END THE FED - ACTION 11/22/2009
“Already Over 359,479 Are Living Happier, Healthier and More Successful Lives Thanks To The American Monk”
The Bullshit Meter Goes Off the Scale! Fort Hood shooting: Texas army killer linked to September 11 terrorists
http://www.federaljack.com/?p=12617(Telegraph/UK) Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. His mother’s funeral was held there in May that year.
The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a “spiritual adviser” to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.
By Philip Sherwell and Alex Spillius
Published: 8:17PM GMT 07 Nov 2009
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Hasan’s eyes “lit up” when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday’s horrific shooting spree.
As investigators look at Hasan’s motives and mindset, his attendance at the mosque could be an important piece of the jigsaw. Al-Awlaki moved to Dar al-Hijrah as imam in January, 2001, from the west coast, and three months later the September 11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour began attending his services. A third hijacker attended his services in California.
Hasan was praying at Dar al-Hijrah at about the same time, and the FBI will now want to investigate whether he met the two terrorists.
Charles Allen, a former under-secretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, has described al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, as an “al-Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11 hijackers… who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen”.
Last night Hasan remained
in a coma under guard at a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas, and was
said to be in a “stable” condition. Born in America to a Palestinian
family, Hasan, 39, was an army psychiatrist who had chosen to sign up for
the US military against his parents’ wishes.
But he turned into an
angry critic of the wars America was waging in Iraq and Afghanistan and had
tried in vain to negotiate his discharge.
He counselled soldiers
returning from the front line and told relatives that he was horrified at
the prospect of a deployment to Afghanistan later this year – his first time
in a combat zone.
Whether due to his personal
convictions, his stress over his deployment or other reasons, Hasan is alleged
to have snapped and gone on a murderous rampage with a powerful semi-automatic
handgun after shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (”God is great”),
according to survivors. He had earlier given away copies of the Koran to neighbours.
Investigators at this
stage have no indication that he planned the attacks with anyone else. But
they are trawling through his phone records, paperwork and computers he used
before the attack during an apparently sleepless night.
Five of the 13 victims were fellow mental health professionals from three units of the army’s Combat Stress Control Detachment, it was disclosed yesterday.
It is understood that
Hasan had been due to be deployed with members of those units in coming months.
Whether he deliberately singled out other combat stress counsellors is another
key question.
What does seem clear is
that the army missed an increasing number of red flags that Hasan was a troubled and brooding individual within its ranks.
“I was shocked but not surprised by news of Thursday’s attack,” said Dr Val Finnell, a fellow student on a public health course in 2007-08 who heard Hasan equate the war on terrorism to a war on Islam. Another student had warned military
officials that Hasan was a “ticking time bomb” after he reportedly gave a presentation defending suicide bombers.
Kamran Pasha, the author
of Mother of the Believers, a new novel relating the story of Islam
from the perspective of Aisha, Prophet Mohammed’s wife, was told of
the al-Awlaki connection from a Muslim friend who is also an officer at Fort Hood. Using the name Richard, the recent convert to Islam described how he
frequently prayed with Hasan at the town mosque after Hasan was deployed to
Fort Hood in July. They last worshipped together at predawn prayers on the
day of the massacre when Hasan “appeared relaxed and not in any way
troubled or nervous”.
But Richard had previously
argued with Hasan when he said that he felt the “war on terror”
was really a war against Islam, expressed anti-Jewish sentiments and defended
suicide bombings.
“I asked Richard
whether he believed that Hasan was motivated by religious radicalism in his
murderous actions,” Mr Pasha said.
“Richard, with great
sadness, said that he believed this was true. He also believed that psychological
factors from Hasan’s job as an army psychiatrist added to his pathos.
The news that he would be deployed overseas, to a war that he rejected, may
have pushed him over the edge.
“But Richard does
not excuse Hasan. As a Muslim, he finds Hasan’s religious perspectives
to be fundamentally misguided. And as a soldier, he finds Hasan’s actions
cowardly and evil.”
Fellow Muslims in the
US armed forces have also been quick to denounce Hasan’s actions and
insist that they were the product of a lone individual rather than of Islamic
teachings. Osman Danquah, the co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater
Killeen, said Hasan never expressed anger toward the army or indicated any
plans for violence.
But he said that, at their
second meeting, Hasan seemed almost incoherent.
