Month: April 2019

How Typically American to Punish Poor Brown People Twice

In 2009 the Obama administration encouraged a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel

The democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya

Zelaya.  This fact is not in dispute.  Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, admitted as much in a 2014 interview.

Together Obama and Clinton helped to install a right-wing dictatorship that continues to rule over the Honduran people to this day. Not only has this dictatorship overrun the civil rights of the Honduran people, it works hand-in-glove with the drug cartels terrorizing all of Central America.

Those cartels use local gangs of enforcers to extort protection money from poor and middle-class business owners, often driving them out of business and killing anyone refusing to cooperate. These gangs, operating with the

Honduran gang members

silent approval of government leaders, are the primary cause of Honduras’ skyrocketing murder rate.

So, guess what. The U.S. bears the lion share of responsibility for the problems facing Honduras today.

If this is not familiar to you, please take a few minutes to watch two video

Lucy Pagoada

explanations. The first features Lucy Pagoada, an Honduran immigrant explaining the situation in her native country, and why she fled to the United States.

The second is an episode of On Contact with Chris Hedges. He interviews Professor Dana Frank, author of the book The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the United States in the

Prof. Dana Frank

Aftermath of the Coup. She poignantly explains America’s role in transforming Honduras into a failed state.

Now, President Trump is threatening to close America’s southern border. He refuses to receive any more applicants for asylum and is ending all foreign aid to Honduras, Guatemala and San Salvador (two additional nations where the U.S. has meddled with disastrous effect).

So, let me get this straight.  First, we intervene in these nation’s internal affairs. We help to overthrow the Honduran government and install a corrupt dictatorship.

Then we support that dictatorship even as it enriches itself at the people’s

Honduran anti-coup protesters arrested

expense by allying itself with violent drug cartels. We stand by and watch as the dictators’ neo-liberal economic policies exacerbate poverty, unemployment and violent crime because those policies benefit U.S. corporate interests.

Then when the poorest of the poor flee for their lives, seeking asylum and a better life in the U.S., our esteemed president stigmatizes them as criminals, rapists, the “worst of the worst.”

He takes away their children, locks them into cages, loses hundreds if not thousands of those children due to poor record keeping, and closes the

Honduran refugees tear gassed

border. For the coup de’grace he orders border patrol agents to shoot these helpless, refugee families with tear gas and rubber bullets.

All the while, President Trump continues his xenophobic rants insisting that this southern “invasion” – vast weaponized caravans of brown invaders intent on destroying the American way of life – is THE greatest national security threat facing our country today.

And many Americans listen.  Too many are persuaded.

They are persuaded because they have never bothered to follow the news. They are persuaded because don’t know anything about our history of

Children cry next to their mother in a caravan of Honduran migrants near Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. (CNS photo/Edgard Garrido, Reuters)

Central American interventions.

Worse yet, they don’t care to learn.

They are too busy gulping down the poisonous swill of U.S. exceptionalism to hear the cries of innocent Hondurans crushed beneath the colossus of American geopolitical power.

We are witnessing a textbook definition of oppression unfolding before our eyes. It is more than a national disgrace; it is wickedness incarnate.

America is the beast risen from the abyss.

In Israel Fascism Can Smell Like Democracy

Perhaps you have heard about the strange campaign ad recently released by Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked. It describes her favorite perfume

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked

called Fascism. But she believes it smells like Democracy.

I am posting a copy of the ad with accompanying English translation below.  Take a look:

 

Throughout her political career, Shaked has objected whenever the Supreme Court has (periodically) defended the civil rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

She despises “liberal” activists who condemn Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and described all Palestinians as inherently violent people who deserve to be eradicated.

She was a prominent advocate for Israel’s recently approved Jewish Nation-State Law which explicitly defines Israel as a state of, for and by Jews and Jews alone.

In other words, Shaked’s ad is mocking anyone who fails to understand what has, in fact, always been the truth about Israel — Israel’s political Zionism provides democracy for its Jewish population and no one else.

At least Shaked has the cajones to discard political double-speak. Unlike most politicians, she says what she means.

George Orwell once wrote that “political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Nothing embodies Orwell’s maxim on the political abuse of language more graphically than Zionism’s stranglehold on the definition of “acceptable discourse” concerning Israel.

Take, for instance, Israel’s insistence on referring to itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Shaked believes in that lie as much as any successful politician in Israel. It’s a given.  What sets her apart however is her willingness to say what she actually means, what in fact every Zionist politician means by those words.

Israel has never been a democracy for all its citizens. But that stark reality has always been obscured by the smoke and mirrors of Zionist propaganda and its successful redefinition of words like democracy.

Shaked, on the other hand, is a rare phenomenon:  she is an honest Zionist.

She has publicly declared that if genuine democracy (e.g. equal treatment for everyone before the law) happens to threaten Zionist Israel’s status as an exclusively Jewish state populated and governed by a Jewish majority (which it certainly does), then Israel must give up its pretense of democracy.

That is the point of her ad.  And, even though few will admit to it, that is why her ad has caused such a stir within Israel and around the world.

Shaked is not playing the traditional Zionist word-games.  And for that, at least, I admire her.

She presents the ugly face of political Zionism for what it is: a mask.

It may be a lovely mask for Israel’s Jewish majority – just as Shaked could be a model if she wanted a new career – but for Israel’s Palestinian minority, Zionism has always meant fascism.