With [traditional Israeli defense strategists] it’s all about tanks and land and controlling territories … and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless.
– Incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

Soon after the sand settled following the Six Day War in 1967, Jewish settlements began dotting the hills in the occupied territories. These settlements are typically located on the high ground to better control the surrounding landscape. Today there are 127 Jewish settlements with a population exceeding 468,000 in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and in the suburbs of East Jerusalem—the last of nearly 8,000 settlers were removed from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

According to a recent Amnesty International report, “In the first six months of 2008 Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank/East Jerusalem at a faster rate than in the previous seven years.”

Unbeknownst to most Americans, Israel’s westernmost settlement is not located in Palestine-Israel, but is 6000 miles away on the high ground overlooking Foggy Bottom in Washington D.C.

This Capital Hill settlement of pro-Israel lobbies and think tanks strategically controls the high ground overlooking the United States’ Middle East policy landscape by having made kibbutzniks of most members of the executive and legislative branches of the government—including President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden (a wannabe Zionist), and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (a born Zionist).

While Israel’s hilltop settlements in the occupied territories—violating over 30 UN Security Council resolutions since 1968—are “facts on the ground” that make the two state peace solution unlikely, their hilltop settlement in the center of the world’s only superpower makes it equally unlikely that Israel’s right-wing government will feel compelled to end their “self defensive” brutalization of the Palestinian people, which has been condemned by the international community (UN, EU) as crimes against humanity.

John Holmes, UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said that Israel’s blockade of vital supplies to the Gaza Strip in retaliation for rocket attacks “amounts to collective punishment and is contrary to international humanitarian law.”

Collective punishment is forbidden by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states, “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” A “protected person” is someone who is under the control of an “Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.” Only the most ideologically blinkered individual would fail to recognize the Gaza Strip as occupied territory.

Israel’s current blockade of Gaza, which began on November 4, is resulting in what the UN Relief and Works Agency is calling a humanitarian catastrophe. Before the blockade, 1000 truckloads of food, fuel and essential supplies per day were necessary to sustain the 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned behind the concrete and barbed wire of the 25-mile long border. Eighty percent of Gazans live on two dollars a day and depend on international aid to survive. Since the border crossings were sealed, less than 100 truckloads have been permitted through.

The imprisoned Palestinians—50 percent of whom are younger than 15—are slowly starving. They lack the fuel to generate electricity for lighting, water purification, and sewage treatment. The erratic, intermittent electrical power puts the lives of patients in intensive care wards and those who are connected to live-sustaining equipment in grave peril. The lack of basic medicines such as antibiotics and insulin pose an equally fatal threat.

Twenty human rights organizations and all Israeli and international journalists have been barred from entering the Gaza Strip since the blockade began. A letter of protest signed by most major news organizations was sent to Prime Minister Olmert. Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror responded to the letter by saying that Israel was afraid journalists would inflate the Palestinians’ suffering. No one is allow to speak out on behalf of this beleaguered population.

President-elect Obama has been speaking out “swiftly and boldly” about the economic catastrophe threatening our 401Ks, but his silence regarding the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe threatening the lives of Palestinians is both deafening and telling of the price he’s willing to pay to maintain his status as kibbutznik-in-good-standing in Israel’s westernmost hilltop settlement.

Obama’s unconditional support for Israel’s policy of “self defense,” preemptive attacks, and repressive occupations is not one iota different from that of George W. Bush, an internationally recognized war criminal. This is not an encouraging beginning for a man whose battle cry was “change we can believe in.”

By any rational, humanitarian standard, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians amounts to collective punishment and crimes against humanity. Perpetrators of such crimes, whether they are individuals or governments or willing allies, are criminals who should one day sit in the dock of the International Court of Justice in The Hague—just as defendants sat in a Nuremberg court 60 years ago—and be held accountable for their crimes.

Until Israel’s hilltop settlement in our nation’s capital is dismantled, allowing for the possibility of a just and lasting peace in Palestine-Israel, its influence on both branches of our government and its insidious affect on US Middle East policy will continue to make willing—or unwitting—kibbutzniks of all Americans. We will be held as complicit, and as culpable, as the citizens of the country whose leaders sat in the dock at Nuremberg.

The world will ask, “Why didn’t you do something to stop it?” The majority of us will reply, “We didn’t know!”

Listening to Diamond and her friends, with shouts of “yeah Obama!” in the background, one might have gotten the impression Goodman was interviewing the just-saved at a pay-for-heaven revival instead of young voters in a historic presidential election. Diamond’s palpable enthusiasm and her refreshingly naïve faith in her candidate are, paradoxically, both reassuring and unsettling.

Diamond and her friends are among the 95 percent of African American voters 18-29 who voted for Obama. Seventy-five percent of Hispanic and 54 percent of white voters in that same age group cast their ballot for him as well.

That a handsome, intelligent, charismatic man whose genome was sufficiently ambiguous enough to break the color barrier has reached savior status and motivated 2.2 million more young people than in 2004 to vote is a reassuring sign that democracy in America can compete with the insularity of ipods and cell phones.

However, the religious-like furor and blind faith that young—and many older—voters have in Obama that he will single-handedly raise America up from the ashes of the Bush presidency and create a “shining city upon a hill” are unsettling.

President-elect Obama is, first and foremost, a consummate politician who has no doubt compromised himself to become the zenith star of one of the two political parties that control the electoral process, and whose well-heeled and connected sponsors are not at all interested in “change you can believe in” if it adversely affects their bottom line or their particular agenda.

Diamond and her friends should let the post victory euphoria subside and then ask Obama a few questions. They need to call in some chits, which will be redeemable only until November 2012.

Diamond might ask him why he was too busy on the campaign trail last February to go on congressional record by voting for the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which banned torture as an interrogation technique. He owes Diamond more of an explanation than it was a politically prudent absence.

Diamond might ask the President-elect why early in his campaign he promised to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq on day one of his presidency, which played well with the dove vote, only to later adjust his withdrawal policy “based on the advice of military commanders,” which played well with the hawk vote. She might also ask about his apparent support for the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes against any country deemed to be a threat to US security. Obama owes Diamond more of an explanation than Bush-era bromides about winning the “war on terror.”

Diamond might ask the first president of color—though not a descendant of American slaves—how he can support and defend Israel’s brutal apartheid policies regarding the Palestinians, or what signal his appointment of Rahm Israel Emanuel as Chief of Staff sends to Arabs in the Middle East. Emanuel is literally a son of Israel who rabidly supports its occupation of the West Bank, its imprisonment and unconscionable blockade of the Gaza Strip, and its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. This is not a good faith move for brokering a just and lasting peace in Middle East.

Obama owes Diamond more of an explanation than Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East whose “security is sacrosanct” and “non-negotiable.” He needs to explain to Diamond that national politicians must first pledge allegiance to Israel before they can swear to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Diamond and her friends need to know that Israel’s shadow government on K Street dictates Middle East policy to American presidents. Consequently, in the “war on terror” America’s security is second to that of Israel’s.

Most importantly, Diamond might ask the new president who will be heard the most often. Will it be the voices of the 1.5 million small contributors ($200 or less) to his staggering $850 million war chest, or will it be the whispers of a relatively few on Wall Street and K Street? If Diamond knew that Obama’s economic advisors are the same people who a decade ago helped dismantle Depression-era banking regulations, which has lead to the current economic meltdown and trillion-dollar-plus bailout, she would have her answer.

Moments after Amy Goodman interviewed Diamond, she asked an older, unidentified woman—a mother who wants her daughter to go to college—why she had voted for Obama: “I was going to give my vote to someone else, but since she didn’t win, I gave it to him … I just hope he do—I know he can’t do everything, but just do something better than what it is. That’s all.”

President Obama does not owe Diamond perfection, neither can he “cure everything,” but he does owe her the promise to ”do something better than what it is.”

And “something better” will only happen if Diamond and her friends have not already plugged in their earphones and flipped open their cell phones waiting for President Obama to “cure everything.” If they are not calling or text messaging the White House and making their voices heard above the whispers, their “savior” will continue to be nothing but a politician.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.
– Mark Twain

Mark Twain once said that “in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.” Now if the two are combined, as James Dobson’s right-wing Christian organization, Focus on the Family, did in their recent “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” the bar has been lowered to somewhere between the reasoning power of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, the most poisonous biological substance known, and that of George W. Bush … the most toxic presidential substance yet known [19 percent approval rating].

