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- FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL - Let Them Eat Cookies On July 7, 2010, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (R-Los Angeles) held a "Town Hall Meeting." Only it wasn't like your ordinary congressman's town hall meeting. Not at all. First, the public at large was not invited. Second, it wasn't held in a public venue. It was held on private property, deliberately so that the private interests that owned the venue could at will exclude anyone they wished. Third, there was no publicity - it wasn't announced on the congressman's web site. Fourth, only a select few were invited to attend, representing one interest and one interest only - Israel. From his comments (see link above) at this "town hall meeting," it was evident, reading between the lines, that the congressman clearly puts Israel's interests above those of the constituents he serves or the republic whose constitution he is sworn to protect and defend. In other words, when forced to choose between Israel and the United States he ostensibly represents, he'll unhesitatingly choose Israel, even while Israel is totally indifferent to the United States' own security needs and interests in the region as is becoming obvious to everyone. The exclusivity and secrecy of this "Town Hall Meeting," and what was said there, is symptomatic of a serious problem in U.S.-Israel relations. Namely, the fact that U.S. foreign policy, and increasingly even domestic policy, is being vetoed, if not written in Jerusalem and not in Washington. As the grip of the Israel lobby tightens, it has clearly come to the point that U.S. interests, both domestic and foreign, are increasingly getting strangled. To wit: At the end of May, Israel attacked a civilian cargo vessel peacefully and lawfully navigating upon the high seas, and, with clear premeditation (one Israeli soldier was caught with a list of passengers, including photos, that were targeted for extermination), murdered at least 15 passengers aboard the vessel (six missing passengers were never accounted for by Israel; witnesses say they were shot and the bodies thrown overboard). The dead included an American citizen, and our illustrious sycophant for Israeli interests, Mr. Sherman, rather than demanding an accounting by Israel, suggested that those Americans aboard who weren't murdered should be prosecuted as terrorists for peaceably attempting to break a blockade that virtually every professor of international law agrees is illegal. No arms, no support for "militants" nor aid to any recognized terrorist organization - just humanitarian aid for the siege victims in Gaza. That, to Mr. Sherman, makes them "terrorists." The backlash that ensued from that incident was worldwide condemnation, not just for the massacre, but for the siege of Gaza that inspired the attempt at relieving it. Indeed, on the last remaining section of the Warsaw Ghetto enclosure wall in Warsaw, Poland, a Jewish peace activist from Israel, spray-painted grafitti noting the resemblance between the seige of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis, to the seige of the Gaza Strip by Israel. The former inspired the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention On The Protection Of Civilians In Time Of War, to which Israel is now famously signatory. Articles 33, 49 and 53 of that treaty clearly, specifically forbids what Israel is now doing to Gaza. But while Israel's actions are clearly antithetical to U.S. interests, the interests of the diasporic Jews, and Israel's long-term security, it goes on, because Israel's internal politics, which drive the Israel lobby in the U.S., have devolved into a sump of 19th-century far-right racism, nationalism, tribalism and outright, naked vengeance-seeking. Any Israeli politician who plays to such prurient values might stand a chance of getting elected, while those who aspire to lifting the electorate to seek some form of true moral legitimacy for a Jewish state find themselves getting shouted down and even threatened. With this morally degraded domestic politics, and a "Basic Law" (which is what passes for a constitution in Israel) encouraging this kind of moral degradation, it is not surprising that Israel has come to this. Even if its leaders were inclined towards empathy and compassion for the Gazan civilians, their electorate has become so consumed with the hatred which that the political class has relentlessly fostered, that such leadership would never stand. Certainly any Israeli politician that dared admit to Israeli culpability in the suffering of the people of Gaza, would see his career, if not his life, ended quickly. In his groundbreaking book on the nature of evil, "People Of The Lie," psychologist M. Scott Peck wrote that there are several characteristics that distinguish genuine evil from merely misguided moral error. The most evident thing that separates the two is that those who are genuinely evil will deny the suffering they are causing the innocent whenever such denial is plausible, and, when that suffering becomes undeniable, they will evade responsibility for it, seeking to place the responsibility on the victim. Evil people often justify their behavior on their own arrogated sense of victimhood, blaming their victims for not being empathetic to the evil person's status as a victim himself. Perhaps it would be useful to take a look at Israel in the context of what Peck has written. Attacks by truly evil persons on their victims are normally mounted within the context of a total lack of empathy and compassion for the victims. In the Freedom Flotilla episode, we heard nothing from Israel about the suffering their actions were causing to either the Palestinians, nor for the families of the dead victims - just the mealy-mouthed comment that the deaths themselves were "regrettable." According to Peck, it is that lack of empathy and compassion for the suffering that has happened that separates the deeply, congenitally evil from mere passive evil and morally erroneous. When the lies justifying the action don't hold up, the deeply evil will resort to a range of justifications for what they are doing, saying that if anything went wrong, it was clearly the victim's fault. We saw this most clearly in Israel's response to the Freedom Flotilla massacre, in which the murdered victims were blamed by Israel for having had the temerity to actually defend themselves! Such a response is clearly the response that Peck would have expected from evil men. An additional, common behavior of the truly evil is to actively block any attempt by the victim to seek help from third parties. That, of course, is what