W. Niederhut

Yes, Paul, I read that lone straw man propaganda response, which had very little to do with the substance of Sterling's article about JFK's disagreements with Ben Gurion and the militant right wing Zionists in Palestine. It reminded me of Michael Griffith's standard, misleading straw man arguments in our debates on this forum. The technique is, "Hey, look at this straw man over here! If the author didn't describe this little straw man quite correctly, all of his work must be inaccurate," etc.

James DiEugenio's recent Substack essay about Gaza and JFK has inspired me to study the history of U.S. relations with Israel during the past 60 years. Last night, I discovered this interesting essay, From Dallas to Gaza, at a website called LA Progressive. The author, Rick Sterling, is a Canadian American from Berkeley, California. Probably no accident that a Canadian has a more accurate perspective on U.S. history than most Americans. Rather than focusing on JFK's relationship with Nasser, Sterling's essay focuses more on JFK's relationship with David Ben Gurion and right wing Zionists in Israel and the U.S. It also discusses RFK's efforts as Attorney General to accurately register Israeli lobbyists in the U.S. as agents of a foreign government. Sterling also describes the disagreements that many liberal Jewish intellectuals in the U.S.-- including Albert Einstein-- had with militant, right wing Zionists in the JFK era, a subject that Robert Burrows has mentioned in our discussion on the Gaza and JFK thread. Needless to say, the U.S. military industrial complex and the right wing Israeli military complex (and Israeli lobby in the U.S.) have emerged victorious following the assassinations of JFK and RFK. This article is worth reading. From Dallas to Gaza: How JFK’s Assassination Was Good for Zionist Israel Kennedy wanted to steer the Jewish Zionists away from the racist, militaristic and ultra-nationalistic impulses which have led to where we are today. https://www.laprogressive.com/the-middle-east/from-dallas-to-gaza December 15, 2023

BTW, Ron, I was just contemplating a related question. Why is it that the mainstream U.S. media has been so eager to publish graphic stories about the private sex lives of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, while remaining silent about Trump wearing a diaper and shitting in his pants in public? Talk about a double standard! Can you imagine the 24/7 Fox News coverage if Joe Biden had a habit of shitting in his pants? 😲

Ron, Should Trump market a Trump brand MAGA aerosol deodorizer for guys who suffer from fecal incontinence? It could be manufactured in China, like a lot of other MAGA merchandise. As I recall, some guy who worked on the set of the Apprentice back in the day described Trump's fecal incontinence problems on the set, in nauseating detail. I don't know if those stories are true, but Donald certainly appears to be wearing a diaper in a number of public photos.

I hope you're right, Matt, but I'm beginning to wonder about the stranglehold that Israel has on Biden and the entire U.S. government. No one dares to cross AIPAC, except Bernie Sanders and the Squad. It's political suicide.

I'm working on answering my own question (above) about the evolution U.S. foreign policy toward Israel after JFK's assassination. Apparently, Israel has received more foreign aid from the U.S. than any country in the world since WWII, and it looks like U.S. foreign aid to Israel surged quite dramatically after 1972-- during the Ford and Carter administrations. I can't find any readily available data about AIPAC revenue and spending by year-- to see if there is any correlation between U.S. foreign aid to Israel and the growth of the immensely powerful Israeli lobby in the U.S. since 1963. It's an awkward subject, but it's evident that Israel has strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy during the past 50 years-- as Ariel Sharon pointed out in 2000, when he boasted that, "Israel controls America, and the Americans know it." The recent Gaza crisis has, certainly, re-focused attention on this issue. Biden and Blinken have been bending over backwards to support Netanyahu's massacre of Gaza's civilian population. At the same time, American politicians and public figures who have dared to criticize the Netanyahu administration's war crimes in Gaza have been explicitly targeted for retaliation by Israeli interest groups in the U.S.-- in a manner reminiscent of the NRA targeting politicians who support gun control legislation. Benjamin Cole seems quite pleased with this state of affairs, without asking whether the foreign (and domestic) policies of Israel are necessarily in the best interests of the United States. Hopefully, Ben will eventually develop a modicum of curiosity about the subject. For example, how does it benefit the U.S. to be drawn by Netanyahu's Likud Party into another round of multi-trillion dollar wars against Islamic nations in the Middle East? We've been there and done that in the 21st century. Did we learn nothing from Bush and Cheney's Neocon/PNAC debacle after 9/11?

