This week: • Israel • Sears Nonsense •
• Freestone • Spinospeare • Mel bonding •Stuff •

 

Israel’s mum wears combat boots

In Israel the state starts to brainwash kids from a young age that the army is there to protect you, the army is your friend, the army can do now wrong. The army is kind of like a surrogate parent in many ways. And so the seeds of fascism are sown from generation to generation. The army is lionised while those living around the nation’s borders are demonised. At an impressionable age this doctrine of power and hate ingrains for life. The politicians are largely ex-military and making the message hit home so are many key media men.

You can sit watching the main Israeli channels all day, flicking between channels 1, 2 and 10, and not see a Lebanese face, apart from that of Hassan Nasrallah, the new Hitler. Just as you almost never see a Palestinian face on Israeli TV unless they are the mob, disfigured with hatred as they hold aloft another martyr on his way to burial. Lebanon only swings in to view on Israeli television through the black and white footage of an aerial gun sight, or through the long shot of a distant urban landscape seconds before it is “pulverised” by a dropped bomb. The buildings crumble, flames shoot up, clouds of dust billow into the air. Another shot of arcade-game adrenalin.

The rest of the coverage is dedicated to Israeli army spokespeople, including the national heartthrob Miri Regev, and media “commentators” and “analysts”. Who are these people? They are from the same pool of former military intelligence and security service officers who once did this job in the closed rooms of army HQ but now wallow in the limelight. Most of the anchors too are merely soldiers in pinstripes.

This is what comes of having a “citizen army”, where teenagers learn to use a gun before they can drive and men do reserve duty until their late 40s. It means every male teacher, professor, psychologist and journalist thinks as a soldier because that is what he has been for most of his life. We first encountered the Israeli military brainwashing effects in the middle of the Bolivian jungle more than a decade ago where a bunch of Israelis who had just finished their national service were as rude and pushy to the locals as we have ever experienced. While the rest of us were aghast at their behaviour, an elderly Israeli couple passing through the area said they could see nothing wrong with their actions. Hear no evil, see no evil. The army can do no wrong, even when it deliberately targets UN vehicles or uses banned cluster bombs on Lebanese civilian sites.

 

 

Miami 7 : Credibility 0

Remember the load of crap that was this summer’s “attempt to blow up the Sears Towers”? Even the FBI’s deputy director has conceded that the plan of the so-called Miami 7 was “more aspirational than operational.” Comedy writers lie awake at night dreaming about indictments like this one: The leader of the Miami plotters met with an FBI informant posing as a member of al-Qaeda and promptly demanded “a list of materials and equipment needed in order to wage jihad, which list included boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios and vehicles.” In demanding the complete GI Joe Action War Kit, the group’s ringleader somehow forgot to ask for something to, er, go boom. Well, the plot gets better with this latest nugget; the FBI paid key “terror” informants in the case against the Miami 7 $56,000.  US officials also granted the second informant a “significant public benefit” — immigration parole so he could remain in the country.

“The fact that these are not just good citizens that are cooperating with the government, but that these are opportunists that are trying to earn not only money but other benefits by creating a case is extremely significant,” said Gregory Prebish, attorney for Burson Augustin, one of the accused. No sh*t, Sherlock. It kinda puts the last nail in this particular terror hokum story as far as are concerned.

 

 

Israel has already lost

For this instalment of Angry American Abroad I’d planned to write a scathing criticism of Israel’s attack on Lebanon. Though an American by birth and a Jew by heritage, I felt the need to express my opinion that Israel’s killing of civilians in Lebanon might not be the best way for Israel to bring about a reduction in anti-Israeli sentiment. Not surprisingly, it seems that quite the opposite has happened, and that anti-Israeli sentiment is on the rise nearly everywhere, with the possible exception of inside Israel of Joe Lieberman’s immediate family. (It’s worth noting that Lieberman’s family currently makes up two thirds of Joe’s dwindling political base, with Dick Cheney and Dubya taking up the slack. Talk about Joe-incidence! But I digress…)

I was about to put pen to paper, so to speak, when the phone rang. It was my Great Uncle, Yetzl Bangs, the Brooklyn diamond mogul and part owner of New York’s Mitzvah-on-wheels franchise. ‘Yahuda,’ he said through his electronic larynx (his natural one having been removed as a result of five decades of improper cigar smoking technique) ‘I want you should stay out of this. Make an old man happy for once in your miserable life.’

