Supporters of Israel cannot hide their racism

Supporters of Israel's genocidal polices cannot hide their racism, even while trying to preach to the unconverted. Consider, for example, this story in FrontPage magazine, which touts Israel's many accomplishments:

OK. So I understand that you are ticked off at Israel, and in love with the Palestinians.

That's fine with me, as long as you have truly weighed up all the facts.

So, you want to boycott Israel?

I'll be sorry to miss you, but if you are doing it - do it properly.

Let me help you.

Make sure that you do not have tablets, drops, lotions, etc., made by Abic or Teva...

And so on. The list includes many achievements by Israeli companies, scientists and researchers. At the end of the piece, we learn that Israel is even making life better for the Palestinians -- which must surely come as news to those living behind the wall, forbidden to operate within the professional world.

The words that made me wince were these: "So I understand that you are...in love with the Palestinians."

That very wording was used by the Nazis to denigrate anyone who showed any sympathy for the untermenschen. If you're so much in love with the Jews, maybe you should share their fate...

Remember?

Remember how southerners used to deride civil rights activists as "nigger lovers"? Remember ugly taunts like "If you love the negroes so much, would you let your daughter marry one?"

Racists -- even when trying to act on their best behavior -- always speak in the same fashion.

The fact is, the accomplishments of Israeli scientists, research firms and scholars are as nothing compared to the accomplishments of Nazi scientists, research firms, and scholars. And yet, despite Germany's cultural accomplishments and corporate successes, a boycott of Hitler's evil regime was perfectly justified. So were the bombs dropped on that nation throughout the war.

The analogy between Hitler's Germany and modern Israel is not overdrawn; it is exact. Anyone with any sense knows that the rightist faction in Israel wants nothing less than physical removal and annihilation of the rightful inhabitants of that land. Because Israel has copied the crimes of Nazis -- has become the stereotypical abused child who evolves into an abuser -- that nation will one day suffer the same fate as the Third Reich. Such are the wages of genocide.

I do not support a boycott. I support eradication of the Jewish state -- of the very concept of a state devoted to the supremacy of one race or religion. For the same reason, I also support the eradication of Saudi Arabia. (I would except Vatican City only because it is one-third the size of the Los Angeles Zoo; its status as an independent state is really an agreed-upon fiction.)

I do not speak of physical annihilation of the people; I speak of annihilating a government and an ideology. Just as the Germans had, through their crimes, lost the right to self-determination (in my view, they should not have regained sovereignty until the passing of every single German alive during the Nazi era), so too have the Israelis. The civilized world must impose a solution upon them -- by force if necessary, though non-violent means are, of course, preferable.

A pluralist, open, non-racist society -- a single-state solution -- is the only option for that patch of real estate. If any Jews in Israel cannot stomach such an outcome, then I say let the bigots find a new home in the sea.

Standing up to evil

The video above shows a brave teenaged girl -- American, to judge from her accent -- risking her life to stop Israeli monsters from killing children. I do not know the origin of this video, and I do not know who the girl is. But her courage shames me.

I strongly urge you to watch this footage. This beautiful young woman should be more famous than the Chinese man who stood up to those tanks.

From the Guardian, we learn that the Israeli army in a Gaza suburb called Zeitoun evacuated more than 100 Palestinians -- mostly children -- to a single-story house "for their own safety." The army then fired rockets into the house.

The little girl in the photograph to your left is one of the victims.

There is no escape for these civilians. Any avenue of escape presented to them soon stands revealed as an evil Israeli ruse -- a massacre trap.

The UN said there had been extensive destruction in Zeitoun. For three days, from 3-7 January, the Israeli Defence Force prevented Red Cross medical teams from entering the area to evacuate the wounded.