Dobson’s letter from the “future” was emailed on October 22 to millions of his weekly TV and radio audience in the United States. His purpose was to scare the bejesus out of corn pone connoisseurs who devour the stuff faster than even Jesus can multiply it.

Keep in mind that the targeted readers’ “reasoning power” has already convinced them that they’re going to be Raptured—swooshed up bodily [naked as a third-rate centerfold] into heaven—moments after they initiate an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration in the Middle East, which they hope will eventually engulf the entire world. This is not a one-derivation-above-the-mean crowd, after all.

“To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Thank you, Mr. Twain.

According to the letter, a phantasmagoria of horror begins shortly after Obama takes office. Shedding his centrist campaigning skin, he is transmogrified into a far left-wing liberal antichrist. Outlandish? Keep reading.

In his first week in office Obama fires all 93 U.S. attorneys and replaces them with radical ACLU lawyers. Consequently, the Justice Department initiates criminal proceedings against nearly every member of the Bush administration.

Due to death or retirement, the Supreme Court is taken over by far left-wing radical judges (6-3 majority) who—you guessed it—begin legislating from the bench. The youthful appointees are expected to rule the country for the next 30-40 years.

Same-sex marriage becomes the law and compulsory training in gender identity in elementary school results in the firing of tens of thousands of Christian teachers accused of hate speech for refusing to speak positively about homosexuality.

The Boy Scouts choose to disband rather than obey a Supreme Court decision ordering them to hire homosexual scoutmasters to sleep with young boys in tents.

The Bible can no longer be read on radio or TV because doing so amounts to hate speech, and students cannot pray in school … not even silently while sitting outside the principal’s office.

All federal restrictions on abortion are removed and babies are killed only seconds before they can be delivered. Doctors and nurses who refuse to “murder” babies lose their licenses.

A new law mandating equal time for alternative views on public airwaves drives Rush Limbaugh types off the air, essentially shutting down conservative [hate] talk radio in America by 2010.

Commander in Chief Obama proves to be a total wimp, which emboldens Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who eventually seize control of Iraq, imprisoning, torturing [imitation is the ultimate form of flattery] and putting to death millions of “American sympathizers” in that country.

Obama, it seems, is more interested in sending foreign aid to impoverished Third World countries in the form of food and medical aid, which does nothing but nourish and keep healthy the next generation of terrorists.

Dobson finally lets go of his tenuous grip on reality when he describes how Iran’s one nuclear missile destroys Tel Aviv and forces Israel to cede huge amounts of land to the Palestinians, leaving Israel defenseless. WHAT? Israel cede land? Israel defenseless?

“The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightening ain’t distributed right.” Thank you Mr. Twain.

Oh yeah, and gasoline costs $7 per gallon and only military personnel can own a gun.

Needless to say, the next four years are a living hell for the Dobson clan, much as the last eight years have been for anyone with reasoning power marginally superior to that of Twain’s pet monkey.

As a bona fide left-wing liberal atheist, who “wasted” a vote on Nader, I had mixed feelings reading Dobson’s half-baked corn pone. My initial reaction was something akin to enjoying a preposterously funny Twain satire. But then I began to get the creepy feeling I was reading an American fundamentalist version of the Nazis’1935 Nuremburg Laws, which disenfranchised German Jews and foreshadowed the murderous persecution of European Jewry.

It became clear that what I was actually reading was Focus on the Family’s back-handed glimpse of America under a ruler of their choice … say, for instance, Sarah Palin.

Win or lose this time around, Palin is the GOP’s rising star and James Dobson’s heartthrob. She’s the “real deal” of an End Times fundamentalist. Unlike President Bush—a suspected convert—she’s been stuffing her gob with apocalyptic corn pone her entire life. The only way for Palin to get to heaven with her admittedly appealing carcass intact is the Rapture route via an Armageddon avenue, which does not bode well for a survivable foreign policy.

It’s easy to poke fun at the corn pone Focus on the Family and like-mindless organizations dish out during an election. It stops being funny, however, when one realizes that for tens of millions of people this fare is their only sustenance, and this toxic repast, like the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, is the most poisonous of all substances to the body politic.

“If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.” Thank you, Mr. Twain.

I was the first who wanted to impose Israeli sovereignty … I admit it … I was not ready to look into all the depths of reality.

– Incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

In a September 30 article in the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a former member of the right-wing Likud party, said that Israel must withdraw “from almost all of the territories, if not from all the territories. We shall keep in our hands a percentage of these territories, but we shall be compelled to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

He went on to say, “We can perhaps take an historic step in our relations with the Palestinians … the decision we must make is the decision we have refused to face with open eyes for 40 years … What I am telling you was never said by any previous Israeli leader, it’s time to lay everything on the table.”

The reality that Olmert was willing to lay before the Israeli people, “which exposed him to criticism from all quarters,” according to Yedioth Ahronot interviewers Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, is one that no Democratic or Republican politician who aspires to national office has the chutzpa to tell the American electorate.

This lack of chutzpa has been nowhere more evident than in the presidential and vice-presidential “debates.” These prime-time events, which are really nothing more than 90 minutes of vacuous one-upmanship, could serve as a reality check for the 70 million-plus viewers if the moderators were willing to challenge the candidates’ evasions, half truths, exaggerations and outright lies … or if Ralph Nader were allowed to participate.

During the vice-presidential debate, both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin professed their undying love and support for Israel, “our strongest and best ally in the Middle East (Palin).”

“No one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel … (Biden).”

“I’m so encouraged to know that we both love Israel (Palin).”

One-upping Palin, Biden boldly claimed, “I would have never, ever joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion [for Israel].” Obviously, Obama does.

Moderator Gwen Ifill might have taken this opportunity to inquire as to the source of Palin’s “love” and Biden’s “passion” for Israel. Ifill might have pointed out to the 70 million-plus viewers that a candidate does not make it to a national “debate” without first being pronounced kosher by Israel’s shadow government on K Street.

Both Ifill and Tom Brokaw, the moderator of the recent town hall presidential “debate,” might have challenged the candidates’ assertions that Israel is a hairs’ breath away from annihilation by its Arab neighbors.

“An armed, nuclear armed … Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider. They cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons period. Israel is in jeopardy … (Palin).”

“We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon … it [would] threaten Israel, our strongest ally in the region and one of our strongest allies in the world … (Obama).”

Keep in mind that U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran is years away from developing even one nuclear device, while Israel has over 200 nuclear warheads targeted and minutes away from any Arab or Persian country foolish enough to attack it.

Keep in mind also what Olmert told Yedioth Ahronot, “Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East, it can win any war against any regional country, it can even win a war against all of them together.”

All four candidates took the opportunity during the “debates” to once again assure Israelis in the Holy Land and Jews on K Street that their administrations would continue the annual $6 billion in direct and indirect economic and military aid … even as Americans are losing their homes and jobs and retirement savings.

Ifill and Brokaw might have challenged the candidates’ promise of continued economic and military aid to Israel considering:

• Israel is one of the most economically and industrially advanced countries in Southwest Asia.
• Israel ranks second among foreign countries in the number of companies on U.S. stock exchanges.
• Israel has the second largest number of startup companies in the world and the largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies outside North America.
• Israel’s GDP per capita is $31,767.
• Israel’s economic growth in 2006 was the fastest of any Western nation.
• Israel has the best armed and trained military in the region and is the fourth largest weapons exporter in the world ($2 billion annually).

And the United States’ taxpayers are expected to finance Israel?

But the “depth of reality” check of utmost salience to the 70 million-plus “debate” viewers is why the candidates and most members of Congress consider Israel our “strongest ally in the world.”

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, igniting a civil war. America’s support for Israel cost the lives of 241 servicemen who were blown apart as they slept in their Beirut barracks.

Israel did not fight in the first Gulf War, neither did its soldiers die in Afghanistan or Iraq—a war its cooked intelligence helped to bring about. This year our “strongest ally” pushed the Bush administration to the brink of war with Iran—a war whose catastrophic reverberations would have been on a par with the current global economic meltdown.

