I'm new here lurked a while, then posted two or three diaries.
I'm incensed about US foreign policy, especially regarding Middle East.
I'm outraged that US Congresspersons are in thrall to Israel. Like Walt and Mearsheimer, and also highly esteemed UC Berkeley Professor of History Kenneth N. Waltz, I think Israel should be treated just like any other place in the world -- like Canada, or Norway.
It outrages me that persons with dual citizenship can take orders from Israel, represent and advocate for Israel's interests, but not be required to register as foreign agents. Donald Rumsfeld was among the first to ensure that persons in the US who acted as advocates for Israel did not have to register as foreign agents. I'm not a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld.
I am particularly distressed that the US, and many of its legislators, government agencies, media, and decision-shapers, promulgate views about Iran that are embarrassing in their ignorance, hideously immoral and anti-American in the extent to which they seek to rain harm on the Iranian people, their leaders, and their economic prosperity. It seems to me that a people -- the United States people -- who allow themselves to be represented in the world by those who deliberately seek to starve, kill, punish, constrain employment opportunities, etc., all of which the US has done to Iran, or looked the other way as Israel has done these things to Iran, does not understand even the version of the Golden Rule that my then-four year old son understood: What you do to other people is what you wish would happen to you. John Lennon called it Instant Karma.
Beyond that, it seems to me to be beyond stupid that the US seeks out ways to hate Iran, when Iran is, in so many ways, a natural friend to the US, and when it would really be in the very best interests of the US to engage with, trade with, parley with Iran, rather then spend itself into financial and moral oblivion by lying about Iran and seeking ways to harm Iran.
So those are the dynamos that wind my gears.
My few lame diaries on this forum have all elicited a curious response: I've been accused of lifting my information from a site that is "banned" by the DailyKos moderators.
Lest the top paragraph be polluted with the name of that site, hop over the squiggle ---
UPDATED 1:15 pm PDT -- 2 videos added
I'd never heard of the place, Mondoweiss (is mentioning the name a "bannable" offense?) (Does a democratic Democratic liberal progressive website ACTUALLY engage in BANNING fer god's sake!!! Cardinal Bellarmine Lives!)
The claim was made that the site is antisemitic.
As I said, I'd never heard of it. Being the half-cat person I am, curiousity drove me to take a peek at the site, to bat around the ball of yarn.
Mondoweiss is antisemitic?
Are Jews routinely called antisemites?
If I didn't mention it above, I think the behavior of the Israeli government toward the Palestinian people is an abomination. The behavior runs counter to the values that I used to think America stood for. In an earlier diary, I posted a passage from a speech by Chas Freemanthat encapsulated how the US has tended toward adapting to those non-American values.
Most of the comments to that diary agreed with the first premise, that depriving children of sleep is torture.
But as I said above, there was a lot of distracting conversation challenging the SOURCE of the information in the diary (for the record, the linked source was an article in the UK newspaper, The Independent). The truth-value of the story was not challenged, the heinous nature of the behavior described was not defended or challenged (in fact, as one commenternoted, those commenters who were most wrought about what they (fantasized) alleged was the source of the diary, were far less concerned with the content of the original, core story of the diary.
Back to the notion of "banning" Mondoweiss, a site run by Jewish people, that, based on my brief visit, seems to look at the highly controversial issues involving Israel, its relations with the US, and the American Jewish community, from an American Jewish point of view.
In fact, the diary (do they call their articles diaries?) that smacked me in the face when I visited the banned site this morning, was written by a Jewish person who stated that he has dual citizenship -- in Israel and in the US; his grandfather was Irgun [one of the early zionist terror organizations]; he visits relatives in Israel twice yearly; that those visits take him into occupied territories (apparently, since his relatives are settlers).
His diary scanned the outrages he has seen perpetrated on Palestinian Arabs, by his fellow Jews, in Israel, acts of which he said he is deeply ashamed, and that do not represent what it means to be Jewish.
He said:
I have witnessed enough unnecessary violence and degradation by Jews in the West Bank to fill a very large book. I have seen IDF soldiers at a check point pissing on Palestinian shoes. In this instance, the Palestinian man tried to take a swing at the soldier who merely stepped back and shot the man in the chest. I watched two young teenagers near Kiryat Arba force a Palestinian family at gunpoint to get on their hands and knees and bark like a dog while a jeep full of IDF soldiers 20 feet away laughed. I have watched settlers at Bat Ayin use Palestinian sheep and goats for target practice and then have the nerve to retrieve the animals for their own feasts. I have watched settlers from Itamar cutting down Palestinian Olive trees in broad daylight with the IDF sitting in their vehicles 50 meters away watching the destruction. I have watched wholesale fondling of Palestinian women’s breasts by the IDF and armed settlers usually when the husband was present to degrade the man in front of others.
So the situation that confronts people who participate at DailyKos is something like the Galileo situation:
What is more important to you, dear Americans, Democrats, liberals, progressives: to shelter your tender sensibilities against truths that are as bold as the sun, because they may force you to confront your own ignorance, or destabilize your preconceived notions of what is being done by our friends, with American tax dollars, and may be advocated and supported by donors who are essential to Democratic victory? Or will you confront truth boldly, with the view and hope of reforming TWO societies that we all love and hold dear, the United States and Israel, so that they both might achieve their highest ambitions and their finest spiritual and moral development?
What would Charles Bellarmine do?
3:33 PM PT: One of the major goals of this diary is to provide information -- about how an influential American ally is behaving, about how the US foreign policy is skewed, and some elemental information about Iran.
A comment below upbraided this diarist for being "uninformed" about Iran, and suggested that I correct that condition by viewing a "flick," Persepolis.
Here is my response to that comment:
Marjane Satrapi's
work is amusing, but calling it "resonant historical . . ." gives it far more value than it's due. Satrapi seemed to me to be self-absorbed and weak. Many of my Iranian friends encountered far greater challenges, and displayed more character and courage, in the face of a revolution, than Satrapi demonstrated in "Persepolis."
btw, if someone, like a US revolutionary era Winston Churchill Kermit Roosevelt, had intefered in the US revolution and formation of its constitutional government, then followed up by installing a monarch who ruled the country using secret police, then, when the American settlers (it would not have been the United States) overthrew THAT tyrant, the 18th century Churchill-Roosevelt incited a neighbor to wage war on the struggling-to-be-independent peoples, what do you think would have been the state of the US Constitutional republic in, say, 1852?
That's how long Iran has been struggling, against the intrusions and interferences of the US and Great Britain, to form its own, sovereign, independent state.
If your serious about discovering Iran's history (not the made-for-flicks version), try James Bill, "The Eagle and the Lion;"
Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men;
William R Polk, Understanding Iran;
If you want an insight into how relations between US and Iran USED to be, and could be again, Deo Volente, find a copy of . W. Morgan Shuster's "The Strangling of Persia" It's a bit pricey to purchase, but a university library should have a copy on the shelves.
since y'all seem to delight in hiding any comments that run the risk of presenting honest information, I will copy this comment into the diary as an update. I think it's important for Democrats, liberals, and progressives to be well informed. That means acquiring information about a nation as important as Iran from sources other than "flicks."