I hope everyone will read these thoughts from a recently retired United States Marine who saw service in Iraq:

I am dismayed by the rhetoric from US politicians and pundits to the effect that "if the US were under rocket attack from Mexico or Canada, we would respond like the Israelis." This a gross insult to US servicemen; I can assure you that we would NOT respond like the Israelis. In fact, US armed forces and adjunct civilians are under attack constantly in Iraq and Afghanistan by people who are much better armed, much better trained and far deadlier than Hamas (I'll ignore for now that the politicians seem to be oblivious to this fact). Israel has indeed taken a small number of casualties from Hamas rocket fire (about 20 killed since 2001), but we have taken thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, including many civilian personnel. Hundreds of American casualties have occurred due to indirect fire, often from mortars. This is particularly true in or near the Green Zone in Baghdad. This fire often originates from densely populated urban areas.

Americans do not, I repeat DO NOT, respond to that fire indiscriminately. When I say "indiscriminately," I mean that even if we can precisely identify the source of the fire (which can be very difficult), we do not respond if we know we will cause civilian casualties. We always evaluate the threat to civilians before responding, and in an urban area the threat to civilians is extremely high. If US servicemen violate those rules of engagement and harm civilians, I assure you we do our best to investigate -- and mete out punishment if warranted. There are differing opinions on the conflict in Iraq, but I am proud of the conduct of our servicemen there.

With that in mind, I find the conduct of the Israeli army in Gaza to be brutal and dishonorable, and it is insulting that they and others claim that the US military would behave in the same way.

Obviously, we should disregard all Israeli claims that their soldiers are simply responding to fire. That excuse is nothing more than a "cover" for genocide.

The Israeli approach in Gaza strikes me as uncontrolled and vengeful. My objective analysis is that it has little tactical effectiveness; my opinion is that its main goal is to whip the entire Gaza population into submission. This is disturbingly similar to the Israelis' conduct in Lebanon in 2006, so I feel obliged to say that the Israeli military displays a concerted pattern of disregard for civilian lives.

The Israelis deliberately fired on a UN relief truck, halting relief efforts.

Clearly, the Israeli leadership has decided upon enacting "Final Solution" to the Palestinian problem.

A Vatican official has compared Gaza to a concentration camp:

“Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said in an interview published Wednesday in Il Sussidiaro.

He defended his comments in the center-left Italian daily La Repubblica on Thursday. While noting that Hamas rockets into Israel were “certainly not sugared almonds,” he called the situation in Gaza “horrific.” Israel sharply condemned the cardinal’s use of World War II imagery. “We are astounded that a spiritual dignitary would have such words that are so far removed from truth and dignity,” said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

But Martino used Holocaust imagery, not World War II imagery -- and this is precisely what causes synapses to fry within the minds of many Jews. Although they cannot admit the truth to themselves, they know full well that Israel is doing to the Palestinians as Hitler's Germany did to the Jews.

Hamas rocket attacks, though far fewer in number than Israeli-American propaganda would have us believe, were perfectly justified. Imagine how Americans would respond if they had to live under pre-attack circumstances, as documented by Oxfam:

Movement in and out of Gaza is all but impossible and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment, and basic healthcare can no longer be taken for granted. As a result of the blockade and collapse of the economy, there is little money to buy food and limited food to buy. Food prices are rising and wheat flour, baby milk, and rice, among other essential goods, are increasingly scarce. During the period of May-June 2007 alone, these commodity prices rose 34%, 30% and 20.5% respectively.

The blockade is destroying public service infrastructure in Gaza. The Israeli government prevents the repair and maintenance of the electricity and water service infrastructure in Gaza by prohibiting the import of spare parts. The impact of this is amplified by Israel’s parallel punitive restrictions on fuel and electricity to Gaza. Hospitals cannot generate electricity to keep lifesaving equipment working or to generate oxygen, while 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily.

In June 2007, there were 748 truckloads of exports leaving Gaza for Israel and other countries. A month later there were none.

Writers Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone have some sound advice, although the do not go nearly far enough:

Many people, especially on the left, persist in thinking that Israel is only a pawn in an American capitalist or imperialist strategy to control the Middle East. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel is of no use to anybody or anything but its own fantasies of domination.

