Bubblehammerblog

Palestinians and other oppressed peoples should not waste their time with expectations that the coming inauguration of Barack Obama will signal any real change in US foreign policy. His VP Joe Biden is a self confessed Zionist, his choice of the barefaced opportunist Hillary Clinton indicates broad continuity with Cheney/Bush policies for the Middle East, and one of his most significant staff appointees, Rahm Emanuel, is in fact a former member of the terrorist Israeli Defense Forces.

Obama is a fully integrated member of the craven US political establishment. His skin colour is of negligible significance. Before the election the Republican Party approached Colin Powell to run for the presidency, he refused. Had he accepted, the ambition crazed Condoleeza Rice would have needed no persuasion to become his running mate. This ticket might well have carried the election. The US Empire would then have been headed by two people of colour.

The recent US Congress resolution in support of Israeli aggression in Gaza was almost unanimously carried. I knew the names of the two who voted against before it was announced - Ron Paul, and the excellent Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is an honorable and principled defender of the US Constitution. Dennis Kucinich was the most prominent supporter of moves to impeach Cheney/Bush over the Iraq war.

Why this overwhelming consensus on a policy issue inside the US political establishment, a phenomena surely unique outside total dictatorships, like Saddam Hussein's? The main answer has to be the hugely influential and massively funded Israeli lobbying apparatus. When yesterday Ehud Olmert bragged that he'd 'phoned Bush, had him dragged from the podium in the middle of a speech, and instructed him to tell Condoleeza Rice how to vote at the UN, I, for one, believed him, despite the flurry of face-saving American denials. The truth is that without the nod from AIPAC, Obama could not have won the election.

Because of the might of the Zionist lobby, the US media continues to present its audience with a discontinuous, ahistorical narrative about the Zionist and Palestinian conflict. This is a depressing feature of American public political discourse in general, but on this issue it's particularly blatant. An illiterate Punjabi peasant could retell the story of Palestinian dispossession and oppression at the hands of the Zionists more accurately than many educated Americans.

At times I've switched from the unbearable and heartbreaking scenes of dead and injured Gaza children shown on Al Jazeera to CNN. Of course, the major concern expressed there is the Hamas rockets fired from 'refugee camps' into Southern Israel. Not once have I seen it explained to CNN viewers why it is that Palestinians are living in refugee camps, and where exactly they originally came from. Not unexpectedly, Americans are not allowed by their government to receive Al Jazeera, the only TV network with correspondents inside Gaza.

As most of the World knows, the State of Israel could not have been brought into being and sustained had its creation not served the strategic interests of the West, Britain and the US in particular. There was also the question of salving the bad conscience of the West over its inaction, and in some cases complicity, over the mass murder of European Jews. The Palestinians continue to pay the price for this. I know it's a fading dream, but one once shared by many Palestinians and non-Zionist Jews, but might there still be a solution to this tragedy through a democratic and independent Palestine for Jews and Arabs alike? The dying 'One State Solution', with 'Do Not Resuscitate' above it's bed.

I've heard it said that one reason for America's sympathy for Zionism is that they too are a settler nation, built on the expropriation and extermination of the original inhabitants of its land. Perhaps the Palestinians will eventually share the fate of the Native Americans. Many will simply fade away, while others live on reservations, and eventually succumb to alcoholism and drug addiction, and the luckier ones might thrive as tourist attractions or casino operators.
...

Watching the war criminal Tony Blair yesterday receiving his medal from George Bush for contributions to global 'peace and democracy', I could only be reminded of Tom Lehrer's remark that 'satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'.

|