



In America principles are goods placed on sale to the highest bidder. Career paths are paved with bricks forged by selling yourself out at every opportunity.
Cash in your chips at the next square and move on to another chance for a sell-out.
Guardians of integrity are rare beasts on our fruited plain. Experience has taught me that wealth management is incompatible with free and open society. But weapons of wealth management are the coin of our realm.
A kind and gentle hint: the system is gamed.
Marking my 50th post on this blog, I leverage what goes for my political capital (49 previous articles) by suggesting that
STANLEY COHEN UN-CAGED AND STILL UN-DAUNTED
become essential reading for billziegler1947 readers.
THE SHADOW is the sole remaining underground newspaper in New York, the home of Stanley Cohen and the only living boy in New York. Mr. Cohen is following the same principled path he began in 1969 and his principles are not for sale.
Imagine that you are looking for a source for truth on Palestine. It’s right here on @StanleyCohenLaw all day long.
But if you need an additional source for truth on that occupied land, consider the words of anthropologist Jeff Halper. He graduated from Hebrew Union College in 1969, the same year I graduated from another Cincinnati institution on Clifton Avenue. I am presently reading and recommending his
War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification
Jerry Rubin is best known as one of the Chicago 7 of ’68, he was also a fellow University of Cincinnati alumnus who decided that selling stock portfolios was the new revolutionary act. Rubin gave an address in Cincinnati the late 60’s. That was before joining the “revolution” on Wall Street as the Reagan era began.
I was still at U.C. during Naksa (’67 War) learning geography from Laurence G. Wolf.
Today, speaking truth to power is the best way I know to find yourself in a Gulag.
Israel is a state recognized completely and thoroughly by the United States and a few South-Pacific island territory/nations. The prisons in Israel are legally available for detaining pre-teen Palestinians, indefinitely. Not the vision evoked by Leon Uris’ Exodus, more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
But if you are looking for an investment opportunity for idle dollars, prisons are wise investments. Billions of dollars accrete to a single individual. It’s where the smart money goes.
Good luck on your career path.
Alea jacta est.
Israel insists that it is still the underdog in the Middle East. Danny Ayalon, well known for his video series The Truth about Israel, is a familiar countenance on the pro-Israeli internet. He explains Underdogland with familiar maps and graphics, available at the click (such as the link above). The presentation has high production qualities, the music is rousing and the end-tone is dramatic. Favored mightily by those who like echo-chamber metaphors.
Something happened at Harvard and Microsoft recently: two prestigious shakers and movers (lifelong Zionists) endorsed a boycott of Israel, a ‘single state.’ It became the most read article on the Washington Post. This does not mean that they have joined the BDS Movement but it’s a step.
Consider diaspora: the Syrians these last five years, the Palestinians these last sixty-seven years? To be ousted from ancestral lands along the Mediterranean and shoved to the east. Then, in 1967 (Naksa) occupied by the same people who shoved you eastward in 1948: (Nakba).
But what about Lebensraum for the people of choice?
Unfortunately it was Paradise (Mahmoud Darwish)
Perhaps a current dweller thinks “The Mediterranean coast is beautiful, but we need more living space for more living rooms. May the houses all look like the ones in California where the climate is the same.”
Descendants of Abraham: Ishmael and Isaac. A great lesson learned from those who occupied all of Palestine, the British and their Empire. A semantic sleight of hand and, magically, the Palestinians no longer exist. But a magician’s trick does not stay a secret forever. It turns out Palestinians were there all along with a history, a culture, families, friends, acquaintances, businesses, interests, festivals, religions, works of literature, restaurants, theaters, tourist trade, traditions…and tragedies.
At present, a two-state solution (State of Israel/State of Palestine) remains challenged by Realpolitik.
Immigration, emigration, visiting exiled family in other climes. Travel back and forth between Gaza and the West Bank? It’s onerous. The two territories are not contiguous. It is also expensive, time-consuming and dangerous.
Did you know that most Israelis are not interested in visiting the occupied territories? To go through generations without once meeting the “other.” Believing only their own propaganda.
