Category Archives: Eric Cantor Iranium
Tea Party Swine Squeal Over Occupy Wall Street Protests
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been an enormous success despite the media, especially the cadre of right-wing swine who made hay with their phony Tea Party insurgency are squealing now. With the movement gaining momentum and spreading across the country (we even had a gathering here in Tampa on Thursday) it is imperative for the plutocrats, the oligarchy and the neocon war machine to nip it in the bud before moribund and broken Americans get the seeds of an idea that they can take to the streets to force change. I am very pleasantly surprised by the success to this point of the nascent movement, I had become resigned to the thought that Americans would only rebel if Dancing With the Stars was suddenly cancelled, it is not that we don’t have more than our share of economically fucked folks whose futures have been stolen by the pigs on Wall Street but there isn’t the fire, or the character of peoples in other lands who are engaging in serious civil unrest. Even the corrupt corporate media was forced to cover the protests, the hypocrisy of CNN and FOX descending like buzzards to feature a dozen or so teabaggers gathered at a Waffle House with a few “Where’s My Birth Certificate?” signs on a near daily basis and then ignore thousands gathering at the nexus of greed and immorality that is ‘the street’ would have been just a bit too obvious of whose interest those guardians of free speech and a free press truly represent.
The Occupy Wall Street movement really hit it big on Friday when two of the most prominent national political charlatans, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the insipidly slimy Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R) – Tel Aviv took to the air to denounce the protests. Bloomberg, a reliable lackey for the banksters audaciously claimed that those who were basing their operation out of Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park were “destroying jobs”. This is pretty fucking funny considering that the malefactors of great wealth who use their false legitimacy as “wealth creators” to peddle toilet bogus paper sold as “securities”, receive an endless supply of free money from the U.S. government that they then lend out at usurious interest rates to the same taxpayers who are being shaken down to finance their gambling schemes and target Main Street with their financial weapons of mass destruction. What is Bloomberg to say? He is fully owned by the banking cartels, he would never have become Mayor of the Big Apple otherwise. The financial terrorists have been for too long been looked upon as anything other than the predatory jackals that they are and the day is coming when things are going to be set right. The longer that the protests continue, the more nervous that the smug and arrogant pricks are going to become that the jig is up. As the economy continues to deteriorate and with the imminent default of Greece in the not too distant future blowing another hole in the global matrix of greed and fraudulent wealth we may soon be making something other than bogus investment paper and bombs in America again – guillotines.
The real indicator of just how serious that Occupy Wall Street and the associated protests springing up across the fruited plain would be that Eric Cantor, Netanyahu’s man in Congress has come out now and denounced the protesters as “mobs”. This is as hysterical as it is hypocritical, I didn’t see Cantor anywhere when his lynch mob of white racists, the Tea Party, a phony construct that is nothing more than a re-branding of the hard core haters of the Republican base post-Bush were gathered around the Capitol hectoring and spitting on black legislators who were voting on Obama’s heinous health care ‘reform’ backdoor bailout of the insurance parasites. Cantor is an interesting piece of work as I have previously noted, he is a key man in the upcoming GOP drive to make support for the monsters who are currently running the show in Israel as the central tenet in the 2012 elections. The phony Tea Party with it’s overwhelming percentage of Christian Zionists will be in full storm the beaches mode to ensure that the secret Muslim, the Antichrist and the Commie Barack Hussein Obama has his black ass ousted from the WHITE House come next November. Netanyahu and his cabal of blood drinking freaks are determined to attack Iran and need U.S. support to pull it off. Obama, for all of his failings has been an impediment to launching the strike that would be the opening act of World War III and Christ knows that the Rapture can’t come until the Middle East is engulfed by an apocalypse.