Doug, Based on your educational background at Georgetown, and your knowledge of American diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy, do you think JFK was the last POTUS who ever said, "No," to Israel? Ben Gurion was furious at JFK about the Dimona nuclear project, which LBJ later greenlighted. LBJ also suppressed the U.S.S. Liberty incident. I'm not that familiar with the Middle East policies of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Cheney and Rumsfeld stacked George W. Bush's administration with PNAC Neocons. Bob Woodward reported, in Plan of Attack, that Dubya called Poppy Bush before his Inauguration in January of 2001 and asked, "Dad, who are the Neocons?" Poppy replied, "In a word, son-- Israel."

What's the military "emergency?" More evidence that Biden and Blinken are actively complicit in Netanyahu's Gaza genocide. Bypassing Congress, Blinken approves emergency weapons sale to Israel (axios.com) Details: The Defense Department said in a statement on Friday Secretary of State Antony Blinken had "determined and provided detailed justification to Congress that an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale" to Israel. This waives "the Congressional review requirements" needed for selling defense equipment to other countries, per the department. The sale includes ancillary items, such as fuzes, primers and charges, which amount to an estimated total of $147.5 million, according to the Defense Department. The ancillary items make the 155mm shells that Israel previously bought functional, according to a State Department spokesperson.

Gerry, Here are some stats and references from the following article that I recently posted on the "JFK and Gaza" thread.* If I recall correctly, Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone quoted a figure of 3-4 million indigenous casualties in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in their Untold History of the United States textbook. I didn't mention post-11/22/63 casualties in Latin America and elsewhere caused by CIA ops under LBJ, and Nixon. * The U.S. Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 "Victim Nations" Since World War II - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization Vietnam According to a Vietnamese government statement in 1995 the number of deaths of civilians and military personnel during the Vietnam War was 5.1 million. (2) Since deaths in Cambodia and Laos were about 2.7 million (See Cambodia and Laos) the estimated total for the Vietnam War is 7.8 million. Cambodia U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but when President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia it caused major protests in the U.S. against the Vietnam War. There is little awareness today of the scope of these bombings and the human suffering involved. Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power. Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people. So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge. (1,2,3) Laos From 1965 to 1973 during the Vietnam War the U.S. dropped over two million tons of bombs on Laos – more than was dropped in WWII by both sides. Over a quarter of the population became refugees. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Branfman make the only estimate that I am aware of , stating that hundreds of thousands died. This can be interpeted to mean that at least 200,000 died. (1,2,3) Indonesia In 1965, in Indonesia, a coup replaced General Sukarno with General Suharto as leader. The U.S. played a role in that change of government. Robert Martens,a former officer in the U.S. embassy in Indonesia, described how U.S. diplomats and CIA officers provided up to 5,000 names to Indonesian Army death squads in 1965 and checked them off as they were killed or captured. Martens admitted that “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” (1,2,3) Estimates of the number of deaths range from 500,000 to 3 million. (4,5,6) From 1993 to 1997 the U.S. provided Jakarta with almost $400 million in economic aid and sold tens of million of dollars of weaponry to that nation. U.S. Green Berets provided training for the Indonesia’s elite force which was responsible for many of atrocities in East Timor. (3)

Jim, To clarify, I didn't think your reference to Timber Sycamore was specious at all. It was important. What seemed "specious" to me was your comment that people here were moving the thread "off topic" by discussing the history of U.S. foreign policy changes (and the Neocons, in particular) after JFK's murder. JFK and Gaza is a very broad topic.