For the pro-Western petro-monarchies and the "moderate" Arab regimes, Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands is a nightmare, which radicalizes much of their populations and threatens their rule. It is Israel, by its absurd policies, that provoked the creation of both Hezbollah and Hamas and that is indirectly responsible for much of the recent growth of "radical Islam".

Allow non-Jews to speak their mind about Israel

The notion of collective guilt was already very questionable in 1945, but the idea of transmitting that collective guilt to subsequent generations is quite simply a religious notion.

The fact that we are not all guilty of the crimes of the Third Reich is simple and obvious, but needs to be driven home to allow non-Jews to speak up freely about Palestine. As it is, non-Jews who often feel they must leave it to Jews, as the only people who have the "right" to criticize Israel, to defend the Palestinians. But given the relationship of forces between the Jewish critics of Israel, and the influential Zionist organizations claiming to speak for the Jewish people, there is no realistic hope that Jewish voices alone can save the Palestinians.

However, the main reason for the silence is surely not guilt precisely because it is so artificial, but rather fear. Fear of "what will they think", fear of slander and even of being taken to court for "anti-Semitism". If you are not convinced, take a journalist, a politician or a publisher to some spot where nobody is listening and there is no hidden camera or microphone, and ask whether he or she says in public all he or she thinks of Israel in private.

The practical initiatives are summed up in three letters : BDS- Boycott, disinvestment, sanctions

What is important about sanctions, especially on the cultural level, is their symbolic value. It is a way of telling our governments that we do not accept their policy of collaboration with a state that has chosen to become an international outlaw.

Juan Cole now seems to agree that the two-state solution is dead. I've long felt that way. Forgive a bit of self-quotation:

I support eradication of the Jewish state -- of the very concept of a state devoted to the supremacy of one race or religion. For the same reason, I also support the eradication of Saudi Arabia. (I would except Vatican City only because it is one-third the size of the Los Angeles Zoo; its status as an independent state is really an agreed-upon fiction.)

I do not speak of physical annihilation of the people; I speak of annihilating a government and an ideology. Just as the Germans had, through their crimes, lost the right to self-determination (in my view, they should not have regained sovereignty until the passing of every single German alive during the Nazi era), so too have the Israelis. The civilized world must impose a solution upon them -- by force if necessary, though non-violent means are, of course, preferable.

A pluralist, open, non-racist society -- a single-state solution -- is the only option for that patch of real estate. If any Jews in Israel cannot stomach such an outcome, then I say let the bigots find a new home in the sea.

The megaphonies return!

As we saw during Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon, the SLC (Shitty Little Country) has a software program called Megaphone which spams any blog critical of the latest atrocity committed against the Palestinians.

Side note: Some may claim that I ought to apologize for the acronym SLC ( derived from terminology used by the French ambassador to London). Why should I? I would not hesitate to call Saudi Arabia a Krappy Kingdom. For that matter, my own nation has often functioned as a Shitty Big Country, especially when it tolerated slavery and committed genocide against the Indians. Indeed, if you compare the eradication of the Indians to the current attempted eradication of the Palestinians, you will find one of the more exact parallels to be found in the chronicles of shittiness.

Back to the Megaphonies.

When last we encountered these clowns, they really did not have their act together. They were using young people with poor judgment and inferior writing skills to do the actual dirty work of blog-spamming. Usually, they resorted to one simple argument: Anyone who dares to criticize the SLC on any score must be a Jew-hater.

Ridiculous.

Of course, I go further. I do not merely question Israel's policies; I call for that cessation of that country's government, to be replaced by a multi-ethnic democracy (set up under UN auspices) in which every person has an equal vote, regardless or religion or background. In short, I do not believe that a "Jewish state" has a right to exist.

I also do not think that an Islamic state should exist -- there, or anywhere else.

Is it inherently anti-Semitic to argue that a Jewish state should not exist? Let's put the matter into perspective: I also do not believe that a separate nation for American blacks -- the demented dream of Louis Farrakhan -- has a right to exist. Most Americans, including our current President-elect, would agree with my stance. Are we all haters of black people?

