Legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas resigns [News Commentary]

I couldn’t even claim to be much of a pseudo-journalist if I didn’t mark a milestone with the retirement of one of the industry’s juggernauts.

On June 7, Helen Thomas, who has been asking tough questions of U.S. Presidents since the Kennedy administration, announced her immediate retirement, amid the controversy surrounding her expressed opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict. She turns 90 on August 4.

Thomas made some pretty insensitive and, one could argue, ignorant remarks about the Palestine controversy at a White House event which was caught on video and became viral. Most sensible people would attribute this as a tactless case of word vomit due to age. She quickly made a statement apologizing for the tone of her gaffe. This apparently wasn’t enough and she made an official announcement through her employer, Hearst Newspapers that she was stepping down, ending over 50 years of pointed remarks and unconventional decorum in the White House Press Corps.

Obama vs. the Left + News Round-Up

Dude…I didn’t realize how good the soundtrack for Lost season 4 was.

News Round-Up

Tricky Dicks

The Supreme Court has ruled that Pakistani Javaid Iqbal (who oddly enough shares a name with a Supreme Court Justice in Pakistan) cannot continue his lawsuit against FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft for keeping him in solitary confinement for six months based on his religious beliefs.

But the government argued that there was nothing linking Mueller and Ashcroft to the abuses that happened to Iqbal at a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison’s Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit, and the court agreed.

“The complaint does not show or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion or national origin,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. “All it plausibly suggests is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”

The court’s liberal justices — David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens — dissented from the court’s opinion.

“There is no principled basis for the majority’s disregard of the allegations linking Ashcroft and Mueller to their subordinates’ discrimination,” Souter wrote….

..

Iqbal was arrested at his Long Island home on Nov. 2, 2001, and charged with nonviolent federal crimes unrelated to terrorism. Two months later, he was moved to a holding facility in Brooklyn, where he was in solitary confinement for more than 150 days without a hearing, his lawsuit alleges.

He said he was subjected to physical and verbal abuse, including unnecessary strip searches. On the day he entered solitary confinement, he says, he was thrown against a wall, kicked in the stomach, punched in the face and dragged across a floor by federal prison officers.

He was cleared of any involvement in terrorism and was deported in January 2003 after pleading guilty to fraud and being sentenced to a year and four months in prison.

Religious and racial discrimination? All we were doing was locking up Arabs. What's discriminatory about that?

Congrats, Bush court. You’ve ensured that yet another group of slimeballs gets to experience no reprecussions for breaking the letter and the spirit of the law.

So when’s Obama’s pick getting seated again? As if it would matter.
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Here be Dragons

The Tamil Tigers have been “militarily defeated” as their rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed. The rebel group was a secessionist organization fighting the Sri Lankan government since 1976. The Tamils are an ethnic minority that have had strained relations with the Sri Lankan Sinhalese majority since Sri Lanka gained independence. I think I first learned about the Tamils senior year of high school when we read a book called Anil’s Ghost.

Anyway, this supposedly puts an “end” to the civil war. FTA:

While Velupillai Prabhakaran (Ve-LU’-pi-lay PRAH’-bah-ka-ran) was a hero to some, his group was branded a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, and it was accused of waging hundreds of suicide attacks, including the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female bomber. The rebels also forcibly recruited child soldiers.

Sri Lanka’s army chief, Lt. Gen. Sareth Fonseka, said on television that his troops routed the last rebels from the northern war zone Monday morning.

“We can announce very responsibly that we have liberated the whole country from terrorism,” he told state television…

..

Suren Surendiran, a spokesman for the British Tamils’ Forum, the largest organization for expatriate Tamils in Britain, said the community was in despair.

“The people are very somber and very saddened. But we are ever determined and resilient to continue our struggle for Eelam,” he said, invoking the name of the Tamils hoped-for independent state. “We have to win the freedom and liberation of our people.”…

..Full-fledged war broke out in 1983 after the rebels killed 13 soldiers in an ambush, sparking anti-Tamil riots that human rights groups say killed as many as 2,000 people. By the time the war ended, more than 70,000 had been killed.

I’m sure both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan committed terrible atrocities. I don’t know when people will realize that taking up arms and trying to wage war against an institution or an ideal never works. What I do know is that the violence can’t be over and it’s a shame. Sri Lanka will still be a major spot for human rights abuses, civilian violence, and oppression…And the world merely looks on.

In other world news, Obama met with Irsaeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today and told him it’s time to start talking peace again.

"Get your hand off my ass, Obama."

FTA:

“We have seen progress stalled on this front, and I suggested to the prime minister that he has a historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure,” Obama said. “That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to.”

Added Obama: “I think that there is no reason why we should not seize this opportunity and this moment.”

Netanyahu said he was ready to resume peace talks with the Palestinians immediately but said any agreement depended on their acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. It was not immediately clear in the way he phrased the response whether Netanyahu was demanding that as a precondition for talks.

Palestinians offered praise for Obama but expressed disappointment with Netanyahu’s remarks.