Israel’s regional aggression and its repressive—often brutal— domestic policies regarding the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank inflames its Arab neighbors and cinches tight the explosive vest to the chests of Arab youths.

Predictably, the United States’ irrational and unconditional support of Israel makes it equally culpable and equally target-worthy in the eyes of Arabs and Persians in the Middle East and Muslims worldwide. An ally that causes more insecurity than succor can hardly be considered the strongest ally in the world—unless that ally is also the only way to the White House.

Gwen Ifill and Tom Brokaw might have challenged the candidates in a way that exposed him or her to criticism from the Israeli quarter. Unfortunately for the 70 million-plus viewers Israel is a “depth of reality” the American political system and mainstream media are unwilling to plumb.

But as a right-wing Israeli Prime Minister says, “it’s time to lay everything on the table.”

If I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist. I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.

– Senator Joseph Biden

Considering the last eight years and the current (viable) options, I’ll admit to wanting Barak Obama in the White House in January. Undoubtedly, more people around the world will have a better chance of surviving the next four years with his finger on — or rather off — the button. However . . .

For all of Obama’s campaign promises of “change,” his choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate sends a clear signal to Israel’s lobby in Washington and its right-wing government in Jerusalem that for the next four years there will be no change in the United States’ unconditional support or its annual $6 billion in direct and indirect aid.

Predictably, neither will there be a change in the hopelessness and the impotent rage of the Arabs suffering under a US-supported Zionist ideology in Palestine.

Senator Biden is the ardently pro-Israel chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is a 36-year veteran politician whose specialty is foreign policy. When he told a reporter from the Jewish cable network, Shalom TV, that he is a Zionist, he knew the implications of that admission for the Palestinians, the entirety of the Arab world, and America’s global “war on terror.”

Matt Dorf, the Jewish outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee, said that “Israel would have no better friend in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.” Dorf might just as easily — and as honestly — have said, “Palestinians would have no greater foe in the vice president’s office than Joe Biden.”

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 2007, Biden planted his flag deep in Israel’s camp: “The responsibility rests on those who will not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, will not play fair, will not deal, will not renounce terror.”

Obama’s running mate has chosen his side. He cannot be a neutral American statesman brokering a Middle East peace or he cannot be a Zionist.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the suffering of Palestinians on the same moral plane as that of Israeli Jews.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel dismantle its illegal settlements that co-opt nearly half the land in the Gaza Strip and Occupied West Bank.

One cannot be a Zionist and place the blame for sixty years of violence and the deaths of innocent thousands — both Palestinian and Israeli — on the cold-blooded determination with which the Zionist cadre executed the ethic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians from the land they had inhabited for untold generations.

One cannot be a Zionist and contemplate the return of Palestinians to their homes that are now occupied by Israeli Jews or the rebuilding of the 500 Palestinian villages destroyed during the great Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

One cannot be a Zionist and abandon the dream of Eretz Israel in order to live as equals with an Arab neighbor in a truly democratic Palestine-Israel.

One cannot be a Zionist and demand that Israel’s apartheid wall be torn down.

One can be a Jew. One can be an Israeli. But one cannot be a Zionist.

Joseph Biden is neither a Jew nor an Israeli. He is the Democratic vice presidential candidate who unabashedly declared, “The Democrats’ support for Israel comes from our gut . . . and ends up in our heads.” Sound familiar? Haven’t we already had eight years of a president who “thinks” with his gut and expects the rest of us to behave like dung beetle larvae? Speaking strictly for myself, I’m tired of their balls of poo.

Could it be there is no difference, no possibility of change as Obama promises, between the Democratic and Republican parties’ subservience to Israel’s shadow government on K Street or their tacit support of Israel’s internationally condemned policies toward the Palestinians?

Could it be that the two parties’ overt support for Israel’s regional aggression exacerbates the “war on terror” and makes the people their candidates swear to God to protect and defend less safe?

Could it be that the “ball of dung” being fed to the American people by both parties conceals the obvious truth that there is no strategic value in our irrational alliance with Israel?

Commenting on the unrest in Palestine in 1921, Winston Churchill, one of the architects of the modern Middle East, told the House of Commons: “The cause of unrest in Palestine, and the only cause, arises from the Zionist movement, and from our promises and pledges in regard to it.”

Joseph Biden’s self-professed Zionism plays well on Shalom TV, but it is a liability for the United States in the global “war on terror” and a death warrant for Palestinian and Israeli innocents.

My number one priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.

– Former House Speaker Richard Armey

Rocky was a boyhood friend. He was as big and as strong as his name. In his wild days, Rocky hung out with a runt whose obnoxious mouth regularly got my friend into serious bar fights. One night Rocky was beaten senseless when he stepped between the runt and someone with dangerous friends. I never understood his irrational defense of a guy with obvious “needs.”

But then—K Street realpolitik notwithstanding—I have difficulty understanding America’s irrational defense of Israel, a country whose “needs” are as much at odds with the security of my country as were the runt’s “needs” at odds with the health of my friend.

Earlier this month 7,000 activists and politicians attended the America Israel Public Forum Committee’s 2008 Policy Conference in Washington D.C. This was AIPAC’s premier pro-Israel event, which attracted a bipartisan who’s who of Congressional sycophants. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s keynote address drew nearly half the members of Congress.

Along with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, both presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential candidates bent a knee and lowered their head in supplication, pledging an unwavering fealty along with an additional 30 billion taxpayer dollars in military aid to Israel.

John McCain told attendees, “The threats to Israel’s security are large and growing and America’s commitment must grow as well. I strongly support the increase in military aid to Israel … our shared interests and values are too great for us to follow any other policy.”

Barak Obama dittoed, “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable … Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us … as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.”

As an American citizen, I’d like to think the number one “non-negotiable” of anyone who would be president is the security and the interests of the American people. Instead of reading from the same AIPAC-vetted script, McCain and Obama would better serve their country by reading from the same Constitution—the version enshrined in Washington D.C. not in Jerusalem.

AIPAC is the most powerful of the dozen or so major organizations and think-tanks that comprise the “Israel lobby” in the United States. This influential lobby dictates U.S. Middle East foreign policy: “You can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here,” admitted Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) upon leaving office in 2004.

Recently, former President Jimmy Carter pointed out that the Israel lobby makes or breaks American politicians depending on their willingness to promote Israel’s “security” as their number one foreign policy priority: “It’s almost political suicide … for a member of Congress who wants to seek reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti-policy of the conservative Israeli government.”

Predictably, politicians wanting to keep their government and K Street paychecks merrily dance the mizinka, the Jewish traditional marriage (of convenience) polka.

Most detrimental to the democratic process, however, is the way the lobby manages the political and social discourse by tarring critics of Israel’s policies and actions regarding the Palestinians, Gaza and the West Bank with the brush of anti-Semitism, a black epithet that once applied is difficult, if not impossible, to scrub off.

But does our “non-negotiable” support for Israel make us more secure, or is it a MAD policy akin to the insane Cold War strategy of “mutual assured destruction?” Such a strategy may, in the war on terror between “radical Islam” and “freedom-loving democracies,” result in the mutual assured destruction of both the United States and Israel.

A Pentagon Defense Science Board report published in 2004 concluded, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies.” And the policy that motivates their young men to bring the Middle East conflict to America by crashing passenger planes into the most prominent symbols of our affluence and military might is our “non-negotiable,” irrational support for the policies of Israel’s right-wing government.

In 2003 it was in Israel’s national security interest to see Saddam Hussein and his perceived regional threat disappear, and to let the American military do the killing and the dying to ensure that it vanished. It was never about American security. Period!

While Israel and their American lobby are not exclusively responsible for the Iraq War, it was their cooked intelligence reports and political clout that both stiffened the spine of the neocon administration bent on war and weaken the knees of American politicians who would be voting for the war.

Likewise, Israel’s “security” demands that Iran not further its nuclear ambitions, peaceful or otherwise. It is once again in their best interest to let the U.S. do the killing. The Bush administration and Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain promised to do just that using American nukes. AIPAC is intent on holding them to their promise.

Former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, wrote in his 2006 book, Target Iran, “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and no where else.” That war will both inflame and unite the Arab world against Israel and its benefactor and will once again bring the “chickens home to roost” on American shores.