The Tea Party, already packed to the brim with useful idiots who would be overjoyed to pray with Rick Perry at a BBQ/Hank Williams Jr. concert down at “Niggerhead” for Obama’s sudden death (which would be an achievement because God didn’t give a rat’s ass about Perry’s prayers for rain) is a de facto arm of the Israeli right-wing government working to destabilize the United States from within. Anyone who is familiar with the power and tactics of the Israel Lobby understands that in Congress, fealty to God’s Chosen land is essential to hold office, fuck America, our corrupt representatives know who butters their bread – the banks, big money corporations and most importantly the fascist human rights abusing racist Apartheid state Israel. Tea Party king Glenn Beck has been laying low in the weeds while prepping for the rollout of the all in for Israel onslaught of the coming year, visiting Jerusalem and chumming around with CUFI’s Pastor John Hagee. No coincidence that these diseased rats have been increasingly gathering in Texas where Governor Rick Perry is being groomed as their Fuhrer figure.
Cantor has a wild hair up his ass because Occupy Wall Street is a real grass roots movement, it shatters the fraudulent Tea Party as an insurgency and the perception of the sheeple is critical, especially as the Obama v. Israel storyline is cemented into place by the right-wing media. Today the media has out of sheer desperation been saturated with the bullshit manufactured Solyndra scandal, the Republicans, in true style are launching an inquisition that will predictably end in calls for Obama’s impeachment. Solyndra also serves to drive the news cycle away from Occupy Wall Street and to get Americans focused back on what matters – being fleeced by the gangsters in government and on Wall Street and watching football. It is the hope of the power elite that by next week Occupy Wall Street have been flushed down the memory hole and when the media is away, the New York city cops will play, the skull-cracking will commence. Now the entire Solyndra thing is ludicrous for a number of reasons, the Republicans sure as hell never investigated war criminals Bush, Cheney and Rummy for their lies that led the U.S. into two never-ending wars costing trillions of dollars and resulting in thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of dead non-Christian brown people and a military style dictatorship being built on American soil. Such things don’t matter to these pigs, Clinton wasn’t ever hauled in front of their silly tribunals for his ruinous trade pacts that contributed to today’s economic plight nor for dirty dealings with China. It was all bullshit about a Whitewater real estate deal gone sour and for lying about getting his dick sucked by a chubby little trollop. Obama keeps his snake in it’s cage so there is no sex scandal that would truly resonate with the masses of asses so they are now smacking him with the ridiculous Solyndra chicanery. It is also notable that Obama isn’t being investigated for the money that he received from Goldman Sachs and the preferential treatment that his administration has bestowed upon the giant vampire squid when it came to the bailouts. Of course the corruption on Wall Street doesn’t matter to the teabaggers, they only care about taking down Obama over dirty deals that their own Republican leadership don’t have a piece of.
Not only is it total bullshit that the Republican pigfuckers are pissing away more money on this witch hunt but they will not doing a damned thing to investigate Tea Party backers the Koch Brothers for breaking laws and dealing with none other than Iran. In a Bloomberg investigative piece that broke on Monday, the Kochs were outed for circumventing the law and bartering in chemicals with the evil country that according to the talking points wants to “wipe Israel off the face of the map”. This should be the huge scandal, especially since it involves the primary U.S. funders of the phony Tea Party who will be hammering the Obama won’t nuke Iran because he is a Muslim narrative on the campaign trail. Cantor can’t be thrilled with this revelation either, since he has been using his office to shill for the ultra vile Clarion Fund anti-Muslim activist outfit by screening propaganda films like Iranium, a sequel to the mass DVD distribution of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. The venal and consolidated media won’t print anything else about the Koch Brother’s Iran dealings, you can take that one to the bank, big money buys a lot of favorable coverage and the Koch’s are flush with it. The Koch brothers also have a huge interest in quashing the Occupy Wall Street protests, they are among the .00001 percent having inherited their fortunes from their Bircher daddy Fred’s dealings with Russian dictator Joseph Stalin. Of course the teabaggers don’t care about any of this, they were also down with Bush’s grandfather who traded with Hitler.
And so it goes…. right now everything is dependent on the Wall Street protests continuing, this may be the best and last chance to slow down the fascist machine, it is imperative that all of us back these people who are in the streets to the best of our ability because the full fury of the corrupt system is about to be loosed upon them.
