Subscribe To
Sustain Us

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

Read CC In Your
Own Language

CC Malayalam

Iraq

Peak Oil

Climate Change

US Imperialism

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Globalisation

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

Contact Us

Subscribe To Our
News Letter

Name: E-mail:

 

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

 

 

Leave A Comment
&
Share Your Insights

Comment Policy


Digg it! And spread the word!



Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So, as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.



 

Get CC HeadlinesOn your Desk Top

Subscribe To
Sustain Us

 

Search Our Archive



Our Site

Web

Online Users