Incitement to violence against all Palestinians by member of the Israeli parliament

(Ismael Mohamad / United Press International)
Israeli lawmaker’s call for genocide of Palestinians gets thousands of Facebook likes
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Mon, 07/07/2014 - 16:12
800px-ayelet_shaked.jpg

Ayelet Shaked (Wikipedia)
A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive allegedly by six Israeli Jewish youths, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians.

It is a call for genocide because it declares that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

It is a call for genocide because it calls for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

If Shaked’s post does not meet the legal definition of a call for genocide then nothing does.

Shaked is a senior figure in the Habeyit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party that is part of Israel’s ruling coalition.

Her post was shared more than one thousand times and received almost five thousand “Likes.”

Uri Elitzur, to whom she refers, and who died a few months ago, was leader of the settler movement and speechwriter and close advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here’s a full translation of Shaked’s posting:

This is an article by the late Uri Elitzur, which was written 12 years ago, but remained unpublished. It is as relevant today as it was at the time.

The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to define reality with the simple words that language puts at our disposal. Why do we have to make up a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding with war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word “war”, nor a clear definition who the enemy is. Au contraire: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, and that war is not the normal state of things, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.

And the morality of war knows that it is not possible to refrain from hurting enemy civilians. It does not condemn the British air force, which bombed and totally destroyed the German city of Dresden, or the US planes that destroyed the cities of Poland and wrecked half of Budapest, places whose wretched residents had never done a thing to America, but which had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil. The morals of war do not require that Russia be brought to trial, though it bombs and destroys towns and neighborhoods in Chechnya. It does not denounce the UN Peacekeeping Forces for killing hundreds of civilians in Angola, nor the NATO forces who bombed Milosevic’s Belgrade, a city with a million civilians, elderly, babies, women, and children. The morals of war accept as correct in principle, not only politically, what America has done in Afghanistan, including the massive bombing of populated places, including the creation of a refugee stream of hundreds of thousands of people who escaped the horrors of war, for thousands of whom there is no home to return to.

And in our war this is sevenfold more correct, because the enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Shocking words like this from Israeli leaders have an impact. And they are words backed by actions.

When Israel rampages against the entire Palestinian population, subjecting them to what Human Rights Watch calls “collective punishment,” it sends a clear message to the Israeli public that any Palestinian is fair game for “revenge.”

Shaked evidently has much worse in mind.

Hate trickles down

In another sickening example of the country’s endemic racism, Israeli website shtieble.net, which is oriented toward an Orthodox Jewish audience, referred to lynching victim Muhammad Abu Khudair in a headline as a “little terrorist.”

on Twitter

The hate trickles down. These two images were posted on the photo-sharing website Instagram – they are among hundreds posted on various social media sites inciting “revenge” and celebrating violence against Palestinians.

The first image, posted on 3 July, apparently shows an Israeli soldier with a weapon on his shoulder and the word “revenge” with two bloody daggers tatooed or drawn on his back.

#נקמה #revenge #army #tattoo #צהל #ישראל
#נקמה #revenge #army #tattoo #צהל #ישראל on Instagram
In the second image, posted on 6 July, the badly injured face of Palestinian American 15-year-old Tariq Abukhdeir appears next to an image of a pig.

What's this pix? #caption
What's this pix? #caption on Instagram
Abukhdeir was savagely beaten by Israeli forces in eastern occupied Jerusalem last Thursday. He is a cousin of Muhammad Abu Khudair.

Not “fringe”

In a New York Times article today, Isabel Kershner presents the rampant racism that apparently led six Israeli youths to lynch Muhammad Abu Khudair as a “fringe” phenomenon.

It is no such thing. Incitement comes from the top.

Shaked is not alone in inciting this kind of genocidal hatred and it was Netanyahu who was the first to incite “vengeance” after the bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers were found in the West Bank one week ago.

on Twitter

on Twitter

And the Times is not alone in helping to whitewash it.