When you get right down to it, the theoretical black utopia proposed by Farrakhan is just as absurd an idea as was the Jewish utopia proposed by Theodore Herzl. Alas, theory became reality in the latter instance, much to the dismay of that land's rightful inhabitants.

They are not bigots who insist that Farrakhan-land should never be. They are not bigots who insist that Herzl-land should never have been.

We are realists. We understand that sick, racist dreams of ethnic purity can never be the basis for a nation. Hitler taught us this lesson. Milosevic of Yugoslavia and the Hutus of Rwanda gave us refresher courses. Farrakahn's opponents are not bigots: Farrakhan is a bigot, because he wants to build a nation on the basis of race. Israel's opponents are not bigots: The Israelis are bigots, because they have tried to build a nation on the basis of race and religion.

I've digressed again, haven't I? Back, once more, to the megaphonies.

They are getting better at it. They are no longer leaving it to kids; now the SLC foreign ministry is running the show. See this piece for the latest:

A reader of my blog has received the following email which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a pro-Israel "media volunteer" also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments...

The foreign ministry shouldn't get a pass on this one. It may view such hasbara as maximising its efforts to "explain" Israel's position in the world media. I view it as a cynical attempt to flood the web and news media with favorable flackery in a vain attempt to tilt public opinion toward Israel.

Not to mention that this is such cheap pennyante stuff. What do they gain by this? How effective can it be and how many can be convinced? By the way, I've even noticed the hasbaraniks in my own blog. You can see them a mile away because they've never published a comment before yet write something like: "I've enjoyed your blog for a long time, but anyone with a brain in their head knows that Hamas is out to destroy Israel blah, blah blah." Pretty formulaic stuff. Also, you can Google a few phrases of the comment and if you find it appears elsewhere on the web you know you either have a hasbaranik or someone who has repetition compulsion.

Guys, we're onto you. Just stop it. You aren't fooling anyone.

Of racism and respect

This is not going to become a Norman Finkelstein blog. But I may pay more attention to his message, given the recent attempts to censor that message. He speaks here on the prospect for a new, worse war in Lebanon -- and on the more basic issue of self-respect.

Even if you think you are going to hate what you hear, you owe it to yourself to listen to this man.

On racism: A short while back, there was a brouhaha over a cartoon which indicated that the Israelis had begun to act like goosesteppers. Such a comparison, we heard, was indefensible.

Oh really...? This comes (originally) from the anti-fascist publication Searchlight:

The Preserving Western Civilization conference drew about 100 men and women from Canada, the UK, and the USA to a suit-and-tie affair at a hotel near the Baltimore-Washington International airport. The event was organised by 76 year-old Michael Hart, who received his PhD in astrophysics from Princeton and is known in white nationalist circles for his proposal for a racial partition of the United States. Hart is also Jewish, as were a significant percentage of the conference speakers and the attendees. These were “scientific racists”, seeking to root their anti-Islamic politics in genetics, rather than simply in culture.

This was an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism.

After the white nationalist American Renaissance began inviting a handful of Jewish racists, such as Michael Levin, to its conferences promoting old-fashioned genetic determinism, there has been an uneasy truce about “the Jewish question” in white nationalist intellectual circles.

Do you think that this unholy alliance can be consigned to the political fringe? Think again. Read what the estimable Chris Hedges (whose work we have praised in other contexts) has to say:

It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet.

The racist tirades of Jewish proto-fascists like Meir Kahane stood outside the law, were vigorously condemned by most Israelis and were prosecuted accordingly. Kahane’s repugnant Kach Party, labeled by the United States, Canada and the European Union as a terrorist organization, was outlawed by the Israeli government in 1988 for inciting racism.

Israel has changed. And the racist virus spread by Kahane, whose thugs were charged with the murders and beatings of dozens of unarmed Palestinians and whose members held rallies in Jerusalem where they chanted “Death to Arabs!” has returned to Israel in the figure of Israel’s powerful new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman openly calls for an araberrein Israel—an Israel free of Arabs.

