We have joined the murderers

December 21

 

GUEST: Ahmad Katani, Palestinian American and human rights activist, describes his troubled journey from a refugee camp in the West Bank to the heart of the American Empire, where all the bombs and bullets are made for Israel's war crimes.

Chris Hedges on the Death of Israel

How does the "civilized" world deal with one of its own, when that country is committing genocide? When it kills 20,000 people, almost half of them children? Israel's butchery and grotesque war crimes strain the limits of state sanctioned killing. And yet countries like the United States and members of the EU, just look the other way, especially if there is money to be made selling bullets and bombs for the carnage. 

Ahmad brings us down to the individual Palestinian who has suffered from Israeli apartheid. We understand what the camps are like, and what the slaughter of refugees means. But to really understand the extent of the carnage, we have to remember the European country that slaughtered six million of its Jews, in an attempt to purge them from their "Master Race." In one of life's most destructive ironies, the very people who were slaughtered by the Third Reich, are now "cleansing" Israel of all those who are not Jewish. The victims of the Holocaust have learned to be the perpetrators.

The failure of the more "civilized" Western nations to stop this second Holocaust reveals the base nature of their centuries old claim. Instead of "never again," we have joined the murderers.   

 

America is a killer state

There are events in history that reveal underlying truths about our society. The people of the United States are horrified by pictures of Gaza. Can it be that Israel killed 8,000 Palestinian children? And that our country supported and paid for this genocide?

The wealthy elite at the top of our supposed democracy aren't surprised at all. They rule the world with their high tech bombs and killing machines. Israel is their perfect partner in crime, doing the empire's dirty work in Third World countries. In Gaza, these two of the most powerful countries in the world are annihilating tens of thousands of people who are virtually defenseless.

Lesson one: America is a killer state and has been since the end of WW II. Not the citizens, of course. But their political leaders. Millions have been killed in US invasions, all based on crude lies.

Lesson two: America's ruling elite are completely corrupt. They are highly paid by the major weapons makers and by Israel itself. The man who accepted the most in Israeli bribes is our very own President Biden, pulling in a lifetime haul of $4,346,264 (OpenSecrets.org).

Lesson three: If we take to the streets we can shake up their devotion to greed and murder. We can expose them for the monsters they really are. We can throw a wrench into their vulgar political machine and lobby driven existence. There is no major party for working people, and this rule by the elite has got to go.

Fred Nagel

The world now calls it apartheid

There was a period during the Vietnam War when I lost hope for my country. The US was slaughtering whole villages at the time, and pulverizing Cambodia from the air. I was drafted and sent overseas, so I knew what our military was doing in Southeast Asia.

Many Third World Counties later, our military is again slaughtering tens of thousands, this time in Gaza. Israel is doing the dirty work, as it often does. But the world knows who this genocide can be traced back to. We supply the arms, we send Israel billions in aid, and we cover up for them at the UN. And there is so much to cover up. There are seven million Palestinians still living in their homeland, and their treatment is so disgustingly racist that most of the world now calls it apartheid.   

My country, I realized long ago, is not as evil as it is just broken. There is hardly a member of Congress not being paid off by the Israel Lobby. Our weapons makers sit in the Pentagon and plan how to sell more bombs and fighter jets. Our corporate media has been pro-apartheid Israel for decades. These are all failures of a country that was supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Would our country starve millions of children in Gaza if it were run by the people? Or for the people? This genocide is the end of an ideal we once held for our nation.

Fred Nagel

Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,”

I remember when I first read about the Holocaust. I was about 12 years old, and had never learned about it in school.

I couldn't believe it; the savagery was too much to comprehend. So I went to the library and read all I could. But in the mid fifties, there just wasn't much to be had. It was only when I went to college that I was able to learn more: about Kristallnacht, about the Nazis, and about the extermination camps. I spent a lot of time putting it all together. I read about the night of the "long knives," who had funded Hitler, and the failed assignation attempt. I thought if I studied it enough, I could come to terms with what had happened. I could fit it in.