Palestinians are also de facto victims of extrajudicial executions. There are no Palestinian soldiers, there is no Palestinian military force. Israeli soldiers know they can simply attack fellow humans using their own judgment, without disciplinary action. Did you know that records detailing criminal acts are sometimes lost by the authorities entrusted with preserving them? I’ve hear that it happens.
Highways connecting settlements are modern and rimmed with security. Fences built to complement the security wall lengthen.
source: Embaixadores de Israel: mais uma farsa do moderno apartheid
Existing Palestinian homes are demolished daily, reason optional. Unemployment is so high in the occupied sectors that many Palestinians work as domestic help in the very homes they lost to “settlers”. Yes, this is humiliating, but those who humiliate know that a mean-spirited, tough, single-minded determination and persistence may bring blossoms of fear and submission. The New York Times and NPR do not remove bias from their reporting. Both news giants are either corporations or corporately funded.
What happens when Rupert Murdock purchases media? The Wall Street Journal was once a newspaper of integrity, now it’s a tabloid. National Geographic was an institution and cultural icon. Guess who owns NG now. Readers and listeners are left to wonder: just who are these tattered keffiyeh-sporting angry people in the street, those with weapons slightly more modern than those of the Ottoman Empire, with knives and stones: stones right at-hand, produced from rubble left by incendiary bombs equipped with the latest technology, dropped on civilians (collaterals) by the fourth largest military on our planet.
Counter-arguments are always welcomed.
Thanks for reading
I found an obscure op-ed dated 9 July 2015. The opinion by an editorial board: Gaza and Greece are comparable. Offhand I can think of two points for comparison: both border the Mediterranean, both begin with the letter “G.” GAZA NEEDS WHAT GREECE IS GETTING. thePretty much published on the first anniversary of the 51 Day War, also known as Operation Protective Shield.
The fantasyland of eternal bailouts. The fantasyland of eternal hatred.
The ultimate lesson about Greece is not economic, it’s about Fantasyland. Greece has lived in Fantasyland — just like Gaza.
Greece’s fantasyland is the free lunch. Gaza’s fantasyland is the attitudinal free lunch: hatred without consequences.
The Greek fantasy is the supply of money as automatic as the laws of nature.
The Gaza fantasy is the end of Israel despite the laws of nature.
The Greek fantasy is pensions, wages, holidays, insurance, subsidies, welfare, all based on funds from outside Greece, without limit.
The Gaza fantasy is the destruction of Israel based on random missile fire and terror tunnels.
The Greeks fight the laws of production. The Gazans fight the laws of decency and self-interest.
The Greeks are finding out the hard way that big bailouts are not forever.
The Gazans need to find out that hatred forever will not destroy Israel.
The Greeks are finding out that there is no way to economic strength other than work, discipline and the end of ridiculous policies, such as huge pensions tied to early retirement.
The Gazans need to find out that there is no path to social achievement other than tolerance, political pluralism and religious freedom.
The Greek bluff was called.
Excellent symbol.
Now the Gaza bluff needs to be called: no more “humanitarian assistance” when it is basic humanitarianism, i.e., the end of the hatred of Jews and Israelis, that Gazans need to cultivate.
Greece banked on the fear of others to let Greece fail. For this, Greece is failing.
Gaza banks on the blindness of others to the true cause of their suffering: themselves. For this, Gaza wins sympathy around the world, yet continues its suffering.
Greece is now getting a dose of reality. Gaza is long overdue for a dose of reality.
Greece turned its good people against the necessary pain and pleasure of hard work, economic reform and national self-reliance.
Gaza turns its people toward the unnecessary pain of dead Gaza children as the inevitable consequence of placing them in harm’s way.
Greece is learning: It is not someone else’s job to fix the mess it created.
Gaza needs the very lesson that Greece is learning: Its poverty is of its own making, not someone else’s responsibility to fix.
Greece is learning: Fantasyland cannot last forever. The day of reckoning inevitably arrives.
Ditto, Gaza.
Greece’s fantasyland is the free lunch
Gaza’s fantasyland is the attitudinal free lunch: hatred without consequences.
Greece is learning: It is not someone else’s job to fix the mess it created.
Gaza needs the very lesson that Greece is learning: Its poverty is of its own making, not someone else’s responsibility to fix.