Uncle Yetzl then reminded me in no uncertain terms that he read my column regularly, and could change his will ‘like that’. So rather than risk my share of the inheritance (which stands to be even larger with the absence of inheritance tax), I’ve asked noted Taiwan-based political writer and fellow Angry American Abroad Djeager Freestone to guest write this week’s column.

Israel Has Already Lost
By Djeager Freestone
Special to Canned Revolution

Israel’s latest violence against the people of the Middle East is still receiving lots of press. In today’s instant media this reaction is often nothing more than a signal that everybody’s confused, from the lowest to the high.  Folks just don’t know what’s going on. Even in such an unpredictable environment a few universally true rhetorical tells can nevertheless be counted upon.

The truth is that Israel is losing, and losing mightily.

These are the facts, sans rhetoric:

• The Israeli commander is an Air-force guy, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on at the ground level.

This may sound like an over-simplified generalization, but there’s a lot of good evidence it’s true. Essentially, air wars are only good for breaking down infantry positions; as one general explained, “People don’t live in the clouds.” Air forces have never yet won a war without the support of infantry and this war isn’t going to be the one to break the current pattern.

• If one subtracts from the Lebanese death toll the hundreds of innocent civilians killed by the Israelis, one is left with a virtually 1:1 ratio of dead Hizbollah to Israeli regulars, virtually no penetration of Israeli ground forces, and a fiercely prepared and heavily fortified Hizbollah that has already managed to take out a few tanks and helicopters, execute a successful raid against a regular military patrol across a heavily fortified border, and to eliminate an Israeli ship-of-the-line.

This is, simply put, history in the making. In the last hundred years of warfare, never before has a non-state militia (i.e. — guerrillas or terrorists) gone head-to-head with state-supported standing armies and managed so strongly.

More importantly, no Arab state has ever managed to so successfully face off against Israel.

What this boils down to is that Hizbollah is doing as US and Israeli military and political leaders never entertained, and most fear.

• Israeli rhetoric has been on the retreat. We have all heard them go from “We shall eliminate Hizbollah!” to “Purge them from the government!” to “Disarm them!” to “Eliminate their rockets!” to “Occupy them!” to “International occupation? Please?” Moreover, this all in the same time that the initial Israeli predictions asserted would see the end of the action and achievement of their goals.

• Support for Hizbollah has undergone a huge swell throughout the Ummah. This is, for Israel (and the US), the single most disastrous effect.

Israel is surrounded by a bunch of Sunni Muslim peoples who are corralled into dictatorships/kingdoms propped up by the US These are Sunni (i.e. — following Arab theology) peoples, and their governments encourage a fierce antagonism towards the Shia (i.e. — following Persian theology). Hizbollah is Shia. Iran is Shia. Iraq’s government is Shia — and, lest we forget — Iran is also, however imperfect, the Middle East’s only functioning democracy. Now, think about that: suddenly, many traditional Sunni — and this is world-wide, the entire Ummah — have become willing to overlook the ancient Shia-Sunni antagonism to embrace Tallahoosa’s as the heroic military representatives of the only Islamic democracy both willing and able to stand against the injustices of US and Israeli domination.

It’s even got that bastion of Shiite hate – Al Qaeda – worried enough to tout Hizbollah.

Figures in Lebanon are exemplary, also of Israel’s underestimation (remember, the aerial campaign was supposed to undermine support). Where native Lebanese support for Hizbollah was some 29% or so before the war, it’s now 86% — and this in a country with a huge majority of Christians and Sunni.

• The Israelis have just destroyed the Middle East’s only Sunni democracy, a state that was among the most successfully and peacefully multi-ethnic in Islam.

Leaving aside the brutality and horrors of 1980’s Lebanon, these last ten or fifteen years have seen it grow from an impoverished and brutalized urban backwater into a fragile but democratically cosmopolitan Islamic state. Israel has now destroyed that, with the US government’s open encouragement and support.