I strongly recommend David Sheen’s latest article for Muftah on the phenomenon of racism in Israel and its widespread denial: “Jewish Groups’ Whitewash of Israeli Racism Ensures It Will Fester.”

With thanks to Ofer Naiman for assistance with research and Dena Shunra for translation.

Chomsky and BDS

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/chomsky-and-bds.html


Tom Suarez on July 6, 2014

Many people who have come to value the courageous and principled stands of Noam Chomsky regarding injustice and imperialism are surprised to learn of his opposition to most aspects of BDS. Precisely because of the stature and influence of this “father of modern linguistics”, it is especially important that his views be subject to the same rigor for which he himself is famous. As it turns out, the perplexing aspect of Professor Chomsky’s arguments vis a vis BDS is how precipitously they fail scrutiny.
Professor Chomsky parses issues, and his views, with great precision, sometimes leading to sloppy interpretation by commentators expediently forcing those views into box “A” or “B”. So it is important to point out that his opposition to BDS is carefully qualified, and there are aspects of its method and goals that he supports. Previously, he was widely misunderstood as supporting a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, when he simply saw two states as the only possible path to his favored solution, a bi-national state. This system preserves regional autonomy (as either a Jewish or Arab area) within a single nation. In 1947, such a bi-national state was supported by moderates like Judah Magnes and the socialist group Hashomer Hatzair. Most Arabs supported a one-state solution, a single, secular Western-style democracy—as do many people today (including this writer). Five years ago Professor Chomsky clarified his views, and last year he discussed the bi-national solution in context of the developing reality on the ground.
Before addressing Professor Chomsky’s specific points regarding BDS, a few general comments about BDS that raise the issue above the confines on which he bases his critique.
Whatever its imperfectness, BDS is the most powerful tool available for forcing the Palestine issue, so systematically sidelined and distorted by the mass media, to the fore. This is because the very utterance of BDS in relation to Israel begs the question, “Why?” It forces the media to respond where it could otherwise ignore, and it elicits a desire to know why in the mind of the ordinary fair-minded citizen whose understanding has been controlled by that media.
In one key respect, BDS is even more important regarding Israel than old South Africa. That white people were subjugating black people was consistent with the prevailing cultural understanding in the West. Even if some people made excuses for South Africa’s apartheid, white people were seen as racially privileged, black people as exploited. Claiming that South Africa was an apartheid state “rang true”. But our society’s mindset regarding Israel inexorably links the nation-state with the Jewish people, whom we understand as a vulnerable, persecuted people, and Arabs, whom we are conditioned to believe to be their immediate tormentors. Thus BDS’ value in forcing the issue to the fore is especially important, since the West’s collective mindset has turned the Israeli-Palestinian issue upside-down.
Now a brief look at Professor Chomsky’s points.
Professor Chomsky argues that Resolution 194 (specifically regarding Right of Return) is a non-binding “recommendation” since it is from the General Assembly, not the Security Council. This is a straw issue. Right of Return is international law, above and beyond Resolution 194. 194 merely restates it in context of the aftermath of the 1948 war. Right of Return is an individual right that cannot be bargained away on someone’s behalf. Further, abiding by UN Resolutions (including 194) was a specific condition to which Israel agreed for admission to the UN. Thatwas binding. Moreover, Right of Return is simply the antidote to ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing, in this case Plan Dalet, is a war crime, and undoing it not merely a “recommendation”. (Ironically, it is UNGA Resolution 181, the Resolution upon which Israel claims statehood, that exists solely as a General Assembly “recommendation”, yet in that case the Jewish Agency argued that it carried binding force.)