There has been a steady decline from the days of the socialist Labor Party, which founded Israel in 1948 and held within its ranks many leaders, such as Yitzhak Rabin, who were serious about peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. The moral squalor of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Lieberman reflects the country’s degeneration. Labor, like Israel, is a shell of its old self.

Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer who was a member of the Kach Party, has the personal and political habits of the Islamic goons he opposes. He was found guilty in 2001 of beating a 12-year-old boy and fined by an Israeli court. He is being investigated for multimillion-dollar fraud and money laundering and is rumored to have close ties with the Russian mafia. He lives, in defiance of international law, in the Jewish settlement of Nokdim on occupied Palestinian land.

Lieberman, as did his mentor Kahane, calls for the eradication of Palestinians from Israel and the territories it occupies.

Lieberman, from the floor of the Knesset, openly fantasized three years ago about executing the handful of Palestinian Knesset members.

Palestinians have become, by Israeli design, impoverished, reduced to a level of bare subsistence and dependent on the United Nations for food assistance. They live ringed by Israeli troops in a series of pod-like ghettos in the West Bank and in Gaza, which is a massive, fetid open-air prison. And when these little Bantustans become restive, Israel swiftly turns off the delivery of basic food and supplies or uses F-16 fighter jets or heavy artillery to bomb the squalid concrete hovels.

The public embrace by a senior Israeli official of a policy of ethnic cleansing, however, is ominous. It signals a further evolution of the Israeli state from one that at least paid lip service to equality to one that increasingly resembles the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Racism, once practiced in private and condemned in public, has become to many Israelis acceptable.

How can Americans continue to support this nation of bloodthirsty bigots?

This is what is happening

It's happening slowly, but it is happening. Blinkered American opinion is shifting. With each atrocity committed by the bloodthirsty Israelis, more Americans lose their ability to rationalize the inexcusable.

I admire what Glenn Greenwald has written:

More to the point: for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life). No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth.

So extreme is their emotional identification with one side (Israel) that it literally never occurs to them to give any thought to any of that, to imagine what it's like to live in those circumstances.

The excuse for the current massacre of Palestinian civilians comes down to so-called "rocket attacks" on the border town of Sderot. Those attacks took 13 victims in eight years, and not one of the victims is recent. Adam Horowitz has been to Sderot:

But I was surprised to find that although the people of Sderot who I met wanted the missiles to end they understood that militarism would not protect them.

The people I met with were not calling for war, they were calling for negotiation.

Julia Chaitin, a senior lecturer at the Sapir Academic College near Sderot, has written these words:

And so this is an unnecessary, cruel and cynical war -- a war that could have been avoided if our leaders had shown courage during the months of the cease-fire to truly work toward creating better lives for people whose only crime is that they live in the south.

But I know the answer to our conflict will not come with this war. We will know peace only when we accept the fact that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have every right to lives of dignity. We will know peace only when we recognize that we must negotiate with Hamas, our enemy, even if we are devastated that the Palestinians did not elect a more moderate party to lead them. We will know peace only when our leaders stop considering our lives cheap and expendable, and help us create a beautiful, green Negev, free of fear and despair.

The current destruction of Gaza reminds me of the Ardeatine massacre of World War II. On March 23, 1944, Italian partisans in Rome launched an attack on a facist convoy, killing 28. Hitler ordered the reprisal killing of 50 Italian partisans for every dead fascist. The German security commander in Rome, Herbert Kappler, "downsized" this directive to a 10-to-1 ratio. As a result, 280 Italians (mostly civilians) were murdered in the Ardeatine caves, an atrocity which has lived in the annals of infamy.

Ten-to-one reprisal killings. During World War II. And people are still angry about it.

And now, in retaliation for 15 rocket attacks over the course of eight years, Israel has decided to massacre an entire civilian population. The proportions are much worse than 10-to-1, worse than Hitler's suggestion of 50-to-1.