In other words, Israel has just destroyed a fledgling and increasingly prosperous democratic society and replaced it with rubble and beggars, in the process leaving only its own most militaristic and extreme antagonists potent and intact.

In doing so, they have validated the worst suspicions of every Muslim on the planet.

Not only has Israel lost this war, but they are going to continue to lose it for the next fifty years.

 

 

Spinoza: brush up your bard

As is now well known, during the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, President Bush was at a diplomatic bun fight in St. Petersburg when Tony Blair tried to engage him in a discussion on the use of an enlarged multinational force to create a buffer zone in Lebanon because, as is now well known, the Israelis have brutalized Lebanon, again; it seems like just yesterday that Madonna was going with Sean Penn, and Lebanon was being attacked for being a multiconfessional state that doesn’t have the resources to control terrorism.

As is now well known, the President of the United States doesn’t have enough class to stop snarfing Cheeze Doodles and turn to respectfully address his interlocutor even when the interlocutor was the Queen’s first minister, who found himself humiliated on a Shakespearean scale.

I am all too familiar with the strategic oaf, and his use of deliberate boorishness to communicate his importance and my being worth bugger all. Common courtesy is an option for fools and required only of the servant class.

In my mind’s eye (Horatio) I see Blair in a hallway of some deserted hotel ballroom unmasked, breaking down in tears at the humiliation of it all and asking God, why me.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
In my blind eye, I see as Homer saw: Blair as Hecuba “threatening the flames with bissom rheum”.

[“Bissom rheum” are tears, in Shakespeare’s send-up of bad blank verse in the episode of the Player King].

I have been there. You do everything right, and some clown with half your class humiliates you, and, in Blair’s case, your country, and, in Blair’s case on worldwide TeeVee.

The clown with no class is re-narrated to you as normalcy yet it comes to you that this may not so, that there is no such thing as the normal heart, and that history can be told as a sort of rape of Europa, a flaying of the satyr Marysas, and a family from a village near Tyre blown to bits.

The normal heart would not pimp your fucking ass with the Liar Paradox. The Liar, who is consciously at war with his father has been telling the Right Honourable gentleman all along, broadband through words and body language, winks and shoulder rubs, that he, the Liar, is in a state of war, an Hobbesian state of war that started when the Liar President kicked the shit out of his baby brother in order to watch him cry. When the Big Liar told Jeb that the Easter Bunny would bring presents in addition to sweets.

Everything I say is a liar, including this statement. Whatchoo gonna do about it? Ha ha ha.

Mom, he’s doin’ it again! For the horde has killed the absent Father.

In a state of war everything I tell you (all) is a lie, and you are a fool to have trusted me. “I’m [Ah’m] a war Prezdent. I [Ah] goes to work with war on my (mah) mind.”

Care for a Cheeze Doodle? We take you now to Spinoza’s Shakespeare Festival and Beach Volleyball Tournament, soon to be seen on our Fantasy Island once I, like Taxi Driver, get organasized:

Prime Minister Blair: Good my lord, a multinational force of armed men
Should go, as on a crusade, to the Holy Land.

President Bush: The irony of it, as the right honourable gentleman oughta know
Is that the paynim have only to stop all their paynim shit
Put down their bright swords for the Mountain Dew will rust them
And allow us to be magnaminous. [Exit President Bush, munching Cheese Doodles.]

Prime Minister Blair, solus: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
A president had Cheeze Doodles in his lap
And munched, and munched and munched.
Heavy lies the head that wears the crown:
I took it up but Labour would I to put it down!

 

 

Bangs: A Million Pieces of Mel

Yahuda Bangs obtained this copy of a statement written by Mel Gibson during his brief incarceration in an LA County jail following his recent arrest for drunk driving. The document, written in Aramaic on toilet paper, provides a fascinating insight into the mind of the troubled Hollywood star on the night of the incident.

…I was somewhere between my eighteenth and twenty-second vodka tonic when I saw the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. They were blinking from point to point. I didn’t even need to take my travel copy of “protocols” from the glove box to see it was a Star of David. They were after me again.