Professor Chomsky also argues that Israel regularly violates even the Security Council resolutions that are binding, and therefore one is asking for something that will not happen. With Professor Chomsky’s precedent, then, all international law by definition becomes irrelevant, because non-compliance becomes self-justifying. Rather, exposing the non-compliance is part of the very value of BDS. Israel has ignored the Security Council for decades precisely because it is confident of impunity, as Professor Chomsky’s attitude demonstrates.
The argument of relative badness is also invoked. The US is the larger offender, so it is hypocritical to target Israeli institutions when we don’t target Harvard. But this linkage is artificial. Israeli wrongdoing is not morally contingent on any other country’s wrongdoing, nor mitigated by the fact that other countries, in particular the US, empower that wrongdoing. With this reasoning, no injustice could ever be targeted except the one that is (according to criteria of one’s choosing) the absolute most egregious on the planet. All others need simply point the finger downward.
Interestingly, however, it is largely thanks to Professor Chomsky’s influence thatStephen Hawking honored the academic boycott of Israel. Inconsistent, or meticulous parsing? The difference appears to have been that the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) asked Professor Hawking to boycott the Israeli invitation. But surely if all Palestinians had such a voice, they would beseech the international community to boycott Israel with a thundering, near-unanimous chorus.
The “D” of BDS does implicitly mean boycott of US interests involved in Israeli militarism. Divestment from American companies such as Caterpillar or Hewlett-Packard is no longer considered a fringe campaign, thanks to BDS. Respected, mainstream institutions have earnestly considered, and sometimes undertaken such divestment. That the economic impact on them may be trivial, is irrelevant: the issue is pushed into the visible world. Bill Gates has divested from G4S evidently because of its complicity in Israeli prisons.
Professor Chomsky says that the abbreviation should be “BD,” not “BDS”, since sanctions are “not on the horizon”. No, professor, the question is whether sanctions are justified, and if they are, they should be part of the strategy. Nor are sanctions against Israel as remote as Professor Chomsky suggests: Already in 2010, 26 ex-EU leaders argued for sanctions.
Professor Chomsky points out that South African apartheid is different than Israel’s. Yes, South Africa had no desire to ethnically cleanse the Africans, as their subjugation was the whole point, whereas an ethnically “pure” settler nation—well, with a sufficient supply of the Other left behind as cheap labor—is Israel’s. But … so? More specifically, Professor Chomsky says that those building the boycott movement against South Africa devoted years to educating and building a case, homework that the Palestinian movement has not done. This is not only a dubious argument on its face, but it is also untrue. People have worked tirelessly since the early 1950s to do precisely what the Professor advocates, but for reasons touched on above, these attempts at informing the public faced a particularly impenetrable wall. Even if we eliminate Palestinian writers and activists, whom the West sidelined altogether, there were people like Alfred Lilienthal and Moshe Menuhin actively and eloquently saying fifty and sixty years ago what still can barely be heard in the mainstream media. Palestinian and Western scholars continued to research, write, expose; and the voices grew numerous over the years, with Israeli scholars eventually joining the ranks. The cumulative wealth of documentation and activism is extraordinary. Yet Professor Chomsky dismisses the movement for justice in Israel-Palestine as not having done its homework?
But perhaps Professor Chomsky’s strangest statement of all, a rather terrifying statement on the face of it, is that “There is no reason to expect Israel to accept a Palestinian population it does not want.” There you have it, all condensed into one sentence, an admission that Israel is a racially predicated state and that the rights of the Palestinians themselves must remain subservient to it. There is no reason to expect a settler nation to accept the people whose land it took. Everything is framed in terms of what Israel wants, or what Israel will or will not agree to. Is this the same Noam Chomsky whose Manufacturing Consent and Fateful Triangle sit on my bookshelf?
Links
BDS Movement (Palestinian BDS National Committee)
PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel)
BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine)