Keep in mind that Israel has never lost a major war since 1948. It has the most technologically advanced and deadly military in the region and, according to journalist Chris Hedges, is the world’s fourth largest arms dealer and security technology exporter. It has over 200 nuclear warheads, enough to wipe the Arab world off the map in minutes. It has accomplished all this with chutzpa and 154 billion in U.S taxpayer dollars—monies it is not required to account for, unlike other countries that receive U.S. aid.

Keep in mind also that it is official U.S. policy that Israel not expand its settlements in the occupied territories. However, Israel is constructing a 40-foot high “security barrier” in the West Bank—at a cost of one million U.S taxpayer dollars per mile—that will effectively annex 40 percent of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements and further the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This MAD policy waves a shoe in the face of Palestinian Arabs who have struggled for sixty years to live free in the State of Palestine. Be assured, Arabs know who is footing the bill.

Past victimhood is no moral justification for Israel’s repressive, draconian “defensive” policies against Palestinian resistance, whether that resistance takes the form of slingshots or backpack explosives. Nothing excuses the killing of innocents on either side, but we do well to remember that terror bombing was midwife to the birth of the state of Israel. Indeed, Israeli historian Benny Morris speculates, “The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Shamir argued that “neither Jewish ethics nor tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.” Defending his terrorist past to an interviewer in1998 he further claimed, “Had I not acted as I did, it is doubtful that we would have been able to create an independent Jewish state of our own.” No doubt Palestinian fighters are thinking the same regarding an independent Palestinian state of their own.

Since there is no overwhelming strategic or moral reason for the United States to continue its “non-negotiable” support of Israel, that country should be treated like any other ally and not like an over-indulged adolescent. It is time Israel makes its own way in the world. To assume it is incapable of doing so is anti-Semitism worthy of the brush stroke, and a MAD policy we can no longer afford.

More than likely, the runt would not have been as belligerent had Rocky not been watching his back.

[Author’s note: For a non-AIPAC vetted view of the Middle East conflict see Ramzy Baroud’s The Second Palestine Intifada, Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.]

During the battle for Falluja in 2004, U.S. snipers positioned themselves on rooftops covering the entrance to the only hospital still in operation, creating what locals called “sniper alley.” Iraqi men, women, and children seeking medical treatment were fired on. Ambulances delivering patients and supplies were fired on. Unlike Nora, many did not survive the sniper’s bullet.

On May 30, 2006 Nabiha Nisaif Jasiam and her cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassen were shot from behind by a U.S. sniper as they drove to Samarra General hospital. Nabiha was about to deliver her third child. Neither survived the sniper’s bullet.

No U.S. president or general or lowly lieutenant acknowledged, much less apologized, for these illegal and immoral shootings. No sniper was held accountable.

On May 19 the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. General Jeffrey Hammond, apologized to community leaders and imams from the Baghdad neighborhood of Radhwaniya after it was discovered that a U.S. sniper used a copy of the Quran for target practice.

Gen. Hammond told the angry crowd, “I come before you here seeking your forgiveness. In the most humble manner … I say please forgive me and my soldiers. The actions of one soldier were nothing more than criminal behavior.”

Sheikh Hamadi al-Qirtani, speaking for the tribal sheiks of Radhwaniya, called the sniper’s behavior “aggression against the entire Islamic world.” The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned “this heinous crime against God’s book” and warned Gen. Hammond, “God preserves his book and [is] the Great Avenger.”

We need some perspective here!

Nora and the other innocent Iraqis shot by snipers are made of flesh and blood and a brain capable of remembering yesterday and hoping for tomorrow. They are their god’s “Islamic World,” the living testament to faith in a sacred covenant. It is these human beings who are the victims of a “heinous crime” and deserve to be avenged by their god, if not at least apologized to by Gen. Hammond.

Holy books, on the other hand, are made of cardboard and paper and ink. They are made for profits (pun absolutely intended). These books are not manna from heaven. They are manufactured here on Earth and there is nothing sacred about their physical presence. Whatever “sacredness” there may be in holy books can, like little Nora, survive a sniper’s bullet. If it cannot, then it is most assuredly the creation of men, not of gods.

To seal his apology at Radhwaniya, Gen. Hammond ordered a soldier to kiss a new copy of the Quran and present it to the community. That done, he assured them, “I have punished this soldier. [He] has lost the honor to serve the United States Army and the people of Iraq here in Baghdad.” The soldier was sent home to his family.

Is it any wonder that the Vietnam War lasted for more than a decade and claimed the lives of 58,200 Americans and over two million Vietnamese? During that war, soldiers and marines had to shoot themselves instead of a book in order to lose the “honor” of serving the U.S. military and the people of Vietnam and get sent home to their families.

With that in mind, consider this proposal for a “holey” workable Iraq peace plan: Mothers write to your son, wives to your husband, and kids to your dad. Beg him to drill a few 7.62 holes into a holy book of his choice, turning it into an instrument of peace. Have him respectfully submit this symbol of peace to his commanding officer with a notarized photograph to the unit chaplain or local imam. He will no longer be allowed to “serve” the people of Iraq and will be safely home in a week. The war will be over by Christmas.

It seems unlikely that either the Peaceful Prophet of Islam or the Prince of Peace of Christianity will have a problem with 140,000 holey holy books if it means saving twice that many lives and the ending of an immoral war and suffocating occupation.

The Peaceful Prophet said, “Whoever kills a single soul … it is as though he had killed all of humanity,” while the Prince of Peace made it clear, “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethrens, ye have done it unto me.

Neither Prophet nor Prince ever said anything about “killing” a book. It is the “living testament” that is sacred to them, not something made of cardboard and paper and profits.

To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it . . . An evil unchecked is the prelude to genocide.

– Dr. Mordechai, The Ezekiel Option

There are over 70 million human beings living in Iran, 17.5 million of whom are under the age of fifteen. Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess or are likely to for some time — if ever.

Hillary’s “final solution” to the Persian problem bests Adolf Hitler by a magnitude of ten.

Missing in Clinton’s campaign trail pandering to America’s pro-Israel lobbies and the mushrooming evangelical Christian Zionist movement is the “inconvenient truth” that Israel has the most modern and most deadly army in the Middle East thanks to an annual $3.5 billion in American aid — one third of the U.S. aid budget.

Israel is also a major nuclear power in the region — though it refuses to admit it — with up to 200 nuclear warheads and the inter-continental-range ballistic missiles to deliver them and, according to the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, also has an undeclared offensive chemical and biological warfare program.

Israel, along with India and Pakistan are the only three nations not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory of the NNPT, by the way.

The most inconvenient truth, however, is that Israel has a 60-year history of attacking — with American-supplied armaments — any Arab country it perceives as a threat, nuclear-armed or slingshot-armed alike. Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 comes to mind as an example of the former, its shelling of Gaza the latter.

Israel can and will “ preemptively defend” itself against Iran, the country that a February 2008 International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded has not diverted nuclear material to non-peaceful purposes. Unfortunately for the 70 million Persians in Hillary’s bombsight, Iran’s biggest liability is its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — but then the US is equally burdened.

So the real truth behind Clinton’s “final solution” to the Persian problem or John McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” off-key hyperbole is not simply a “David and Goliath” struggle for survival, but is instead a cynical exploitation of the unholy marriage of convenience between fanatical Jewish Zionists who want a Muslim-free Eretz Israel in order to fulfill Old Testament prophecy and bring about the first coming of their Messiah and fanatical Christian Zionists who want the entire Middle East in flames to fulfill New Testament prophecy and bring about the Second Coming of their Messiah.

Jewish Zionists need the money and the political clout of the Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists need the Semitism and the chutzpah of the Jewish Zionists. Politicians need the votes that both groups can deliver, which in religion-drenched America is a hefty consignment.

According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, fully 44 percent of Americans believe that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people” and 36 percent believe the “creation of the state of Israel is a step toward the Second Coming of Jesus.”

Depending on which poll is the most accurate, there are between 105-135 million evangelical and born-again Christians in the United States. Of these Christians, a 2004 International Fellowship of Christians and Jews poll found that 31 percent identified US support for Israel as their “primary consideration” in selecting a presidential candidate, while 64 percent cited it as an “important factor.”

