Alhumdulilah and the Wrath of God.

My first few miles hitching in a Muslim country in 1964, brought us to an ugly traffic accident. I was somewhat shocked that everyone was standing around laughing. When back in the car with my hosts, a doctor and his wife, I asked about the laughing. They explained that it was the will of Allah, alhumdulilah, and therefore everything was fine. This scenario was often repeated throughout several years of travel from Morrocco to Indonesia. Grief was relatively rare. I fear that if the driver of the car had been a jew they would have been dismembered on the spot even then.

When I now look for definitions of alhumdulilah I find "Praise be to Allah." Essentially the same definition...but different. Now misfortune is no longer Allah's will but always the fault of some other non-Islamic culture. If someone is a true believer are not all misfortunes the will of Allah? Are not infidel's bombs the wrath of God? When Muslim brutalizes other Muslims, is that not also Alhumdulilah? If one is a true believer how can they have it both ways?

If one is a true believer, is it not God's will for the for the Israeli's to win challenge after challenge for close to a century? When Rifaat Assad killed 20-60,000 of his own people in Hama, Syria in 1982, that too must have been God's will and worthy of celebration. And yet no one celebrates. It is so confusing.

When a Jew dies it is Allah's will. When a Muslim dies it must also be the will of God. Then why do Muslims always threaten retibution on a mass scale for something which was clearly God's will? Maybe they are not true believer's after all. They hide behind their book for all good and all evil they do to others....and each other but their book doesn't know how to handle strategic withdrawal.

We all know that the huge Saud royal family own a vast amount of Arabia's wealth. They are the ones blessed by Allah are they not? Any other explanation must be blasphemy. Alhamdulilah.

San Diego Buddhists seize nukes

July 28, 2006

Since the United Nations gave San Diego County to the World Buddhist Federation on Monday events have escalated dramatically. The Buddhist Militia also known as Gayaists are reputed to have more than 12,000 well armed men and women ready to defend the mandate of the United Nations. Yesterday the Gayaist militia moved with great speed to seize the Naval stockpiles of weapons. It is believed that many nuclear weapons were among those seized. A Pentagon official told our reporter off the record “The nation of Gayael is now the world’s third largest nuclear power!" The News is trying to get more information on why all Pentagon forces are being withdrawn out of San Diego County.

Tens of thousands of mostly white refugees have been pouring into surrounding counties claiming the Buddhists had run them off their land. While the Mexican and hispanic population have supported their mostly Asian neighbors in the formation of Gayael, many have become disenchanted with the idea of a Buddhist theocracy.

A spokesperson for the United Nations in New York again reiterated the UN’s mandate claiming Buddhists had suffered throughout Asia the past 70 years and now needed a homeland. The people of San Diego wonder why it had to be their home to give away. Many are already speaking of endless rebellion against any and all Buddhists wherever they are until San Diego is returned to the San Diegans.

War Frenzy by Robert Parry

http://www.opednews.com

Just as Saddam Hussein was cast as the monster whose elimination would transform Iraq into a democratic oasis, Hezbollah and its allies in Syria and Iran are presented now as the crux of all evil in the Middle East whose military defeat will bring a new day.

Inside the United States, many of the same politicians and pundits who stampeded the nation into Iraq are back again urging the application of even more violence. While George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers may be leading the herd, influential Democrats - like Hillary Clinton and Alan Dershowitz - are running with this pack, too.

But the ease with which these Middle East hawks tolerate the slaughter of Arabs in Lebanon - as well as in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories - has a flavor of racism that has poisoned U.S. policy as far as many Muslims are concerned and indeed has strengthened popular support for Islamic extremists on the Arab street.

On July 17, New York Sen. Clinton shared the stage in a pro-Israel rally with Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations who has espoused anti-Arab bigotry in the past and now proudly defends Israel's "disproportionate" violence against Lebanese civilians.

"Let us finish the job," Gillerman told the crowd. "We will excise the cancer in Lebanon" and "cut off the fingers" of Hezbollah. Responding to international concerns that Israel was using "disproportionate" force by bombing Lebanon and killing hundreds of civilians, Gillerman said, "You're damn right we are." [NYT, July 18, 2006]

In other public statements, Gillerman has been even more disdainful of Muslims. At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington on March 6, Gillerman virtually equated Muslims with terrorists.