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
Happy 10th Anniversary: The Orgy Of 9/11 Exploitation
– Paul Craig Roberts
Ten years gone. The big lies of 9/11, that oh so glorious day in America when the reset button was flipped on over two hundred years and the country flipped full blown fascist were cemented into place forever over the weekend. One of the only institutions more respected by the star-spangled sheep than the blessed military, the National Football League played an enormous part in promulgating the new normal and glorifying the society changing event that has come to be justification for plunder, wars without end, a colossal police state and the undercurrent of anti-Muslim hatred that will soon lead to blood in the streets. It was a day when corporate advertising took full advantage of the exploitation of the 9/11 dead (no mention ever goes to the the tens to hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians murdered by the U.S. military and our allies in the endless and phony war on terror) and used the occasion to pimp their products. Not that this is entirely precedent setting, the Republican party was cashing in on the ‘terrorist’ attacks while the smell of rotting flesh still wafted in on the morning breezes in lower Manhattan. The appropriation of 9/11 by corporations is only the obvious evolution of the moral decay that has a once mighty nation up against the ropes, staggering like a punch drunk palooka and just struggling to avoid the knockout blow.
Being a football fan for years the NFL season opener had long been a festive event. There was beer, parties and barbecues followed by a day spent immersed in football. Not this year, the repulsive promotion of the new American religion of 9/11 was too much for me to take, I spent the majority of the afternoon monitoring the games on the internet. I skipped all of the pregame ceremonies, the usual pregame shows where buffoons like Terry Bradshaw (once accused of being so dumb that he couldn’t spell cat if he was spotted the first two letters) and grinning shit salesman Howie Long would ensure that sports and war metaphors would become interchangeable. FOX’s NFL for example had long been in the war propaganda business, Murdoch the old dog knew fully well that pushing right-wing political agendas would be his bread and butter as his cancerous media empire metastasized across the globe and he knew that faux patriotism and sports sold to the masses. It was on Veteran’s Day weekend back in 2009 that FOX set up it’s NFL show studios in Afghanistan, with all of the assclowns who never wore the uniform in actual service were dressed up in their cammies like fake soldiers. Bradshaw looked the most ridiculous of all, like a bizarre form of movie parody of an out of touch general. Not that FOX is unique, the porcine Peter King was traveling around to NFL camps this year in his militarized motorcoach to cover the warmups to the big 9/11 kickoff party. Peter King being the prolific and long-tenured football writer for Sports Illustrated not the porcine I.R.A. terrorist sponsoring neo-McCarthyist Republican congressman from Long Island. The big 9/11 whoop de doo was the one reason why I absolutely knew that the NFL’s labor strife would be over in time for the big games of Sunday past.
What little football I did watch (I popped in for about ten minutes of the Steelers vs. Ravens game) made me glad that I just skipped the rest. When fuckwad CBS announcer Jim Nance took a cheap shot at Pittsburgh running back Rashard ‘the Fumble Machine’ Mendenhall for his TWITter comments expressing distaste at the unseemly celebrations over bin Laden’s alleged assassination. Nance even seemed to invite violence and harassment to be heaped on Mendenhall throughout the year in making the inference that he could expect to receive hostile receptions on the road. This is what happens when the official state religion of 9/11 needs to deal with heresy, it’s just too primitive to go around and cut people’s tongues out anymore. The games were even more overly militarized than normal, take this account from Glenn Greenwald’s piece The Meaning of Political Rituals Like 9/11 Day:
Not just 9/11 Day but everything connected to it was constructed to deliver and implant a very politicized message, over and over. Consider this email I received from a friend in South Florida after he attended an NFL football game last night in Miami:Let me describe the patriotic display at last night’s NFL opener. Men with machine guns at all entrances, to scare off the terrorists. Pat down on the way in, to make sure [my wife] and I weren’t carrying plastic explosives. A moving national anthem with troops out on the field spelling out U.S.A. A moving tribute to the thousands who perished in 9/11 and to our nation’s brave response to that atrocity (which was, of course, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world). A U.S.A., U.S.A. chant. Then a Stealth B2 Bomber flew over the stadium, followed by fireworks. At half time, a US Army paratrooper squad jumped out of a plane and landed on the field. Maybe next week they’ll shoot some missiles from unmanned drones.Does anyone want to claim with a straight face that these ceremonies are apolitical, devoid of political messaging? Everything about 9/11 — how it’s talked about, how it’s described, how it’s commemorated — is all designed to impart very specific political messages, and that’s been true since the day it happened.