Predictably then, when Hillary Clinton or John McCain threaten to obliterate Iran, or any predominately Muslim country in the Middle East, with nuclear weapons, the primary audience for their saber rattling is not the Muslim “evildoers” but is, instead, the pro-Israel lobby and the Christian Zionist muscle in America who are willing to see the “ultimate evil” committed to further their ideological and eschatological agenda.

Nowhere does “ultimate evil” play a more prominent role than in the End Time machinations of two well-connected Christian Zionists, Tim LaHaye and John Hagee.

Tim LaHaye is best known as the coauthor of the blockbuster Left Behind series, which has sold over 60 million copies worldwide. The pulp fiction series takes the Book of Revelation as its inspiration and chronicles the tribulations that will occur between the Rapture of born-again Christians and the Second Coming of Jesus. The blood and viscera of millions of infidels and heretics — unrepentant Atheists, Jews, Muslims, and Catholics — are spattered on every page.

Tim LaHaye is least known as the founder and first president of the secretive Council for National Policy. The CNP was formed in 1981 as an umbrella organization to advance an ultra-conservative, right wing Christian agenda. LaHaye’s particular agenda items include replacing U.S. secular law with Old Testament biblical law and a Middle East foreign policy that expedites the Second Coming.

According to the New York Times, the CNP consists of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations . . . to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.” Though the membership of the CNP is a guarded secret, a list of those known to have been associated with it reads like a who’s who of Christian Zionists and neocon ideologues whose passion is to see the Middle East in flames and in chains.

A short list includes: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, and Oliver North—the guy who sold weapons to Iran using Israel as the middleman.

Do not be blindsided. The CNP is a major player in domestic and foreign policy decisions and the “evil” that results.

John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is the founder of Christian United for Israel. Hagee formed CUFI in 2005 following the publication of his book, The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, which sports a mushroom cloud on its cover and argues for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.

Hagee’s theology — and vision of the future — focuses on selected apocalyptic passages from the Old Testament. He believes that a nuclear strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russian leadership, as outlined in the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Consequently, CUFI exists to set the fires of the Apocalypse and bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming, but it needs Jewish Zionists to strike the match.

Christians United for Israel is the evangelical equivalent of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby courted and placated by every American politician who has national aspirations. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama have each pledged their fealty to AIPAC.

John Hagee is not without his own short list of beltway benefactors. The list includes, but is not limited to: George W. Bush, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, Senator Joe Lieberman — who called Hagee an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God — and John McCain who was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement [for president].”

When Christian Zionists with the stature of LaHaye and Hagee shill for fanatical Jewish Zionists who are promoting the ethic cleansing of Eretz Israel for biblical or nationalistic reasons or the pre-emptive “defensive” nuking of Iran, politicians with the stature of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, along with a hefty consignment of the electorate, are their willing dupes. It’s just the politics of religion as usual in America.

But Jewish Zionists need to understand that the difference between Christian Zionists and Muslim suicide bombers is scale, a nuclear warhead versus a backpack bomb, and a willingness to let others do the killing — and the dying — for them.

Jewish Zionists should also keep in mind that Christian Zionists have no intention of being around when the sands of the Middle East are turned to glass in a furnace of primordial fire. They will have been Raptured and out of harm’s way in Paradise. Their Bible tells them so.

In 2002, when the scope of the pedophile priest scandal in the United States was becoming too obvious for even the Vatican to continue to ignore, Rottweiler Ratzinger claimed that the sexual abuse allegations against Catholic clergy were part of a “planned campaign” that was “intentional [and] manipulated” to discredit the church. Whose campaign he didn’t say, but his short list probably included the pro-choice and gay rights lobbies.

On April 19, 2005, in an arcane rite of “transubstantiation” known only to the College of Cardinals, the rabid Rottweiler Ratzinger became, with a puff of white smoke, the kindly, thoughtful Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th Bishop of Rome and leader of one billion Catholics worldwide.

During Benedict’s million-dollar-a-day junket to the United States, a trip that the Vatican admits is a P.R. opportunity to change a German Rottweiler into an American Golden Retriever, the mystery of pedophile priests was cleared up … sort of.

According to Benedict, it is America’s “increasingly secular and materialistic culture” that caused priests to fondle and rape children. Keep in mind that the “materialistic” remark is coming from a guy who has been seen sporting a pair of custom-cobbled red shoes, Gucci sunglasses, ceremonial gowns by Gamarelli, and listening to an iPod Nano while tens of millions of Catholics worldwide struggle to feed their families, much less put shoes on their feet or sunglasses on their faces.

One can also suppose that the bishops who knew of the abuse and did nothing other than transfer the pedophiles to other parishes, where they continued to molest children, were suffering from the same demonic secular possession as the priests.

According to a 2002 study conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in the United States have been accused of sexual abuse of children since 1950, leaving an estimated 13,000 victims and over 2 billion dollars in lawsuits—money that could have been spent feeding and clothing and “sunglassing” tens of millions of destitute, but tithing, Catholics.

A “penitent” Benedict said that he was “deeply ashamed” of the pedophile priests who scandalized the Catholic Church in the U.S. He said, “It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen.” He did not dwell on the suffering of the 13,000 victims, one of whom described what happened to her as an “abuse of her soul.”

The “Golden Retriever” wagged his tail as he asked 67 million U.S. Catholics to create an atmosphere of healing and reconciliation for the victims while the “Rottweiler” tugged at his chain with a not-so-subtle admonition, “Also, I ask you to love your priests, and to affirm them in the excellent work that they do.” In other words, “Lay off! There aren’t enough priests to go around as it is.”

A good number of the abuse victims were not healed by Benedict’s anemic apology. Becky Ianni, who was abused by her parish priest from age 9 to 11, said, “He talks about feeling shame for the scandal but it’s a far cry from the shame that victims have had to live with our entire lives. We don’t really need his sense of shame, we need him to take firm actions to correct the situation.”

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the website, Bishop Accountability, which documents sexual abuse, said that words are cheap, but action has a price and she is skeptical that Benedict is willing to ante up.

Doyle wants the church hierarchy that sheltered pedophile priests from the law and allowed them to continue to abuse the bodies and souls of Catholic children to be held accountable, “Rather than shifting attention to pedophile priests, he needs to focus on the culpability of bishops. The crisis occurred because many U.S. bishops were willing to hide their priests’ crimes from the police with lies.”

So far Benedict, who is the only church official with the authority to discipline bishops for their role in perpetuating the sexual abuse, has failed to do so. Only a sucker’s bet says he will.

While Benedict is in his Retriever coat, there are a number of other people to whom he needs to apologize: to gays whom he called emotionally immature and homosexuality “objectively disordered;” to the 50 percent of Catholics whose gender disqualifies them for the priesthood; to impoverished mothers who continue to have children they can ill afford because of the Rottweiler’s dogmatic stance against family planning and birth control; to the tens of millions of tithing Catholics who live in squalid poverty while he lives in opulence on their nickels.

While a “kindly” Pope Benedict XVI can get away with blaming priestly pedophilia on someone else’s secularism, all the other sorrow caused by his doctrinal intransigence rests squarely in Joseph Ratzinger’s gilded lap.

So who is the real Bishop of Rome, the Rottweiler or the Retriever? A few words of caution should inform one’s rumination on that mystery. Zebras never change their stripes and dogs only rarely change their dispositions.

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice.

– Hebrews 11:17

This Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin died of diabetic ketoacidosis, a curable condition. While Kara was bedridden suffering waves of nausea and vomiting and excessive thirst and could not talk, her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, knelt in prayer and refused to seek medical treatment.

Kara’s aunt called 911 from California and told the dispatcher that her niece was severely ill and that, “We’ve been trying to get [Leilani] to take Kara to the hospital for a week, a few days now . . . but she is very religious and is refusing.”

When Kara stopped breathing, her father’s faith weakened and he dialed 911. Following the ambulance to the hospital, Leilani called the prayer elders of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention, and asked them to pray that the Lord would raise her daughter up. Kara was pronounced dead at the hospital. Predictably, there was no resurrection in Weston, Wisconsin this Easter Sunday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin, who is investigating the death, told reporters that the Neumanns are “not crazy.” He went on to explain, “They believed up to the time she stopped breathing that she was going to get better. They just thought it was a spiritual attack. They believed that if they prayed enough she would get better . . . they said it was the course of action they would take again.”