“I told him, ‘There’s
something wrong with you’. I didn’t get the feeling he was talking
for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.”
He was sufficiently troubled
that he recommended the centre reject Hasan’s request to become a lay
Muslim leader at Fort Hood.
Hasan had, in fact, already
come to the attention of the authorities before Thursday’s massacre.
He was suspected of being the author of internet postings that compared suicide
bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others and
had also reportedly been warned about proselytising to patients.
At Fort Hood, he told
a colleague, Col Terry Lee, that he believed Muslims should rise up against
American “aggressors”. He made no attempt to hide his desire to
end his military service early or his mortification at the prospect of deployment
to Afghanistan. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors
they saw over there,” said his cousin, Nader Hasan.
Yet away from his strident
attacks on US foreign policy, he came across as subdued and reclusive – not
hostile or threatening. Soldiers he counselled at the Walter Reed hospital
in Washington praised him, while at Fort Hood, Kimberly Kesling, the deputy
commander of clinical services, remarked: “Up to this point, I would
consider him an asset.”
Relatives said that the
death of Hasan’s parents, in 1998 and 2001, turned him more devout.
“After he lost his parents he tried to replace their love by reading
a lot of books, including the Koran,” his uncle Rafiq Hamad said.
“He didn’t
have a girlfriend, he didn’t dance, he didn’t go to bars.”
His failed search for
a wife seemed to haunt Hasan. At the Muslim Community Centre in the Washington
suburb of Silver Spring, he signed up for an Islamic matchmaking service,
specifying that he wanted a bride who wore the hijab and prayed five times
a day.
Adnan Haider, a retired
professor of statistics, recalled how at their first meeting last year, a
casual introduction after Friday prayers, Hasan immediately asked the academic
if he knew “a nice Muslim girl” he could marry.
“It was a strange
thing to ask someone you have met two seconds before. It was clear to me he
was under pressure, you could just see it in his face,” said Prof Haider,
74, who used to work at Georgetown University in Washington. “You could
see he was lonely and didn’t have friends.
“He is working with
psychiatric people and I ask why the people around him didn’t spot that
something was wrong? When I heard what had happened I actually wasn’t
that surprised.”
Indeed, many of the characteristics
attributed to Hasan by acquaintances – withdrawn, unassuming, brooding, socially
awkward and never known to have had a girlfriend – have also applied to other
mass murderers.
Hasan was born and brought
up in Virginia to parents who ran restaurants after emigrating to America
from the West Bank. He graduated from Virginia Tech university – coincidentally,
the scene of the worst mass shooting in US history in 2007 – with a degree
in biochemistry and then joined the army, which trained him as a psychiatrist.
Relatives said that he
was subjected to increasingly ugly taunts about his religion and ethnicity
from other soldiers after the September 11 attacks. But his uncle insisted
yesterday that Hasan would not have been driven to mass murder by revenge
or religion.
Speaking in the West Bank
town of al-Bireh, Mr Hamad said his nephew “loved America” and
could only have been caused to snap by an as yet unexplained factor. “He
always said there was no country in the world like America,” he told
The Sunday Telegraph. “Something big happened to him in Texas.
If he did it – and until now I am in denial – it had to have been something
huge because revenge was not in his nature.”
•Additional reporting
by Adrian Blomfield in al-Bireh
http://www.chomsky.info/
Israel,
the Holocaust, and Anti-Semitism
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Chronicles of Dissent, 1992
QUESTION: One of your books, The Fateful Triangle, focuses specifically on
the Middle East, and I was wondering if you could talk about your position
on a possible two-state solution to the Palestinian question.
CHOMSKY: I don't think that's the optimal solution, but it has been the realistic
political settlement for some time. We have to begin with some fundamentals
here. The real question is: there are plainly two national groups that claim
the right of self-determination in what used to be Palestine, roughly the
area now occupied by Israel minus the Golan Heights, which is part of Syria.
So there are two national groups which claim national self-determination.
