The bêtes noires of the far left - the US and Israel - have rushed to bring aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti. So it won’t come as a surprise to learn that the counter-attack against these imperialist dogs has begun, led by Hugo Chavez.
Speaking on his weekly television rant, “Alo Presidente,” Chavez claimed that the real goal of the US was the military occupation of Haiti. Addressing President Obama with the racist pejorative “chico” - “boy” - he issued the following instruction: “Obama, send doctors, boy. Do you understand me? Send doctors, rescue workers, medicine, water, instead of sending soldiers.” (Click on the “shotlist” tab in the previous link to see this quote.)
One pressing matter which Chavez didn’t address is the punishing debt of $167 million which Haiti owes to Venezuela. Last July, the Paris Club agreed to cancel $214 million of Haitian debt, but no similar announcement has been forthcoming from Caracas, even after the earthquake. Perhaps Chavez has earmarked those funds for Hamas.
Eamonn McDonagh adds:
That’s not the half of it. According to this story in ABC he’s now accusing the USA of actually having deliberately caused the quake. And why would the US do a thing like that? It’s all part of a plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by means of an earthquake attack. I kid you not.
El Comandante is showing increasing signs of not being right in the head.
Support the relief effort here. Support Israel’s soldiers here.
Ben Cohen adds: Since my post on Thursday asking for reader donations, the deal toll in Haiti has climbed still higher, with current estimates hovering at around 100,000. The toll is likely to escalate as more corpses are pulled from the wreckage and as survivors deal with malnutrition, lack of clean drinking water, water-borne diseases and other horrors. So please, give as generously as you can. Football/futbol/soccer fans among you might also want to purchase one of these T-Shirts - all proceeds to earthquake relief.
Here’s British parliamentarian Sir Gerald Kaufman on Israel’s operation in Gaza against Hamas: “”We have had a fuss in our country about the inability of certain Israeli politicians to visit Britain for fear of being arrested…Anybody who uses white phosphorus should be arrested and should be tried for war crimes.”
Sounds like a bold interventionist on behalf of human rights, no?
Here’s what Gerald Kaufman, then the Shadow (opposition) Foreign Secretary, said at the onset of the Serb onslaught against Bosnia, in June 1992: “The situation is far too confused for forcible intervention from outside to do any positive good…The Foreign Secretary is equally right to make it clear that the Serbs are not the only guilty party - that others share the guilt.” (Quoted in Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, Penguin 2001, pps. 297-98.)
And here he is again in early 1993, when the genocidal nature of the Serb campaign was becoming increasingly clear: “The European Community should have no military role in this conflict or indeed in any other. The need is not to extend the conflict but to maintain it [sic].” (See Brendan Simms, p. 298.)
To maintain it. To maintain, in other words, a state of affairs which enabled the punishing siege of Sarajevo, the concentration camps in which women were raped and men brutalized, the massacre at Srebrenica and myriad other atrocities.
Gerald Kaufman was perfectly content for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia to continue apace. So whenever you hear him delivering one of his inchoate, hateful rants against Israel, ask for the salt.
AJC, the advocacy organization which sponsors Z Word, has teamed up with leading Israeli humanitarian NGO IsraAID to send medical teams to Haiti. IsraAID’s staff are carrying medicines, hygiene kits and other much needed supplies with them. We’ve all seen the appalling toll from the earthquake - 50,000 dead and 3 million homeless by the current count - so please, give as generously as you can. You can make an online donation here.
There’s a long article here about the British historian Tony Judt and from it I’d like to focus on the following paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London’s East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. “Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable,” Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. “I was the ideal convert,” he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. [… ]In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were “right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views”; others, he says, “were just dumb idiots with guns.” Israel, he came to believe, “had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society.”
As readers of this blog will be well aware, Juan Miguel Muñoz, is a man of constant sorrow. He’s the Jerusalem correspondent of El País and over the last couple of years it has fallen to him to report on the daily outrages against the conscience of humanity committed by Israel.
However, in this piece in today’s edition of Spain’s most popular serious newspaper he seems a bit more cheerful. The world, as he sees it, is finally waking up to the reality of the many evils that allowing the Jews to govern themselves has brought upon the world. His analysis, however, doesn’t resist serious consideration.
Just a note to direct readers to an interesting piece in Tuesday’s New York Times about Iran’s use of tunnels to protect its nuclear facilities. The article quotes Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak as saying that the plant near Qom is
… located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.
There’s an editorial in today’s El País about Gaza and Israel’s policy towards it that offers a nice mix of rank prejudice and preconceptions masquerading as analysis.
After a two year break, Judeosphere is back. Already, there’s a range of engaging posts, from a quick dissection of Slavoj Žižek’s recent essay on Iran (and the obsequious introduction given it by the New Age messianists at Tikkun) to a reminder of why, when it comes to successful boycotts, it’s the economy, stupid.
Here’s another excuse to hear the line that will doubtless become Judeosphere’s motto:
Here’s our good friend and occasional Z Word contributor David Adler with a charming version of a mellow Christmas tune that sounds just perfect in the twilight of New Year’s Day. In addition to writing about politics, David is a respected jazz critic. He is also, as I know from having met with him, the sort of person with whom debate and even disagreement is instructive and animating, not painful and irritating. And watching his performance below is a pleasing reminder of why a range of interests makes for a happy life. Happy New Year.
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