Israel's Isolation – and America's

It was asinine to start with 'A half blind and deaf paraplegic being wheeled out of a mosque after prayers, '. His physical condition in no way limits his ability to lead, and leaving a mosque certainly does nothing to reduce his tendency to murder civilians.

Some good points are raised in the article, but he never addresses the issue of whether yassin deserved a death sentence. Will he criticize the US if it's determined that one of our bombs took/takes out osama instead of arresting him?

 

When acts of violence cross international borders and exceed the prosecution power of legal systems, the perpatrators become enemy combatants and lose any rights to due process. Even the accords of the Geneva Convention apply to the recognized military
forces of organized governments.

Welcome to the new melennium.

 

Excellent point. I'm not fond of the way he uses his physical handicaps to envoke anger against the Israelis, who had endured enough of Yassin's excesses in regards to being a terrorist ringleader. The blood of many innocents is on his hands and he died a richly deserved death. Hopefully he is burning in everlasting torment with the likes of Hitler, Mengele, Saddam's sons and others who committed vicious atrocities.

 

Gee, I would have thought that a forceful plea for a more internationally cooperative foreign policy from a right-wing hero and a well known xenophobe would have jarred you from your reverie enough to help you actually see the point of the article, but I would have been sadly mistaken.

 

Documentation please.

 

Umm, are you serious? If so, poke around here for a start:

http://www.theamericancause.org/

and here

http://www.buchanan.org/000-v-correspondence.html

I mean, I could go on and on and on, but I'll go out on a limb and assume you know how to google.

 

Humor?

Well, of course web sites that Pat has a hand in will proclaim his glory.

I was interested in reading from sources a bit more neutral/objective than the ones you used........like this:
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<a HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan">Pat Buchanan (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)</a>

<i>......

Buchanan's Politics
Although considered to be a staunch right-wing conservative, Buchanan believes the Republicans have largely abandoned their conservative principles, and are instead embracing bland, inoffensive positions on most of the major issues. <b>Many of his positions are in line with conservative U.S. Republicans of the first half of the 20th century, but have become uncommon in the Republican mainstream in recent generations. </b>
Buchanan is an open isolationist, is in favor of severely restricting immigration into the United States, and of repealing NAFTA and raising tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industry. He is also a harsh critic of American foreign policy and believes that most of America's international actions starting with World War 2 have been unjustified, being largely motivated by imperialist desires. Buchanan's belief that the German Nazi regime was not a threat to American interests or national safety have made some of his critics accuse him of being an apologist for the fascist state. However, Buchanan has at the same time said that the Holocaust was barbaric and a tragedy; he believes that the Nazi regime in Germany and the Soviet regime in Russia would have in time annihilated each other, and thus America's contribution was not necessary, and may have in fact even been counter-productive.
<b>
Because of the way his views differ from those of "mainstream" conservatives, Buchanan is often described as a paleoconservative, referring to himself as a "traditional conservative". </b></i>
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........and this

<a HREF="http://www.infoplease.com/spot/patbuchanan1.html">Pat Buchanan: Rabble rouser for the Reform party (Campaign 2000)</a>


<i>Since he was a young boy, Pat Buchanan has been something of a rabble rouser, both physically and verbally. His combativeness and moral righteousness were ingrained in him by his autocratic father, William Buchanan, an accountant, who preached to his nine children the importance of faith, family, allegiance, and self defense. The elder Buchanan was a nativist and passionate anti-Communist who idolized Sen. Joseph McCarthy and taught his sons to fistfight.

Pat Buchanan inherited several of his father's controversial views. Many of those are outlined in his new foreign-policy book, A Republic, Not an Empire, in which he says Nazi Germany posed "no physical threat to the United States after 1940" and that because Hitler's aim was to move east, into Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, the United States should have let him complete his mission because the areas were not significant to the U.S. A vehement isolationist, Buchanan's book also lashes out against intervention in areas such as Kosovo: "We have no vital interest in that blood-soaked peninsula."

He has also been widely accused of being anti-Semitic and racist. In his book, he rails against Jewish influence in foreign policy and the influx of immigrants. "No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic alteration and survived," he said. Fellow conservative William Buckley labeled him an anti-Semite after he criticized President Bush for U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War.


