Tag Archives: terrorism

Political Rants

Extremism.

It’s just like old times. Terrorism “experts” fanned out across all networks. Threats of new terror attacks every morning. Television commentators hypothesizing about what might be wrong with Islam that it makes its adherents resort to violence. Oh yeah, so reminiscent of the good old days of late 2001. Except that we are already embroiled in endless wars overseas, so it’s hard to see how we could react the same way as we did back then. Invade them again!

AFree speech rogues' gallerymazingly, much of what people talked about on television this week was the fact that the Obama Administration did not send anyone to the enormous march in Paris. All I can say about this is, man, this administration really screws up on the simple stuff. I mean, after going through the time trouble to pass a national health care plan (substandard as it was), they couldn’t manage to build an e-commerce web site, right? You have to wonder …. why couldn’t they just send someone to walk arm and arm with all those great champions of liberty? Hell, Obama could have been dubbed King of the Hypocrites, there with Cameron and Merkel and Netanyahu and reps from Saudi Arabia, Gabon, UAE, Egypt, Russia, and other blatant free speech and human rights abusers. They might have chanted La Marseillaise and praised our shared values as Chelsea Manning rots in the brig and another drone flies in Pakistan or Yemen.

The Paris attack was against a controversial publication, so it can be termed as an assault on free speech. I can’t vehemently criticize Charlie Ebdo because I engage in much the same brand of borderline offensive, often childish humor myself. But there is no question that this publication is not the only motivating factor in these waves of attacks. We get this clearly from the attackers themselves. They were initially motivated, as many of their compatriots were, by America’s war in Iraq. This is blowback, pure and simple. Welcome to the future, my friends. We were warned that we were breeding a new generation of jihadists back in the early 2000s, and now they have come to age.

This is why you don’t go around blowing people up practically at random. It’s like setting your neighbor’s house on fire.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Back at it.

The year is just getting started, and already there are too many things to write about. Let’s start with the obvious.

New Congress. The all-new, all-GOP controlled Congress is now in session, with old Kentucky Mitch holding the gavel in the first Republican-led Senate since 2006. You might think you could resist, even for a single moment, the impressionThe Keystone cop that the GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, the energy companies, and Wall Street … but that wasn’t possible even on  the first day of the session. Our representatives are ready to push forward the Keystone XL pipeline, repeating all the bogus claims that this project will create jobs, jobs, jobs, make America more energy secure, and is only opposed by “environmental extremists”. Sure, blow up the atmosphere on your first day. Good going, Kentucky Mitch.

Charlie Hebdo. The sickening murder of 12 people in Paris by extremists has focused our media-driven culture on the issue of speech freedom. The principle is a good one. I have to say, though, that we live in strange times when the symbols of free speech are somewhat vulgar and childish cartoons about the prophet Mohammed and some dumb-ass Seth Rogen movie. You’d like to think that if people are going to sacrifice their lives and those of their colleagues for freedom of expression, it would be over something that really needed saying. In any case, for all of the anxiety over a threat to free speech, I hope people save some concern for ethnic Algerians in France, who will now be the target of even greater abuse than the substantial measure typically meted out to them.

P.S. – Just so no one understands me, I think Charlie Hebdo and anyone else has every right to publish whatever the hell they want without fear of harassment, imprisonment, or terror attack. People also have the free-speech right to say a particular piece is dumb, inflammatory, gratuitous, childish, etc. (I’ve said as much about our own podcast. Useless rubbish!)

Palestinians and the ICC. I’m not a big believer in the International Criminal Court. The minute they haul a powerful nation in and put them on the dock, I’ll start believing. As of right now, it’s victor’s justice. That said, it’s always a positive thing when there’s a move in the direction of real justice, however modest. Establishing the principle that, say, Netanyahu might be held accountable for killing more than a thousand Palestinians last summer, is worth doing. That would be a far cry from accountability, but a place to start at the very least.

Do that and Cheney might need to start sweating a little. Not much, but … a little.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

New war.

Well, we’ve gotten our marching orders from the President. Time to start hammering the extremist group that grew out of the chaos we created after attacking and destroying Iraq; the jihadists that have benefited from our aid to the Syrian opposition and from the piles of money rolling in from Saudi and other gulf states whose wealthy are only too happy to support extremist Sunnis. Once again, we’re “taking the fight to” some group that wouldn’t have existed without our bankrupt imperial foreign policy. The last round was with Al Qaeda, beneficiaries of our covert proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Now it’s ISIS.

Digging our way out of the holeI can’t say which part of Obama’s proposed campaign against ISIS seems the most confused and misguided. It may be the notion that we should fund the training of “moderate” Syrian opposition forces in Saudi Arabia, of all places. First of all, there is no meaningful moderate opposition in Syria. The lead forces opposing the Assad regime are hyper-religious extremists. They have walked off with many of the weapons we have dropped on the so-called moderates, just as billions of dollars worth of weapons have gone missing in Afghanistan (probably falling into the hands of the Taliban or worse). Any effort to train the “moderates” will be symbolic at best and will likely result in yet another stream of jihadist heading from the gulf to the conflict zone.

Let’s face it, folks. When we destroyed a nation as complex as Iraq – a country that represents the ethnic, religious, and political divisions that run through the entire Middle East – we made an irreparable mess that is still exploding; a process of implosion that has continued unabated from the days of “shock and awe”. We are always encouraged to think that our actions have no lasting consequences, that bad situations are somehow reparable through the application of additional force, more bad policy, etc. Not so.

Those who think we should do this intervention need to ask themselves, when has this ever turned out well? Answer honestly, now.

luv u,

jp