And yet here in America, there are still people -- if we can use the term "people" to describe such pitiless brutes -- who would consider this "retaliation" against the Palestinians justified. Most of these brutes are not Jews but so-called Christian Zionists.

Consider the historical irony, as you compare Gaza to the Ardeatine massacre. Hitler was far kinder to the Italian partisans than Israel is to the Palestinians.

Too many Jews learned the wrong lesson from World War II. The victims of persecution came to equate strength with a willingness to persecute others. Like many other peoples in many other times and places, a large number of Jews were seduced into the false belief that the hardest heart beats longest.

But history teaches a very different lesson. Hitler's Germany did not last. The Third Reich was destroyed for its evil. Germany was divided like an earthworm. Yet it recovered. Who can deny that -- in the long run -- the best thing ever to happen to Germany was the eradication of its government and its (temporary) loss of national sovereignty at the end of World War II?

I'm afraid that it is far too late to realize Julia Chaitin's dream. I fear that the time for negotiation has passed.

Israel must be destroyed, just as Hitler's Germany was destroyed. All Jews throughout the world must forevermore rid themselves of the lunatic, racist dream of "Jewish state." Jews living in Israel will either agree to live in a single multi-ethnic democracy in which everyone ruled (directly or indirectly) by the government has an equal vote -- or they will die in their madness.

Drugs and Bananas and Colombia and Israel

At the beginning of Goldfinger, James Bond makes a crack about "heroin-flavored bananas." Turns out he was prescient. Marcy Wheeler, drawing our attention to a story that deserves widespread attention, opens with these priceless words:

Remember that banana scandal, where a high-powered Republican lawyer advised Chiquita to go on paying right wing terrorists even though it was a felony? Where said high-powered Republican lawyer alleged that Michael Chertoff--the guy now in charge of protecting our country--told him that he could go on funding terrorists so long as he also cooperated with Administration investigations of the terrorists? And where, just last week, DOJ said the high-powered Republican lawyer would not be charged?

Now, if I told you that there were weapons and cocaine involved, would you start looking for those acid washed jeans you put away a couple of decades ago and make an appointment for a Fawn Hall doo?

The terror group, in this case, is a right-wing paramilitary gang in Colombia called the AUC. As for Chiquita -- well, as most of you probably know, the company used to be called United Fruit, and they were pretty damned spooked up. Chiquita bananas are loaded with vitamin CIA.

From an article bearing the marvelous title "The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt":

According to the DEA, the quantity available in the United States has not dropped since the advent of the Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar eradication program. Colombian production actually went up during a period of intense spraying and military actions: the growers just moved to different parts of the country. Who is behind the trade? Although the FARC is involved deeply in the business, it is the right-wing AUC that worked closely with the cartels to organize the smuggling system.

FARC is a left-wing group which AUC has ruthlessly opposed, usually with the blessings of the Colombian government. The story goes on to describe drug shipments aboard boats owned by Chiquita:

The captain said, “Sometimes they put the drugs on the banana boats.” I was stunned. I had been under the impression that drug traffickers only used small fast boats to move cocaine from place to place, but this isn’t true. The freighters are difficult to search and blend into normal shipping traffic—because that is exactly what they are. They can also haul a ton at a time if the kilo bricks are well hidden.

More:

Lorenzo watched the AUC load drugs onto Chiquita boats; he knew about it because he was there when it happened. “Look, there were drugs, and there were times that they sent drugs for weapons. They sent the kilos of drugs, and from out there, those duros said we are going to send this many kilos of drugs and I need this many rifles,” Lorenzo said.

