Shabby America

Among voters 18 - 34 years old, a majority (52 percent) say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 29 percent say the Israelis. This is a sharp reversal from October,.

DC 4.04am, Gaza and Tel Aviv 11.04am

It’s extremely wild to watch "liberal" universities and public defender offices threaten their staff and students with punitive bans on using terms like "settler colonialism" and "genocide." The very same people feigning horror at the right's CRT bans are now imposing them.

Among voters 18 - 34 years old, a majority (52 percent) say their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, while 29 percent say the Israelis. This is a sharp reversal from October, when 41 percent said the Israelis and 26 percent said the Palestinians. Kids today didn’t believe us old people when we said that anti-Iraq war protesters were labeled as Saddam supporters. But it happened. Actually most kids probably did believe that. Now all of them do. These mostly Jewish protesters were calling for a ceasefire (something 80% of Dems support), they were completely peaceful, no one tried to break into the building, it was cops who were pepper spraying people.

Apparently it’s cool to be antisemitic so long as you are also anti-Palestinian. The end result of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been to create a situation where if you are hostile toward Palestinians you can also be antisemitic and have it blessed by the ADL. Absolute disaster for the fight against antisemitism.

There was no rejoicing in Times Square when Hirohito died, though he ordered the killing of 2350 Americans in Pearl Harbor. I remember no such gladness when Hitler died, or Ho Chi Minh, or Mao Tse Tung. Or Che Guevara. Or Salvador Allende. Or Joseph Stalin.

The British didn’t carpet bomb Ireland to “get rid” of the IRA. They negotiated and THAT brought peace. The U.S. bombed Afghanistan to “get rid of” the Taliban. How did that work out?

These laughing, flag-waving, crowded scenes outside the White House and across America have no precedent (except,  perhaps, in the South when Lincoln was shot) and it is to be wondered why they occurred.

This reckoning is happening - solidarity for all who want justice , peace , long and short term safety for the good of all - to stop the killing now . CEASE FIRE - for Palestine for Israel, for the wounded and dead - for those dying now in Gaza - for the hostages yet to be released , to stop the rising tide of anti semitism & Islamophobia . We do not accept THE LIE that any country’s security & safety can depend on the extermination of another people. In what conceivable way is it a valid war tactic, or a moral outcome, to relentlessly bomb a trapped population -- killing thousands of children and badly wounding many more -- and then render its hospitals unable to function?

There was a magical-realist quality to Osama [Usamah] Bin Laden. He looked like the risen Christ, and was often thought dead and came always back to life. His broadcasts needed always to be authenticated because the CIA wanted him dead. He’d humiliated them so enormously they kept saying he was dead. He was ‘on dialysis’, they asserted, wrongly; he had to be dead by now. 9/11 was so clever. He had to be dead.

35 members of Congress now back a ceasefire. 6.7% of Congress now back a ceasefire. Polling shows 68% of Americans support a ceasefire, including about 75% of Democrats & 50% of Republicans. No Republicans have come out in favor of stopping the violence.

And once again they are covering up, and in denial.

As with John F Kennedy, whose brain was stolen, his car washed of its blood, film of his autopsy made to vanish, his alleged assassin murdered and that assassin’s evidence unrecorded, burnt or discarded, we have here, now,  a significant body, the corpse of the world’s most wanted man, ‘buried at sea’. Why do this? Why even think of it, when identifying him forensically was critical to the peace of the Arab and Muslim world?

Uday and Qusay weren’t buried at sea, nor the twenty-four-hour burial rule applied to these two cosmeticked enemy stiffs.  Saddam was helicoptered home to his tribal city (by Mike Kelly MP and Minister for Cheese) for interment in his clan’s sacred ground. Why treat Osama any differently? Why put his body where it couldn’t be checked over? Why not have an autopsy? Why not give their most famous son back to the rich Bin Laden family, and see them set him down in their family plot? What right do Americans have to a fallen enemy’s corpse? Where did that new rule come from? How dare they?

Clearly they feared the sight of his widow, wounded in the fire-fight, at the graveside of him and his dead son, and the sight of his grieving daughter and his other sons would humanise him in an inconvenient way. Clearly they feared his grave would become, like that of Karl Marx or St Thomas a Beckett,  a pilgrim shrine for apostles yet unborn.

