderness.

You got some nice city in Portland and what not. 

But yes this mass shooting is out of control. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

Israel is one of the few that has come good. 

Would have love to have the same in Iraq and Afghanistan,

Probably giving one 3.8bn dollars a year, and bombing and invading the other two while killing a couple of million people is the difference

[Fernando 6,585]

25 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Probably giving one 3.8bn dollars a year, and bombing and invading the other two while killing a couple of million people is the difference

But we always gave a lot of money away to all the other countries....look at how much we spend in Afghanistan? Only to fall to Taliban in less then a month. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

14 minutes ago, Fernando said:

But we always gave a lot of money away to all the other countries....look at how much we spend in Afghanistan? Only to fall to Taliban in less then a month. 

Well the Taliban and other tribes were always there to be fair. Bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age after 9/11 is now widely regarded as a mistake, especially as the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia

[Clockwork 1,794]

Joe Biden questioning the civilians death count in Gaza and downplaying the tragedy, US intelligence and department have not really questioned this in the conflicts over the past couple of decades. Not a single useless reporter is willing to question why are they suddenly unreliable? Neither has the IDF for that matter, they have only questioned the circumstances or who was responsible.

 

https://www.moh.gov.ps/portal/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/تقرير-نهائي-باسماء-الشهداء-1.pdf

So many children on the list. So sad.

 

 

 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Clockwork

[Clockwork 1,794]

Not only is the US and other western countries supporting this tragedy, but also downplaying the losses and suffering. 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Clockwork

[Fernando 6,585]

3 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Well the Taliban and other tribes were always there to be fair. Bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age after 9/11 is now widely regarded as a mistake, especially as the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia

But that's what I'm saying. Nowhere where USA has tried to established democracy has ever worked. Israel has been the only one and to a certain extant Panama, even though they are starting to go down after flourishing for a bit. 

So my original point is that no, USA is not that good to have satellite states everywhere. That is nearly impossible to do, Israel to have flourish like this and is the few democracy is just a miracle. 

[Fernando 6,585]

2 hours ago, Clockwork said:

Joe Biden questioning the civilians death count in Gaza and downplaying the tragedy, US intelligence and department have not really questioned this in the conflicts over the past couple of decades. Not a single useless reporter is willing to question why are they suddenly unreliable? Neither has the IDF for that matter, they have only questioned the circumstances or who was responsible.

 

https://www.moh.gov.ps/portal/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/تقرير-نهائي-باسماء-الشهداء-1.pdf

So many children on the list. So sad.

 

 

 

To be fair I'm actually surprised by this. I always thought Biden was very negative against Israel. Very surprised to say the least. 

[Vesper 30,233]

 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

14 hours ago, Fernando said:

To be fair I'm actually surprised by this. I always thought Biden was very negative against Israel. Very surprised to say the least. 

You don't get to be where he is by being negative against Israel.

[MoroccanBlue 5,385]

14 hours ago, Fernando said:

To be fair I'm actually surprised by this. I always thought Biden was very negative against Israel. Very surprised to say the least. 

Questions the actual death toll of Palestinians, confirmed the beheading of Israeli babies even though it was debunked and he lied about seeing it. 

Joe Biden. 

[Fernando 6,585]

5 hours ago, MoroccanBlue said:

Questions the actual death toll of Palestinians, confirmed the beheading of Israeli babies even though it was debunked and he lied about seeing it. 

Joe Biden. 

debunked? By who?

Seriously I can disagree with some stuff that Israel has done, but you stating that that Israeli made up beheading baby's is just insane. 

Like those that say the Jewish Holocaust never happen.....

[Vesper 30,233]

[Vesper 30,233]

MP Crispin Blunt arrested on suspicion of rape

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67233090

Ex-minister Crispin Blunt has confirmed he was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of rape and the possession of controlled substances.

In a statement, the Reigate MP said he had twice been interviewed by police in connection with this incident.

Mr Blunt said he originally raised the incident with police three weeks ago, concerned about "extortion".

He said he was cooperating with Surrey Police's investigation and was confident he would not be charged.

The police were unable to say if the controlled substances were drugs, as tests are being carried out, according to PA Media.

The Conservative Party withdrew the whip, meaning Mr Blunt will sit as an independent MP, after he confirmed he had been arrested. He has been asked to stay away from Parliament.

Mr Blunt was elected as Conservative MP for Reigate, in Surrey, in the 1997 general election, defeating the incumbent Sir George Gardiner, who had switched from the Tories to the Referendum Party.

He served as a justice minister from 2010 to 2012, in the whips' office when the Conservatives were in opposition and chaired the influential Foreign Affairs Committee.

In April, he apologised for defending former MP Imran Ahmad Khan, following his conviction for sexually assaulting a teenage boy. Mr Blunt had called the verdict a "dreadful miscarriage of justice" in a statement, but retracted his comments.

A month later Mr Blunt announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election.

'Co-operate fully'

In a statement, Mr Blunt said: "It has been reported that an MP was arrested yesterday [25 October] in connection with an allegation of rape. I am confirming that MP was me.

"The fact of the arrest requires a formal notification of the Speaker and then my chief whip.

"I have now been interviewed twice in connection with this incident, the first time three weeks ago, when I initially reported my concern over extortion.

"The second time was earlier this morning under caution following arrest. The arrest was unnecessary as I remain ready to cooperate fully with the investigation that I am confident will end without charge.

"I do not intend to say anything further on this matter until the police have completed their inquiries."

A police spokesman said: "We can confirm a man in his 60s was arrested yesterday morning (25 October) in Horley, on suspicion of rape and possession of controlled substances.

"He has been released on conditional police bail pending further inquiries."

The Conservative Party has declined to comment.

This is the latest sexual misconduct allegation to hit the party.

A separate Conservative MP, in his 50s, was arrested in May 2022 on suspicion of rape, sexual assault, abuse of position of trust and misconduct in a public office.

The MP is currently on bail until mid-February 2024.

[Vesper 30,233]

Exterminate All the Brutes

All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/exterminate-all-the-brutes

During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.

I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares two decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day - is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo. 

On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. 

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.

Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” 

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.

Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,233]

Israel Palestine Double Standard Called Out On BBC Question Time

 

[Vesper 30,233]

How Israel Suppresses The Media