Jim, Your thread and essay are entitled, "JFK and Gaza," and your essay did include references to the Neocons and 21st century U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East-- including Operation Timber Sycamore and the murder of Ghaddafi. And the issue of JFK's opinions about the Israeli-Palestine conflict is, obviously, relevant to the geopolitical history of the past 60 years, and to the current crisis in Gaza. Highly relevant. So, it's a bit specious to accuse people of going "off topic" on this thread by discussing the history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the Neocons, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Is it unacceptable for the forum to discuss the implications of JFK's thwarted policies for the 21st century -- the "betrayal of destiny?" In fact, Edward Curtin specifically mentioned JFK's peace initiatives in his recent "Epistle to RFK" about the Gaza disaster. The truth is that no U.S. President since JFK has really been willing to stand up to the CIA and the U.S. military-industrial complex, or to Israel. Ariel Sharon bragged in 2000 that, "Israel controls America, and the Americans know it." Benjamin Netanyahu has made similar comments in at least one taped interview posted on Professor Juan Cole's website.

I have not, Robert, but his Finkelstein's work looks interesting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

One of the most disingenuous tropes in the M$M since October 7th is the oft-repeated nonsense that critics of Netanyahu's Likud Party war crimes in Gaza support Hamas. Fox News and Benjamin Cole are repeating this false trope lately, just as they used to repeat the false trope that Trump's J6 attack on Congress was a Deep State "Patriot Purge." Ironically, the guy who has actively supported Hamas for more than a decade is Netanyahu! Bibi has used Hamas for years to bolster his popularity and sabotage a two-state solution. Now he's using Hamas as a pretext to ethnically cleanse Palestine of indigenous Palestinians, with U.S. funded cluster bombs. Here's a reference (from our "Water Cooler" discussions) on that subject. How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel | CBC News I should add that some of us have been engaged during the past two months in detailed discussions about the Gaza disaster on the "Water Cooler" board here, sharing many high quality articles and analyses-- mostly from marginalized media sources. Interested forum members should join in our "Water Cooler" discussions. In addition to analysts like Jeffrey Sachs, Norman Soloman, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, Edward Curtin, et.al., we have been discussing the work of Jeremy Scahill and the investigative journalists at The Intercept (sans former colleague Glenn Greenwald, who now works for Rupert Murdoch's propaganda empire.)

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Robert, My hunch is that Ben Cole knows almost nothing about the Talmud or the history of Islam. He's most likely repeating recent talking points by Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, or other Murdoch media affiliates. Has Ben read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Sir Steven Runciman's definitive History of the Crusades? Bat Ye'or's definitive histories of the dhimmitude of Jews and Christians in the Middle East and Balkans? It has been a subject of special interest to me for the past quarter century, mainly because of the centuries-long history of Islamic conflicts and co-existence with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christians and Jews have always been allowed to live in Islamic societies as dhimmis-- religious minorities who pay a special religious tax, called the jizya. The Egyptian Copts are a well-known example. Sadly, Islamophobic propaganda has been a growth industry in the U.S. since 9/11, and many Islamic societies have been mercilessly destroyed in our multi-trillion dollar post-9/11 Neocon "War on Terror"-- especially in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. A refutation of Ben Cole's abysmally ignorant comments about the 9/11 evidence are a subject for an entirely different thread, and a different EF board. Suffice it to say that there is a wide array of scientific and forensic data debunking the official Bush/Cheney/Zelikow narrative about what happened on 9/11. Most people, including Ben Cole, know nothing about it. Hopefully, Ben will eventually study and begin to comprehend that 9/11 data. But I won't hold my breath. Based on his redundant comments on the subject, Ben still hasn't even discovered the evidence that Trump organized and incited a violent mob attack on the U.S. Congress on January 6th.