The Fumble Machine wasn’t the only one getting publicly pilloried, New York Times columnist and noted economist Paul Krugman drew the wrath of the establishment for his dead on blog posting on that holiest of days that the post 9/11 era is one of shame not valor, glory and remembrance:
As of today Krugman is a dead man walking, he is so fat a high-value target to the filthy neo-Nazis in the Republican establishment (as well as the rats of the Democratic Obama led corporatists and Wall Street looters) that he will be the new Dan Rather. His bloody scalp will soon be brandished as a trophy, if I were Krugman I would put a lock on my hamper to prevent the underwear sniffing punk Andrew Breitbart or any of his latent pork sword swallowing acolytes from being the ones bearing the tomahawk.
The NFL while wallowing in nationalism and rolling out the military worship barely even paid homage to a true hero, formerly one of their own: Pat Tillman. Tillman left a promising career with the Arizona Cardinals to go and enlist in the Army Rangers after the American Reichstag Fire, it was the patriotic thing to do right? As so much of our current history is a perversely Bizarro reinvention of World War II strained through the electronic crackpipe that is the television Tillman was to place loyalty to country over personal fame and fortune. But 9/11 was not your grandfather’s Pearl Harbor but rather the “New Pearl Harbor” of the cunning, amoral pack of jackal neocons of the Project For The New American Century. Tillman quickly realized that it was all just bullshit and had turned against the wars, who knows what he thought about 9/11 but he was communicating with Noam Chomsky and had a story to tell when he would return home – except he didn’t.
From Dave Zirin on Tillman:
In 2004, President George W. Bush appeared on the Jumbotron at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium to address the combat death of former NFL player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman. Bush said: “Pat Tillman loved the game of football. Yet, as much as Pat Tillman loved competing on the football field, he loved America even more… Courageous and humble, a loving husband and son, a devoted brother and a fierce defender of liberty. Pat Tillman will always be remembered.”But Sunday— while NFL teams around the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—Pat’s name was only mentioned before the game in Arizona. In stadium after stadium, in pregame show after pregame show, as the NFL’s 9/11 commemoration strategy was rolled out with lockstep discipline, Tillman’s name was conspicuously absent.George W. Bush certainly got his moment in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation by 70,000 fans at the Meadowlands. On other football fields, massive flags were unfurled, “official NFL/9/11 logos” were unveiled, soldiers were cheered, Reebok’s “We Will Never Forget” 9/11 gear was worn, and yet it was as if Pat Tillman had never existed.
Adolf Hitler was more interested in the children who would be the future of his thousand year Reich for all that they would know would be his worldview. It is very similar her in Der Heimat. Our youngest citizens have known nothing other than the fear, fascism, hatred and perpetual warfare that were set into motion ten years ago. They will grow to adulthood in a society where airport checkpoints manned by drooling government goons and the ever present all-seeing eyes of Big Brother are a part of daily life. On Sunday they even trotted out the war criminal George W. Bush as though he were some sort of fucking dignitary despite the truth that after spending the morning of 9/11 with his nose buried in My Pet Goat and then flying around the country on Air Force One like some sort of chickenshit while the treasonous Cheney and Rummy were running the show. And when it comes to chickenshits who has anything on that diseased little turd Eric Cantor, the bespectacled Virginia Republican Majority Leader whose face looks like the logo on the New England Patriots helmet. In an act as brazenly shameless as corporations using 9/11 tributes to sell hamburgers and other crap Cantor took a break from screening anti-Muslim propaganda films on behalf of his Israeli buddies to introduce HR 391 – the resolution to “Never Forget” 9/11, or rather the official big lie of 9/11. In true GOP fashion it was another ghoulish use of the dead to push their decidedly fascist, anti-American political agenda. Then again, pissing on the 9/11 dead is nothing new to the Republicans who had the most kick ass club in the bag once the war criminal Bush grabbed a megaphone and climbed atop that pile of debris at “Ground Zero” while the rubble was still smoldering. As H.L. Mencken once remarked, “imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not”.
