cross posted
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| Credit : Humbug! The Skeptics Field Guide To Spotting Fallacies And Deceptive Arguments |
John Pilger is back. Bloody hell. All hopes it was just a flying visit down under have faded.
This is the latest of the usual. Same play. Different set.
Read it by all means but here's a summary.
Everything is our fault and every leader of the US, UK and Australia still alive since Kennedy, Thatcher and Menzies should be prosecuted as war criminals, convicted and handed life sentences, hanged really if Saddam was hanged, except Gough Whitlam and Jimmy Carter.
Malcolm Fraser gets an amnesty and a Sydney Peace Prize for being the head grass.
Hacking the heads off live women is a little low rent, sure, especially when they broadcast it globally, but back in his day in Cambodia with Pol Pot and all they used to ... yadda yadda yadda
And that's it really
Except the inevitable.
You guessed it.
The bits about Israel. It's always there.
How to solve the problem of ISIS? Simple.
Give up Israel. Israel is the cause of all that is rotten in the Middle East and the world.
This how John Pilger starts.
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable.
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And this is how John Pilger ends. This is how John Pilger always ends.
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- The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.
A truce – however difficult to achieve – is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as “morally questionable” (the Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.
Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.
More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”.
Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.
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That's how it ends. With the end of Israel. All John Pilger's pieces end that way. As you would expect given the man is on the payroll of Tehran.
NM owner Chris Graham questions a key comment from Iain Hall on how to deal with ISIS with advance military technology.
The blog comments
Posted Friday, October 10, 2014 - 00:46
Chris Graham
Really Iain? 700,000 dead in Iraq (at least) BEFORE ISIS and you think it's about 'military technology'.?
Iain is exactly right about the advances in military technology not only since Cambodia, but as Chris Graham has emphasised, even since the last Iraq war.
In skilled, professional hands, trained in the ethics of the purity of arms as every soldier in every modern military in the West is no matter what it is called, the military is a much more precise instrument than it was even ten years ago, let alone in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The Israelis have just proved that beyond all doubt.
Cut away the Left/Islamist/Nazi hysteria and war propaganda and you will see a landmark achievement. The IDF took out a sophisticated, heavily armed, experienced and intensely trained militia, equivalent to two divisions of the Iranian army, dug into a vast complex of serviced concrete tunnels and bunkers carefully positioned in and under residential blocks, schools, mosques, hotels and especially under the Israeli built hospital.
Hamas et al had stockpiled tens of thousands of missiles and rockets, vast quantities of war materiel, with human shields in place by the thousands and with the strategic advantage of knowing that Israel must supply them with all the food, water, power and drugs they need out of an overriding humanitarian imperative for the civilian population that for all purposes Hamas was holding hostage for their lives.
The IDF achievement is miraculous. About 1800 "palestinians" had their lives thrown away by their war criminal bosses out of which likely about 1000 were jihadist killers armed and in the act. Among them was an astonishing number of the war criminal bosses themselves.
Of the approximately 800 civilians it is certain that most were killed by Hamas et al , mostly by reckless accident but also by execution, often in public.
Israel is investigating several incidents involving its forces including a strike on a beach and another on a school.
Every violent killing is one too many. It is a sick calculus of this war that it has so many spectators who just love to keep count as if they were keeping score at the stadium at some macabre game of their own invention.
Which is of course is exactly what they are doing. Especially in the left/liberal institutions in the media and academia. It is a racist fantasy that the turmoil of the Arab Muslim Middle East is externally imposed, or at least externally imposed from the West. The turmoil and war is indigenous. It is absurd to hold that the Middle East is the only place it is not.
ISIS and Hamas are spiritual sisters, they are as close as two snakes on a Gorgon's head. ISIS is modeled on Hamas and is no stronger even though it is hissing louder right now. It has some stronger weapons, tanks and artillery, but not the missiles, depth and training; and its strategic position is very much weaker.
ISIS has a sophisticated and substantial media and propaganda arm, but it is far inferior to that of Hamas even though it is no less ruthless.
And yet despite all of this, the IDF was able to bring the ugly sister in Gaza to its knees, while inflicting so few civilian casualties that the Hamas propaganda churners and stringers were reduced to cannibalising images from Syria and kids Hamas had killed in Gaza for the dead baby pictures and clips faithfully front paged by their allies in the Western media as part of the war effort against Israel..
Something new has come out of the Gaza war that may cause Hamas and others to do yet more rue-ing of the day Hamas decided to launched an unprovoked murderous attack on Israel.
Funny how things work out.
We know now that we should not be afraid to go after these life hating, death cultist cowards, boots and all, no matter how deep they have dug themselves into their ratholes , for fear of slaughtering the innocent that we know for sure they will be behind.
We now have the skills and tools to cope with this terrible dilemma with so much at stake. With more science and training this can only get better. The Israelis have just shown that.
And
There is a green/leftist street legend ( like all religions, they have so many) that the Israelis term a military intervention in Gaza, "mowing the lawn".
It's horseshit of course but like a dingo with a fly blown goanna, the left just can't let the damn thing go.
So be it. Here's another one for you. Bearing in mind the ISIS position with Hamas on the Gorgon's head.
The campaign to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS should be called giving it a haircut..
As close as possible.
- John Pilger
I particularly enjoy how he uses the desires of Osama bin Laden to make his point. Now there's a rational, deep, progressive thinker!
ReplyDeleteJay, Robert Fisk has done the same thing re Osama. Coming to think of it, Osama praised Fisk's journalism. And I'm sure he would have praised Pilger if he had known the latter's oeuvre.
ReplyDeleteThere's a name I've been fortunate enough not to hear for a while. Yeah, Fisk is another one who has the unfortunate habit of coming back like a bad meal...
DeletePilger writes:
ReplyDelete"Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them."
This idea is, perhaps, the single most pernicious notion embedded in the conversation around the long Arab war against the Jews.
It is an ahistorical appeal to progressive-left values wherein the defeated party must, by definition, be considered to inhabit the moral high ground.
The truth, of course, is that the Arab majority has been smacking around the Jewish minority in that part of the world since the 7th century and are simply carrying out behavior related to taditional Arab Jewish hatred derived from the Koran.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with justice, neither for them nor for us.
Yeah, that quote stuck out to me, as well.
DeleteI don't even know what the hell that first sentence is supposed to mean. And as for the second, where to start? The entire premise is flawed to begin with, based upon the phrasing which demands one accept as a starting point that the Palestinian-Arabs are being denied 'justice' by certain others (but surely not by their fellow Arabs in other countries who keep them in perpetual 'refugee' status for generations), even as their leaders repeatedly do everything possible to refuse accepting a state of their own in peace with their Jewish neighbors.
What is Pilger's idea of 'justice,' after all? Oh wait, I think I know. And yeah, that's as wrong as everything else he writes.
I hadn't heard of this guy prior to geoffff's piece, but I read his wikipedia entry, linked in the diary above. He's the kind of 'peace activist' who actively supports terrorists, as long as they're fighting US and / or other Western troops.
Well, okay then...