Paul, RFK, Jr. is only a small part of what I have mentioned here. There are much larger issues having to do with our forum's reluctance to discuss the historic relationships between the CIA and Islam, (e.g., Suharto, Bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" mujaheddin in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria) and, of course, Israel. This forum, at times, scratches the surface of 21st century Deep State history, then promptly avoids talking about it. As an example, in James DiEugenio's recent Substack essay on JFK and Gaza, the only 21st century references were to CIA Operation Timber Sycamore (in Syria) and the U.S./NATO war to overthrow and murder Ghaddafi.

The deafening silence of the RFK, Jr. fan boys on this forum today about Edward Curtin's candid, accurate essay on JFK's Peace Speech, RFK, Jr., and Netanyahu's Gaza genocide is simply astonishing. What's wrong with you guys? Serious question. You're the same group of ostriches who have persistently refused to discuss the critically important 21st century history of the 9/11 op and the Neocon Project for a New American Century, and --in Paul Rigby's case-- to condemn Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, while assiduously avoiding any review or discussion of former KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Putin's history of transforming the nascent Russian Federation democracy into a 21st century totalitarian police state. No comment about Curtin's essay? I happen to know that James DiEugenio has had a positive opinion of Curtin's previous work. What happened? Meanwhile, Ben Cole is referencing the CIA's use of Suharto and Muslims against communism in Indonesia as an argument for generalized Neocon-style Islamophobia. Beware the Green Menace. I'm guessing that Ben is clueless about the CIA's similar use of Muslims (including their trainees, Osama Bin Laden and "Al Qaeda") against communism in the Soviet -Afghan War, and against the Yugoslav communist rump state in the Bosnian and Kosovo Wars. (Yes, Osama Bin Laden, et.al., were working with the KLA in Kosovo, and with the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia, and even using Bosnian passports in the 1990s.) Has Ben Cole, the MAGA neo-Islamophobe, studied the Likud Party charter-- which has explicitly vowed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in Palestine? Is Ben aware of Netanyahu's public boasts about successfully sabotaging a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine crisis, and supporting Hamas for the past 12 years as a method of sabotaging a two-state solution? Is Ben aware that Netanyahu has recently informed his Likud Party associates that he is their best option for preventing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis? Meanwhile, Netanyahu has now used cluster bombs to massacre more than 21,000 Palestinian civilians-- including more than 8,000 children-- in one of the world's most densely populated regions, while demolishing schools, hospitals, and more than 56,000 residential buildings. Where are our progressive, Democratic, JFK-like peaceniks nowadays? The only published writers willing to talk honestly about this Gaza crisis are a handful of progressives -- e.g., Jeff Sachs, Norman Soloman, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, Juan Cole, and Edward Curtin. On this forum, the list is even shorter-- Douglas Caddy, Kirk Gallaway and I.

On the subject of Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, JFK's American University Peace speech, and RFK, Jr., Edward Curtin has published two recent articles. People may recall that Curtin published a favorable, accurate review of JFK Revisited. He was also an RFK, Jr. supporter, prior to RFK, Jr.'s defense of Netanyahu's recent Gaza war crimes-- where the civilian death toll has now surpassed 21,000, including more than 8,000 murdered children. I posted the first Curtin article on the Political Discussion board last night, because I thought it deserved its own thread. An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by Edward Curtin - The Unz Review

Ron, One of my former psychiatry professors (at Harvard) used to say that it's very difficult to predict what psychotic people will do. So, I have no idea how the delusional MAGA Republicans in Colorado will vote in the future. I was surprised when Boebert won her last election. I think she won by only 500 votes in a heavily Republican district. Meanwhile, those of us who are skeptical about RFK, Jr.'s 2024 candidacy might be interested in reading Edward Curtin's recent denunciation of RFK, Jr. I posted this epistle separately on the Political Discussion board last night, because I thought it deserved its own thread. Unfortunately, no one visits the Political Discussion board. It's an erstwhile Education Forum dust bin. An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by Edward Curtin - The Unz Review