One group is the indigenous population, or what's left of it -- a lot of it's
been expelled or driven out or fled. The other group is the Jewish settlers
who came in, originally from Europe, later from other parts of the Middle
East and some other places. So there are two groups, the indigenous population
and the immigrants and their descendants. Both claim the right of national
self-determination. Here we have to make a crucial decision: are we racists
or aren't we? If we're not racists, then the indigenous population has the
same rights of self-determination as the settlers who replaced them. Some
might claim more, but let's say at least as much right. Hence if we are not
racist, we will try to press for a solution which accords them -- we'll say
they are human beings with equal rights, therefore they both merit the claim
to national self-determination. I'm granting that the settlers have the same
rights as the indigenous population; many do not find that obvious but let's
grant it. Then there are a number of possibilities. One possibility is a democratic
secular society. Virtually nobody is in favor of that. Some people say they
are, but if you look closely they're not really. There are various models
for multi-ethnic societies, say Switzerland or whatever. And maybe in the
long run these might be the best idea, but they're unrealistic.
The only realistic political settlement, for the time being, in the past
ten or twelve years, that would satisfy the right of self-determination for
both national groups is a two-state settlement. Everybody knows what it would
have to be: Israel within approximately the pre-June 1967 borders and a Palestinian
state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and a return of the Golan Heights
to Syria, or maybe some other arrangement. This would be associated with maybe
demilitarized zones and international guarantees of some sort or another,
but that's the framework of a possible political settlement. As I say, I don't
think it's the best one, but that's the realistic one, very realistic. It's
supported by most of the world. It's supported by Europe, by the Soviet Union,
has been for a long time, by almost all the non-aligned countries, it's supported
by all the major Arab states and has been for a long time, supported by the
mainstream of the PLO and, again, has been for a long time, it's supported
even by the American population, by about two to one according to the polls.
But there are also people who oppose it. It's opposed by the rejection front
in the Arab world, the minority elements of the PLO, Libya, a few others,
minority rejectionist elements, but crucially it's opposed by the leaders
of the rejection front, namely the United States and Israel. The United States
and Israel adamantly oppose it. The United States will not consider it. Both
political groupings in Israel reject it totally. They reject any right of
national self-determination for the indigenous popula- tion in the former
Palestine. They can have Jordan if they want, or the former Syria, or something,
but not the area that they now hold under military occupation. In fact they're
explicit about it. There are carefully fostered illusions here that the Labor
Party is interested in compromise over the issue. But if you look closely,
there's no meaningful compromise. The position of the Labor Party remains
what was expressed by their representative, who is now President, Chaim Herzog,
who said that "no one can be a partner with us in a land that has been holy
to our people for 2000 years." That's the position. They're willing to make
minor adjustments. They don't want to take care of the population in the West
Bank, because there are too many Arabs; they don't want a lot of Arabs around,
so what they would like to do is take the areas and the water and the resources
they want from the West Bank but leave the population, either stateless or
under Jordanian control. That's what's called a "compromise solution." It's
a very cynical proposal, even worse in many respects than annexation. But
that's called here compromise and the reason is that we are again educated
elites in the United States and national discussion takes a strictly racist
view of this. The Palestinians are not human, they do not deserve the rights
that we accord automatically to the settlers who displaced them. That's the
basis of articulate American discussion: pure, unadulterated racism. Again,
that's not true of the population, as usual, but it is of the politically
active and articulate parts of it and certainly the government. As long as
the United States and Israel reject the political settlement, there can't
be one.
There certainly have been very plausible opportunities for a political settlement
over many years, in fact, just to mention a few which have disappeared from
history because they're too inconvenient: in February 1971 President Sadat
of Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel on the pre-June 67 borders.
In accordance with official American policy, incidentally, but not operative
policy, offering nothing to the Palestinians, he didn't even offer them a
Palestinian state, nothing. Nevertheless Israel rejected it, and the United
States backed them in that rejection. In January 1976 Syria, Jordan and Egypt,
the so-called "confrontation states," made a proposal in the U.N. Security
Council for a two-state settlement with international guarantees and territorial
rights secured and so on. That was backed and even prepared by the PLO, supported
by the Soviet Union and most of the world. It was vigorously opposed by Israel,
which even boycotted the session, in fact, it bombed Lebanon in retaliation
against the United Nations, killing about 50 people, no excuse at all, just
a fit of anger, "We're going to kill anybody who gets in our way if you push
this," and the United States vetoed it. There have been a series of such things
ever since. The United States has always blocked them and Israel has always
refused them, and that means there's no political settlement. Rather there
is a state of permanent military confrontation. That's aside from what it
means to the Palestinians, which is obvious and terrible; it's very bad for
Israel. It's leading to their own destruction, in my view, certainly to their
economic collapse and moral degeneration and probably, sooner or later, their
physical destruction, because you can't have a state of military confrontation
without a defeat sooner or later. It's leading the world very close to nuclear
war, repeatedly. Every time we have an Arab-Israeli conflict -- and there
will be more of them, as long as we maintain a military confrontation -- the
Soviet Union and the United States come into confrontation. Both are involved.
