By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

It begs the question why Israelis put up with lawless governance harming them as well as Palestinians. When will weeks of social injustice outrage arouse them to embrace universal equity?

Why haven't Martin Luther King's words hit home that, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." In Israel and Occupied Palestine, Arabs and Jews both are harmed. Injustice to anyone denies it to all.

Since the 1980s, destructive neoliberalism plagued Israel like the West. A race to the bottom followed, producing social injustice, inequality, and growing human need. Israelis finally reacted, demanding change, at the same time showing a hint of solidarity with Arab citizens, far more gravely impacted than themselves.

It's high time that spirit addressed 44 years of Occupied Palestinian torment. Permitting that to go on betrays core Judaic tenets. In their own time of need, will Jews embrace the universal struggle for justice everywhere, especially a few kilometers from their own backyard. Turning a blind eye to that injustice no longer can be tolerated.

What's now ongoing bears witness. Overnight, Israeli jets bombed Gaza, killing at least one resident and wounding seven or more others (including a child) in a series of lawless raids.

Gaza's medical emergency spokesperson, Adham Abu Salmiyya, said three residents were seriously injured after Israel bombed the Al Zeitoun neighborhood, Rafah tunnel areas, and an alleged Al Qassam Brigades training center in Gaza City's At-Tuffah community.

Further attacks struck eastern Khan Younis, causing extensive damage but no injuries. Israel targets Gaza regularly by air, land and sea, falsely claiming self-defense every time. It long ago rang hollow.

Imagine if instead Israeli neighborhoods were bombed regularly, killing innocent civilians? Western leaders would express outrage in response.

In contrast, when Palestinians are killed, it goes unnoticed, notably by major media sources more focused on supporting NATO aggression, slaughtering people in the name of "liberating" them.

The hypocrisy is stark and galling, yet commonplace backing wrong over right. The horrors need volumes to explain.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli forces also razed Palestinian farmland south of Hebron, bulldozing fruit trees belonging to several Palestinian families. At the same time, several Hebron neighborhoods were raided. In addition, residents of Yatta, Tarqomia, and other Palestinian communities face regular Israeli incursions, harassing and aiming to displace them.

Israel Welcomes Glenn Beck

On August 14, Israel National News writer Tzvi Ben Gadalyahu headlined, "Israel Rolls Out Red Carpet for Glenn Beck" ahead of his "Restoring Courage" tour in Jerusalem, saying:

He scrapped plans to hold it at the Temple Mount after being warned about Muslim outrage. Instead, he'll hold two Jerusalem events, "at the Davidson Center at the southern edge of the Western Wall and the other in Safra Square," near municipal offices and city hall.

A previous article explained Beck's demagoguery, right wing extremism, and racism.

No longer on Fox News, he continues his hatemongering diatribes against disadvantaged minorities, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and anyone to the left of his views, meaning he'll fit right in among Israeli extremists who arranged his visit.

Beck claims it's "time to Stand and Restore Courage. We ask those of you who value freedom honor and faith to travel to Israel and stand with Glenn Beck and leaders from around the world with one united voice."

Palestinians, anti-war activists, and opponents of Israel's illegal occupation aren't invited. Nor were they included on a July Beck visit when extremist Knesset members let him address the Aliyah and Absorption Committee, saying he came "to speak the truth" about efforts to delegitimize Israel.

He also claimed PA demands exacerbate anti-Semitism that's "going through the roof," when US and European studies show it in steep decline.

Now he's back, endorsed by Rev. John Hagee, a fellow demagogue, supporting racial hatred, white Christian supremacy, imperial wars, apocalyptic violence, gay bashing, male gender dominance, and fanatically wanting Israel exclusively for Jews.

They're a matched set, Hagee writing Beck, saying:

"I'm writing to express my strong support for the Restoring Courage events to be held in Israel....Those of us who love Israel (see) especially ominous thunder clap to come down in September, when the (UN) will most likely support a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood."

He falsely claimed the General Assembly has no power to do it, at the same time railing against "the symbolic impact" he called "extremely dangerous."

"I look forward to seeing you" in Israel, he said, "the land God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in an eternal covenant that is binding to this day."

Hagee knows because God told him so, communicating directly he apparently believes. So do his parishioners sadly and other followers of his demagogic hatemongering misinterpretation of vital truths.

New Settlement Units Announced

In 2004, America's United Methodist Church stood firm against "confiscat(ing) Palestinian land for construction of settlements and the building of a separation wall."