"There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States," Buchanan said.

Party Reformer?

<b>
When Buchanan hinted that he may bolt from the Republican Party and seek the presidential nomination as a Reform candidate, presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said, "It is evident to me by Pat Buchanan's own rhetoric that he has left the Republican Party."</b></i>
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and finally:

<a HREF="http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/09/26/buchanan.GOP/">
Pat Buchanan insists controversial book not pro-Hitler</a>

<i>


Pat Buchanan insists controversial book not pro-Hitler
GOP chorus bidding Buchanan adios continues to grow

September 26, 1999
Web posted at: 7:23 p.m. EDT (2323 GMT)



WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, September 26) -- Presidential contender Pat Buchanan continued to defend his controversial new book Sunday against charges that it shows him to be sympathetic to Adolph Hitler during World War II.

"We had every right, and we were more than right ... just and moral to smash (Germany and Japan)," Buchanan said on CNN's "Late Edition." "It was a noble cause. There's nothing in that book that says otherwise."
<b>
But the chorus of prominent Republicans who believe their party will be better off if Buchanan jumps to the Reform Party continued to rise Sunday, with a key Senate Republican saying the conservative commentator should simply be ignored.

"I think that we're paying much too much attention to Pat Buchanan," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania on "Fox News Sunday." "I think if we ignored Pat Buchanan and didn't give him the tremendous national exposure, it would be in the interest of everyone."

And Bill Bennett, a Republican activist who served as education secretary and drug czar during the Reagan and Bush administrations, said he would advise the GOP front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to more explicitly distance himself from Buchanan's views. </b>

"I think what (Bush) should say is, 'Look, we welcome his followers, but this is a party that has views. We do not believe that America should stand by while some totalitarian regime slaughters millions or hundreds of millions of people. We do not believe that we should have restrictions on trade that will finally hurt America,'" Bennett said on CBS's "Face The Nation." .............

Buchanan: U.S. repeating mistakes of 1940s

In his book, "A Republic, Not an Empire," Buchanan maintains that Germany was not a military threat to the United States after 1940. He also wrote that guarantees by Western governments to defend Poland helped start World War II.

Buchanan said the book, which has ignited a fierce controversy, was meant to be "boring, scholarly work on foreign policy" to sound the alarm about the possible consequences of U.S. intervention around the world. He said the perception that he is soft on Hitler "is rooted in malice and ignorance and not in a single line in that book."

"What I say was a horrendous mistake was Neville Chamberlain's policy of handing war guarantees to Poland he had no intention of keeping. That led directly to the Hitler-Stalin pact, to the annihilation of Poland, the overrunning of Western Europe, the death of the British Empire," Buchanan said on "Fox News Sunday."

"Now, the reason I wrote that is we are making those war guarantees right now to Poland," he said. "Here is a defeated, divided, demoralized ... Russia sitting there, and we are pushing them with our NATO expansion right into the arms of China, which bears tremendous resentment toward the West and the United States."

On "Late Edition," Buchanan said the Washington establishment believes "in going around the world searching for monsters to destroy, involving ourselves in all these places, and the war in Kosovo is a particular example. I thought it was an unconstitutional, undeclared war."

"The Republican Party at the national level ... is simply beholden to the transnational corporations and the globalists and all the folks here who will move into foreign policy, and they will get us into more wars than Clinton did," he said.
<b>
Several of his rivals for the GOP nomination, including Sen. John McCain, Elizabeth Dole and Steve Forbes, have been critical of Buchanan's interpretation of history. McCain went the furthest, saying Republicans should welcome Buchanan's departure from the party. </b>

But Bush has said he hopes Buchanan stays in the GOP fold, rather than siphoning off conservative votes. Asked about Bush's comments during his Fox interview, Buchanan said, "I thought it was gracious, and I thought it was smart."</i>

<hr color=red>

Pat has his <i>niche</i> in right-wing politics.......but he doesn't seem to be the hero of the right as you suggested earlier.