The Soviet Union is close by, it's not like Central America, it's a strategic
region right near their border, they're involved; it's very far from us but
it's a strategic region for us because of the oil nearby, primarily. So we're
involved, the fleets come into confrontation, it's very close. In 1967 it
came very close to nuclear war and it will again. So it's very dangerous,
it's the most likely spot where a nuclear war would develop, but we are pursuing
it, because we don't want a political settlement. The United States is intent
on maintaining a military confrontation.
QUESTION: You mentioned racism vis-à-vis the Palestinians. To what extent,
if any, have Israelis of Ashkenazic origin absorbed German racial attitudes
toward not just Arabs but even to the Oriental Jews, the Sephardim, is there
anything in that?
CHOMSKY: I wouldn't call it particularly German.
QUESTION: European?
CHOMSKY: Yes. It's part of European culture to have
racist attitudes toward the Third World, including us, we're part of Europe
in that respect. Naturally the Jewish community shared the attitudes of the
rest of Europe, not surprising. There certainly are such things inside Israel.
My feeling is they could be overcome in time under a situation of peace. I
think they're real, but I don't think they're lethal, through slow integration
they could probably be overcome. The one that probably can't be overcome is
the anti-Arab racism, because that requires subjugation of a defeated and
conquered people and that leads to racism. If you're sitting with your boot
on somebody's neck, you're going to hate him, because that's the only way
that you can justify what you're doing, so subjugation automatically yields
racism, and you can't overcome that. Furthermore, anti-Arab racism is rampant
in the United States and much of the West, there's no question about that.
The only kind of racism that can be openly expressed with outrage is anti-Arab
racism. You don't put caricatures of blacks in the newspapers any more; you
do put caricatures of Arabs.
QUESTION: But isn't it curious that they're using the old Jewish stereotypes,
the money coming out the pockets, the beards, the hooked nose?
CHOMSKY: I've often noticed that the cartoons and caricatures
are very similar to the ones you'd find in the Nazi press about the Jews,
very similar.
QUESTION: What dimension does the Holocaust play in this equation? Is it
manipulated by the Israeli state to promote its own interests?
CHOMSKY: It's very consciously manipulated. I mean,
it's quite certainly real, there's no question about that, but it is also
undoubted that they manipulate it. In fact, they say so. For example, in the
Jerusalem Post, in English so you can read it, their Washington correspondent
Wolf Blitzer, I don't recall the exact date, but after one of the big Holocaust
memorial meetings in Washington he wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post
in which he said it was a great success. He said, "Nobody mentioned arms sales
to the Arabs but all the Congressmen understood that that was the hidden message.
So we got it across." In fact, one very conservative and very honest Zionist
leader, Nachem Goldman, who was the President of the World Zionist Organization
and who was detested towards the end because he was much too honest -- they
even refused to send a delegation to his burial, I believe, or a message.
He's one of the founders of the Jewish state and the Zionist movement and
one of the elder statesmen, a very honest man, he -- just before his death
in 1982 or so -- made a rather eloquent and unusual statement in which he
said that it's -- he used the Hebrew word for "sacrilege" -- he said it's
sacrilege to use the Holocaust as a justification for oppressing others. He
was referring to something very real: exploitation of probably the world's
most horrifying atrocity in order to justify oppression of others. That kind
of manipulation is really sick.
QUESTION: That disturbs you and...
CHOMSKY: Really sick. Many people find it deeply immoral
but most people are afraid to say anything about it. Nachem Goldman is one
of the few who was able to say anything about it and it was one of the reasons
he was hated. Anyone who tries to say anything about it is going to be subjected
to a very efficient defamation campaign of the sort that would have made the
old Communist Party open-mouthed in awe, people don't talk about it.
QUESTION: I ask you this question because I know that you have been plagued
and hounded around the United States specifically on this issue of the Holocaust.
It's been said that Noam Chomsky is somehow agnostic on the issue of whether
the Holocaust occurred or not.