An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by Edward Curtin - The Unz Review EDWARD CURTIN NOVEMBER 10, 2023 As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a deep revulsion for our country’s imperial wars and violent history, would triumph and usher in a new era of peace. Despite the naysayers who dismissed you from the start, I said Yes, that you would shock those who ridiculed and maligned you and that you would be the man to carry out President Kennedy’s American University speech and fulfill his and your father’s legacy of “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” because “we all breathe the same air” and “we all cherish our children’s futures” and “we are all mortal.” I suggested that you would heal the divide and not expand it. Seeing you stumble on your way by throwing your full support to the Zionist leaders of Israel has been a body blow to me. At first I thought it might be explained by your reaction to the false antisemitic accusations that were hurled your way once word emerged that you might enter the presidential race. But as time went on it dawned on me that I was wrong and that you were in sync with the powerful Israel Lobby. So now, I feel as if we are in the tenth round of fight for your soul’s compassion. That you have not defended the children of Gaza and condemned their massacre by the thousands has shocked and sickened me. As a scholar of religion and its intersection with politics, I have been meditating on current events. Religion has for a very long time been used as a cover for slaughtering people and seizing their land. This is true for the United States and Israel. It is built into their theological underpinnings. So it should not be at all surprising that the current Israeli massacre of Palestinians is fully supported by the U.S. government led by President Joseph Biden and by almost every presidential aspirant. You, however, as a self-styled anti-war candidate are a great surprise to me, although I may be naïve and shouldn’t be since you gave your unequivocal support to the Israel government a month ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel that killed innocent Israelis (many of whom were also probably killed by the IDF as Jonathan Cooke has reported). Despite that, I still expected your conscience would surely prompt you to condemn what can only be described as genocide, the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza that is ongoing. You have undermined your claim to “end the forever wars” and to defend children. Why you have done (or not done) this is a question that so many of your supporters and former supporters are asking. Only you can say. Perhaps we might only know if you unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions and faced whatever might come your way as a result. This is unlikely, I now realize, but one can still hope. I think it would take a spiritual miracle of moral courage, because of your claim that your historical analysis that you say is sincere and true that Israel now and always has been the just and innocent party and the Palestinians the evil ones. I find your analysis unbelievable and your silence as innocents are being slaughtered indefensible, even as I applaud so many of your other positions, as you know. Everyone knows that running for the U.S. presidency creates strange bedfellows, but your touting of the Israeli propaganda in which you conflate the Palestinian people with Hamas to justify massacring civilians is beyond strange – it is immoral. I know how much you respect Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you no doubt have heard his words before. “And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Conscience calls to you, Bobby. Be true to that voice within. Politic as it may be, there is a heavy burden of guilt for abandoning the Palestinians to slaughter by silence. King learned this when he saw those photos of the napalmed and dead Vietnamese children and was conscience-stricken to come to Riverside Church in New York to give his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” You can do the same. The pictures of dead Palestinian children, victims of U.S. support for Israeli bombs, are there to see. Martin quoted your uncle, John, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” He said that we can no longer worship the God of hate and retribution. He said, “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.” You too, Bobby, can break your silence, step up high and let your conscience also leave you no other choice but to condemn the genocide in Gaza. As Martin said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” You say you are making “a moral case for Israel” as the justified party in its seventy-five year long war with the Palestinians. In doing so you have reneged on your campaign promise to emulate President John Kennedy, who would be appalled by your silence. Your website, Kennedy 24, declares that “[you] Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist.” In genuflecting to the Israel genocide while touting your connection to JFK and your father, Senator Robert Kennedy, you have in fact taken a position toward Israel diametrically opposed to theirs. One could sense this coming when under pressure this past summer, you withdrew your support for Roger Waters, a strong Palestinian supporter who was falsely accused of being anti-Jewish, and you then allowed your “friend” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, killed your father in 1968 when you knew that was a lie and was part of a sophisticated intelligence conspiracy to blame the patsy who was said to hate Israel. To allow Shmuley to audaciously and heartlessly repeat a CIA trope about your father’s assassination was a telltale sign of worse to come. For both the U.S. and Israel, the Bible has been used to cover up the crimes of their foundings. They have analogous histories rooted in religious myths. In both cases, the indigenous peoples were considered less than human – savages, infidels – or in the description of Palestinians by the current Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals.” Such racist, dehumanizing language has been repeated time and again throughout the American and Israeli narratives used to justify their crimes against those they killed and whose land they stole. The gloss of civilized hypocrisy has been unmasked by such language, just as it was when Hitler repeatedly called Jews “vermin.” Irony aside, the Nazi rhetoric of denigration and racial superiority to justify exterminating Jewish people has been repeatedly mirrored by American and Israeli leaders, whether it was against the Original Free Peoples of North America, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, etc. or the Palestinians. It is the master/slave mentality deeply rooted in U.S. and Israel history. Bobby, you have said that you hope to be the second independent candidate to become president, the first being George Washington. Yet Washington was a racist and slave owner who supported the extermination of the Indian natives so the white settlers could take their land. He himself did so, speculating in Native lands together with most of the other prominent politicians from the early days of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, et al. For the governors and legislators of the thirteen states it was also open sesame on the seizure of Indian land which required their slaughter in turn. One can learn this in Peter P. d’Errico’s important recent book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, where he makes clear how U.S. law was used to codify such “legal” theft and killing. Such federal law was, as d’Errico writes, a claim of unlimited U.S. power and not really law at all but the suspension of law as it granted the U.S. government complete authority over Native peoples, their lives, and their land. Legal theft, in other words. Like the English justification for their claim to their colonies – the “right of discovery” proclaimed in Henry VII’s commission to John Cabot: “to subdue and take possession of any lands unoccupied by any Christian Power” – a series of three Supreme Court rulings in the 1830s by Chief Justice John Marshall were based on the claim of “Christian discovery,” which in turn was based on a papal grant from Pope Alexander the Sixth in 1493 that gave to Christopher Columbus’s sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, ownership of any land Columbus might discover. This divine right required the killing and subjugation of non-Christian infidels and heathens who were considered brute animals, just as the Palestinians are today. Similar justifications have been used by Zionists for the killing of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the name of the Biblical Jewish God and his instructions to them. This myth claims that God gave them the ancestral Palestinians’ land, therefore, like native peoples of North America who, according to the non-law U.S. Indian law, only had the right of occupancy, the Palestinians could be killed and dispossessed by the God-given rightful owners, which they were in 1948. Netanyahu has made such claims many times, as have his predecessors. He calls for a holy war of annihilation against the Palestinians, based on the Hebrew Bible. This is widely known and has a long history in the Zionist propaganda narrative that has allowed for seventy-five years of killing and the systematic shrinking of Palestinian land to its pitiful size today. It is interesting to note that the three primary countries that intersect in the use of religious justification for colonial and imperial policies are England, the U.S., and Israel – together with the Papacy and its May 4, 1493 bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander the Sixth to declare Christian discovery. I mention this since I am an Irish-American Catholic, and it was the Irish uprising against the English colonial occupiers that has become a key inspiration for anti-colonial rebels throughout the twentieth century and beyond. I have taken inspiration from my Irish ancestors. This is your heritage also, Bobby, so it becomes even more surprising that you, even as you tout the American Revolutionary War rebel fighters against the English colonialists, would support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. As a lawyer, you must be aware of Federal Indian Law and how it, like all law, is rooted in a metaphysics of being human; has presuppositions that are brought to the bar, and in the case of federal Indian law, a Christian nomos at odds with that of Native peoples’. You surely know that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a massive war crime according to international law, and even within the moderate Catholic just war theory, is, by its distorted proportionality, evil and must be rejected as immoral and a terrible sin. You claim to want to end all wars but support the ongoing slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including so many children and women. Nor have you said a word against Biden’s saber rattling with aircraft carriers, U.S. drones, and assistance for Israel’s bloodthirsty assault that raises the threat of a much wider war that could turn nuclear. Yes, the question is why such silence, which you can break now. I beg you to speak out. You are a man of conscience. MLK, Jr. speaks to us all still. Pax tibi,