Kara’s three siblings are staying with relatives until the investigation is completed, but Chief Vergin assured reporters, “There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see.” Vergin is correct . . . sort of. Refusing life-saving medical care to their remaining children as “the course of action they would take again” is not child abuse, it is premeditated negligent homicide.

Unfortunately, the death of a child at the praying hands of religious parents is not uncommon and is sanctioned by state and federal religious exemption laws. Under Wisconsin law, parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they fervently believed prayer was the best treatment for a disease or life-threatening condition.

In 1986, seven-year-old Amy Hermanson of Sarasota, Florida died of diabetes because her mother and father’s religious beliefs forbade medical treatment. The parents were convicted of child abuse and third-degree murder. Florida’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1992.

In 1989, 11-year-old Ian Lundman of Independence, Minnesota died of diabetes because his mother and stepfather relied on prayer to cure him. Ian’s death was ruled a homicide and his parents were indicted. A district court dismissed the case because Minnesota’s religious exemption rule recognized prayer as medical treatment. Minnesota’s Appeals Court and Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

In 2003, federal legislation “sanctioned” the killing of children by religious parents in the “Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.” The act requires that states receiving federal grant dollars must include “failure to provide medical treatment” in their definition of child neglect. However, to placate the powerful Christian Science lobby and other fundamentalist groups, legislators included the following caveat: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as establishing a Federal requirement that a parent or legal guardian provide a child any medical service or treatment against the religious beliefs of the parent or legal guardian.”

Only by a twisted, fundamentalist logic — pandered to by politicians — in the overly religious United States, which is one Supreme Court vote away from overturning Roe v. Wade in order to protect the rights of an undifferentiated bundle of cells in a woman’s womb, can thinking, feeling, trusting, loving children be allowed to suffer and die because of the fanatical religious beliefs of their parents . . .whether the child holds those beliefs or not.

It is unfortunate that parents, who obviously love their children, regard their faith in a god with a lousy track record for healing as unassailable, neither by the love nor by the trust of their children. Between 1975 and 1995, 172 children died in the United States because their parents refused medical treatment on religious grounds. 140 of those children died from conditions which medical science had a 90 percent track record of curing.

The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect concluded, “There are more children actually being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan.” As Gerald Witt, mayor of Lake City, Florida, said about local faith-based deaths, “It may be necessary for some babies to die to maintain our religious freedoms. It may be the price we have to pay; everything has a price.”

But religious zealots need not pay the ultimate price of sacrificing their children on the altar of faith. It says so in the first book of their bible. “Abraham built an altar . . . and laid the wood . . . and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham . . . lay not thine hand upon the lad . . . for now I know that thou fearest God . . .” (Gen. 22:9-12).

Should parents decide to disregard both their god’s admonition against sacrificing children to prove a fanatical faith and society’s laws against homicide, they should be held accountable to a secular “higher power” in a court of law that does not accept the strength of a person’s religious belief as evidence of their guilt or innocence.

* Author’s note: The United States and Somalia are the only countries that have not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Danielle Shafi, a 5-year-old Israeli girl, was killed by the bullet fired from a Palestinian rifle as her mother combed her hair in the child’s upstairs bedroom. Drenched in the blood of her wound, Danielle slowly stopped breathing and died in her mother’s arms minutes after being shot.

According to a United Nation’s report, 971 Palestinian and Israeli children were killed between September 2000—the beginning of the second intifada—and July 2007. Of those destroyed children, 854 were Palestinian. The intifada and the dying continue.

Safa and Danielle are two of the children whose lives the evangelical political action committee, Christians United for Israel, are willing to sacrifice on the alter of their fundamentalist eschatology in the hope of bringing about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Pastor John Hagee, televangelist to 99 million viewers and pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, established the CUFI in 2005 following the publication of his book, “The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.” Hagee envisions CUFI as the Christian version the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has a significant influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

The late Molly Ivins, a Texas political commentator and author, described Hagee as a “pre-millennial dispensationalist, whose theology focuses on selected apocalyptic passages of the Book of Revelation.” In 1998, Hagee teamed up with Christian filmmakers to produce, “Vanished in the Twinkling of an Eye,” a docudrama about the tribulations following the Rapture.

Despite Pastor Hagee’s obvious interest in eschatology, he insists that CUFI’s support for Israel has nothing to do with end time prophecy. But in an unguarded moment in the intimate confines of his 50,000 sq. ft. multimedia chapel, Hagee set the truth free, “The judgment of the nations is going to happen as soon as Christ returns to earth. As soon as he sets up his throne on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, he’s going to rule the world with a rod of iron. That means he’s going to make the ACLU do what he wants them to … We will live by the law of god, and no other law.”

The problem with Hagee’s version of the truth is the fact that the Temple Mount is Islam’s third most sacred site, upon which sits the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the oldest extant Islamic structure in the world.

According to Judaism, the Mount is where the final Third Temple will be rebuilt before the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Unfortunately for CUFI, the Second Coming of Jesus is on hold until the temple’s completion, and that cannot happen until Islam is destroyed—Hagee’s holy grail.

Predictably then, the good pastor opposes any peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supports Israel’s persecution and “imprisonment” of 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and advocates pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran. John Hagee lives, and CUFI exists, to light the fires of the Apocalypse using Israel as the match.

To get a candid look at CUFI and its members, journalist Max Blumenthal took his cameras to the CUFI’s Washington-Israel Summit held last July in the nation’s capital.

His video, Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour opens with Blumenthal cornering disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay and asking him how important the Second Coming is in his support of Israel. The “Hammer” replied, “Obviously, it is what I live for. Really, I hope it comes tomorrow. Obviously, we need to be connected to Israel to enjoy the Second Coming of Christ.”

Blumenthal mingled with the 4,500 CUFI rank and file attending the Summit and asked their opinion on Armageddon and the identity of the Antichrist:

Q. “Are you looking forward to Armageddon?”

A. “I’m looking forward to Armageddon and the cleansing of the earth.”

Q. “Who is the Antichrist?”

A. “He will be a man of peace. So he will be one who has promoted peace for many years. The one who forces Israel into a peace treaty with the Arabs is the Beast.”

A. “Another reason that we support Israel is that we have a common enemy, the Muslims. We are fighting what is behind the Muslim people, which is Satan. Satan is actually the one who is trying to destroy the human race.”

After asking Pastor Hagee the “wrong” question during a Summit news conference, Blumenthal and his crew were escorted out of the building by off-duty police officers.

John Hagee is not without fawning friends in Washington. Presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign stop at the Summit and admitted to the audience that, “It’s very hard trying to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan …” House Minority Whip Roy Blunt followed McCain to the podium and assured the faithful that “This is a mission, this is a vision that I believe is a vision for God’s time.” Senator Joe Lieberman was there and described Pastor Hagee as an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God.

Never one to be left out of a well-attended Christian Right convocation, President Bush sent his best wishes, “I appreciate CUFI members … for your passion and dedication to enhancing the relationship between the United States and Israel. Your efforts set a shining example for others …”

Cultivating his friendship with the man who believes the U.S. will be in Iraq for the next one hundred years, Pastor Hagee endorsed—and hugged—John McCain for president at a news conference held at the Cornerstone Church. Senator McCain graciously accepted, saying, “I’m very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement today,” When asked about Hagee’s extensive writings on Armageddon, McCain responded that “all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.’’

Considering the above, the following should not need to be said. Pastor Hagee’s right-wing Jewish allies will do well to consider that after Islam is destroyed and the Temple rebuilt and Jesus comes and raptures all “true believers,” all non-believers—including Jews—will be hunted down and converted or destroyed … that is, those few who survived the nuclear holocaust that was prayed for and schemed for by the “Ish Elokim” and the CUFI.

In the meanwhile, Palestinian and Israeli children will continue to die singularly or in small groups by the bullets and the bombs and the fire send their way on the wings of CUFI’s prayerful machinations.