I could go on and on about the dishonor of America’s behavior in the aftermath of 9/11 but what’s the point? It was a lamentable display of all that his country has come to stand for that was force fed to us all last weekend, the corporate NFL’s corpse humping being the cherry on top of the shit cake. Guys like Krugman and Chris Hedges had the best takes but there were many, many others who saw this travesty as the charade that it truly was. Hedges, always with a unique perspective flayed the myth by reintroducing the “jumpers” or those who perished in the World Trade Center towers but have been erased from collective memory by a treacherous media. Hedges’ 9/11 10th Anniversary piece is entitled A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe and I excerpt the following:
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.
Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.
The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.
The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.
Hedges’ piece evokes an account of the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, another bit of history that has been revised to the benefit of the rapacious looter capitalist state. Even in their gruesome war justifying lies, lies responsible now for ten years of death and torture, human misery and looting the treasury Americans love their subterfuge sunny side up. People jumping out of a burning building and going SPLAT doesn’t fit that mindset, the mindset of a lemming, a lemming now in freefall down the rabbit hole, and it still doesn’t understand that the rabbit hole is a grave.
Tea Norwegian Style: Will Anti-Muslim Crusade Bring Blood to America For 2012?
Nordic avenger Anders Breivik, in executing his murderous attacks last Friday in Oslo has forever had his ticked punched as a heroic figure to the extreme right-wingers of the same sort that have eaten America from within with their virulent hatred. Breivik or Anders Behring Breivik in sticking with the favored propaganda technique of the thoroughly rotten media who since the days of Lee Harvey Oswald always assign all three names to political murderers, a blond-haired blue-eyed fanatic was a Christian who loved guns, hated Muslims and “cultural Marxists” slaughtered 76 people in a rampage that rocked Norway. The majority of Breivik’s victims were gunned down at a government youth camp on Utoeya Island where the shooter, dressed as a policeman conjured up dark European memories of the Waffen SS as he carried out his executions in an icily detached militaristic manner. Using high-capacity magazines purchased from the U.S., the terrorist stalked and taunted his victims, laughing as he ended their lives in a hail of bullets and vengeful fury. Breivik brought to mind notorious American terrorist Timothy McVeigh when he built a massive bomb, using up to six tons of fertilizer to detonate in front of government offices near the Parliament building. Fortunately for Norway, the fertilizer bomb was not as devastating as the one that took down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995 or the carnage and body count would have been far worse. Breivik, like McVeigh is a Christian and this fact is downplayed in the American media in the standard cynical attempt to not have the powerful “terrorist” label applied to a non-Muslim.
It had to happen: the rise of a “counter-jihadist” terrorist outfit that is the mirror image of al-Qaeda. That it first arose in Norway, rather than, say, in the US, is just a coincidence, although I’m sure Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Norwegian mass murder in Utoya, has his American collaborators, as he claimed in his manifesto, “2083: A Declaration of European Independence,” [.pdf] and an accompanying video. Indeed, a good many of the sources he cites in “2083″ – which is basically a compendium of previously published works by others – are American. Material from David Horowitz’s website, Frontpagemag.com, figures prominently, along with articles taken verbatim from the Horowitz-affiliated “Jihad Watch,” run by professional hater and make-believe “scholar” Robert Spencer.
Breivik’s “book” is a mishmash, half diary of his careful preparations for the attack thrown together with anti-Muslim materials and boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the importance of faith, family, and community – Breivik lifts an entire section of a screed on “Cultural Conservatism” by the late Paul Weyrich – totaling well over a thousand pages. Thankfully, we don’t have to plough through this disjointed “compendium,” as he calls it – which shows signs of being hastily thrown together in preparation for his international debut as the Norwegian Timothy McVeigh, just like his Facebook page and his Twitter account. Breivik created a much more coherent video version which gives us a lot more clues about why he murdered 90-plus (at last count) of his fellow Norwegians in the name of fighting Islam.
For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates. The morning statement issued by President Obama — “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring” and “we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks” — appeared to assume, though (to its credit) did not overtly state, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group.