It also expressed opposition to other Israeli abuses, including "intensified closures, curfews, dehumanizing check points, home demolitions, uprooted trees, bulldozed fields....confiscation of Palestinian land and water....targeted assassinations," and other Israeli occupation abuses.

In recent days, Israel announced thousands of new settlement units, defiant of international law, and a vital need for new construction in Tel Aviv, Haifa, West Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities, not Occupied Palestine, to relieve a severe housing shortage, causing prices to skyrocket.

Many human rights organizations express similar views, including opposition to settlement developments, stealing Palestinian land for exclusive Jewish use.

No matter. On August 15, 277 West Bank Ariel units were approved. Earlier, 500 others were announced in Gush Etzion, Ma'ale Adumin, Ariel, and Kiryat Sefer.

In early August, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) said 930 more are planned for East Jerusalem's Har Homa C and 42 public buildings in Har Homa B, as well as extensive accompanying infrastructure.

On August 11, thousands more were announced - 1,600 in Ramat Shlomo, 2,000 in Givat Hamatos, and 700 in Pisgat Zeev. "This would bring (total East Jerusalem approvals) to over 5,200, and counting, in August alone."

In 121 illegal settlements and nearly 100 outposts, around 300,000 settlers populate the West Bank, another 200,000 in East Jerusalem, and the numbers keep growing.

As a result, over 42% of choice West Bank land and large parts of East Jerusalem have been stolen by successive Israeli governments, claiming they want peace.

Compounded by his duplicitous rhetoric overall, Obama (like his predecessors) stands firmly in support, reiterating America's "unbreakable" bond with Israel, including its most lawless acts.

According to PCHR and other human rights organizations, as long as international community leaders grant Israel impunity, Palestinian justice will lose out.

Will socially oppressed Israeli Jews finally take note and say No More!

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

By Mohamed Khodr* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." 
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

No just cause has been so unclaimed by humanity than the cause of Palestine.

No just cause for the freedom of a subjugated people has been the blind spot of humanity for so long than the cause of Palestine.

No just cause has generated more words and less action than the cause of Palestine.

World history can be divided into eras of ideas; ideas that have elevated humanity to the summit of greatness and justice or plummet it to the depths of an abyss, an inferno of injustice and cruelty.

Our modern era is acutely and tragically defined by dumb politicians, smart bombs, and an apathetic world detached from the machinations of corrupt, greedy, selfish and cruel elites who view the world as their playground for power and the entitled theft of nations and their resources.

In pursuit of their wealth they have callously and without any semblance of conscience committed holocausts and genocides that in the 20th Century alone have killed over 170 Million people¹, ethnically cleansed mass populations across the globe, and committed untold war crimes and crimes against humanity. They believe that innocent populations living in their own lands are simply expendable to be exterminated and removed from their very earth to seize their homeland and its resources.

The powerful elite not only admit their craven bloodthirsty disregard for human life but are supremely proud of their deadly evil deeds.

"We belong to the superior race and civilization... The basic justification of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority - not just economic and military but also moral...That quality underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity"
-- Jules Harmand, French Colonialist, 1910

"We in the rich world live in comparative comfort only because of the inordinate power our governments wield and the inordinate wealth which flows from that power...Global democracy means ensuring that the world is run for our benefit"'
-- George Orwell, 1932

No greater sense of narcissistic and paranoid entitlement topped with a heaped sense of superiority and supremacy exists in today's world than in Israel and its shadow political and economic elites in western capitols.

Due to such inordinate Zionist power Khazarian Jews, mainly from Russia and Eastern Europe, were gifted a land they neither owned nor had any legitimate claim to as a homeland to solve the Anti-Jewish problem of Europe. Palestine was stolen by force, its people ethnically cleansed, massacred by Jewish terrorism, and now enduring the longest most brutal occupation of all aspects of their lives for decades.

This tragic oppression and dispossession was publicly supported by the governments of the United States and Europe. Is it possible that such free democratic societies were complicit and supportive of Israel's Apartheid Fascist existence and rule over an entire population, the Palestinians? It can't be, after all, they are the beacon of hope, liberty, freedom, self determination, equality and justice for all, and the spreaders of democratic human rights values around the world by peaceful means.

God allows these murderous oppressors time to either repent or hang themselves by their own weapons.

Thus divine time cures all injustices against all His creations. The end times for these "democratic" oppressive empires is fast approaching.