 

A hero in his own mind, maybe. i don't think using his own sites as 'documented proof' of his credibility with anyone is particularly convincing

Pat is a crack-pot. No more a right wing hero than the Rev AL Sharpton is a reasoned and balanced voice from the left. (and by comparing the two, i've been tremendously unjust to the Rev Al!) The anti semitism allegations against him a while back also detract a wee bit on his objectivity regarding Israel. Plus he's an extreme isolationalist to boot.

The point of this article was: "this is pat. i've lost all relevance -- assuming i ever had any. hear me roar.'

WHile he may be quite right about Sharon's martyr making, there are certainly more credible people making this observation.

EDIT -- for a the unabridged and better referenced version of this post, read Mango's above. Him much faster researcher and typer than me.

PS -- Sharon's still an assclown.

 

Look, he's plainly a wacko, but he does, as you say, Mango, have niche support. I'd charactarize that support as strong if limited.

My initial point was to celebrate the irony of an extreme isolationist championing a foreign policy with respect to the middle east so heavily reliant on and even predicated upon allied support. And, of course, to make fun of BS, which I can never seem to resist the opportunity to do, god help me.

 

I can live with that <i>portrait</i> of him. The right-wing <i>hero</i> was too far a reach.

 

I guess i just didn't see him championing any foreign policy. While he may be critical of the iraq war, i suspect his rational has more to do with being an isolationist (and being unable to resist yammering on current events). Somehow i doubt he would applaud a coalition with the French, Germans and the rest of Europe.

That part, i fully understand, and encourage

 

There are certainly some who drop the label at any israeli critisism. There are others for whom the charge is appropriate.

 

Buchanan isn't particularly anti-semetic. He simply wouldn't lift a finger to save any dying man unless they were white, middle-class, protestant, english speaking and American. He simply distains that which is not like him. It's not so much like the pure hate that nazi groups spout, but more akin to the kind of blank-stare apathy look that Ashcroft gets when someone tries to question him about the Patriot act and constitutional freedom.

Regardless of what you think of Sharon (& I think he's a monster - see Sharon, the USS Liberty, and massacres in Egypt), I think people who view Israel ( http://resistance.jeeran.com/index.htm ) with such disdain should visit the following (unpleasant) anti-Isreal website, and contemplate what it would do to your mindset if you were subjected to this sort of crap for 50 years. This stuff is not new, it was the same stuff that the Syrians, Egyptians, and Transjordanians were spouting when they invaded in 1948.

 

I grant you that the mind's image of Buchanan in blue tights and a cape is unsettling at best.

So do I. His piece, which to me reads like an oblique swipe at Israel, seemed to urge better alliances with neighboring, middle eastern countries. He claims to be concerned that the region's current, fierce animosity towards all things US creates a difficult and perhaps impossible climate in which to advance our objectives, whatever they may be. I certainly fear that alienating the region so totally will result in very damaging long-term consequences.

 

Now was that really necessary???

 

glynch here's an interesting article from the Asia Times. No idea of its veracity.


Iraq was invaded 'to protect Israel' - US official
By Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON - Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States, but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.

Inter Press Service uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001 - the 9/11 commission - in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch US ally in the Middle East.

Zelikow's casting of the attack on Iraq as one launched to protect Israel appears at odds with the public position of US President George W Bush and his administration, which has never overtly drawn the link between its war on the regime of Saddam and its concern for Israel's security.

The administration has instead insisted it launched the war to liberate the Iraqi people, destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to protect the United States.

Zelikow made his statements about "the unstated threat" during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president. He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.

"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 - it's the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of September 11 and the future of the war on al-Qaeda.

"And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," said Zelikow.

The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 US troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.

The administration, which is surrounded by staunch pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawks, is currently fighting an extensive campaign to ward off accusations that it derailed the "war on terrorism" it launched after September 11 by taking a detour to Iraq, which appears to have posed no direct threat to the US.

Israel is Washington's biggest ally in the Middle East, receiving annual direct aid of US$3-4 billion.

Even though members of the 16-person PFIAB come from outside government, they enjoy the confidence of the president and have access to all information related to foreign intelligence that they need to play their vital advisory role. Known in intelligence circles as "Piffy-ab", the board is supposed to evaluate the nation's intelligence agencies and probe any mistakes they make. The unpaid appointees on the board require a security clearance known as "code word" that is higher than top secret.

