How to alienate your allies

Now, almost all of you will have heard about the disgusting comments by Greg Gutfeld on a red-eye show on Fox Neighborhood Crap-hole News Network concerning Canada's military in Afghanistan. Several days earlier, Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie - Chief of Land Command Staff - commented that our military will need "a year of recovery" following our 2011 withdrawal from the region. Here, word for word, is Gutfeld's response:

"Meaning, the Canadian military wants to take a breather to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white Capri pants, and get their manicures and pedicures...I didn't even know they were in the war, I thought that's where you go if you don't want to fight, Go chill in Canada...we should take this opportunity to invade them"

Now, in order:

1: Yes, we have nice landscapes - far better than the ones you gutted under the Bush administration with your colossal strip-mining and land-raping projects. Yes, Capri pants are gorgeous - they fit well, and manicures and pedicures never hurt anyone.

2: Yes, we are at war. In fact, the only reason we have a large-scale troop commitment in the bloodbath called Kandahar is because you, the Excited States, are too busy slaughtering people in the war-crime you call "The Iraq War". Yes, 60,000 draft-dodgers came here during the Vietnam War, which we chose to pass on (despite what Ann Coulter may say). Dozens of deserters from the current imperialist-project (which we also - wisely - chose to sit out) are now trying to seek asylum in Canada. In fact, they're seeking that asylum because their conscience would not allow them to continue to participate in what they were doing - and if they remain in America they will be arrested and jailed; not because they committed atrocious war-crimes and violated almost every article of the Geneva convention not mentioning nuclear and chemical war, but because they refused to go back and keep participating in the slaughter!

The sheer fact that America has any allies left astounds me. This is precisely what Obama and Kucinich and Ron Paul talked about throughout the Primaries, that pissing off your allies doesn't further your cause. France - who supplied 95% of the ammunition and 30% of the troops in 1776 - refused to join in the Iraq lie, and was attacked virulently. Turns out (drum roll please).....they were right about it! There were no nuclear weapons, the chemical weapons had long-since been dismantled and/or removed from the country, and ditto on the biological weapons. Canada sent in 2,800 troops into the most dangerous area of Afghanistan, and has lost 116 soldiers as a result while YOU - the US and A - plunged another country into civil war and sold off its infrastructure to Houston and San-Francisco! Have you never heard of the phrase "the most important criticism comes from your friends"? So while I may criticize the United States' foreign policy, their corporate-controlled media, their self-destructive lifestyle, their horrific apathy and ignorance (i'm not sure which is worse), I do it all in the hope that they will wake up soon and realize that the world is slipping out of their hands.

If they don't, they will wake up to a different reality; one where all of their allies have long since left them, where their friends have been alienated, where they are utterly and completely alone in the world - against a world that hates them. Looking at the arguments of Chavez, Morales and Castro - and then looking at the latest idiocy to spew out of Fox News, I can't say as I blame them.

The Ultimate Misnomer

Unless you've lived with your head buried in the sand for the last eight years, you've probably heard the phrase "The War on Terror". What I'm going to attempt to do in this post is deconstruct the myth surrounding the term, showing how 1) The War on Terror is unwinnable and 2) Why it's really not a War on Terror.

Starting with the first goal: Terror is an idea. How do you fight an idea? Hasn't the Pentagon ever read any history? The first thing you learn very quickly is that you can destroy the person representing an idea, the faction that expresses it, but you cannot destroy the idea, no matter how hard you try and for how long. Take, for example, the idea of greed. In our 40,000 year history, we have yet to defeat that idea/emotion, and it looks to be quite some time before we ever do. If this really is a war on terror, then it is incapable of being won. Even if they manage to kill Bin Laden, vaporize all of Al Quaeda's leaders, kill every last insurgent and liberation fighter in Iraq, destroy the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, and permanently establish a powerful counterterrorist unit, terror would still exist. With the exception of the first two, I hope none of them ever occur. That said, it is quite clear that the war on terror, if believed to still be winnable, will be going on for a very, very long time.

Yet, maybe that's what the war's planners wanted when they started it. Wars have this way with big business. The CEOs of massive corporations tend to reap massive benefits from the suffering of the world every time a war comes around. Since the beginning of the WOT, the profit margins of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Grumman, General Electric, Halliburton, and various other neocon-run murderers have done nothing but go up, despite the economic recession we now find ourselves in. The truth is, wars are always orchestrated by the powerful and wealthy, without failure, and those wars are always about wealth and power, without fail. To suggest that there is such thing as a "war started with a just cause" is both a fallacy and an absurdity.

