Shuttle
Lunacy
By David Truskoff
26 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In
the July 22,2007 San Fransisco Chronicle Joel Brinkley wrote that Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice finds that her star is fading. What has she
accomplished?" he asked. "Iraq has slid far downhill in the
past 2 1/2 years. Iran is no closer to giving up its nuclear development
program than when she took office. Even though the Bush administration
has done more than any other country to help the victims in Darfur,
the carnage there continues unabated. Last week, the Sudanese government
began bombing Darfur civilians again.
Relations with Russia, her
area of speciality, have steadily worsened; a week ago, Russia dropped
out of a key arms control treaty. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela,
has evolved from an irritant to a menace as he moves to nationalize
Venezuela's oil industry. Despite many visits to Israel and the Palestinian
territories, she has had no appreciable impact on events there.
September 2006 the Israeli government said it plans to build 700 new
homes in two settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank"
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came back from her recent Middle
East tour on Thursday Oct 18,2007. Her statement to the press was either
out of a jet lag brain or scripted by the White House before she landed.
She said, "there is moment of opportunity" for peace but much
work was still needed to be done. She plans to return in two weeks.
What opportunity?
"The teams are serious,"
she said. "The people are serious, the issues are serious, and
so I'm not surprised that there are some tensions. I'm not surprised
that there are some ups and downs. ... But I was encouraged by what
I heard." WHAT?
She went to London ostensibly
to gain support from the King of Jordan for a Mideast peace
repeating the admonition that Israelis and Palestinians have a new "moment
of opportunity" to forge peace, despite the obstacles. What?
Comics and cartoonists are
having a field day with the woman who seems to believe that she is doing
something important. The poor befuddled Secretary never appears to have
a reference point. Even during her many Trips back and forth the Israelis
mock her. Israel announced on October 2,2003 it would build 565 new
homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Should that not have been
her reference point?
Does not the "road map"
peace plan require a freeze in construction in 150 Jewish settlements?Should
that not be her reference point? Wasn’t that a plan the US agreed
to?
Israel has repeatedly violated
that plan. Actually the so -called Road map Peace plan was nothing more
than a political speech by Bush probably written by someone like Carl
Rove. The U.S. State Department drafted it,
Fourth Geneva Convention,
article 49 prohibits any occupying power from transferring citizens
from its own territory to the occupied territory The Hague Regulations
"prohibit the occupying power from undertaking permanent changes
in the occupied area, unless these are due to military needs in the
narrow sense of the term.
Foundation for Middle East
Peace reports Israel’s many violations such as Settlers from Tekoa
set fire to 300 dunams of land owned by Palestinians from the nearby
village of Tuqu’, damaging some 400 olive trees. (OCHA)
IDF soldiers and security
personnel guarding the Susiya settlement prevent a surveyor hired by
Palestinians from surveying their lands in preparation for a presentation
to the Israeli High Court. (OCHA)
Settlers from Susiya force
Palestinian landowners off land located near the settlement. (OCHA)
Settlers from Hebron’s Beit Hadassa assault and injure a 13 year
old Palestinian boy from Hebron City. (OCHA)
OCHA reports on an investigation
by the IDF into the uprooting of 300 olive trees belonging to a Palestinian
farmer from Qaryut, Nablus. The IDF discovered that the trees had been
uprooted by settlers from the Shilo outpost and 140 of them were replanted
in the outpost. The IDF returned the trees to the farmer.
It is a land completely out
of control and as Condi Rice waves and smiles from the steps of the
plane, she give the impression that she is totally unaware of the depth
of the problem and the hatred that has been allowed to fester all these
years. She has very little if any credibility in the area and her frequent
jaunts only add to her image of a lost diplomat without direction.
In all fairness to Secretary Rice what direction can she get from Dupya
in the White House?
There is a great deal of talk in Russia about US President Roosevelt.
Russian Television recently did a documentary stressing that Americans
trusted FDR and so did the rest of the world.
Apparently Putin is comparing himself to Roosevelt. One can only imagine
what Putin thinks of Secretary Rice as she flits in and out of Moscow.
It seems no one can capture
the trust and credibility we all had in our Government under FDR. Cordell
Hull, a man who literally came out of a Tennessee log cabin to become
the Secretary of State under FDR before and during the war, would probably
view Secretary Rice as I do. A butterfly flitting meaninglessly about
and living a short political life.
When I was a young student
I learned in History class that the expansionists were the evil ones
like the Spaniards that raped and pillaged behind the cross through
South America and the Japanese that did the same to China and the beastly
nazis who did the same to Europe.
I was given to believe that
Secretary Rice was a good student in school, but perhaps she had different
teachers and different textbooks.
In a Pluto Press book Review
of the book THE POLITICS OF DENIAL the writer states,
"The 1948 war ended in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians from their villages and homes. Israeli settlers moved in
to occupy their land and the Palestinian refugees found themselves in
refugee camps, or in neighboring Arab countries. Today there are nearly
four million Palestinian refugees -- and they want the right to go home.
Their problem is the greatest and most enduring refugee problem in the
world.
Ninety-three percent of the
land is now characterized as Jewish land, meaning that no non-Jew is
allowed to lease, sell or buy it. "
Genevieve Cora Fraser once
wrote from Ramallah and asked the question that needs no answer. "Is
America a Servant to the Will of Israel? Is America a servant of Israel's
Will?" She went on to state,
"Israel’s treatment
of the Palestinians since 1948 has also been to regard them as "untermenschen"
sub-humans and never more so than today. In January 2001 Ha'aretz published
an article by Amir Oren, "At the Gates of Yassergrad" which
cites an Israeli officer's statement that the Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) studies the 1943 military tactics of the Nazi SS against the Jewish
resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, for application against the Palestinians
of the West Bank and Gaza.
Even without the Ha'aretz
article, casual observation of the incarceration of the 3.5 million
men, women and children of Palestine in concentration camp conditions
within the confines of the Apartheid wall, electrified razor wire fence,
Israeli-only roads, and nearly 900 checkpoints and roadblocks is a tip-off
that something is up. When you add in the destruction of a million olive
and fruit trees, farmlands, livestock and beehives, enforced starvation
(bombing of the UN food warehouse and refusal to allow in food aid)
and dehydration (reservoirs, wells and roof top water tanks destroyed
by the IDF), curfews that spread into weeks and sometimes a month or
more, plus 24/7 IDF assaults on civilians whose defense is the use of
rocks, confiscated rifles and homemade bombs, it doesn’t take
a rocket scientist to understand why the term neo-Nazi is common graffiti
at certain protest sites."
So what is Secretary Rice’s
point of reference?
www.erols.com/suttonbear
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