On the subject of U.S. genocides since WWII, one of the most popular Global Research articles in history is this 2015 analysis by James A. Lucas. * It includes detailed estimates of casualties committed by the CIA and U.S. military in multiple nations around the world since WWII-- totaling an estimated 20 million. I vividly recall taking a psychiatric history from a Gulf War veteran at a local alcohol treatment facility back in the 1990s. He described the horrific psychological trauma of seeing the charred bodies of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in burnt jeeps and trucks-- totaling about 200,000-- in the aftermath of General Norman Schwarzkopf's artillery barrage during GHWB's Gulf War. That Gulf War carnage was largely blacked out of the sanitized U.S. mainstream media coverage. And the Gulf War was celebrated as a glorious military triumph in the U.S. media, with almost no discussion of it's strangely deceptive origins. (The later Neocon PNAC plan was a direct response to the disappointment of Cheney and Rumsfeld that Saddam had not been deposed during the Gulf War.) People may recall that, in Dan Rather's famous interview of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 U.S./British invasion of Iraq, Saddam kept referring to George W. Bush as, "the Son of the Snake." GHWB and Rumsfeld had actively armed Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime during the Reagan era Iran-Iraq War-- while simultaneously arming Iran in their Iran-Contra scheme. * The U.S. Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 "Victim Nations" Since World War II - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Amen, Ron, and, on Earth, peace, good will to men (and women.) I posted a few of my old Christmas/Yuletide guitar arrangements at Soundclick this week. https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14701846

