So the U.S. Senate on Thursday passed by voice vote a resolution blindly supporting Israeli attacks on Gaza and heaping derision on Hamas.
This craven display should awaken anyone who sanguinely assumed that “everything changed” on November 4.
The resolution contained numerous twists of history, but the most glaring absurdity is the following:
“Whereas Hamas was founded with the stated goal of destroying Israel…”
Perhaps the senators were in a rush to collect campaign contributions, so they did not have time to glance at the history of how Hamas arose to power.
Hamas was created with massive aid from the Israeli government. Following is an excerpt from my Terrorism & Tyranny (2003):
Perhaps the single largest mistake in the history of the Israeli government’s long war on terrorism was its covert financing, cosseting, and arming of Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denounced Hamas as “the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face.” But the Israeli government is reticent about admitting its role in creating this Frankenstein.
Beginning in the 1970s Israel began pouring money into Islamic organizations —especially the Moslem Brotherhood—hoping that religion would distract the Palestinians from political activism and the radical left-wing Palestinian Liberation Organization. Hamas was a late offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood. Prior to 1988 Moslem Brotherhood activists “had refrained from openly anti-Israel activities.” But with the outbreak of the first Intifada (uprising) in late 1987, the Israeli government was stunned to see how fast Hamas became the primary source of deadly attacks against Israelis.
Anthony Cordesman, a former State Department and Defense Department intelligence officer and currently a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, stated that the Israeli government “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.” A United Press International analysis reported, “According to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.” UPI noted that, according to documents provided by Israeli terrorism experts, “Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami.”
The Jerusalem Post reported on May 29, 1989, that, until the late 1980s, the Moslem Brotherhood “organizations in Gaza and the Islamic University received much encouragement from the [Israeli] military government. . . . The military government believed that their activity would undermine the power of the PLO and of leftist organizations in Gaza. They even supplied some of their activists with weapons, for their protection.” During the first Intifada (uprising), the PLO and Hamas openly clashed over how to resist the Israeli occupation. The Jerusalem Post noted: “The [Israeli] security forces greeted this tension [between Palestinian groups] with satisfaction, in line with the principle of divide and conquer. In several cases, Palestinians noticed that troops stood by quietly during Hamas street activity, but did interfere when PLO activists engaged in the same activity.” The Israeli government assumed that if the PLO could be thwarted, the Palestinian problem would be solved. But Hamas was far more bloodthirsty and radical than the PLO. The PLO effectively recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1988, while Hamas devoted itself to seizing all of Palestine for an Islamic state.
Now Buster, calling the august gentlemen and ladies in the solemn body of the Senate “nitwits” has gone too far. “Moron” maybe, “mountebanks” perhaps, but nitwit seems a tad intemperate to me.
After all, the Senate Majority Leader Mr. Reid, the Nevada Mormon (an odd bit of double jeopardy to
be sure) who sits beneath a portrait of Andy Jackson and Mark Twain cannot be expected to offer any spirited efforts on our behalf after 8 long years of gelding by the Bush Administration capped by a failed showdown with the Mayor of Chicago….a kind of homemade cross between Boss Tweed and Pee Wee Herman and his “kiss my arse” gesture….
Well, we should show a little sensitivity here and not be too harsh because the Congress is in the last throes of a Meth and Bacardi binge and so they should be cut a little slack.
After all, Kissinger is out making the rounds again with their old “New World Order” plan and this guy Ross will soon be talking to the mad Mullahs so that the attack on Iran can be scheduled and then, well, this problem in Gaza will seem but a walk in the park……..except say for the Palestinians who have as much right to that land as the Commanches did to Texas and just where would we be without Texas?
Oh, Jim. History is like so yesterday. Haven’t you been getting the message? We must forget the past and begin moving forward today — you know, the kind of short-term thinking that has characterized the progressives for many decades and has now been co-opted on the right. Down the memory-hole with you. We have been seeking the enemy Bernstein forever and have been at war with Terror forever.
Dirk – on Harry Reid – I recall when he first rose to prominence by vigorously bashing the IRS. He has come a long ways.
And Kissinger – he is living proof that the elite media doesn’t give a damn about either pathological lying or war crimes. He is still respectable in their eyes.
Lawrence – I wonder how many people recognize your allusion to 1984….
What the hell – maybe the bad guys will self-destruct through sheer incompetence one of these years…
Ron Paul reminded the House about the origins of Hamas, but they aren’t about to let facts get in the way of the AIPAC propaganda they have internalized.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z6vMAoFwf4
The U.S. Congress: …rustlers, cutthroats, murders, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con-men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglars, horse thieves, bull-dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh**-kickers, and Methodists!
Methodists??!!?
Sorry Jim, I thought you’d recognize the Blazing Saddles reference.
It’s a funny line regardless of where it came from.
It didn’t need a former defensive lineman punching a mule to get a laugh.
When Kissinger hosted a fund raiser with W. last spring in Kent, Ct., the state highway intersecting his little dirt road to the estate was posted for 2 miles in both directions with “no parking ” signs stapled to trees and guide rail posts every 50′ or so. The highway is a 2 lane rural thoroughfare. This
paranoia was justified when the local Troopers rousted the only protestors along the “secure zone” ….2 girls, and 1 boy who looked to be teenagers carrying an anti-Bush placard .
Kissinger, like the rest of our “Foreign Affairs Experts”…cashes in big time on war and insecurity. In fact, it is the new “Kevin Bacon game”……look anywhere near most the venerated “experts” of our era and you will find a support structure that would make even the most professional pirate swoon with admiration. Freebooting is the principle occupation of the American Media Grandee.
Alpowolf…Are you “a pious sidewinder?” (Another Blazing Saddles reference)