There were six of them, all hook nosed and greasy pored. They were closing in fast.  It reminded me of that scene in Road Warrior, with the motorcycle punks. One of them was a fag, the handsome blonde one.  He took a shot at me with a crossbow but missed. God damned homosexuals. I could have taken the shot.  I wasn’t scared then or now.  I saw the kike cop’s beady eyes staring at me through the window, so I asked the lord for guidance.  “Be a man,” the lord said. “Be a man.”  So I slugged down my sixteenth shot of Absolute straight out of the bottle and got out of the car.  The Jew called me /Mr. Gibson/, real polite like, then asked me to put down my bible.  Leave it to a Jew to try to separate a man from the lord. I wasn’t even holding a bible. Damned Christ-killer!

The other cops started to circle around the car, so I let them all have a blast from the old Mel hole. I invited the yids to a little man-to-man action, but they acted like they didn’t understand men.  Typical Jews, resorting to egghead tricks when the chips are down.  I think one of them might have mentioned liking "Ransom." I baited them a bit more, telling them what my pa says about the “holocaust”.  This always sets them off. The Jews have always hated my pa. I wanted to put pa in The Patriot, but the studio wouldn’t let me. God damned Christ Killers and their money.  One of the cops said he liked Braveheart, then he asked me if I was speaking Mexican. I took another slug of Jack and took a swing at his greasy beak…

…Toilet paper runs out

[Editor’s note: Mr Bangs has already annoyed at least one person suffering from Humour-Deficiency Syndrome with this article on the Enter the Fray section of Slate.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Get yer Media Goggles on: Demolishing Lebanon
Media Lens has a two part look at Lebanon and media bias using comparisons with calls for action in Kosovo in part one and looking at how the Israeli side tends to be overstated in part two.

 

Do not feed the animals and homeless people
The city of Las Vegas has made it illegal to feed homeless people in parks. This fell deed now carries a maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, but it only applies to poor people: feeding rich people in parks is perfectly legal. Which is just the most surreal legislation we’ve heard of in a long time.

 

The Truman show & How to get Ahead in Advertising
Greek Leftists pulled down a statue of President Harry Truman as part of an anti-war demonstration against the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Reuters pointed out the similarity between this move and the toppling by US marines of Saddam’s statue, although judging by reports, the Greek effort had a proper crowd around it. The move caused “citizen diplomacy” groups to call for new efforts by US citizens to counter the US’ increasing unpopularity abroad. The little red email feels that all the advertising in the world is not going to help if they don’t change the thing which makes them unpopular in the first place: US foreign policy. It’s the foreign policies that people hate — not Americans per se. This article did bring us into the delightful world of Disneyesque naïveté of people who are convinced that as long as the rest of the world gets to really know Americans, the US government will be able to invade anywhere or support all manner of attrocity-producing regimes without upsetting people. Live the dream:
Business for Diplomatic Action: Building New Bridges to The World
Coalition for Citizen Diplomacy

 

Gitmo not winding down but expanding
Which bring us nicely along to something I’m sure the world would be able to stomach much better if only we all met a few more Americans and really got to know them. According to the Independent (whose entire staff have obviously never met an American in person), in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling its practices illegal and in violation of the Geneva Convention, Gitmo is set to expand rather than close. A new $30m, two-storey block is set to hold 200 prisoners in maximum security and minimum scrutiny by human rights groups.

 

Iraq not winding down but expanding
Lesser mortals might think was a pattern forming here, but they’d be wrong. honest. The president wouldn’t lie about stuff as important as a war in Iraq, now would he? Nevertheless those godless communists at the Financial Times seem to think that Iraq is an expanding conflict rather than a mission accompli.

 

PATRIOT Act not winding down but expanding
Apparently the Boston Globe and AP have never met any Americans either. They seem a bit upset by Bush administration moves to include US citizens in the indefinite detention without trial or legal recourse game. This may be a move to fill up the new $30m Halliburton wing of Gitmo mentioned above. Be assured though: this is not a pattern. Really. Trust us.