Prophet Muhammad taught:

"God has no mercy on one who has no mercy for others"

As a Muslim and a human being I am commanded by God to fight oppression anywhere against anyone who attacks and subjugates an innocent people, a people created free by God to live in peace and harmony with one another. (To comfort the doubters I have repeatedly called upon Muslim peoples to fight and exterminate Muslim terrorism)

"O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Truly, the most honored of you in God's sight is the greatest of you in piety. God is All-Knowing, All Aware" (Qur'an: 49:13)

Hence my overwhelming passion to fight for the rights of the oppressed people of Palestine until their dream of freedom from Israel, a western colony that ironically is the master of the west, is realized.

Yet, I must admit my failure to have made an iota of difference in the life of Palestinian children who simply want to sleep, if for one night, in peace and quiet in their hope and prayers to live to see another day with their entire family still alive, none killed, or imprisoned.

My sole contribution to the freedom of Palestine is my keyboard and my weapon of mouse distribution of emails to others of like mind and heart.

I send out words in the hope they will touch someone, anyone; that they will move someone, anyone; that they will impact someone, anyone; that they may generate a mass gathering, a march, a rallying cry; anything that ends the inhumane suffering of the children of Gaza, Jenin, and East Jerusalem that they may see the light and warmth of freedom and awaken from their nightmare to live in a free independent Palestine.

Alas, my own dismal struggle for the Palestinian cause is limited to a Jihad by Email; a cyber struggle, words sent out with a click of a mouse and not with a thump of my feet banging across pavements that lead to our occupied centers of power.

There are many honorable men and women around the world of all faiths and races who like me toil against the Apartheid occupation of Palestine with their own Jihad by Email, their own struggle to enlighten the world that gross injustice exists under the very feet of the western invention of a "democratic Jewish only State" called Israel.

So few have the courage and motivation to physically stand up and protest around the western capitols raising their voices to free Palestine on behalf of the voiceless faceless Palestinians.

Despite their small numbers they are shining light on the Palestinian struggle to end their occupation and gain their freedom.

But why are their numbers small? Where is the rest of humanity that believes in justice, freedom, equality, and human rights? Are they afraid of Israel, its Mossad, AIPAC, and Anti Defamation League's attacks, threats to their lives, and media smears? Are they afraid of being harassed by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and every other soup alphabet? Are they afraid for their safety and loss of jobs?

If yes, than that's all the more reason to unite and oppose these forces by protesting around the country and in other western capitols that the powers of our government are meant to serve us not oppress us.

We have the most powerful weapon every invented by man: the VOTE. No amount of special interest money can overcome our votes, our voices, our demands.

They must hear this loudly: SERVE THE PEOPLE or YOU'RE FIRED.

Jihad by Email has given each of us some semblance of comfort that we're participating in a just struggle for Palestinian freedom but only massive peaceful protests and marches will bring about the revolution of change in our nation's subservient slavish surrender to Israel and its Zionists.

We must launch a rebellion of peaceful protests to reclaim our government and nation from the elite that enriches itself at the expense of the American people and sends our youth to die for corporate greed and Israel.

It is time to instill the fear of God in them, our government and Israel's lobbies, such as AIPAC.

It is time for them to be afraid, really afraid.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said:

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

History has always changed due to heavenly revelations, individual ideas and principles whether in the arena of politics, economics, science and technology, social, cultural norms and traditions. Such change has come by either violent revolutions or peaceful civil disobedience. We the people of conscience will reclaim our nation in a totally peaceful manner, via protesting and voting.

History is a journey of ideas; some meant for progress of humanity others meant to hinder and destroy humanity, hence the clash of man's free will for good or evil.

This time in history is our time. The time when humanity finally declares In unison-no more injustice, no more wars for oil and Israel, no more oppression of man's free will, no more enslavement or subjugation of peoples, especially women and children, around the world; no more corporate welfare, no more monopoly and accumulation of wealth by only 2% of the world's population, no more freedom to pollute our earth, no more hunger in an rich world, no more deaths due to lack of vaccines and drugs, and most importantly an END TO ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND WASHINGTON D.C.

Ideas alone can only succeed when voices are heard above the lies and propaganda of the elite, and when feet march to the beat of a drum crying for freedom.