With that in mind, let us move onto the second myth. Many will claim that the War on Terror is working, that we are bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East. Really? Freedom? Democracy? Peace? Tell that to Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji, who lost his mother, two brothers, both his parents, his wife and his six children when a "precision strike" hit his house during the firebombing of Baghdad. When reporters found the gruesome scene, his only comment was "God take our revenge on America" as he struggled to find the bodies of his loved ones. Is that freedom? Is that democracy? For having lost everyone he ever cared for, he shows remarkable restraint. Had that been me, I would have been the first one fighting back against the invader, ensuring that the bastards paid for what they'd done. Or howabout the mother who watched as the severed torso, then the head, of her daughter were pulled from a smoldering crater where four smart bombs had hit a restaurant were Saddam Hussein might have been. It ended up destroying three homes, killing fourteen people. A Research Group in London announched that anywhere from 6,806 to 7,797 Iraqi civilians died during the "precision-bombing" of Baghdad. Is that freedom? Is that democracy? We could also look at the War in Afghanistan, where our so-called noble efforts have resulted in the deaths of 30,000 civilians. Is that freedom?

This is not a war on terror. It is a war of terror.

Thoughts on Israeli Apartheid Week

As we come to the end of what has been deemed "Israeli Apartheid Week" in Canadian and American Post-Secondary Institutions, I feel the urge to comment on the last week's banter back and forth about the ideas behind the organization.

I want to start by sending a very simple request to Bernie Farber and the other members of the Executive Board of the Canadian Jewish Congress: Grow up. For the last three months, each and every one, without fail, has demonstrated some of the most pathetic scare-tactics I have ever seen. Every single time a peep about Israel was mentioned by anyone, be it Mr. Ryan of the CUPE, Dr. Norman Finkelstein (whom I actually heard at a lecture in Calgary a month and a bit ago), Noam Chomsky, the Canadian Arab Federation, or the Palestinian-Canadian Students Society, Farber and Co. immediately began the press campaign of screaming out "antisemitism! antisemitism! Any criticism of Israel turns you into a racist bigot who wants the holocaust to restart!" and various other statements to that effect. Where are we living? Germany in the 30's?

Believe it or not, there are some people in the world, and when I say some I mean 95% of the nations in the UN General Assembly, who do not support Israel's actions towards Gaza and the West Bank. Believe it or not, this disagreement does not make us inherently antisemitic. Yes, there is some antisemitism within the movement against Israeli colonialism. But, anyone who notes this also has to realize that the same is true of the neozionist side of the debate. Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the ultranationalist "Yisrael Beiteinu", has called for the execution or deportation of Arab MKs within Israel's government. His supporters at massive rallies have frequently chanted "Death to the Arabs!" as they awaited his arrival. If that isn't racism, then kindly tell me what is.

So long as scare-tactics and fear-mongering are permitted to be used by the fascist-controlled press within Canada, the United States and Britain, there will never be a shred of honest public debate concerning the Israel-Palestine debacle. On one side, you have those in Egypt and North Africa calling for "Jews [to go] back in the ovens" - that's horrific, and I'll be the first to concede that. On the other end of things, you have those calling for the Palestinian populations to be pushed out of Greater Israel in their entirety, or (to again refer to Lieberman) that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons should be "thrown into the Dead Sea". This sort of polarizing opinion on its own gets us virtually nowhere; and in the background, you have radically pro-Israel organizations screaming "antisemitism!" to the point where there can be no open and honest debate, because you're either a raving anti-Semite or the supporter of a colonial regime.

Throughout the entire debate, there's this whole misconception that antizionism is automatically antisemitism. They are not. True, they have converged on several occasions, but then again - so have capitalism and fascism and totalitarianism, and yet no one would suggest that all capitalist societies are totalitarian by their very nature. To disprove this incredibly absurd theory, I point to three of the harshest critics of Israel. The first of these - and also my favourite political author - is Noam Chomsky. In 1947, his views were considered Zionist. He supported a secular socialist binational Israeli-Palestinian state. Today, he is one of the harshest critics of neozionism to walk the earth. The second of these is Dr. Norman Finkelstein. Both of his parents survived the Holocaust (his entire extended family was annihilated 12 years before his birth), and yet he is perhaps even harsher than Chomsky in his criticism of Israel's government policies towards Palestine - and in particular the Settlement Blocks in the West Bank. The third of these is the Orthodox Jewish communities, the group that ultimately disproves the absurd claims that any and all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The most Orthodox among Judaism criticize Israel's policies continuously. Are they antisemitic? NO THEY'RE NOT!

Until Farber and Co. realize that the world of Israel/Palestine is not black and white; until they realize that Israel has made a continual series of colossal screwups since it rejected the 1971 Peace Accords that have led it only closer to colonialism and apartheid; until they realize that peace doesn't come by polarizing the debate; and until they realize that open and honest discussion gets the region far closer to peace than the irrational screamfest we're subjected to every time the issue comes up, I cannot help but express my support for Israel's courageous critics, those who stand up to Alan Dershowitz and Lieberman and Farber, and expose them for what they are: Fools who only lead us ever further away from Peace in the Near East.