CHOMSKY: My "agnosticism" is in print. I described the Holocaust years ago
as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history, so much so that
if we even agree to discuss the matter we demean ourselves. Those statements
and numerous others like them are in print, but they're basically irrelevant
because you have to understand that this is part of a Stalinist-style technique
to silence critics of the holy state and therefore the truth is entirely irrelevant,
you just tell as many lies as you can and hope that some of the mud will stick.
It's a standard technique used by the Stalinist parties, by the Nazis and
by these guys.
QUESTION: There's tremendous support for Israel in the United States at least
in elite groups. There's also on another level a very steady, virulent anti-Semitism
that goes on. Can you talk about that?
CHOMSKY: Anti-Semitism has changed, during my lifetime
at least. Where I grew up we were virtually the only Jewish family, I think
there was one other. Of course being the only Jewish family in a largely Irish-Catholic
and German-Catholic community--
QUESTION: In Philadelphia?
CHOMSKY: In Philadelphia. And the anti-Semitism was
very real. There were certain paths I could take to walk to the store without
getting beaten up. It was the late 1930s and the area was openly pro-Nazi.
I remember beer parties when Paris fell and things like that. It's not like
living under Hitler, but it's a very unpleasant thing. There was a really
rabid anti-Semitism in that neighborhood where I grew up as a kid and it continued.
By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s there was still very detectable
anti-Semitism. It wasn't that they beat you up on the way to school or something,
but other ways, kind of WASP-ish anti-Semitism. There were very few Jewish
professors on the faculty at that time. There was beginning to be a scattering
of them, but still very few. This was the tail end of a long time of WASP-ish
anti-Semitism at the elite institutions. Over the last thirty years that's
changed very radically. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it's now on
a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don't think
it's more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that's been a very significant
change in the last generation, one that I've experienced myself in my own
life, and it's very visible throughout the society.
QUESTION: How would you account for that?
CHOMSKY: How would I account for it? I think partly that the Holocaust did
have an effect. It brought out the horrifying consequences of anti-Semitism
in a way that certainly is striking. I presume, I can't prove this, but there
must be, at least I hope there is, a kind of guilt feeling involved, because
the role of the United States during the Holocaust was awful, before and during.
They didn't act to save Jews, and they could have in many respects. The role
of the Zionist organization is not very pretty either. In the late 1940s there
were plenty of displaced persons in the Jewish DP camps. Some survived. It
remained awful, they stayed in the DP camps, in fact, for a while they were
dying at almost the same rate they were under the Nazis. Many of those people,
if they had been given a chance, surely would have wanted to come to the United
States. There are debates about how many, but it's just unimaginable that
if they'd been given a chance they wouldn't have wanted to come here. They
didn't. A tiny scattering came. There was an immigration bill, the Stratton
bill, which I think admitted about 400,000 people, if I remember, to the United
States, very few Jews among them. Plenty of Nazis, incidentally, straight
out of their SS uniforms. The reason that bill passed, I think it was 1947,
was that it was the beginning of the Cold War and priority was being given
to basically the Nazis, because we were resurrecting them all over the world,
a lot of them were brought in, a lot of Nazi war criminals, and others, but
very few Jews. That's not a very pretty sight. You say, during the war you
could have given some argument, not an acceptable argument, but you could
have given at least a not ridiculous argument that you had to fight the war
and not worry about the people being sent to the gas chambers, but after the
war you couldn't give any argu- ment. It was a matter of saving the survivors,
and we didn't do it. I should say the Zionist organization
didn't support it either, they didn't even lobby for the bill. The only Jewish
organizations that lobbied for the admission of Jewish refugees to the United
States were the non-Zionist or the anti-Zionist organizations. The reason
was that they wanted to send them off to Palestine. Whether they wanted to
go there or not is another story, the same matter being relived today, incidentally,
with the Russian emigres. The Zionist organization wants to force them to
go to Israel. Most of them, especially from the European parts of Russia,
want to come to the United States, and all sorts of pressures are being brought
to bear to prevent that. It's kind of a reenactment at a less hideous level
of the same story. I suppose there's some element of guilt, certainly over
the Holocaust and maybe over the post-war matter.
Besides that, the Jewish community has changed socially
and economically. It's now become substantial, not huge in numbers, but given
its numbers it's a substantial part of the dominant privileged elite groups
in every part of the society -- professional, economic, political, etc. It's
not like the anti-Semitic stereotype, they don't own the corporations, but
relative to the numbers they're very influential, particularly in the ideological
system, lots of writers, editors, etc. and that has an effect.