These two paragraphs reward close study:

In 1997, shortly after the AUC arrived in Urabá, it began to consolidate power through a series of massacres and assassinations intended to drive out the FARC, which had organized in the banana fields. Swept up in the paramilitary net were civilians who had no connection to any armed groups. A large number of villagers and workers were summarily executed after being tortured or fingered as sympathetic to the FARC. Many of the killings took place around river towns. AUC gunmen would arrive, assemble the villagers in a central place and begin to interrogate them. Often, they were killed regardless of their answers. Establishing guilt in this system is just a pretext for widespread murder. It was a tremendous success. Eventually, the AUC controlled the entire banana-growing region of Urabá, any leftist agitators were in hiding, and the AUC had access to the Chiquita port. They controlled it, but the commanders were still engaged in a brutal fight for control of the banana and coca fields. They faced a serious logistics problem. The paramilitary group was winning, but it badly needed war material to expand its influence.

On November 5, 2001, four years after the AUC arrived in Urabá, a mysterious shipment of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition arrived at the Chiquita docks, a lethal cargo that went directly to the AUC commanders. Aside from an Organization of American States (OAS) report that focused on the two Israeli arms dealers who arranged the deal from Guatemala and Panama, there have been few details to emerge about how the weapons were handled on the Colombian side. It is also true that people directly associated with the shipment have had a tendency to disappear.

In a previous piece, I discussed the Israeli connection to AUC.

Colombian intelligence agents arrested Yar Klein, a former Israeli Army Colonel, in 2000, when he tried to deliver a massive number of guns to the terrorists. He was convicted of similar charges by an Israeli court in 1991, and had to pay a nearly inconsequential fine.

Obviously, Klein operated at the behest of the Israeli power structure, which protected itself by draping Klein in a thin veil of plausible deniability. From an excellent piece by Jeremy Bigwood:

According to a 1989 Colombian Secret Police intelligence report, apart from training Carlos Castao in 1983, Israeli trainers arrived in Colombia in 1987 to train him and other paramilitaries who would later make up the AUC.

Fifty of the paramilitaries' "best" students were then sent on scholarships to Israel for further training according to a Colombian police intelligence report, and the AUC became the most prominent paramilitary force in the hemisphere, with some 10,000-12,000 men in arms.

The Colombian AUC paramilitaries are always in need of arms, and it should come as no surprise that some of their major suppliers are Israeli. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the right-wing paramilitaries in South America attracted many out-and-out Nazis, some from Europe. And yet we have ample documentation of Israeli cooperation with these fascists.

Why? What brought the Israelis to that remote locale? What lured them into a partnership with the kind of people most Jews would consider blood enemies?

Drugs and guns.

That's how a pariah nation stays financially afloat.

"And now a word from our false sponsor..."

Some of Xymphora's stuff has been a bit over-the-top lately. But his latest conspiracy theory, drawn from this story by Ramzy Baroud, makes sense to me. Is the group which kidnapped two Fox journalists in Gaza a real organization, or is it a "pseudo-gang" (as dear old Lt. Kitson used to put it)?

Baroud:

The Palestinian group has no clear record and no apparent affiliation with any other known Palestinian faction. They laid out impossible demands and employed Islamic rhetoric. Both journalists were forced to convert to Islam, in a very disturbing, yet amateurish act. Any Islamic interpretation, no matter how fundamental, forbids such practice. Qoranic verses in this regard are indisputable.

Did the Holy Jihad Brigades -- a dodgy name by any Palestinian standards -- know that forcing a person to recite that "There is No God but Allah" does not qualify them as Muslim?

The forced conversions play into a meme that receives strong circulation in fundamentalist Christian circles here in the states. Simple-minded buffoons that they are, our evangelical good-ol-boy brethren believe that the jihadists' goal is not dynasty change in Saudi Arabia, not the elimination of Israel, not the eradication of American influence in the Middle East, not even the re-establishment of the Caliphate. No, it's not about anything going on over there-- it's really all about us.

Many of our Christian friends actually believe that what Osama and the Palestinians and any other Muslims who don't like us really, really, really want to do is to march into our land, raid our churches, and force all Christians to convert to Islam.

This delusion has always had one problem: No evidence has ever backed it. Osama has never talked about such a thing. Neither has any Palestinian. Neither has anyone in Hezbollah. Neither, so far as I know, has any Arab of any stripe.

Now look at what has happened. Isn't that con-veeeeeenient?