Israel does not want peace Rejectionism is embedded in Israel's most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone.

from Haaretz
By Gideon Levy | Jul. 4, 2014 | 2:31 PM | 73




Israel does not want peace. There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else.

The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the dissemination of the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada. But the truth is that even before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress.

The Israeli peace camp, too – if ever there was such a thing – also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada and the no-partner lie. All that remained were a handful of organizations that were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left with its rejectionist stance.

The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.

On the assumption that Israel’s decisions are rational, it is impossible to accept construction in the territories and the aspiration to peace as mutually coexisting. Every act of building in the settlements, every mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been to end all construction in the territories. Unconditionally. Without a quid pro quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace.

But the settlements were only a touchstone of Israel’s intentions. Its rejectionism is embedded far more deeply – in its DNA, its bloodstream, its raison d’être, its most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. There, at the deepest level, is entrenched the value of “am sgula” – God’s “treasured people” – and “God chose us.” In practice, this is translated to mean that, in this land, Jews are allowed to do what is forbidden to others. That is the point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace. There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. No way to achieve peace when the demonization of the Palestinians is hammered into people’s heads day after day. Those who are convinced that every Palestinian is a suspicious person and that every Palestinian wants “to throw the Jews into the sea” will never make peace with the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those statements.

In the past decade, the two peoples have been separated from each another. The average young Israeli will never meet his Palestinian peer, other than during his army service (and then only if he does his service in the territories). Nor will the average young Palestinian ever meet an Israeli his own age, other than the soldier who huffs and puffs at him at the checkpoint, or invades his home in the middle of the night, or in the person of the settler who usurps his land or torches his groves.

Consequently, the only encounter between the two people is between the occupiers, who are armed and violent, and the occupied, who are despairing and also turn to violence. Gone are the days when Palestinians worked in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestine. Gone is the period of the half-normal and quarter-equal relations that existed for a few decades between the two peoples that share the same piece of territory. It is very easy, in this state of affairs, to incite and inflame the two peoples against one another, to spread fears and to instill new hatreds on top of those that already exist. This, too, is a sure recipe for non-peace.

So it was that a new Israeli yearning sprang up: the desire for separation: “They will be there and we will be here (and also there).” At a time when the majority of Palestinians – an assessment I allow myself to make after decades of covering the territories – still want coexistence, even if less and less, most Israelis want disengagement and separation, but without paying the price. The two-state vision has gained widespread adherence, but without any intention to implement it in practice. Most Israelis are in favor, but not now and maybe not even here. They have been trained to believe that there is no partner for peace – a Palestinian partner, that is – but that there is an Israeli partner.

Unfortunately, the truth is almost the reverse. The Palestinian non-partners no longer have any chance to prove that they are partners; the Israeli non-partners are convinced that they are interlocutors. So began the process in which Israeli conditions, obstacles and difficulties were heaped up, one more milestone in Israeli rejectionism. First came the demand for a cessation of terrorism; then the demand for a change of leadership (Yasser Arafat as a stumbling block); and after that Hamas became the hurdle. Now it’s the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Israel considers every step it takes – from mass political arrests to building in the territories – to be legitimate, whereas every Palestinian move is “unilateral.”

The only country on the planet with no borders is so far unwilling to delineate even the compromise borders it is ready to be satisfied with. Israel has not internalized the fact that, for the Palestinians, the borders of 1967 are the mother of all compromises, the red line of justice (or relative justice). For the Israelis, they are “suicide borders.” This is why the preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever agreed to live under occupation without resistance. And the international community, too, is one day apt to utter a firm pronouncement on this state of affairs, with accompanying punitive measures. It follows that the Israeli goal is unrealistic.

Disconnected from reality, the majority of Israelis pursue their regular way of life. In their mind’s eye the world is always against them, and the areas of occupation on their doorstep are beyond their realm of interest. Anyone who dares criticize the occupation policy is branded an anti-Semite, every act of resistance is perceived as an existential threat. All international opposition to the occupation is read as the “delegitimizing” of Israel and as a provocation to the country’s very existence. The world’s seven billion people – most of whom are against the occupation – are wrong, and six million Israeli Jews – most of whom support the occupation – are right. That’s the reality in the eyes of the average Israeli.