Netanyahu “did not mention a commitment to a two-state solution, and we need to see American action against this policy,” said Nail Abu Redden, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who visits the White House on June 28.

Saeb Erekat, the top Palestinian negotiator, issue a similar assessment:

“Mr. Netanyahu failed to mention the two-state solution, signed agreements and the commitment to stop settlement activity. He said he wants the Palestinians to govern themselves. The question to Mr. Netanyahu is, ‘How can I govern myself while your occupation continues everywhere in the West Bank and Gaza, and how can I govern myself under your wall, roadblocks and settlement activities?'”

It looks like the only way they’ll ever work together is if Iran becomes a common enemy.

You know, I can’ twait until we meet a race of aliens that is truly just evil and bad. Then we can unite together AND be totally justified in killing things.

Ba-ROCK or Not

Checking in after 5 months

People may notice a lot of Barack Obama criticism on this blog. I want to make clear that I do not watch Fox News, listen to Rush Limbaugh, nor do I have Ann Coulter’s mug plastered on my walls. I voted for Obama. I believe in progression, change, and social responsibility. I also believe in our responsibilities to watch our leaders and make sure they’re sticking to their ideals.

Obama, predictably, isn’t sticking very much to his.

Politico blogger Josh Gerstein talks about how Obama’s making enemies on the left as well as the right.

He has pushed gun control to the back burner, used the state secrets privilege to try to quash lawsuits over warrantless wiretapping, opposed a “truth commission” to investigate alleged torture and sought to deny some legal protections to detainees in Afghanistan.

And he’s made clear he’s in no rush to do immigration reform or repeal the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers.

A growing number of organizations, bloggers and pundits, many of whom kept quiet about slights in Obama’s first few months, are now going public with their disillusionment.

“On torture, change we wanted to believe in feels like more of the same,” the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch said in a joint statement Friday.

“I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on [gay] issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away,” the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan wrote last week, dismissing Obama’s pledge to end the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy as “toilet paper.”

Maddow accused Obama of doing a “blatant 180” on military commissions. On issues like the wiretapping suits, some critics have suggested Obama is even worse than Bush.

I’m not going to join the growing group of left loons and anarchists who claim Obama will betray us all and continue this country on a path of ruination…

But almost half a year into his presidency and I don’t feel that much better about my government than I did under Bush.

Why do we only elect people who seek to serve themselves?

I’ll be happy if Obama tosses out the states secret privilege, stops illegal detainment of world and national citizens, gives every detainee left a fair trial, allows government officials and torturers, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, to be sued and/or prosecuted and stops amping up the funding to kill innocent people abroad.

So it looks like I’m not going to be a proud patriot anytime soon.

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I’ll leave you with an understanding of religion as compared to trilogies that I found on Reddit (note: are there better social media sites out there? The buzz on Reddit is pretty tiresome).

The Gaza Question, Or Why We Should Give a Damn

So I didn’t do my entry yesterday, but thankfully, the real world left me alone. I spent all day watching DVDs and playing videogames with my friends and that’s what break is (partially) supposed to be about. Remind me to show you the presents Mike and Cecilia got me. They’re oddly…appropriate.

The idea is that most of my entries won’t be as long as the Twilight rant, because, in theory, I’m supposed to be busy with school and work, so I can’t afford to write over 1000 words a day, but let’s shift gear from pop culture to something of undeniable importance: the conflict in the Middle East.

….I know, I don’t feel prepared to tackle this topic at all.

——

I said last entry that I couldn’t afford to just “shoot off at the mouth,” but speaking honestly, if I tried to do too much research, I’d never get around to expressing much of any opinion. Secondly, there’s a certain type of warped perversion that comes from someone wrapping themselves in history and conventional wisdom when commenting on a contemporary controversy.

You see, it seems to me that the naïve and innocent have a better sense of right and wrong. Where political analysts see a complex weaving of cause and effect, a mere child, with the information given, sees a simple situation: One power is killing a lot more innocent people than the other. That’s not to say that there aren’t layers and complex factors at work here, but at some point, world powers should simplify things for the sake of being effective humanitarians:

Rocket attacks have been raging for more than three days. People are dying. Enough is enough.

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An article to give us context: Day 4 of Gaza Strip Attacks.

If the December 2008 Gaza strip attacks seem familiar to us, that’s because something similarly horrifying happened in the summer of 2006 with the Hezbollah-Israel crisis. Speaking as an ignorant American, from my perspective back then, it looked like some uppity terrorist group made a standard attempt at attacking the state of Israel and Israel reacted completely disproportionately, killing several civilians in their act of “self-defense.” For more recent atrocity deja vu, you may remember the Attacks in Georgia during the Olympics (nothing to do with Israel, but a similarly awful mess of thin excuses and overblown violence).

Now, I could educate myself and try to land on either side of the fence. I could go with the status quo and put my foot down firmly against the “Ay-rab Ter’rists” in support of Israel. Or I could be one of those radicals who insists that Israel is the true terrorist state and championing the Palestinian cause. Rather, I prefer the stance of the ignorant liberal American, who I suspect isn’t sure who is to blame, but simply knows that this is terrible. This is as opposed to the ignorant xenophobe American who has no sympathy for Arabs or Palestinians ever.