 

Some war criminals are more equal than others
Another set of people locked up in Gitmo are set to do without the chance of a court trial: the guards. The War Crimes Act of 1996 criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if US-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment. The Bush adminstration is now rushing to avoid US Army personnel being tried for the war crimes committed at Gitmo, Baghram and Abu Ghraib.

 

Flash Bushflash revisited
Well if that lot didn’t make you wonder a bit about where the US is heading, perhaps this Bushflash will.

 

Infographic images of war
That disproportionate response in graphic form. Suppressing Hizbollah along the border is all it is. Honest

 

US Vetos UN condemnation of Israeli bombing of UN troops
That’s right the US won’t let the rest of the UN condemn the bombing of UN troops. This is odd because they certainly condemned the last bombing of a UN post. Bush came out with this on the subject, in fact: “The terrorists who struck today have again shown their contempt for the innocent. They showed their fear of progress and their hatred of peace.” Apparently Israeli contempt for the innocent is just fine: drop the ‘s’ ‘e’ and ‘l’, add a ‘q’, and it’s a free-condemnation zone. Of course it’s hard to condemn a bombing if you paid for 20% of the cost of it and supplied the bomb.

 

Video More time to bomb
Mathaba News and ICH gives us this sad and sometimes scandalous video on Lebanon with the poignant Labi Siffre song. Bringing home the fact that anyone who deliberately sets off 500lb bombs in a city is deliberately killing civilians, no matter what feel good PR term like “collateral damage” they use to describe it.

 

Conspiracy of the week Part 1: Murdoch backs Israel
No real surprise here. Rupert Murdoch has been a staunch suporter of Israel for years.

Conspiracy of the week Part 2: Murdoch backs Hillary
Now this is surprising — Fox News’ boss is fund raising for Hillary Clinton?!? Shome mishtake, surely?

Conspiracy of the week Part 3: Hillary backs Israel
Fresh from the fund-raiser, Hillary spouts forth her adamant support for Israel: supporting “whatever steps are necessary” to defend Israel against Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran and Syria in the military conflict in the Middle East.

 

BIG: Boycott Israeli Goods
Now we at the little red email aren’t especially enamoured with a lot of the extremists who are anti Israeli, they’re often as scary mental as the pro-Israeli camp. We’re probably biased: the hippie vegetarian book swap café and half the trees on our island lair were placed their by the only Lebanese guy we know. We offer the less rabid sites: Boycott Israel and the rather dated Boycott Israeli Goods. To cover the other 20% of Israel’s military budget, of course, you’ll have to boycott American goods too.

 

March for justice: Shock & Awe Gallery
Not for the faint hearted, but with a media generally desperate to make war look like an antiseptic and pain-free experience, it bears remembering that war is an ugly and messy business.

 

I Sometime Feel Like An Alien Creature
An odd little poem from Woody Harrelson.

 

Guess who’s coming to the Security Council?
Here’s Hugo!!! Chavez has a shot at a seat on the UN Security Council. We can just imagine the look on ‘Strap On’ John Bolton’s face.

 

Credit where credit is due — even when we are talking about MaccieD’s
Well OK, it was mostly down to a Greenpeace campaign, but McDonalds will no longer be selling chicken fed on soya grown in deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest.

 

Shell vs. BP: Who is performing worst on climate change?
Friends of the Earth investigates and finds that both companies fresh green paintwork rubs off easily. Renewable loveliness “beyond petroleum” pouring 72% of its investments into petroleum but only 5.7% — or $800m — into the beyond bit. We can be sure that Shell’s 1.1% of investments — about $200m — in the clean and green is outstripped somewhat by its 69% investment into the dirty and black. It makes the little red curious to know if either of those figures outstrip the respective companies’ advertising budgets.

 

Flagbust The Independent flys the flags of war and peace
It’s not an adbust, but we felt it was an image worthy of a place. When the US and UK start to whine about UN inaction over Lebanon, and how it makes it seem even more irrelevant, just remember whose veto makes it unable to act, and who’s trying to make world opinion irrelevant. The Independent (whose staff definitely haven’t met an American yet) will help you:

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then why are there heatwaves across Europe and the US?