Twelfth Bough

John McCain has accepted the support of John Hagee, a Christian Zionist. (By the way, I’m very curious how the Catholic Church will handle telling us to vote Republican again this time, as they’ve done the last several times, in violation of the separation of church and state…but I digress.) Hagee had a busy weekend sucking up to Benjamin Netanyahu and other Zionist Israelis to the tune of $6M. Hagee, a Christian Zionist who has been in the spotlight lately for endorsing presidential candidate John McCain and criticizing the Catholic Church, brought hundreds of backers on a solidarity trip to Israel . Hagee and his group, Christians United for Israel, joined keynote speaker Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel’s hard-line opposition Likud Party, at a rally in support of Jerusalem remaining united and under Jewish control. “Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban,” Hagee told an audience filled with America...

I am reposting this video of two IDF soldiers describing their service in the Second Intifada. I originally posted about it in January 2008. "The American public opinion is the most powerful weapon the IDF has."

A brief summary of the latest installment by the amazing analyst, William H. White : Behind Door #1 we have: [at a maximum] the dangers Iran presents to the US and Israel from its “support of terrorism” and “nuclear weapons ‘programs and knowledge’” Note: No evidence exists to support the claim that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Also, Iran has not started a war in centuries. Behind Door #2 we have: [at a minimum] [immediate] damage to the US and global economies, as well as a de facto world trade embargo against US goods…as well as the most serious political and economic destabilization of the United States since the Civil War [ie: martial law/national emergency] Note: Other dangers include nuclear warfare and fallout, losing US warships full of US military personnel, touching off a broader war in the Middle East, etc. Please go read the whole thing. Not that there’s much we can do about it, but people should really have an idea about the devastating consequences of an ...

I had never heard about this incident back in November 2006. A 19-year old Swedish human rights worker had her cheekbone broken by a Jewish extremist in Hebron today. Earlier the same day at least five Palestinians, including a 3-year-old child, were injured by the settler-supporting extremists, who rampaged through Tel Rumeida hurling stones and bottles at local residents. Palestinian schoolchildren on their way home were also attacked. The Israeli army, which was intensively deployed in the area, did not intervene to stop the attacks. When we first saw the pictures out of Abu Ghraib of grinning soldiers posing next to dead, wounded or otherwise tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners with their thumbs up, we were appalled. Does anyone remember that? I hope so, because I hope we will be appalled at the rest of this story. I’m pretty certain that most Americans haven’t got the faintest inkling that this kind of thing goes on in Israel and has been for a long time. Tove Johansson fr...

Les Vis - generally not the guy you read when you want to be cheered up - actually just cheered me up. Go figure. He’s got some kind of ember going over there, and the thing to do is breathe on it gently now, and focus. It is not by accident that various political figures from Italy, Germany and Japan have named the culprits in 9/11 and other affairs. It is not by accident that the UN is considering an investigation into 9/11 as former Italian President Francesco Cossiga has stated, “All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe…know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad , with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.” As Leonard Cohen said, “Everybody knows.” It doesn’t get talked about on your televisions. It doesn’t get mentioned in your newspapers but it is being discussed in offices and wherever political ...

#1. We’re supposed to believe that the US military and intelligence establishment is just now figuring out the important of blogs and psyops. Right. Sure. #2. We’re supposed to believe that the military has to limit soldiers’ use of YouTube and MySpace accounts because they use too much bandwidth. Okaay. #3. We’re supposed to believe that Islamofascist terrorists are practically everywhere, raising money through t-shirt sales as they blog about killing us . In broad daylight, I tell you. Check. #4. We’re supposed to believe that this guy is talking about ….well, who the hell is he talking about anyway? That shift in attitude can’t come quick enough, one influential counterinsurgency officer tells DANGER ROOM . “We still don’t see or accept information as an element of power,” he writes. “For the enemy, it is THE driving element.” Why? Because for modern, highly developed democracies the beliefs and opinions of their well-informed populations is their center of gravity. If y...