There are articles and articles and articles on the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In fact, so much that it’s really information overload. The best way to make sure no one learns anything is by spinning it over decades and decades of bias, hate, and political motives. The simplest cause of this conflict seems to be this: Palestinians live in the disputed Gaza territory, neighboring Israel. The Palestinians work through several avenues to make the Gaza Strip autonomous and free of Israeli presence — political and terrorist. One of the groups that is lumped into both categories is Hamas. Since Hamas took political control in 2006, violence on behlaf of Palestinians and Israel has escalated, culminating in this response to terrorist rocket attacks on Israel originating from Gaza.

Becaue most Americans, including myself, aren't sure where the Gaza Strip is.

So who’s to blame?

Does it matter?

This conflict is a black hole. It sucks in new generations into a war with a cause long ago distorted and destroyed. All that the youth of the Middle East know is that there are forces at work that are trying to kill them, no matter what side that they’re on. Even if a Palestinian originally bears no ill will to Israelis, watching his fellow people getting blown to bits will probably plant some healthy resentment. Similarly, suffering bus attacks and civilian casualties as per Hamas’ M.O. gives your average Israeli no sympathy to the Palestinian cause.

What is our responsibility as Americans?

For one thing, we should get our governments to stop getting so mired in bullshit. Unfortunately, that would involve the entire unraveling of our foreign policy as we’ve known it since the end of World War II.

Gaza. Lebanon. Iran. Al-Qaeda. It all goes back to the Great Problem of the 20th Century: The Jewish Question, as Marx would have put it.

World War II displaced Europe’s Jewish population. Jewish people suffered greatly in the Middle East for centuries as it was. We created Israel at the end of World War II. The antisemites and displaced peoples of the Middle East have been calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state.

Okay, imagine if…I dunno…Central American banded together to annihilate Mexico. We, the United States, step in to save the Mexicans, and after the initial war is over, Mexico is left ravaged, destroyed, and occupied by pissed-off Communist Cubans. To make up for the genocide that we probably let happen under our noses, we give Mexico Texas back. You know, because it was kind of theirs to begin with.

How pissed off would today’s Texans be if we suddenly said that Texas now belonged to the Mexicans?

Real pissed off

So for decades, the Arabs have had a new reason to hate the Jews. And, much like the nerd who takes karate with intent to beat up on his former bullies, Israel has had to beef up military to survive. But now they end up killing several civilians every time they take a swing at their enemies. It’s like the hand of God coming down to swat a single fly.

But you know what the United States will never do?

Side against Israel.

We were there for their creation. We have funded their military operations. Tons of conspiracy theories are flying around about the “Zionists” that are currently running our government. But it doesn’t take a conspiracy kook to see the obvious: We have chosen a side. And like a teacher with a favored pupil, we often ignore it when they do something wrong. Meanwhile, we’re quick to criticize Hams and other Palestinian groups  for their part.

I’m not saying the Palestinian terrorist groups don’t have blood on their hands. I’m not saying they’re not at fault. All I’m saying is that the state that we are currently supporting, like scores of states that we’ve supported in our history, has been responsible for a sizable portion of the carnage during this relentless conflict: And we never hold them accountable.

At the time of this writing the Israeli casulaty count is at about 4 to 6 killed, 31 wounded. The Palestinian count is 375 killed and around 1400 wounded.

Warning: The following videos will disturb anyone who has a weak heart for pain and suffering.

It’s not like this sprouted up overnight:

Here’s a video from someone sympathetic to the Palestinians and anti-Israel:

And, to show that the Palestinian leadership is not full of loonies chanting “death to Israel,” Abbas’ statement, placing blame on Hamas:

The crisis is so great that even the supposedly “Zionist controlled” mainstream media seems somewhat appalled at Israel’s rocketing response. It goes to show that there’s some hope for objectivity.

For the last time, not that it would matter to some raving warhawks, I am not sympathetic to Hamas itself or to terrorist acts commited in the name of Palestinian liberty. I do not look forward to a day when Israel is eradicated. I’m not raving for harsh punishment on the Israelis themselves and I don’t see myself as supporting any side in this stupid, stupid, stupid war that we are tangled up in.

All I’m saying is that people are dying. And I believe in global karma. If we stand by and do nothing, we’re going to end up feeling it too, just like we did seven years ago when the conflict over Israel was brought to our doorstep. If you think Obama’s going to magically keep us safe by supporting the same status quo foreign policy that every U.S. president since Truman has supported…Then you’re sadly mistaken.

And I hope that in my lifetime someone does something, before we all get sucked into this black hole.

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So what do you think? What should our foreign policy reflect? Are we making ourselves vulnerable by making enemies in the Middle East in our undying support for Israel? Or are we morally correct here? Does Israel have every right to defend itself in this matter? Let me know. Educate me.