But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn’t from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a right-wing Norwegian nationalist with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugged,Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. Despite that, The New York Times is still working hard to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals (h/t sysprog):
Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.
“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist. Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivated shooting rampages. The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance tomake a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda. So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.
My first reaction was to be pretty surprised about how—or not really surprised, but just struck by how intense the media coverage was and the media interest was in this attack. Obviously, it was a heinous attack. When a government building blows up, when someone goes on an indiscriminate shooting rampage aimed at teenagers, it’s horrific. And yet, at the same time, the United States and its allies have brought killing like this, violence like this, to numerous countries around the world that receives a tiny fraction of the attention that this attack received, a tiny—it prompts a tiny fraction of the interest in denouncing it and in declaring it to be evil. And it just struck me that when we think that Muslims are responsible for violence aimed at Western nations, it receives a huge amount of attention in the American media, and yet when the United States brings violence on that level to Muslim countries, kills an equal number of civilians, dozens of people killed by drone attacks and the like, and tons of people killed that way over Afghanistan over the past decade, it barely registers. I mean, an attack like this, this level of death in Iraq, for example, or Afghanistan, would barely register on the media scale.
The other aspect of it, though, is what you referenced in your question, which is, when it was widely assumed, based on basically nothing, that Muslims had been responsible for this attack and that a radical Muslim group likely perpetrated it, it was widely declared to be a “terrorist” attack. That was the word that was continuously used. And yet, when it became apparent that Muslims were not involved and that, in reality, it was a right-wing nationalist with extremely anti-Muslim, strident anti-Muslim bigotry as part of his worldview, the word “terrorism” almost completely disappeared from establishment media discourse. Instead, he began to be referred to as a “madman” or an “extremist.” And it really underscores, for me, the fact that this word “terrorism,” that plays such a central role in our political discourse and our law, really has no objective meaning. It’s come to mean nothing more than Muslims who engage in violence, especially when they’re Muslims whom the West dislikes.
AND –
That you would think that—you would think that in response to this attack, we would end up doing things like, for example, profiling Nordic males or tall, blond Americans, tall, blond, Nordic-looking people at airports, or would start to, for example, engage in surveillance on the communications of people who belong to right-wing groups in Europe, or you look at the people who inspire these attacks, people like Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller, people who engage in this sort of strident anti-Muslim commentary who inspired this individual. You know, we look at Islamic radicals who we allege inspire violence, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, and we target them for assassination—due-process-free killing—even though they’re American citizens. Of course, none of these measures are going to be invoked against right-wing ideologues who are anti-Muslim in nature. And you would expect that Peter King’s hearings, if he were really interested in the threat of violence or terrorism, would be expanded to include what we now know is a very real threat, and yet it isn’t, which simply underscores that those hearings, like so many of these measures done in the name of terrorism, is really just a vehicle for demonizing Muslims, restricting their rights, subjecting them to increased scrutiny. It’s about Islamophobia and not about terrorism.
The major candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency, including Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, along with television personalities such as Bill Maher, routinely employ hate talk against Muslims as a way to attract votes or viewers. Right-wing radio and cable news, including Christian radio and television, along with websites such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage, spew toxic filth about Muslims over the airwaves and the Internet. But perhaps most ominously—as pointed out in “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace,” a report by PoliticalResearch Associates—a cadre of right-wing institutions that peddle themselves as counterterrorism specialists and experts on the Muslim world has been indoctrinating thousands of police, intelligence and military personnel in nationwide seminars. These seminars, run by organizations such as Security Solutions International, The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, and International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, embrace gross and distorted stereotypes and propagate wild conspiracy theories. And much of this indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010. The seminars preach that Islam is a terrorist religion, that an Islamic “fifth column” or “stealth jihad” is subverting the United States from within, that mainstream American Muslims have ties to terrorist groups, that Muslims use litigation, free speech and other legal means (something the trainers have nicknamed “Lawfare”) to advance the subversive Muslim agenda and that the goal of Muslims in the United States is to replace the Constitution with Islamic or Shariah law.