But I was never able to. And when I read Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,” I thought I knew what "the horror" really meant. The undefinable and the inexpressible.

Watching and listening to the genocide in Gaza brought me all the way back to that 12 year old student. How could human beings kill 5,000 children in a month? How could Israel send millions fleeing without any place to go? And how could the hospitals, the ambulances and the schools be targeted?

How could my country pay for and protect a government in Israel that is as racist and bloodthirsty as the SS? How could the country I had served in the military be the ultimate cause of all that "horror"?

Fred Nagel

Unwashed faces of the Third World

December 14

 

GUEST: Chisato Kimora, member of the a joint Harvard and Yale and student group, that along with community members from New Haven, disrupted the famous Harvard-Yale football game to protest the genocide in Gaza.

Chisato Kimora, Yale School of Law

Chisato was a delight to interview. Her determination to hold her law school accountable for the genocide in Gaza was extortionary. When push came to shove, she was willing to risk her career for doing the right thing. The distance between her idealism and the jaded support for Israel in our Congressional class is simply astounding. 

Chisato and many others were willing to disrupt one of America's most holy rituals, the Harvard/Yale football game to make a point about Gaza. How could all those well fed and privileged football fans enjoy their masculine combat when images of 6,500 starving children were being held in their faces? It was an atrocity! An assault on American's values happening in the heart of the empire!

Don't Harvard and Yale represent the epitome of our national life? The best education and credentials money can get you into. If our holy sites like these can't be protected from the unwashed faces of the Third World, what can?

 

Supporting genocide when the price is right

December 7

 

GUESTS: Jewish and labor union constituents question Congressmen Pat Ryan on his unwavering support of apartheid Israel, and on his recent vote to describe any criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

Antisemitism bill chips away at free speech

A couple of very large rallies in the Hudson Valley has Congressman Pat Ryan running scared. He won a close race for his seat in Congress, and once there has become a dependable supporter of the genocide in Palestine. He has all sorts of reasons for his pro-Israel statements. His wife is Jewish, as are his children. In public, that is about all he talks about when the issue of Palestine comes up. That and how Israel has a right to defend itself. Of course, apartheid and genocide has nothing to do with the right to defend one's own country. 

At a public meeting, I asked Ryan about the money he gets every year from the Israel Lobby. He denied getting any money at all. More recently, he has said that the contributions he gets from Israel are "insignificant." And yet, research done by the website Open Secrets tell a different story. In fact, their data bank makes interesting reading. Israel is spending tens of millions on Congress, all obscured by various pro-Israel groups in the US. Representatives like Pat Ryan are being paid quite well to look the other way while 6,500 Palestinian children are massacred.

I was lucky to get this recording of Jewish and labor groups questioning Pat Ryan. They don't give him much wiggle room, and why should they? Ryan is a member of a class that supports genocide when the price is right.  

 

The second catastrophe of the Holocaust

 

November 30

 

GUEST: Ellen Davidson, member of Jewish Voice for Peace, Veterans For Peace, and contributor to the NY based Indypendent as well as Mondoweiss, talks about her trips to the West Bank and the meaning of apartheid.

Calling Israel an apartheid state

Ellen is a long time activist for Palestine. She uses her considerable writing and newspaper production skills to publish Peace & Planet News, a Veterans for Peace publication. I met her in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March. About 1,500 members from all over the world waited in Cairo for permission to go into Gaza, permission that never came.

We stayed busy anyway, organizing courses on apartheid and Palestinian liberation. We also stopped the traffic in Tahrir Square, a breathtaking experience when we sat down in front of eight lanes of traffic. You can see what happened to us in a documentary I shot: "Still in Cairo."

So Ellen is one of those people who has worked for social change most of her life. She is Jewish, and considers her work for Palestine to be in the best traditions of Jewish activism and social justice.

How is it that the state of Israel seems to have thrown out all that history of leftist change to become a nationalist state modeled on fascism? Or is the creation of Israel the second catastrophe of the Holocaust?