"While it may be true - and probably is - that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim," Gillerman quipped to the delight of the AIPAC crowd. [Washington Post, March 7, 2006]

Despite Gillerman's professed uncertainty about whether "all Muslims are terrorists," this crass case of anti-Muslim bigotry didn't generate any noticeable protest. It would have been hard to imagine any other ethnic or religious group being subjected to a similar smear without provoking a noisy controversy.

Not only did U.S. officials and politicians - both Republican and Democrat - avoid criticizing Gillerman or almost anything else about AIPAC, they bowed to its legendary power to make or break American political leaders.

Clinton's Stance

Four months later, Sen. Clinton and other Democrats joined Gillerman at the New York rally to endorse Israel's devastating military attacks on Lebanon in response to a July 12 cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers in an effort to distract Israel from an offensive in Gaza and in support of a proposed prisoner exchange.

Clinton, who is considered a Democratic presidential frontrunner in 2008, pleased the crowd by denouncing Hezbollah and Palestinian militants in Hamas as "the new totalitarians of the 21st Century" who believe in neither human rights nor democracy. (As for the democracy part, Hamas won the last round of Palestinian elections and Hezbollah has become a political force in Lebanon, holding seats in parliament.)

Clinton was joined by two Democratic congressmen who also endorsed Israel's bombing raids on Lebanon.

"Since when should a response to aggression and murder be proportionate?" said Rep. Jerrold Nadler.

"President Bush has been wrong about a lot of things," said Rep. Anthony D. Weiner. "He's right about this."

Similarly, attorney Alan Dershowitz, a frequent TV commentator, posted at the liberal HuffingtonPost.com blog site that Israel's killing of large numbers of Lebanese civilians was justified by the need to take out Islamic radicals operating in civilian neighborhoods. He wrote:

"My argument is that by hiding behind their own civilians, the Islamic radicals issue a challenge to democracies: either violate your own morality by coming after us and inevitably killing some innocent civilians, or maintain your morality and leave us with a free hand to target your innocent civilians. This challenge presents democracies such as Israel with a lose-lose option and the terrorist with a win-win option."

In challenging HuffingtonPost readers to respond to his logic, Dershowitz appears oblivious to the racist element in his thinking, that killing large numbers of Muslim civilians to eliminate a few of Israel's enemies is justifiable. If the situation were reversed - armed Muslims slaying large numbers of Israeli civilians to get at a few Israeli leaders - Dershowitz would surely call the killings acts of terrorism or even genocide.

9/11 Logic

Osama bin-Laden justified the 9/11 attacks, which involved the murders of nearly 3,000 civilians, as a way to attack the military and financial centers of the United States, the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers.

Though terrorism is classically defined as violence against civilians to achieve a political goal, the concept has always carried with it the notion of proportionality. For instance, an assault against a genuine military target in wartime may cause civilian casualties - so-called "collateral damage" - but that is not usually considered terrorism.

If, however, civilian deaths are wildly disproportionate to the military target, the attack could constitute terrorism, say, the destruction of a residential high-rise or some other civilian building to kill a couple of enemy targets.

In that sense, one could argue that George W. Bush acted as a terrorist at the start of the Iraq War when he ordered U.S. military aircraft to blow up a residential restaurant in Baghdad based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein might be eating there.

Though Hussein wasn't present, 14 civilians, including seven children, died. One mother collapsed when her headless daughter was pulled from the wreckage.

Similarly, during the Israeli fight for independence, Zionist extremists, including later national leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were members of terrorist groups that attacked Palestinian civilians and British authorities. In one famous case, Jerusalem's King David Hotel, where British officials and other foreigners lived, was blown up.

But many Americans have come to regard terrorism as a strictly Muslim phenomenon. They hold that view despite well-known evidence to the contrary in large part because neoconservatives and other politically powerful forces drum this false idea into the heads of the U.S. population.

Cheney Speech

Take, for example, the speech that Vice President Dick Cheney gave to the same AIPAC conference at which Gillerman wondered whether or not "all Muslims are terrorists." Cheney substantively agreed that terrorism was almost exclusively a Muslim tactic - one that flourished because it didn't draw a sufficiently harsh U.S. response.