the seige of Gaza is all about - preventing Gazans from living ordinary lives unhindered by Israeli persecution, importing and exporting as their needs arise. Israel has not only blockaded Gaza, but has worked hard to whitewash the seige as being about Israel's "legitimate security needs," and not about the Gazans themselves. Yet while Israel loudly proclaims that (in response to international pressure) it has now lifted the seige for all but military or dual-use materials - cookies are now allowed in for the first time in years - there are two realities that put the lie to that assertion. First, only a small portion - estimates are about one-half or less - of the Gazans' actual needs are being permitted to cross into Gaza (the United Nations reports that fully two-thirds of Gazan children under the age of one are showing clear signs of iron-deficiency anemia and other forms of malnutrition), and second, exports from the Gaza Strip are still banned. If this were really about Israel's "legitimate" security needs, what "legitimate security threat" could possibly be posed by Gazans' exporting cut flowers, fresh produce and manufactured goods to the outside world as they had done in the past? It's truly hard to think of one. Peck notes that the genuinely evil often prey upon their victims for years, causing them to degenerate into various states of mental illness and sometimes eventually even death, all the while promoting the view that the problems the victims faced were of their own making. In this conflict, we see this most clearly in the case of Gaza, where for three years, Israel has maintained a tight seige of the one and a half million civilian victims, even while the rocket attacks used as the constantly-repeated pretext for this seige rarely cause more than minor damage, and the total number of Israeli deaths caused by the rockets from Gaza is fewer than a dozen. But that somehow this is supposed to justify the Gaza Massacre of 2008, in which 1,400 innocent civilians died (more than 600 of whom were children), at least 6,000 were injured and tens of thousands left homeless, water purification plants and sewage treatment plants, electric generating facilities, hospitals and schools were all attacked and destroyed - in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and with not even a credible pretext. For years, Gaza has been used as Israel's private shooting gallery, where rockets launched from Israeli gunship helicopters cause numerous civilian casualties almost every week. Peck's analysis of the truly evil persecuting their victims for years, while habitually blaming their victims certainly applies to Israel's behavior in Gaza. But the truly evil seldom lie about their behavior outright - Peck suggests that instead, the truly evil invert reality in twisted ways to conform to their own wildly distorted view of reality and of themselves. And we see this constantly in regards to Israel's outright theft of Palestinian property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. When Palestinians build housing for themselves on land that has been in their family for centuries, and with the legal permission of the Palestinian Authority, often as not it will get bulldozed and the land immediately confiscated outright, with no notice and no compensation - on the pretext that it wasn't Israel who issued the building permits (which, as an occupying power, it has no legal authority to require), and which it very rarely issues to Palestinians anyway. This type of distorted view of reality is constant in Israel's propaganda and it is repeated constantly, without correction, by the press in the U.S., because to question it would be to invite condemnation by Israelis, the Israel lobby and the rabid Zionists for whom Israel is first, last and only. The result is a twisted view among Americans of the situation that reflects the twisted mindset of the Zionists in the U.S. and the far right in Israel itself. As the poet Ghassan Hage has written: "Over the years they’ve taught me so many things: / invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation, / colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid...’ Mohandes Gandhi once famously said that "to cooperate with evil is itself evil." And this brings us back to our old friend, United States Congressman, Brad Sherman (R-Israel). In cooperating with and supporting such evil as I have described above, under Gandhi's principle, Mr. Sherman can himself be considered to be an evil man. And therefore, if you accept that Gandhi's principle applies to Rep. Sherman, and if you are a voting resident of his district, or know someone who is, I charge you with the responsibility to not cooperate with evil, but instead, do something about it - especially next November. Scott Bidstrup, Tobosi de El Guarco, Costa Rica, July 12, 2010 Click on your browser's RSS icon or put this link in your RSS reader for automatic updates of this editorial and other content on this site:

"The Cool Page for Queer Teens" is my effort at helping gay teens avoid some of the misery I faced growing up gay... "My Child is GAY! Now What Do I Do?" is a page that is designed to help parents cope with the unsettling discovery that their child is gay. It's also available in Spanish... W7RI in Costa Rica is a section of this web site devoted to my ham radio activities. If you have recently worked me and are looking for QSL information, or you are searching for the "Scott's Tools" freebie calculator software, or just curious about what it is like being a ham in a DX country, you can find it all here... Wallpaper Images From The U.S. Southwest I've been having a lot of fun with my digital camera over the last couple of years. Here are some nice pictures of the Southwest (and a couple from Africa), suitable for your desktop wallpaper image... Wallpaper Images From Costa Rica I did what every landscape photographer dreams of - I took a trip to Costa Rica, and in just two weeks got more and better wallpaper images than I had before... The News: Finding Out What's Going On is a brief compilation of resources, both print and electronic, that can help you become and stay informed about what's going on - news and information that the powerful in Washington or the corporate media have neglected, or worse, actually suppressed... Putting A Stop To Telemarketing offers a simple, easy way to deal with the problem, and some practical advice for serious telemarketing abuse problems... "Cool Stuff" is a collection of fun things I've found on the web over the years... My Professional Resume (in Word format) in case you're here to offer me the big bucks...

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