Kirk, Just to clarify, I didn't miss Jim's point at all. I merely commented on the most critically important chapter in Neocon history-- 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror." The only reason I posted a comment about the Neocon Project for a New American Century (PNAC) is that Jim had mentioned the later Obama era war against Ghaddafi, and Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria-- essentially leap-frogging the critically important preceding history of PNAC, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, 9/11, and the Bush/Cheney/Neocon "War on Terror." But the Obama era military interventions in Libya and Syria (Timber Sycamore) were merely later phases of the Neocon PNAC plan-- following the Iraq War. Recall that Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz Pentagon officials had briefed General Wesley Clark shortly after 9/11 on Pentagon plans to respond to 9/11 by waging war against several of Israel's Muslim adversaries-- "starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, and Libya." The Pentagon plan was, basically, the pre-2000 Neocon Project for a New American Century, using 9/11 as the pretext-- the "New Pearl Harbor" event. And who benefitted from 9/11 and the PNAC "War on Terror?" Halliburton and other military contractors, Israel, and the Saudis (who, like Israel, wanted the U.S. to depose Saddam and bomb Iran.) Ultimately, the only phase of the PNAC agenda that was never implemented was a U.S. war against Iran. And I read somewhere that Douglas Feith was working on schemes to trigger a U.S. war against Iran, after he was fired from the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

Sandy, My dad, a WWII vet, was a Bing Crosby fan, and I grew up listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas album, with the Andrews Sisters. It's still one of my favorites. The song, I'll Be Home for Christmas, was a hit for American GIs fighting in the war in 1943, and I remember seeing a tear in my father's eye once when he was listening to Bing Crosby sing that song. A lot of the men in my dad's WWII tank battalion (753rd) never made it home for Christmas.

Understood, Jim. And, as I said, it's an excellent essay about JFK and Nasser. I was simply commenting on the fact that the history of the Neocons, PNAC, 9/11, and the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" remains a "third rail" in American political discourse. How many articles has anyone ever seen in our mainstream media about the Neocon Project for a New American Century? It's one of the best kept secrets in 21st century America-- even among historians. Many people still don't even know what it was.