"Over the last several decades, Americans have seen how the terrorists pursue their objectives," Cheney said. "Simply stated, they would hit us, but we would not hit back hard enough.

"In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans, and afterward U.S. forces withdrew from Beirut. In 1993 we had the killing of American soldiers in Mogadishu, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Then came the attack on the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995; the killings at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and, of course, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000."

However, Cheney's one-sided recounting of history reflected an anti-Muslim bias on two levels. First, it ignored the long history of terrorism practiced around the world by people of nearly all religions and ethnic backgrounds.

In 1976, for instance, Chile's U.S.-backed dictatorship sponsored a terrorist bombing on the streets of Washington, killing Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt, yet then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush protected Chile's leaders from exposure and prosecution. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Even today, the current Bush administration is blocking attempts to bring another anti-communist terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, to justice over his alleged role in blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky, also in 1976 when George Bush Sr. was CIA director. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Family's Terrorism Test."]

Cheney's speech also ignored more recent acts of terrorism committed by non-Muslims. For instance, there was no reference in his speech to home-grown right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

For that matter, Cheney offered no self-criticism of the "shock and awe" violence that the Bush administration inflicted on Iraq, killing thousands of civilians in a war launched over false claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

For Vice President Cheney and Ambassador Gillerman, these examples don't seem to count, presumably because the perpetrators weren't Muslim.

Not Terrorism

A second point undermining Cheney's argument was that some of the cases he cited weren't acts of terrorism.

In the case of the 1983 bombing in Beirut, for instance, the attackers targeted the Marine barracks because the Reagan-Bush administration's mission creep had led U.S. forces to intervene militarily against some Muslim elements in the civil war then raging in Lebanon. Muslim villages were even shelled by a U.S. warship. So, while the killing of the Marines was horrible, it wasn't terrorism.

Similarly, the "Black Hawk Down" incident in the Somali city of Mogadishu wasn't an act of terrorism; it was a battle between U.S. Special Forces units and militia troops loyal to a local warlord. Indeed, the Somali militia was reacting to a surprise attack by the American troops, not vice versa.

What Cheney appeared to be saying was that anytime American troops are killed in a conflict whatever the factual circumstances, they are the victims of "terrorism" - with all that word's emotional and propagandistic value. Conversely, acts ordered by President Bush and U.S. allies can never be considered "terrorism" whatever the facts may suggest.

There has been a similar blurring of lines in regard to attacks by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. While some incidents, such as the destruction of mosques and the killing of civilians, do constitute terrorism, bombs directed at U.S. troops as they patrol Iraqi territory are military ambushes or sabotage, not terrorism.

While some Americans might want Iraqi insurgents who are responsible for killing U.S. troops to bear the opprobrium of the disgraced title of "terrorist," the selective application of the word - as favored by Cheney and Gillerman - carries its own danger.

Since U.S. policy forbids negotiations with "terrorists," peace talks with Iraqi insurgents would be barred. That, in turn, could lead to an indefinite war in Iraq and vastly more death and destruction on all sides.

That might serve the goals of some neoconservative ideologues - and ironically the interests of Osama bin-Laden - but it is almost certainly not in the interests of U.S. troops in Iraq - nor of the American people.

Further, when a loaded charge like "terrorism" is leveled against a specific ethnic or religious group - but not against others who have engaged in comparable practices - that kind of selective outrage is generally called bigotry or racism.

Those ugly tendencies have been part of many war fevers in the past. Now, as the Bush administration prepares the American people for even a wider war in the Middle East, this pernicious form of bigotry will surely play a big part again. [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Abyss Beckons."]

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Hardball in Lebanon

Lebanon is interesting to watch. Actually, it's the coverage and varying opinions about Lebanon that is most interesting to follow. Hopefully, thoughtful third parties will put themselves in each factions shoes while considering what's going on. Of course they do not. Everyone feeds on their personal biases and predjudices. If you're not a jew nor an arab/muslim your predjudices may have been formed by many influences such as subtly anti-semetic parents for example. But, for most third parties to a conflict like the jewish-muslim 80-year bargaining session, their influences come from the media.

Of course all people are aware that the media is loaded with their own predjudices. Sadly they may forget that knowledge when Fox News or the New York Times is informing them with spin. The media in America has always had an extreme bias toward Israel's success. That bias has more than one root. It mimicks the policy of the US and other Western governments since WWII. The UN did it overwhelmingly. Even Stalin voted in favor of creating Israel out of other people's cloth.