The national security adviser to former president George H W Bush (1989-93) Brent Scowcroft, currently chairs the board in its work overseeing a number of intelligence bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the various military intelligence groups and the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office.

Neither Scowcroft nor Zelikow returned numerous phone calls and e-mail messages from IPS for this story.

Zelikow has long-established ties to the Bush administration. Before his appointment to PFIAB in October 2001, he was part of the current president's transition team in January 2001. In that capacity, Zelikow drafted a memo for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on reorganizing and restructuring the National Security Council (NSC) and prioritizing its work.

Richard A Clarke, who was counter-terrorism coordinator for Bush's predecessor president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) also worked for Bush senior, and has recently accused the current administration of not heeding his terrorism warnings. Clarke said that Zelikow was among those he briefed about the urgent threat from al-Qaeda in December 2000.

Rice herself had served in the NSC during the first Bush administration, and subsequently teamed up with Zelikow on a 1995 book about the unification of Germany.

Zelikow had ties with another senior Bush administration official - Robert Zoellick, the current trade representative. The two wrote three books together, including one in 1998 on the United States and the Muslim Middle East.

Aside from his position on the 9/11 commission, Zelikow is now also director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His close ties to the administration prompted accusations of a conflict of interest in 2002 from families of victims of the September attacks, who protested his appointment to the investigative body.

In his university speech, Zelikow, who strongly backed attacking the Iraqi dictator, also explained the threat to Israel by arguing that Baghdad was preparing in 1990-91 to spend huge amounts of "scarce hard currency" to harness "communications against electromagnetic pulse", a side-effect of a nuclear explosion that could sever radio, electronic and electrical communications.

That was "a perfectly absurd expenditure unless you were going to ride out a nuclear exchange - they [Iraqi officials] were not preparing to ride out a nuclear exchange with us. Those were preparations to ride out a nuclear exchange with the Israelis," according to Zelikow.
He also suggested that the danger of biological weapons falling into the hands of the anti-Israeli Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym Hamas, would threaten Israel rather than the US, and that those weapons could have been developed to the point where they could deter Washington from attacking Hamas.

"Play out those scenarios," he told his audience, "and I will tell you, people have thought about that, but they are just not talking very much about it".

"Don't look at the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but then ask yourself the question, 'gee, is Iraq tied to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the people who are carrying out suicide bombings in Israel?' Easy question to answer; the evidence is abundant."

To date, the possibility of the US attacking Iraq to protect Israel has been only timidly raised by some intellectuals and writers, with few public acknowledgements from sources close to the administration. Analysts who reviewed Zelikow's statements said that they are concrete evidence of one factor in the rationale for going to war, which has been hushed up.

"Those of us speaking about it sort of routinely referred to the protection of Israel as a component," said Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies. "But this is a very good piece of evidence of that."

Others say that the administration should be blamed for not making known to the public its true intentions and real motives for invading Iraq. "They [the administration] made a decision to invade Iraq, and then started to search for a policy to justify it. It was a decision in search of a policy and because of the odd way they went about it, people are trying to read something into it," said Nathan Brown, professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on the Middle East.

But he downplayed the Israel link. "In terms of securing Israel, it doesn't make sense to me because the Israelis are probably more concerned about Iran than they were about Iraq in terms of the long-term strategic threat," he said.

Still, Brown says that Zelikow's words carried weight. "Certainly his position would allow him to speak with a little bit more expertise about the thinking of the Bush administration, but it doesn't strike me that he is any more authoritative than [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, or Rice or [Secretary of State Colin] Powell or anybody else. All of them were sort of fishing about for justification for a decision that has already been made," Brown said.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FC31Aa01.html

 

Israel has no interest in peace with the Palestinians. The political system is setup in such a way that a small minority of right wing religious nuts that are only interested in more settlements in Palestinian occupied territories can keep their pet projects alive and growing. The only punishment they get for adding settlements is the occasional suicide bomber or stern word from the US.

 

anyone notice the resemblance?
Yassin Saruman