This government does not torture.
– George W. Bush

All right! Waterboarding is a very unpleasant experience, which is sometimes fatal. I can also imagine that a small percentage of root canals are fatal, but no one routinely refers to them as torture—just very unpleasant.

That said, if I were grabbed off the street by five guys in ski masks who jabbed a hypodermic in my neck, threw me in the back of a van, stripped me to gooseflesh, gave me an enema and jammed a wad of cotton where only a proctoscope belongs, forced me into diapers and an orange jumpsuit, plugged my ears, duck-taped my eyes and put a sack over my head, shackled me in a stress position to the cold, aluminum deck of an unheated cargo plane for 15 hours, strapped me in a chair at some black dental site in Karachi and commenced the root canal in a shower of Punjabi expletives … then okay, maybe taken in toto I’d consider that experience torture.

On February 13 the Senate narrowly passed—on a 51-45 party-line vote—an intelligence bill that will, among other things, ban waterboarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique,” a Bush-era euphemism for torture.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, traded his principled stance against waterboarding for a White House endorsement of his candidacy and voted against the ban. Torture is now officially a plank in the GOP platform. Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama were too busy campaigning to go on congressional record as either supporting or opposing the ban.

Such a narrow political plurality against the torture of a human being is possible in an overly-religious nation because of the mistaken notion that torturing a person begins and ends with “waterboarding” and because that term sounds a lot like “waterslide” and “water park.” Who hasn’t gotten water up the nose while playing in a pool but still enjoyed the overall experience?

Dick Cheney refers to waterboarding as “a dunk in the water.” Attorney General Mukasey refuses to call it torture unless, of course, it’s happening to him. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) defended his vote against the ban on waterboarding by saying, “It is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger … the impact is psychological.”

I have news for Mr. Lieberman. If I were strapped in a straitjacket and locked in a 2×3x7 foot box, the exquisite psychological pain of that experience would find no rival in burning coals. And I would say anything to make it stop. Torture, physical or psychological, is about as singularly personal an experience as birth and death.

Waterboarding has become the cause célèbre in the torture controversy that began in this country with the revelation of tortured Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. Considering the attention it gets—3,810,000 Google hits—one can be forgiven for thinking it is the only “enhanced interrogation technique” being used. In reality, it is only the most benign sounding of the Bush-era chamber of horrors, which includes, but is not limited to: electric shock, hypothermia, heat injuries, forced sexual acts, prolonged stress positions, beatings, dog attacks, withholding food, water, and medical attention, sleep depravation, sensory overload, and mock execution.

We have already become a nation “comfortable” with the idea that waterboarding is torture. In a November 2007 CNN poll, 68 percent of the respondents agreed that waterboarding constitutes torture. But only 58 percent of the respondents believe the U.S. should not use the technique. For now, there is a narrow moral plurality against its use.

Waterboarding is the thin edge of the wedge that will work its way into the political and moral discussion and slowly, but inexorably, desensitize the nation to the overt and covert use of all forms of torture. Torture will become a “regrettable” but necessary weapon in the war on terror, much as the madness of “mutual assured destruction” was thought to be integral to surviving the Cold War. Once in the arsenal, torture, like nuclear missiles, will become an unassailable tool of national defense.

Keep in mind, a particular torture technique is not applied in isolation, but is part of a longer torturing experience that includes kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, prolonged isolation, denial of legal rights, no communication with family, draconian sentences, loss of hope, psychosis, suicide, and execution.

Keep in mind also that too often the victims of a torturing experience are the innocent, the constitutionally protected dissenter, the political opponent, the disenfranchised … the children of the disappeared.

On June 18, 1940 the Russia army invaded Lithuania and began arresting community leaders and intellectuals. My aunt’s mother was a librarian, one of her town’s intellectuals. She was arrested and charged with espionage. To extract a confession, her interrogators used pliers to rip the flesh from the inside of her upper arms. I don’t know what she told them. She was, after all, just a woman who loved books. Regardless, she was convicted and condemned to death. After languishing for months in a death cell waiting to be executed, her sentence was commuted to fifteen years in a Siberian gulag. She did not see her husband or her children for a quarter of a century.

Her torture did not begin or end with the pliers—a Stalin-era “enhanced interrogation technique.” The scars from the pliers were visible on her arms, which she hid under long sleeves. The scars of twenty-five years were visible in her eyes, which she hid in books for the remainder of her life.

A society that accommodates itself to the idea of torture, be it torture of minutes or hours or months or years, forfeits the right to think of itself as moral or humane. That nation is not the beacon light of liberty and justice shining on less enlightened countries. It is the umbra.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast.
– Book of Revelation 13:18

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth … and God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” So begins and ends the Christian antediluvian history of the earth—all 788 words of it.

It is this scant “history” that fundamentalist Christians, including members of Congress and the President, want taught in public schools in place of the 150 years of accumulated science embodied in the theory of evolution. This sliver of Christian history is the thin edge of the wedge they hope will split Jefferson’s wall separating church and state and allow fundamentalist dogma to pass for fact in science classrooms.

Now, if the founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, Rep. James Forbes (R-VA), and thirty-one other Representatives succeed in lodging their wedge by passing House Resolution 888, designating the first week in May as “American Religious History Week,” public school history classrooms will be opened to a fundamentalist version of the “rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history,” however scant or however fabricated.

House Resolution 888, introduced in December 2007, purports to be about nothing more than a recognition of America’s history of religious faith. In reality, it is an attempt by the Christian Right to rewrite the history of the United States along the same biblical slant as their revision of the history of life on earth.

According to Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternative Version of American History, the seventy-five “Whereas” clauses of H. R. 888 that are meant to justify its passage are “packed with the same American history lies found on the Christian nationalist websites, and in the books of pseudo-historians … [used] to further the Christian nationalist agenda.”

Michael Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and former White House counsel during the Reagan administration, said that “House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens’ religious freedom by the fundamentalist Christian right.”

Alerted to H. R. 888 by Weinstein’s MRFF, Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, wrote in the Nation, “the resolution is staggering for its sheer volume of falsehoods about our history, our system of government and our democracy. Hedges believes that reading the resolution will help Americans better understand why the right-wing Christian populism of Mike Huckabee—who wants to amend the Constitution to God’s standards—is a serious danger to our secular democracy.

Viewed from the summit of forty years, we can now appreciate the iconic TV drama, Room 222, as a snapshot of American history from the show’s debut in1969 to its cancellation in1974. The setting for the drama was the American history classroom of Pete Dixon, a young, idealistic African-American teacher who helped his students—and the TV audience— navigate not only the tumultuous teen years, but also the turbulent swirl of events that defined their generation and became part of America’s history.

Those of us who watched Room 222, lived the moments and, quite possibly, made the history. The moments included; the Vietnam War, the 1968 King and Kennedy assassinations, Nixon’s election, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Woodstock, the Kent State killings, Earth Day, 18-year-old vote, the north tower of the World Trade Center completed, Equal Rights Amendment passed by Congress, the Watergate burglary, Ms. magazine, Nixon reelected, Roe v. Wade, the last U.S. troops withdraw from Vietnam, POWs return, first black mayor is elected in a major southern city, articles of impeachment voted against Nixon, Nixon resigns, President Ford pardons Nixon.

Predictably, history did not end with ABC’s decision to end Room 222. And other than maybe the opening in New York City of the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, there was nothing particularly Christian about the history of the show’s six years, though Christians were certainly a part of it—as were we all—for good or ill.

Should this resolution be enacted, the history of Room 222, written in the blood and anger and hope and laughter of all Americans, will be co-opted and revised by H. R. 888, written by Rep. Forbes’ fundamentalist cabal at the behest of the Christian Right. The result of their revision will not be America’s history. But then, that is their aim.

Those familiar with the Christian numerology of end time prophecy can predict where this resolution will lead.

888-222 = 666 … The mark of the Beast.

The resolution’s singular purpose is securing the Christian Right’s claim to both our nation’s past and its present. If the wedge of the resolution is hammered deeply enough into the foundation of our nation’s history, a beast of apocalyptic stature may slither through the crack, portending the “end times” of our secular democracy … hyperbole notwithstanding.