But there were other, forensic reasons too.

A coronial enquiry, with witnesses, would show if women were fired upon, or children. It would show if Bin Laden took his own life, as Allende did, it seems, or if his bodyguard, sworn to kill him in such a circumstance, shot him as well, in the back, perhaps.

It would show if he had his hands up, and he was therefore killed against the rules of war, or if his wife said, ‘Please, no.’  It would also get from his wife and daughter evidence of who had lodged them in their splendid quarters, who paid the bills, who took the children to the local school, and what Mushareff knew, and what Azari knew, and indeed what Benazir Bhutto knew, of his five-year stay, if that is how long it was, only three minutes’ walk from an army academy, the West Point of Pakistan.

How shabby the Americans are. How secretive and stupid.

One thinks of the 600 plots to kill Castro: the poisoned face cream, the poisoned wetsuit, the exploding cigars, the former girlfriend who, after sex, couldn’t do it, even when he offered his gun. How low grade they are. How creepy. How overpaid for their shoddy scheming and their bungled midnight raids.

And Osama Bin Laden was buried at sea. Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Imagine Hitler, buried at sea. Or Trotsky. How stupid can they be?

For there is no end to it now. As with Elvis, his voice, his image will recur on websites for fifty years. Was it him? Did he survive? Is he still alive? He must be. He must be. His widow will charge his American assassins with war crimes for killing and wounding civilians:  her son, herself, her daughter. His family will spend millions cleansing his name. The Sunni clergy will denounce the blasphemous travesty of his last rites, not on family ground but the cruel sea.

Karzai will demand compensation for the towns destroyed in America’s vain search for him, in the wrong country. The Saudi royals will be shown to have given him money and Bush to have known this while his father took fees from them. A good few Pakistani colonels will be tortured and shot. The Navy Seals that shot him (in the face, not the legs) will get jobs on Fox News. The Taliban will seize Pakistan and its WMD. And his legend, like Che’s, will grow luminous, and more and more twelve-year-old suicide bombers go into supermarkets whispering his name.

And all they had to do was keep the body, film its autopsy, open it to media view and give it back, in due season, to his family for a proper Sunni funeral, as they did Saddam and Uday and Qusay, in the green, green grass of home.

What klutzes they are. And how dearly we all must pay for their clumsiness, in a rejuvenated al-Qaeda and acts of terror without end, in this country too. And an atomic war, perhaps.

And it’s a pity.

PS. Osama was unarmed, we now are told, but he ‘resisted’ and so was shot ‘above the left eye’ and ‘part of his brain was blown away’. This, and other details, might explain why Barack Obama spent so long rewriting his speech, his worst thus far on a great specific occasion, and why he seemed uneasy giving it. What, we may ask, is he now to say of a murder committed by uninvited American troops on foreign soil, illegally?

Students at Occidental College -- once home to Barack Obama -- seem to have achieved a major victory after occupying the administration office to protest its investment in Israeli militarism. Obama's first political speech, which the protesters keyed in on, was to urge Occidental to divest from apartheid South Africa.

And what is he to do with an illegally kidnapped widow, daughter and sons, and their ongoing education in Abbottobad?

And, indeed, with the question, why are we in Afghanistan?

And with the further, larger question, why, if Osama Bin Laden was for five years in Pakistan, and Pakistan’s rulers knew of it, we are not making war on Pakistan today? In reprisal? As we did  on Afghanistan?

Why are we in Afghanistan, by the way?

Is there any reason left?

I know a lot of high-ranking media, such as New York Times, Guardian, Anadolu, BILD, Spiegel, Financial Times, Strait Times, Washington Post etc subscribed my substack. Plestia ‘Bosbos’ Alaqad ready to be your Stringer inside Gaza under bombing by Israel. Plestiaa2011@gmail.com

Toddler with Plestia, before war, living in Northern Gaza and they evacuated to Southern Gaza. Since Friday, Oct 13, when Israel announced to every Gazans from northern move to southern, more than 5,000 killed in southern, not counting barbaric bombing in northern Gaza. Northern Gaza is being depopulated, while even residents in the south are ordered to evacuate as the israelis implement their ethnic cleansing. Refugee literally fulfilled Israel warning, and still killed with barbaric bombing by Israel. Documentation by Plestia Alaqad

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