Furthermore, I think it's changed because of what's
happened since 1967. In 1967 Israel won a dramatic military victory, demonstrated
its military power, in fact, smashed up the entire Arab world, and that won
great respect. A lot of Americans, especially privileged Americans, love violence
and want to be on the side of the guy with the gun, and here was a powerful,
violent state that smashed up its enemies and demonstrated that it was the
dominant military power in the Middle East, put those Third World upstarts
in their place. This was particularly dramatic because that was 1967, a time
when the United States was having only minimal success in carrying out its
invasion of by then all of Indochina, and it's well worth remembering that
elite opinion, including liberal opinion, overwhelmingly supported the war
in Vietnam and was quite disturbed by the incapacity of the United States
to win it, at least at the level they wanted. Israel came along and showed
them how to do it, and that had a symbolic effect. Since then it has been
presenting itself, with some justice, as the Sparta of the Middle East, a
militarily advanced, technologically compe- tent, powerful society. That's
the kind of thing we like. It also became a strategic asset of the United
States; one of the reasons why the United States maintains the military confrontation
is to assure that it's a dependable, reliable ally that will do what we want,
like, say, support genocide in Guatemala or whatever, and that also increases
the respect for Israel and with it tends to diminish anti-Semitism. I suppose
that's a factor.
QUESTION: But you've pointed out that as long as U.S. state interests are
being served and preserved, Israel will be favored, but the moment that those
interests...
CHOMSKY: That's right, it'll be finished, in fact, anti-Semitism will shoot
up. Apart from the moral level, it's a very fragile alliance on tactical grounds.
QUESTION: So what happens to the moral commitment, the concern for justice
in the Jewish state and all that -- out the window?
CHOMSKY: On the part of whom?
QUESTION: The United States.
CHOMSKY: There's no concern for justice and there never
was. States don't have a concern for justice. States don't act on moral grounds.
QUESTION: Except on a rhetorical level.
CHOMSKY: On a rhetorical level, they all do, even Nazi Germany. On the actual
level, they never do. They are instruments of power and violence, that's true
of all states; they act in the interests of the groups that dominate them,
they spout the nice rhetorical line, but these are just givens of the international
system.
QUESTION: You've been very critical of the American liberal community and
in fact you've said that they're contributing to Israel's destruction. Please
talk a little bit about that.
CHOMSKY: The American liberal community since 1967
has been mobilized at an almost fanatic level in support of an expansionist
Israel, and they have been consistently opposed to any political settlement.
They have been in favor of the aggrandizement of Israeli power. They have
used their position of quite considerable influence in the media in the political
system to defeat and overcome any challenge to the system of military confrontation
using all the standard techniques of vilification, defamation, closing off
control over expression, etc. and it's certainly had an effect. I don't know
if it was a decisive effect, but it had some noticeable effect on bringing
about U.S. government support for the persistent military confrontation and
U.S. government opposition to political settlement. For Israel that's destructive.
In fact, Israeli doves constantly deplore it. They constantly refer to it
as Stalinism. They refer to the Stalinist character of the support for Israel
on the part of what they call the "Jewish community," but that's because they
don't understand enough about the United States. It's not just the Jewish
community, which is what they see; it's basically the intellectual community
at large.
QUESTION: Edward Said, for example, has pointed out that there is much more
pluralism in terms of the discussion, the debate, in Israel itself than inside
the United States.
CHOMSKY: There's no question about that. For example, the editor of the Labor
Party journal, the main newspaper of the Labor Party, has asked me to write
regular columns. I won't do it because I'm concerned with things here, but
that's totally inconceivable in the United States, you can't even imagine
it, you can't even imagine an occasional op-ed. That's quite typical. Positions
that I maintain, which are essentially in terms of the international consensus,
they're not a majority position in Israel, but they're part of the political
spectrum, they're respectable positions. Here it's considered outlandish.
QUESTION: In the time we have remaining, I'd like to ask you two questions.
The first one is, in what ways, if any, has your work in linguistics and grammar
informed your political analyses and perspectives?