Regrettably, the 2008 presidential frontrunners of both parties are ignoring Jesus’ advice regarding the preferred relationship between church and state by professing — ad nauseam — their undying fidelity to the Christian Right’s version of morality and its vision of our nation as their exclusive fiefdom.

Consider the statements of two Republican candidates. Senator John McCain said he believes the “Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Mike Huckabee said we should “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards . . . .” McCain is pandering. Huckabee is deadly earnest. But keep in mind, many a democratic nation has been trampled because politicians were outsmarted by those whose boots they licked.

At least one sitting Supreme Court Justice shares Huckabee’s “deadly earnest” regarding God’s standards. In a 2005 Supreme Court case considering whether a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments sitting near the entrance of the Texas State Capital was unconstitutional and tantamount to government endorsed religion, Justice Scalia lectured the plaintiffs, “It is a symbol that the government derives its authority from God. That’s what it is about. Our laws are derived from God.”

It is of no little consequence when a Supreme Court justice pronounces that our laws are based on ancient biblical commands rather than on the “godless” Constitution. In essence, Scalia is saying that the secular democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers should be a Christian theocracy as envisioned by a determined sect of fundamentalists.

Not only do the folks who share Huckabee and Scalia’s “deadly earnest” want to change our nation’s Constitution, they want to change its history as well.

Rep. James Forbes (R-VA), backed by thirty-one other Representatives, has proposed House Resolution 888 designating the first week in May as “American Religious History Week.” The purpose of the bill is to affirm “the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history . . . and for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.

If passed, this Resolution will be as divisive and detrimental to the study of American history in public schools and public squares as intelligent design creationism has been to the study of evolution. It will—as it is meant to — bolster the Christian Right’s claim to both our nation’s past and its present.

Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and former White House counsel during the Reagan administration, said that “House Resolution 888 is perhaps the most disgraceful, shocking and tragic example yet of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of our bedrock American citizens’ religious freedom by the fundamentalist Christian right.” Mikey is not known to mince words.

That a good number of the Framers of the Constitution were Christians is undeniable. But it is this fact that speaks strongly in defense of their decision to build the “wall of separation” between church and state that keeps government out of the business of religion. Their concern was not necessarily for the rights of the nonbeliever, but for the believer’s freedom to choose which creed he or she will embrace.

The particular genius of the Founding Fathers was their understanding that a Christian nation can be a dangerous place for both believers and nonbelievers. They knew that government prescribed religion — usually that of the most politically connected sect — invariably leads to intolerance and tyranny.

James Madison, writing in defense of this notion, asked the question, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”

If there is any doubt as to the salience of Madison’s question for a secular democracy, one need only consider a promise made by Pat Robertson, the fundamentalist voice of the Christian Right and 1988 presidential candidate. In a stump speech Robertson assured his audience that “after the Christian majority takes over this country, pluralism (non-fundamentalist beliefs) will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anyone to practice it.” If Robertson or Huckabee or Scalia or Forbes have their way, our national motto will be modified accordingly, E Pluribus Fides Unum — Out of Many Beliefs, Only One.

It is a small thing for people of faith to allow religion to creep onto the public square. What harm is there in something as seemingly innocuous as a reference to God in the national pledge or motto, a moment of prayerful silence in the classroom or in a nondenominational prayer at a high school graduation? Why not give equal time to creationism in public schools or support faith-based organizations with tax dollars?

And what person of the “true” faith will object to their child’s daily recitation of the Christian pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands, One Savior, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.” And for those of us who do not believe or who believe a little differently?

In 1817 John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical strife in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy these people cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could, they would.”

Both believer and nonbeliever have a vested interest in the secular nation envisioned by the Founding Fathers; a nation whose “godless” Constitution and social pluralism ensures the kind of democracy in which the practice of any religion, or none, is an inalienable right.

The Rapture is the name given to a future event in which Jesus descends from heaven and gathers up all Christian fundamentalists [a.k.a. Christian Right] and swooshes them up bodily to heaven, but not before they’ve jettisoned their clothes and jewelry and all forms of prostheses, including pompadour hairpieces and inflatable bouffant support bladders.

Before I get too far into this, I want it understood that I’m not wishing these folks ill. On the contrary, I’m wishing them what they’ve always wanted — an eternity of enjoying the unchallenged moral certitude they were never quite able to fully enjoy here on Earth, but which nonetheless caused the rest of us no end of misery.

The signs for finally seeing the backside of the Christian Right are encouraging. According to raptureready.com, the Rapture Index (omens portending the Rapture) stands at 163, the highest it’s been since September 11, 2001 when it peaked at its all-time high of 182. I don’t know what the numbers mean either. But I’m not making this up.

It appears Jesus is getting his transition team in place, what with the recent raptures — albeit by conventional means — of the Rev. D. James Kennedy, godfather of the American Dominionist [a.k.a. theofascist] movement and hater of our secular constitution, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and hater of all people he could think of to hate.

I do wish the Lord would get his jesters assembled and move on this. Think what the Rapture will mean to those of us left behind.

Twenty-three percent of the 208 million adults in America identify themselves as either Pentecostal or Charismatic Christians [a.k.a. Rapture-ready]. In the event of the Rapture up to 50 million workers will be leaving their jobs without clocking out. The number of positions vacated will be five times as many needed to wipe out the country’s unemployment, leaving the rest of us in a workers’ paradise. Affirmative action be damned! It’s “trickle up” economics at work here.

Not only will our career paths be enhanced, but we’ll have a chance at longer, healthier lives by taking the untold billons of dollars President Bush is currently funneling into the Christian Right’s faith-based coffers to save “Americans one soul at a time” and reallocating them to stem cell research and universal health care, which will save considerably more of an American than just his or her ethereal soul.

Along with vocational upgrades and improved health, we’ll no longer have to wonder, “is our kids learning?” High school grads having trouble gaining admission to one of our over-crowded universities will have immediate access to the vacant desks — and possibly iPods — left by the tens of thousands of Rapture-ready students attending America’s 102 “Christ-centered” colleges, which will be under new management and begging for warm bodies.

And guys, speaking of warm bodies, the universities will be flush with coeds since far fewer teenage girls will be home taking care of their babies — there were 435,000 teen mothers last year. The hundreds of millions of federal dollars spent annually on abstinence-only sex education [a.k.a. religious dogma] in our public high schools will now fund comprehensive sex education programs that promote safe and effective birth control methods. Let’s face it. It was only the Christian Right who thought hormone-pumped primates would ever stop “doing it.”

By the way, do I even need to mention that with the Rapture-ready blissfully ensconced behind the pearly gates the rest of us will be left in peace to enjoy our bedrooms and our most personal intimate relationships on our own terms?

Unarguably though, the highlight of the Rapture will be finding out which of the “born-again” politicians are left on the ground. Unless someone has been lying to the American people — perish the thought — we stand to lose 48 Senators, 186 Representatives, four Supreme Court justices, seven presidential hopefuls, and one hopeless president.

If it turns out — highly unlikely though it is — that the 2008 presidential frontrunners of both parties are missing on Rapture-plus-one, we’ll enjoy the remaining election season with candidates who’ve always been willing to talk about more substantive issues than their most recent meet and greet with the Lord. The God-talk will be in heaven where it belongs.

Consider this . . . with a smile. If the Democrats with Dennis Kucinich and Al Gore — we can talk him into it — or the Greens with Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader can’t defeat the unraptured and unrepentant Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani on their own merits, we’ll now own the Supreme Court.

There is a downside. We know damn-good-and-well who’ll be sitting at his Oval Office desk with a “fooled you again” smirk on his mug on Rapture-plus-one. But keep in mind, we’ll still have Section 4 of Article II of the Constitution and we’ll have the votes and we’ll have the prison. Keep in mind also, gods mostly help those who help themselves.

Having imagined all the above, my thinking is not so magical as to believe there won’t be a few post-Rapture problems. After all, according to Revelations this will be the time of the Great Tribulation and we’ll still have Satan [a.k.a. your choice] to wrestle with. But with the Christian Right enjoying eternity . . . well . . . who cares where, we’ll have only one Devil in the ring at a time. And he’ll be the one carrying a pitchfork not a Bible.

Author’s note: Hopefully Jesus is a not a strict sectarian and swooshes up Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists as well. WHAT? I have the right to hope.