It was wrong headed and immoral. The Palestinans got mugged bigtime. Then the arab-world began to do insanely stupid things in reaction over-and-over for the next 60 years...and probably for the next 60 if Israel doesn't stress out and nuke them first. Why did the world mug the palestinians so easily? The answer can not be known. It is simple but certainly not simple. While the europeans in general abhored the german final solution they did not necessarily disagree in the result. Israel was the rest of the world's and international zionism's agreed-upon final solution. The bedouin were disorganized tribal rabble. The jews who would build the modern state of israel were mostly europeans first. Unlike the arab world, the zionists had learned the military lessons of WWII. Zionism had WWII surplus, and the House of Rothschild behind them. The Arab world had telegraphed to the jewish immigrants that when the international community left they would kill all the jews in revenge. That was the first post-war stupid emotional thing they did. Any thinking Israeli was going to beg borrow and steal to avoid being eliminated somemore by hateful people.

Until the 20th century, a more correct term would have been judeao-muslim tradition than judeo-christian. Jews were essential throughout the predominantly muslim countries. The Ottomans and the rest used the jews for access to things proscribed by islam. The jews were the money lenders in other words. When one finally owes the money lenders to much it's easier to kill the lender than to pay him. While your at it you might as well kill the money lender's whole community since they only became successful off my interest. People always have great reasons to hate their neighbors. Basic tribalism is everywhere.

The jews realized that the moment they fell behind the curve they would be massacreed once more. The threat is verbalized throughout the arab/mulism world daily. Millions have been raised to passionately hate israel until they die. Surrounded as they are, if israel misses a beat they're all dead. From an israeli piont-of-view hardball is the only game in town. When the hate intoxicated around you learn to play hardball, you must play ever harder ball...of course.

But watching the sides in the current Lebanese affair everyone's best and worst come out. The hyperbolic excuses both sides is in extreme mode. I have lived and travelled in muslim countries between Morrocco and Indonesia. I did not get into Saudi or the gulf states mostly because they were not on the way anywhere. Even Yemen was visited on the way to somewhere else. I only mention this to say that my views came from living with the people. I never went to Israel. One travels for the exotic. The intrusive ultra-militarized modern artificial neo-american outpost state of Israel was about as enticing to a young world-travelling athiest as Utah, the Vatican or the Rhineland. The passport stamp was also a death knell for a world traveler.

The israeli spin this time has been the usual victimhood. The world press buys it pretty much. The israeli publicity machine in israel and beyond is greased like the finest Swiss timepiece. Mulims were much less able and likely to bend their thing to please the western mind. The muslim spin doctors do everything wrong. The west which underwrote and guaranteed the success of the state of israel ("just go now, please") will not let it fail. The consequences in the market place are to ghastly to imagine. The state of israel struck something better than oil in the long run. They struck vaults...and Oak Ridge, TN.

When small problems arise with their ultra heavy handed tactics, the world-wide publicity machine goes into action with victim blather. When problems arise for the other semites, it's generally handled with horrendous publicity. The so-called civilized world still sees the arabs as rabble or rabble royalty. There as many muslims in america as jews. yet, in general, the arabs have never learned to play the success game as well. Getting american public opinion on the islamic side was admittedly an uphill battle. Blowing up planes at Dawson's Field, attacking the civillian world in Munich, suicide [read:dumb] bombers, and all the rest of the atrocities have lost all public sympathy. They lost the war for people's minds.

As for disproportionate force that's the rule of american police and the Powell Doctrine. The judges always give the max declaring they were making an example. That' what Israel's doing. "See what happens to you when you fuck with me?" There's no anger. What good would that do? There's an excuse to act so we'll take it thank you very much. They want everyone in Lebanon to be mad at the saintly Hizbolah. They was everyone in Palestine to hate the saintly Hamas.

Meanwhile the zionist elite drools over the west bank...east israel.

Another day of chaos.

When the Iron Curtain came down everyone was saying "peace at last." They talked of the "peace dividend" from not needing to have so much money everywhere going into weapons. Well - they were wrong. Instead of the Soviets we now have the Caliphate that wants to rule the world. It never ends and it will never end.