Noam Chomsky on BDS and How the Israeli Occupation is "Much Worse Than Apartheid"

[Galraedia]

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[2banon]

1. Excellent Spanking on Nicolas Kristof's call to Palestinians to follow Ghandi

Cynicism to the nth degree, indeed. Also interesting point wrt to BDS movement. hmm.

Thanks for posting! I do so much respect his views on this and so many other issues, don't always agree with him 100% (eg. on the matter of the JFK assassination for instance) but, definitely respect his views on this issue.

[Peace Patriot]

2. The trouble with telling the U.S. government to honor the Geneva Conventions

and its own laws, as to arming Israel's assaults on the Palestinians, is that the U.S. government itself grossly violated human rights laws, slaughtering at least a hundred thousand innocent people in its "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad alone--a city with NO AIR DEFENSE--and creating a false category of "prisoner-of-war" ("enemy combatant&quot who could be tortured and subjected to indefinite imprisonment, and this was all done WITH NO PUNISHMENT OF THE PERPETRATORS.

We have a former president, a former vice president, a former defense secretary and other former officials who are guilty of massive atrocities, and massive violations of the U.S. Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and other laws and treaties, who have not only not been put on trial for these horrors but who have not even been investigated for them! How, then, can the U.S. government hold Israel accountable for similar--if lesser scale--atrocities and crimes? How can our government invoke the laws that it has repeatedly and grossly violated, with complete impunity for the perps?

Chomsky ends up saying that the U.S. arming of Israel is THE determining factor in Israel's horrors, and thus political activity HERE is the key factor in stopping Israel's atrocities. I certainly agree that, if the U.S. withheld weaponry from Israel and imposed sanctions on Israel, Israel would soon elect a better government and cease stealing Palestinian lands and starving and brutalizing and mass murdering Palestinians. The problem with this argument, though, is that the U.S. government has gone so far down the path of lawlessness, violence and war profiteering that there seems no way back. Until we investigate and punish Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other perps of the Iraq War and torture prisons, we won't be disarming or punishing our violent, lawless "allies."

[PotatoChip]

3. All, very good points. (nt)

[Galraedia]

4. The past shouldn't prevent us from changing the present.

We're not acknowledging that we disagree with the atrocities we ourselves have committed in war if we are still willing to fund them being committed elsewhere in the world.

Our continued support and sponsorship of Israel hasn't brought an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel will not acknowledge the part they have played in creating it and therefore will never be able to fix it. The Israeli government is more interested demonizing the Palestinians rather than solving their differences. One of the ridiculous things they claim is that the Palestinian's goal is world domination. As if the first thing on the mind of a person living in poverty in a country with no army, navy, or air force is world domination. Without the United States sponsoring Israel, they would be more willing to reach a long-term solution for peace.