And –
The effects of this campaign of racial hatred are being felt throughout the Muslim community. Those with Muslim names are routinely harassed at airports, and many who wear traditional Muslim dress report mounting cases of verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Muslim children endure taunts in schools. Muslims complain of intrusive surveillance, unconstitutional profiling and frequent mistreatment by law enforcement. The practice of Islam, especially in its traditional forms, is now viewed by many as a sign of criminal intent. And with the rise of the surveillance and security state—we now have 854,000 people working in our domestic security apparatus and 800,000 more employed as police and emergency personnel—national law is being turned into an instrument of overt repression against a religious minority.
To me personally, the most shocking thing about Breivik’s killing spree is that it happened in Norway and not right here in Der Homeland. There has long been a very sinister campaign to foment anti-Muslim bigotry, the coin of the realm for the neocon right-wing and their Christian Zionist brigades, this has been especially the case since 9/11, the American Reichstag Fire but has spiked with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. While Obama has still maintained the boot-licking fealty of the United States government towards the state of Israel he has been less deferential to the war-crazed Netanyahu regime than his predecessors. With right-wing Likudniks and their neocon American fifth-column hellbent on igniting a global conflagration that will make WW II look like a skirmish by unleashing an attack on Iran they have found Obama to be a recalcitrant obstacle to their agenda and one that must be removed. It has been monumentally helpful to the Israeli extreme right to have been able to manifest it’s policies within the pseudo populist pack of useful idiots that is the Tea Party who will never be able to accept a black man in the WHITE House.
In Obama, pretty much a feckless, worthless stooge of Wall Street looters in my opinion and by the actions of his lamentable administration has proven to be a classic villain to the fascist American right. The very fact that Obama’s skin is of a darker pigmentation ensures that there will always be a driving counter-force among that certain element of the population that are hardened, multi-generational racists but when the sleazy insinuations that he is illegitimate resonates throughout the degenerate Republican party base. Note the potency of the incredibly asinine long-running farce about his birth certificate that only came to a head when the ultra-slimy opportunist pigfucker Donald Trump actually was gathering momentum as some sort of dark horse candidate with his noise pollution about said document. The one moment when Obama finally proved to have a small degree of political canniness came when he produced the birth certificate, blew up the pompous asshole Trump in a brutally mocking monologue at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and for good measure announced the extra-judicial assassination of one time CIA asset Osama bin Laden the same weekend. That the entire Birther movement blew up as the carnival of idiocy that it always was and the black propaganda campaign that was being prepped and was ready to roll out with another bulk purchase extravaganza book by the loathsome ass Jerome Corsi and promoted by Joseph Farah and Fox went up like so much a bag of flaming dogshit only temporarily halted the onslaught. The armies of darkness that are the fascist shocktroops regrouped and will not so easily be chastened as they troll for killers, brutes and goons and the American Anders Breivik.
Glenn Beck pushes the narrative that Obama has betrayed Israel and as the defacto leader of the Republican fascist Tea Party movement is going to be an integral figure in mustering the troops against the infidel Obama. Beck has already been across the pond hitting the hustings over in God’s chosen land, honing his chops for the big show next year by preaching well established lies about the “vaporization of Israel” and accumulating the necessary gravitas with the extremist Netanyahu-Lieberman government to mobilize the domestic fifth-column. Beck has a highly publicized, massive anti-Obama rally slated to be rolled out in the holy land later in August which in another of those slick Orwellian bumper sticker slogans has been dubbed Restoring Courage. The Jerusalem Beck rally that is a warmup to the many domestic Nuremberg style events is being heavily pimped by American Christian fascist groups, notably radical cleric Pat Robertson among many others. The hard core Israeli ideologues have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Religious Right, just as they do with European racist groups in promoting the anti-Muslim crusade. Rather than venture too deeply into the wormhole that is the long-running Israeli penetration of U.S. based religious groups, likely much of it through the head of the serpent that is The Council For National Policy , I will save that for another time because there is plenty to be said. Rest assured, the level is ominous and represents, and I am not engaging in excessive hyperbole – an existential threat to whatever remains of our once vibrant democracy.