Add to this the repression, the concealment and the obfuscation, and you have another explanation for the rejectionism: Why should anyone strive for peace as long as life in Israel is good, calm prevails and the reality is concealed? The only way the besieged Gaza Strip can remind people of its existence is by firing rockets, and the West Bank only gets onto the agenda these days when blood is shed there. Similarly, the viewpoint of the international community is only taken into account when it tries to impose boycotts and sanctions, which in their turn immediately generate a campaign of self-victimization studded with blunt – and at times also impertinent – historical accusations.

This, then, is the gloomy picture. It contains not a ray of hope. The change will not happen on its own, from within Israeli society, as long as that society continues to behave as it does. The Palestinians have made more than one mistake, but their mistakes are marginal. Basic justice is on their side, and basic rejectionism is the Israelis’ purview. The Israelis want occupation, not peace.

I only hope I am wrong.

U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths

from The Onion

NEWS • Politics • Patriotism • ISSUE 46•26 ISSUE 46•15 • Apr 13, 2010

Flags affected by the recall range from halftime-show extravaganza models to the smallest lapel pins.



WASHINGTON—Citing a series of fatal malfunctions dating back to 1777, flag manufacturer Annin & Company announced Monday that it would be recalling all makes and models of its popular American flag from both foreign and domestic markets.

Representatives from the nation's leading flag producer claimed that as many as 143 million deaths in the past two centuries can be attributed directly to the faulty U.S. models, which have been utilized extensively since the 18th century in sectors as diverse as government, the military, and public education.

"It has come to our attention that, due to the inherent risks and hazards it poses, the American flag is simply unfit for general use," said Annin & Company president Ronald Burman, who confirmed that the number of flag-related deaths had noticeably spiked since 2003. "I would like to strongly urge all U.S. citizens: If you have an American flag hanging in your home or place of business, please discontinue using it immediately."



Added Burman, "The last thing we would want is for more innocent men and women around the world to die because of our product."

Millions of U.S. flag–related injuries and fatalities have been reported over a 230-year period in locations as far flung as Europe, Cuba, Korea, Gettysburg, PA, the Philippines, and Iraq. In addition, the company found that U.S. flag exports to Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, a clear sign that there was something seriously wrong with its product.

Despite fears about the flag's safety—especially when improperly used or manipulated in ways not originally intended—sales continued unabated over the years, potentially putting billions of unsuspecting people in danger.

"At first, we wanted one of our flags in every home in America," Burman said. "Unfortunately, the practical applications of this product are far outnumbered by the risks it presents. Millions have died needlessly, and when you ask people why, they point to the flag."


Unfortunate casualties of Old Glory’s near-continuous 230-year use.

Added Burman, "Frankly, we should have pulled it off the market decades ago."

Studies conducted by the Annin & Company research and development department revealed that faulty U.S. flags have caused more than just injuries and deaths. During the mid-1950s, the flags were found to have the bizarre side effect of causing fear, paranoia, and hysterical behavior among millions of Americans. This was dismissed as an isolated event until September 2001, when similar symptoms reemerged on a massive scale.

As hazardous as the flags may be on their own, Annin & Company officials claimed the products become even more dangerous when used in conjunction with other common household items.

"When combined with alcohol, excessive patriotism, grief, or well-intentioned but ultimately misguided ideals, U.S. flags transform into ticking time bombs, just waiting to go off," Burman said.

Manufacturers are addressing the flag's unsafe and potentially lethal alignment of stars and stripes by designing a revised model that they hope will cut down on deaths in the United States and overseas, where experts say the flag is nearly 1,000 times as deadly.

In the meantime, Annin & Company is advising all Americans to either ship their flags back to the manufacturer or, if no time permits, dispose of them in an efficient manner.

"I understand that people might be reluctant to stop using a product they have found to be reliable over the years," Burman told reporters. "But I can't in good conscience allow them to use something I know to be dangerous. We'll try to make adjustments soon and come up with something that benefits everybody rather than hurting them."

Added Burman, "In the interim, I would recommend that all Americans switch to the Canadian flag, which seems to be working just fine."