Thus I call upon myself and all who dare to march to unite in Washington D.C. and New York City this September to demand freedom for Palestine and its recognition as a free and independent State; an end to the Zionist occupation of our corrupt bribed and frightened Congress that funds Israel's occupation, illegal settlements, and atrocities, while cutting funding for lunch programs in schools for America's poor children

Only a strong coordinated effort by people and organizations across this country can bring this protest into fruition. The question is who will lead this effort and who among us will respond physically and financially to secure the dream of a free Palestine, a free Washington D.C., and a free world?

Israel has succeeded in intimidating, frightening, and wearing down our minds and energies. But as Martin Luther King said, no one can ride your back unless your back is bent. Palestine fatigue has begun to set in precisely because of Israel's power and dominance of our government and media. We are fatigued because of their successful decade's long refusal to abide by international law frustrating a world paralyzed by fear of America's wrath against those who dare to oppose Israel. In private Americans detest Israel and its chokehold on this nation but publicly dare not speak. .

A superpower afraid to speak against a small nation it created, funds, supports, and protects. That's an American tragedy.

But with God's help Goliath will be crushed by a stone thrown by a Palestinian child.

Failure is a good probability for this effort but I'd rather try and fail then die a failed man with no legacy of any contribution to my fellow man.

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just"
--Abraham Lincoln

It is easy and tempting to surrender and walk away, but if we do, did we really have the passion and commitment in the first place to any just cause?

Enough "Jihad by Email"- Time to March

After all the very existence and purpose of all life is to struggle for truth and justice.

Can we overcome our inertia? I strongly believe we can, but only time will be the judge of this moment, this era, and our brief inhabitance of this world.

1. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM

* Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

By Linh Dinh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We're in two now, aiming for a third. Japan, whose land we're still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit. It's surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran! A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren't our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade.

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She's also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged. This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn't stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side. We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We're more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don't stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that's war, buddy. We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don't really care about, whose name we can't even pronounce, we'll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It's the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It's the masses we don't give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute - hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer - is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn't even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We're not trying to bomb Arizona.

Needing to kill, a government will lie before, during and after splattering blood. Eschewing subtlety, it prefers to speak in slogans and clipped, cartoonish sentences. They hate us for who we are. We must fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here. We're trying to root out the bad guys. Adopting this lingo, many Americans are dubbing the community center and mosque near Ground Zero a "jihad mosque" or a "victory mosque." In Lower Manhattan last week, I saw a man carrying a sign, "EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM I LEARNED ON 9/11." Another displayed a caricature of "IMAM OBAMA." There was an effigy of a tied up Palestinian, complete with keffiyeh, with this placard, "OBAMA: With a name like HUSSAIN we understand. Bloomberg: what the f@&k is your excuse?"

Totalitarianism always breeds idiocy. Lies that go unchallenged lead to more preposterous lies. Idiocy is also the manure from which totalitarianism rises. On September 11, 2001, the entire world saw America symbolically imploded, but our actual collapse is ongoing. It is relatively gradual, unlike the three, yes, three, World Trade Center buildings that tumbled onto their own foot prints. For the last nine years, we have endured an unending stream of lies and idiocy, none more grotesque than the official explanation to what happened that tragic day.

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government. Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can't imagine that Washington could be complicit in the murder of its own citizens. Ignored is the fact that it has done so many times before, and since, 9/11. Using false pretexts to invade Iraq, our government has caused the death of over four thousand Americans, more than the number who perished on 9/11.

I don't know what happened that day, but it makes no sense to me that World Trade Center #7 fell down without being hit by anything. It makes no sense to me that it collapsed exactly the same way as the twin towers, as if imploding. It makes no sense that the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged hijackers, could be found on the ground, when entire skyscrapers were being pulverized. I also don't understand how no military jets could intercept any of the three planes that hit their targets that day. The first tower was struck at 8:46AM, the Pentagon at 9:40AM, nearly an hour later, with no effective response from our vaunted military. I used to take buses to and from the Pentagon Transit Center. I knew the building wasn't very tall, so it struck me as weird how an airliner could hit it from the side. Why fly parallel to the ground, nearly shaving it, to strike such a low target? Why not just dive into it? There are red flags all over this incident, yet many sane, reasonable people will become completely unhinged at the slightest suggestion that the official version doesn't add up. Our government lies all the time, but when it comes to this one incident, we shouldn't question anything? Even National Review, of all places, pointed out visa irregularities among the alleged hijackers, how they could enter the U.S. without the proper paperwork.

After Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, his family refused to believe the official explanation. They fought and fought until an assassination conspiracy trial was scheduled in 1999. Presented with extensive evidences, a jury concluded that, yes, the federal, state and local governments all had a hand in Dr. King's murder, and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The King family did what any sane, loving family would do. Coretta Scott King explained, "We had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement [...] It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in our power to seek the truth."

On September 11, 2001, someone stabbed America. She's being murdered right now. As Americans, we need to get to the heart of this, because this madness and deceit are perpetuating themselves. If we don't have the courage and clarity to confront this evil, we won't regain our sanity or move forward. We might as well be dead. We're dying. As with the King murder and so much else, you cannot expect the system to convict itself. It will lie and lie until the truth hardly matters.

* Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories and five of poems, with a novel, 'Love Like Hate', scheduled for July. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

Or The Return of Reverend Jeremiah Wright

By William A. Cook* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass, c. 1818-1879.

One hundred and forty seven years ago that charge was leveled at the United States by a former slave who judged America's actions since its founding against the principles that this nation presented to the world as the basis for its existence: the rights of humans to self governance, to life, to liberty, and to happiness. These are his words as he addressed his fellow citizens on the 4th of July: "... your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; ... your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your sermons and thanksgivings ... mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

Today, what has changed? True, we no longer sell humans like cattle in our town squares, no longer confine slaves to the whips of overseers, no longer create unjust laws to discriminate those we find inferior, no longer subdue our fellow humans with force of chains or cudgel or hose or noose, not here, not in these United States. But today America is not confined to an east coast or a west coast; today America occupies Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine and under International Law must provide for those who live under its occupation.

Isn't this the conundrum Obama faces as he confronts the inevitable vote he must make at the United Nations Security Council when it acts on the UNCHR Goldstone Report? How does this man, whose wife is a descendent of slaves, whose father comes from a land that has suffered under colonialism, sit before the council of the world devoted to the security of all, and veto a motion that would force the nation of Israel to face the consequences of its inhumanity to its neighbors and its disregard for International Law? What has changed? Does Obama's vote raise the specter that the United States could be prosecuted for its crimes as well? Listen again to Frederick Douglass:

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

What has changed? It is America that invaded Gaza; it is America that dropped the bombs on the schools and hospitals and homes; it is America that spread white phosphorus on the hapless people of Gaza charring their bodies black as they burned in insufferable pain; it is America that sent its drones overhead to savage families in their homes; it is America that pulled the snipers trigger as he targeted a child or a mother; it is America that chose to invade a sliver of land packed with 1.5 million people, caged like animals, unable to hide or run or protect themselves against the barbarity of the IDF that practiced its war games on a defenseless people, and it is America that votes in its own Knesset to support such savagery and stands naked in its hypocrisy before the assembly of the world. What has changed?

Jeremiah Wright

What has changed that this President must confront or be the face of falsehood before the world? Both Jeremiah Wright and Frederick Douglass identify the same shameful source that marks indelibly this country as savage, one living in slavery, the other bonded in segregation, both products of a mindset that accepted and tolerated the ethnic cleansing by its founders as legitimate practice to establish a nation while proposing that all men are created equal. Today, the state of Israel, our "only friend in the mid-east and the only democracy in the mid-east" cites that very mindset as accepted rationale for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. "Israel is ... unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples, and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that – oh, what irony! – the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?" (Richard Cohen, July 25, 2006, "No, It's Survival"). How ironic indeed, that a people given international approval to form a homeland on someone else's land would find genocide acceptable as a means to establish a democracy that offers self-government to members of a religion but not to others, liberty for the chosen but oppression for the occupied, and happiness for those who conform and obey but not for those segregated and imprisoned.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

Now is the time for this President to stand against the Eurocentric colonial mindset that has enslaved too many for too long. Now is the time for this President to stand against those who continue America's centuries of plunder and pillage at the expense of the masses who bare the brunt of our merciless power. Now is the time for meaningful change, even at the expense of personal power, if the principle that drives the decision recognizes the inherent right of all that fall beneath the boots of America's force to a life of dignity and respect. Now is the time to break the bonds that tie the United States and its people to the criminal state being brought before the Security Council to face justice, to free America to walk in peace in the world and to feel the life giving force of the ideals that give America meaning. Then and only then will America be able to bury the words of Douglass and King and Wright as jeremiads that taught the way to truth by condemning the path of falsehood.

* William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of The Rape Of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy and The Chronicles Of Nefaria. He can be reached at: wcook@laverne.edu.
www.drwilliamacook.com