When Beck is finished polishing his act and the Republican candidates are well into their anti-Muslim rhetoric, a good deal of which is already being pushed by the likes of guaranteed losers like Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and their ilk look for a multi-billion dollar blitz of rancid propaganda featuring the conjured up threat of the replacement of the Constitution with Sharia Law and the Antichrist that is Barack Hussein Obama as the cat’s paw of the reconstructed Islamic caliphate. Leave it to the idiot choir to foment the hatred and rouse the rabble, much like Palin did at her ugly 2008 campaign rallies where the most base instincts of the moral reprobates were sated with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and that sleazy little Obsession DVD was sent out in the Sunday papers of millions of Americans in crucial political battleground states. Many of the same people whose work was inspirational to Anders Breivik were also associated with the Obsession DVD including David Horowitz and his malignantly depraved pals. It was no coincidence that Muslim children were gassed at a Dayton, Ohio mosque during Ramadan during that period. The man who is likely going to benefit the most from the ongoing debt ceiling tango by leveraging his Tea Party clout to overthrow the drunken idiot John Boehner as Speaker of the House is one Eric Cantor who has much riding on the promotion of anti-Muslim sentiment. The rising star Cantor is the go to guy in the Republican party when it comes to promoting the interests of Israel over those of the United States. Cantor not only was a co-sponsor of a Capitol Hill screening of the Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West in 2006 but recently also promoted another propaganda film by the Clarion Fund entitled Iranium which advocates a first strike against Iran before it is able to obtain nuclear capability. Look for this meme to be central to the 2012 Republican campaigns. Cantor is of immense value to the extremist Israeli agenda and provides a critical bridge to the Tea Party and the Republican Evangelical Christian base. Note this story from The Baltimore Jewish Times:
Cantor knows that it’s good branding to be known as the only Jewish congressman in the House majority — if nothing else, it gives him a monopoly of sorts.
“It increased his influence a thousand-fold,” says William Daroff, a lobbyist for the Jewish federation system. When he lends his name to events like a Capitol Hill screening of a new anti-Iran movie, “Iranium,” produced by the conservative Clarion Fund, “it just gives it much more of a hechsher [special certification],” Daroff says.
But his efforts to combat earmarks and budget waste come before any ethnic solidarity: Jay Ipson, head of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, says Cantor had proven unwilling to secure federal grants for the organization he’d helped get up and running. “He was at one point thinking about getting us financial help from Washington, but then when the economy started looking not so good, he swore off any assistance for anybody,” says Ipson, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania who is known for wearing a cowboy hat everywhere, including synagogue.
When asked about his Jewish Republican status, Cantor says, “You know, my faith goes with me in everything I do. … You know, again, I don’t think you ever go far from sort of the moral compass that you were given when you were brought up in faith. So I can only say that I grew up in a very active and vibrant Jewish community, and then a larger civic community in Richmond that didn’t happen to be Jewish also contributed to who I am and what kind of officeholder I hopefully am.”
Many of Cantor’s most ardent supporters aren’t Jewish. When John McCain called Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, in the summer of 2008 looking for advice on who to pick as a running mate — at a time when Lieberman, who campaigned for McCain, was being mentioned as a contender — Land suggested the Arizona senator look at Cantor, who was already doing Jewish outreach for the campaign. (The other person Land recommended in that call was Sarah Palin.)
“Cantor would have helped tremendously in states which would be a very close race, in Virginia, obviously, but in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and he’s the only Republican in Congress who’s Jewish and pro-life,” says Land. “He stood out as a comer from the very beginning — he’s very bright, very energetic, very concerned about the issues we care about.”
Juanita Duggan, the former Philip Morris lobbyist, echoed Land’s comments and told me a story about spiriting Cantor to a Tax Foundation dinner when he was still in freshman orientation, after the 2000 election.
“He knew just what to do,” Duggan says proudly. Then, she joked, “I am the honorary chair of the ‘Eric Cantor for President 2012’ committee.” When I asked her why, she says a Jewish nominee would cement the idea of the GOP as “the pro-Israel party” — just as it would also ease the path of a Southern conservative to the White House.
“Having the first Jewish president be a Republican,” she says, brightly, “would be a wonderful thing.”
In rolling out newly acquired heavy artillery like Beck and CUFI the neocons are about to get back into the game – not that they ever truly left.