Rapper stands up for equal rights

Rapper Talib Kweli (talibkweli.com) has canceled plans to perform in Israel after appeals by supporters of the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

“As much as I want to play Israel, I have decided not to in solidarity with Palestinians who will not have access to my show,” he wrote on Twitter.

“After days of discussions with many, I’ve decided to try and visit Israel and Palestine with those who fight to end the state of apartheid rather than use my art to force the issue on those who would rather not deal with it.”

on Twitter

Rethinking the Fourth of July

Bill Begelow
July 2, 2014
Huffington Post

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852 said, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license..." This July 4, our nation plans the massive deportation of thousands of immigrant children...


Apart from the noise pollution, air pollution, and flying-debris pollution, there is something profoundly inappropriate about blowing off fireworks at a time when the United States is waging war with real fireworks around the world. To cite just one example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London has estimated that since November 2001, U.S. drone attacks have killed at least 2,600 people in five countries, including as many as 247 children. And, of course, the Iraq war, which began with the deadly U.S. fireworks of "shock and awe" bombardment in 2003, has morphed into seemingly endless internecine fighting and, according to the United Nations, the creation of more than a million refugees just this year. The pretend war of celebratory fireworks thus becomes part of a propaganda campaign that inures us -- especially the children among us -- to current and future wars half a world away.

But the yahoo of fireworks also turns an immensely complicated time in U.S. history into a cartoon of miseducation. For example, check out Ray Raphael's "Re-examining the Revolution" at the Zinn Education Project, an article that every history teacher should read before wading into the events leading up to 1776. Raphael analyzed 22 elementary-school, middle-school, and high-school texts and found them filled with inaccuracies -- some merely silly, but others leaving students with important misunderstandings about U.S. history and how social change does and does not happen.

Raphael offers some context for the Declaration of Independence:

In 1997, Pauline Maier published American Scripture, where she uncovered 90 state and local "declarations of independence" that preceded the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The consequence of this historical tidbit is profound: Jefferson was not a lonely genius conjuring his notions from the ether; he was part of a nationwide political upheaval.

Similarly, Raphael reports:

[I]n 1774 common farmers and artisans from throughout Massachusetts rose up by the thousands and overthrew all British authority. In the small town of Worcester (only 300 voters), 4,622 militiamen from 37 surrounding communities lined both sides of Main Street and forced British-appointed officials to walk the gauntlet, hats in hand, reciting their recantations 30 times each so everyone could hear. There were no famous "leaders" for this event. The people elected representatives who served for one day only, the ultimate in term limits. "The body of the people" made decisions and the people decided that the old regime must fall.

Raphael concludes, "Textbook authors and popular history writers fail to portray the great mass of humanity as active players, agents on their own behalf." Instead, textbooks credit Great Men -- Washington, Franklin, Jefferson -- and render all others as "mere followers."

And there is a lot more that complicates the events surrounding the Fourth of July and the Revolutionary War. Raphael notes:

Not one of the elementary or middle school texts [I reviewed] even mentions the genocidal Sullivan campaign, one of the largest military offensives of the war, which burned Iroquois villages and destroyed every orchard and farm in its path to deny food to Indians.

For use with students, see "George Washington: An American Hero?" in Rethinking Columbus, published by Rethinking Schools. In an excerpt included in Rethinking Columbus, Washington wrote to Gen. John Sullivan on May 31, 1779:

The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. ...

[P]arties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

Those are the orders of a war criminal.

Nor do texts mention the indigenous resistance movements of the 1780s in response to American "settler" expansion, which Raphael calls "the largest coalitions of Native Americans in our history."

On a recent episode of Democracy Now!, Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, points out that more enslaved Africans in the American colonies fought with the British than with the American colonists. Horne told Democracy Now! hosts Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, "It makes little sense for slaves to fight alongside slave masters so that slave masters could then deepen the persecution of the enslaved."