CHOMSKY: I suspect very little. Maybe, I don't know,
I'm probably not the person to ask, but I think working in a science is useful
because you somehow learn, you get to understand what evidence and argument
and rationality are and you come to be able to apply these to other domains
where they're very much lacking and very much opposed, so there's probably
some help in that respect. There's probably, at some very deep and abstract
level, some sort of common core conception of human nature and the human drive
for freedom and the right to be free of external coercion and control, that
kind of picture animates my own social and political concerns. My own anarchist
interests, which go way back to early childhood, and on the other hand, they
enter here in a clear and relatively precise way into my work on language
and thought and so on, but it's a pretty loose connection, not a kind of connection
where you can deduce one connection from another or anything like that.
QUESTION: You have an international reputation for your work in linguistics
and philosophy and obviously you weren't content with that, you wanted to
go out into the social and political world--
CHOMSKY: Quite the contrary. It's one of the many examples that show that
people often do things that they don't want to do because they have to. I
made a very conscious decision about this. Actually, my political views haven't
changed much since I was about 12 or 13. I've learned more, I suppose they're
more sophisticated, but fundamentally they haven't changed. However, I was
not an activist. I was, until the early 1960s, working in my own garden, basically,
doing the kind of work I liked, intellectually exciting, rewarding, satisfying,
you make progress. I would have been very happy to stick to it. It would have
been, from a narrow personal point of view, much better for me in every imaginable
respect. I remember I knew as soon as I got involved in political activism
that there was going to be no end, the demands would increase forever, there
would be unpleasant personal consequences -- and they are unpleasant. I mean
there are less unpleasant things than being maced, for example, or spending
a day in a Washington jail cell or being up for a five-year jail sentence
or being subjected to the endless lies of the Anti-Defamation League and its
friends, etc. There are more pleasant things. I didn't know in detail, but
I knew it was going to be much less pleasant than just working in the fields
where I felt I was good and I could make progress and so on. And I knew I
had to cut back on things I really wanted to do and that I enjoyed doing,
many things in personal life, and I knew personal life was going to contract
enormously, something has to give, and in many ways there would be negative
consequences, and I really thought about it pretty hard and I finally took
the plunge, but not with any great joy, I must say.
QUESTION: I think a lot of people are grateful that you did.
CHOMSKY: Thanks.
chomsky.info
AL 'MOSSAD' AEDA: Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED
http://www.youtube.com/user/FEDERALJACKD0TCOM
Paradigm
Shift Refers to a shift in world views. The so-called "new paradigm" (new model
orform) is pantheistic (all is God) and monastic (all is one). http://www.paradigmshift.info/
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/
Mayan
Year of Destiny - 2012
Cayce is informing us that in a previous time cycle, humanity had a level
of consciousness and relationship with the Creative Forces that allowed us
to live at higher levels of material, mental, and spiritual activity in the
Earth and beyond.
I am a stroke survivor and deal
daily with a speech disorder called Aphasia. This disorder is a result of
my stroke in 2005. I am thankful God has given me the ability to express myself
through my images and films." For more information, visit these websites:
http://www.azimagery.com/stroke/
http://r2meshwork.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-world-fair-trade
http://steetsblog.blogspot.com/
http://stroke-azimagery.blogspot.com/
http://my.opera.com/dcimagery/blog/
http://my.opera.com/azimagery/blog/
http://www.vimeo.com/user428906
http://www.youtube.com/user/azimagery
http://steetsblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/lo
Life is full of beauty. Notice
it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces.
Smell the rain, and feel the wind.
Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams. Ashley
Smith
http://www.agnt.org/
Planetary
healing through self-realization and spiritually-motivated activism
is the new promise of these teachings.
Once called the "religion of healthy-mindedness"
by the philosopher, William James, the New Thought movement was born almost
150 years ago as a revolt against the negative dogmas so prevalent in the
churches of that day. The early New Thought movement was driven by the discovery
that physical healing was possible through the power of mind and spiritual
awareness. As that initial idea unfolded into successful application, practitioners
of New Thought began to see that the power of an uplifted consciousness could
also bring healing to negative circumstances and conditions in one's personal
life. As it evolves today, twenty-first century New Thought is driven by a
far broader intention. Planetary healing through self-realization is emerging
as the new promise of these teachings.
Out of a deep conviction
and pure passion to give our movement a clear voice and commanding presence
on the global stage, the Association for Global New Thought - AGNT - has been
born. We invite you to learn more about this movement and its global initiatives
for peace, justice and healing, and in the process discover your own spiritual
calling. Welcome!
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