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706 [lbo-talk] Ways to close Gaza's tunnels -- and why they all won't quite work -- rank: 1000

(Unless I clipped it wrong) Michael Pollack wrote > Dwayne's postulate that in the long term there is no technological fix > that can stop determined low-tech human inventiveness. "No weapon can defeat a people determined to be free' was a slogan of the Irish Republican movement in the seventies and eighties. In the end they were if not defeated, then certainly side-tracked into another route, constitutional nationalism. But the truth of the slogan (which was a response to Britain's g ...

Document Size:	6629
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 19 09:25:48 PST 2009

707 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism -- rank: 1000

And right on cue, here are the anti-capitalists lauding the firebombing of a "zionist owned premises" [except Starbucks is not "zionist owned", it is a publicly listed company] "Smashing the Israeli war machine - Starbucks, Whitechapel firebombed trouble maker | 13.01.2009 16:39 | Anti-militarism | Palestine | Social Struggles | World "A branch of Starbucks in East London has been smashed and firebombed in what appears to be an anti-Israeli protest. Police are inves ...

Document Size:	5695
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 16 13:06:29 PST 2009

708 [lbo-talk] John Mortimer -- rank: 1000

Writer Molly Parkin says that Mortimer was very keen on her smacking his botty. He was also hysterically hostile to the prospect that any more people should be allowed to build a house close to the one his father built in the stockbroker belt. 'No to Mr Prescott's tide of concrete', wrote an emotional Mortimer: 'Our green and pleasant land simply cannot accommodate it.' As so often in this kind of rhetoric, the contrast is between rural idyll, and urban depravity - 'these fields and forests are ...

Document Size:	5486
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 16 09:03:52 PST 2009

709 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism -- rank: 1000

"SA" writes that the West's pro-Israel policy is changing, and actually, I agree. I said that the old anti-imperialist case against Israel situated the struggle in that context. And SA is right to say that context is changing. (I only meant to describe what had gone before). Right now, it has not changed, and Israel continues to enjoy official indulgence from American and European leaders. But the mood is definitely changing among foreign policy analysts and more broadly among the Euro ...

Document Size:	6246
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 16 04:59:23 PST 2009

710 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism -- rank: 1000

Peter Ward writes of "the flagrant anti-Arab racism, long existent, that has flared up" Quite right. When the 2003 war was I was living next door to a Somali family whose windows were broken on a regular basis. They were schoolboys and we chased them a few times, before my neighbour persuaded our MP (venerable left-winger Jeremy Corbyn) to get them re-housed. There's no desire here to minimise that, which is a real issue. (And "long existent" is right, too, when my mother ta ...

Document Size:	5841
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 16 04:36:02 PST 2009

711 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism -- rank: 1000

John Gulick asks "but what is your proof that anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist sentiment has shaded away from anti-imperialism and is shading toward anti-semitism? When was the decisive tipping point crossed and what is evidence of it?" Last year I was teaching a class on third world politics (I might have mentioned this before on this list), about 60 students, self-selecting to look at the third world, mostly radical, about a fifth muslims, British, whose parents came from Pakistan or East A ...

Document Size:	8976
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 15 14:33:42 PST 2009

712 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism -- rank: 1000

Doug: "Not sure whom you're arguing with, really. The anti-Semitism charge is mostly a canard introduced by apologists for Israel. " Then I guess I am arguing against you, because its more than that. It has been that, but now it is more than that.

Document Size:	4726
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 15 11:11:45 PST 2009

713 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti semitism -- rank: 1000

"In his NYPL debate with BHL, Zizek makes the point that anti-Semites can love Israel, because it collects all the Jews in a single place, far away, and because - and this is of course more provocative - creating a militarized Jewish state undoes so many of the things that anti-Semites despise about Jews (or their fantasy of The Jew): rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, radicalism, etc." Yes, that's right. I think one of the Trotskyist writers on Israel (Uri Aveneri, Nathan ...

Document Size:	7573
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 15 10:12:22 PST 2009

714 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti-Semitism -- rank: 1000

Shane Mage writes: "Furedi pretends not to know that the Zionists and their police allies will do anything to smear anyone who dissents from Zionist slaughter as an antisemite, Jewish or not." Steady on, the opening sentences of the article quoted were "I HAVE always criticised the tendency of some Zionist commentators to dismiss all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Such a defensive knee-jerk reaction simply avoids confronting the issues and undermines the possibility of dialo ...

Document Size:	5585
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 15 07:49:52 PST 2009

715 [lbo-talk] Gaza and anti-Semitism -- rank: 1000

Giving voice to anti-Semitism, by Frank Furedi "in recent years, especially since the eruption of the latest conflict in Gaza last month, anti-Israeli sentiments often mutate into anti-Jewish ones. Recent events indicate that in Europe the traditional distinction between anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish feelings has become confusing and blurred. During a demonstration earlier this month, the Dutch Socialist Party MP Harry van Bommel called for a new intifada against Israel. Of course he has eve ...

Document Size:	6109
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 15 02:27:49 PST 2009

716 [lbo-talk] NYC on the government teat -- rank: 1000

Doug: "You sound like Andrew Mellon". No, that's eccentric (or what we Trotskists used to call a smear). I said that it was wrong to give a trillion dollars to banks who were heavily indebted. That these wealthy institutions should be morphed in your mind into farmers and labourers facing liquidation shows just how much you have bought into Wall Street propaganda. What did they do with the millions given them? They paid their executives vast bonuses, but lent precious little to busines ...

Document Size:	7754
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Jan 4 03:52:54 PST 2009

717 [lbo-talk] NYC on the government teat -- rank: 1000

> Do you think that letting them "go to the wall" would have no effect > on the real economy? well, let's be realistic, there is going to be some considerable contraction of the economy ('real' or otherwise). What's more, financial services are going to contract, too. The bailout just delays the inevitable, and at some cost. Better to expose the banks to the full cost of their errors to force them to reform, than to indulge their weaknesses. The effect on the real economy of dela ...

Document Size:	5482
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Jan 3 16:57:55 PST 2009

718 [lbo-talk] NYC on the government teat (was credit crunch) -- rank: 1000

You do not have to believe that the credit crunch was an actual conspiracy to see the bailout for what it is, a shakedown. Paulsen and the bankers told Americans that if they did not get some trillion or so dollars to extract the bad debt then credit would seize up and the economy would tank. But once they had the cash they did not use it to extract the bad debt but to support their own failing businesses. Banks have not made credit available to lenders (either businesses or households). They ha ...

Document Size:	6883
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Jan 3 04:55:09 PST 2009

719 [lbo-talk] Credit crunch a myth? -- rank: 1000

SA asks Carrol, incredulous: "You can predict the future?" Stoned hippy to his friend, 'hey man, y'know, I can see into future'. Friend 'no way, like how?' Hippy 'Let me show you. ... take tomorrow, like, I will wake up, around eleven, or maybe twelve, then I will look all around the apartment for a bit of dope, then I'll skin up a joint..." See, it is easy to predict the future.

Document Size:	4928
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 2 15:02:37 PST 2009

720 [lbo-talk] credit crunch -- rank: 1000

Doug writes: "By the way, I'm guessing that most people who are arguing that there is no credit crunch are doing so to argue that there's no need for a bailout. But there has been a bailout. My guess is that as tight as things are, they would have been a lot worse if it weren't for the aggressiveness of the Fed and, belatedly, the Treasury (though the Treasury could be doing a lot better)." Here's a less banker-generous view from Simon Jenkins: <quote> Who did you see racing from ...

Document Size:	6579
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 2 01:36:08 PST 2009