Included at the Zinn Education Project site is a link to a video of Danny Glover performing one of history's most passionate denunciations of U.S. racism and hypocrisy, Frederick Douglass' "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro," at one of Howard Zinn's remarkable "The People Speak" events. Douglass delivered the speech on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, at a Declaration of Independence commemoration:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Douglass delivered his speech four years after the United States finished its war against Mexico to steal land and spread slavery, five years before the vicious Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, and nine years before the country would explode into civil war. His words call out through the generations to abandon the empty "shout of liberty and equality" on July 4, and to put away the fireworks and flags.

In the spirit of Frederick Douglass, the Zinn Education Project urges teachers to use July 4 as a time to rethink how we equip students to reflect on the complicated birth of the United States of America.

[Bill Bigelow taught high-school social studies in Portland, Oregon, for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This blog post is part of the Zinn Education Project's "If We Knew Our History" series.]

Blood-lusting, death worshiping, terrorist Israel: An ethnocratic country founded on dispossessing, repressing and inciting against the indigenous people is not a democracy

Ten Palestinians were killed during the search of the West Bank for the three Jewish teenagers from a settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron. No big deal; just par for the course. You know, you can't make an omelet without...

A Palestinian in Jerusalem was murdered by a Jewish lynch mob seeking revenge. Others have been attacked and more will likely be killed. This is the real face of Israel's vibrant Western style Democracy. Marches have been held throughout the country chanting "Death to Arabs!" Do they chant: "Let's just punish those proven to have done this killing?" No. It lacks a certain j'ne sait quoi...not quite catchy enough for the democratic-minded Jewish people.

Is the state of Israel a cowering, intimidated little land that has been put upon by the sneaky, death-worshipping, powerful Palestinians and now is finally springing into self-defensive action? Don't ask the NYT or the Wall St. Journal. This US-enabled nuclear power and military juggernaut (and militarized society) has been on a conscious campaign of land-theft, ethnic cleansing and racial incitement against the Palestinians as a people for years.

Pundits and political hacks have droned on for years about how the Palestinians have a culture of revenge and death and thus are inferior and not fit for democracy. People whose land and patrimony have been stolen normally have a negative reaction to their oppressors. They fight back. Some of the are killed and their families say, "My son was a patriot and I'm proud that he sacrificed his life for our people's liberation." There are South African families that are proud of their relatives who died fighting against apartheid in South Africa. Are they death-worshipers? (Don't ask Dick Cheney). How about the French resistance fighters who kidnapped and murdered German occupiers? Were they not fit for democracy?

The Israeli state was founded upon a planned invasion by the European based Zionist movement with the aid of the UK, the occupying imperial power. The intent from the beginning by the founders of the Jewish state was to create an exclusively Jewish state in all of historic Palestine. It has never varied from this goal. The two decades long two-state negotiations interlude was a tactical ploy that bought time for Israel to keep colonizing while restricting the Palestinian response.

In no way is Israel a democratic country. Equality of all before the law? Nope. Only Jews get full rights, it's written into the law and the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the Jewish State is for Jews only, others are merely tolerated. In the West Bank it's simpler: martial law for everyone except the minority of Jewish colonists.

Pluralism? This is a must for societies that are truly democratic. Of course not! Everything is to be Judiazed. this is government policy; Israel is on a mission. It's a militantly Jewish society, not a tolerant one.

Security in property and person? Get real! This is for Jews only. The IDF detains Palestinians at will, no charges need be made. Just hold 'em on administrative detention for weeks or months, or years. It's the law. A normal person might call this "kidnapping."

There is a steady, regular toll of Palestinians killed (by the IDF, or by colonists..or both together), by indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, not just today's revenge bombings, but as a normal part of life..for years. This isn't deemed newsworthy by our media, just inferiors biting the dust.

Israel is an ideological/theocratic society that is on a mission (from God, secularism is on the run in today's sectarian Israel). It cannot tolerate alien, seditious ideas like equal rights, secular government or pluralism.