Christian Zionists Help Settlers Steal Palestinian Lands

Evangelical Christians from the U.S. are living and working at Jewish settlements in the West Bank for weeks at a time. The Christians see Jewish expansion in the area as fulfilling biblical prophecy, though the settlements are a contentious issue between Israelis and Palestinians. Here volunteers harvest grapes. (Photo: Heather Meyers/NPR)

By Allison Deger

In recent months Benjamin Netanyahu has spent time in the interview chair repeating to the American public that settlements are not responsible for the continuation of the conflict. In turn, the U.S. State Department has merely squeaked that they were “disappointed” when the first of many new settlements tenders were announced during the start of direct peace negotiations last summer. When the AP’s Matt Lee hammered spokesperson Marie Harf, she refused to concur that the new construction was harmful to prospects of peace.

In fact, the built-up areas of the settlements themselves are not a major cause of Israeli expansion into the West Bank: they constitute only two to four percent of the occupied territories. Still Israel maintains a direct hold over around 80 percent of the West Bank and one-third of Palestinians farmers can no longer access their fields.

A report published the Israeli NGO Kerem Navot [PDF] explains “that behind the widespread takeover of land throughout the West Bank for agricultural purposes stands a distinctive territorial rationale: in comparison with the construction of buildings in the West Bank settlements, staking a claim to agricultural areas requires few resources and little time.” In the hills near Nablus there are settler olive orchards and vineyards, and most of these, Kerem Navot points out, are planted in land grabbed outside of an Israeli state order by the civilians themselves. Similarly in the Jordan valley, settlers comprise just under ten percent of the population, but 50 percent of the entire region is cultivated by their crops.

The report, “Israeli Settler agriculture as a Means of Land takeover in the. West Bank,” outlines:

Today, over 93,000 dunam of Israeli agricultural activity takes place in between the military posts, civilian outposts, settlements, and bypass roads in the West Bank. This area is much larger area than the actual built-up area of the settlements and outposts (which constitute about 60,000 dunam, not including the Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem). Moreover, the most rapid growth in agricultural areas is occurring around settlements that were originally established as suburban communities and where no substantial agricultural activity took place in the past.

The report also details settlers farming in Area B of the West Bank, which is illegal under Israeli law. And Christian Zionist volunteers are making possible the rapid expansion of settler-controlled fields. Hayoval, an organization founded by the Wallers, a messianic American family who have adopted the dress of modern Orthodox Jews after trading their corporate suburban life for Amish living, brings in hundreds to reinforce outposts in the South Hebron Hills.

This fall the group organized 300 farm hands. Joshua Waller, one of the eleven children of the founders according to an email exchange with Texans for Israel, produced this music video to explain their fervor (notice part of the video is filmed in H1, settler controlled Hebron, and part in the South Hebron Hills.)

Waller, explaining the fervor of his family’s promise to till the West Bank, with soft rock musical accompaniment: 

There’s a battle ragingOver a people and a landWill you rage with the nations?Or will you stand and sayI believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and JacobI believe in the words of the Covenant spoken many years agoI believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and JacobI believe in the words of the Covenant spoken many years agoI believeAnd I will standYes I will standThere’s a line in the sandWhere will you stand?There’s a choice being madeWill you stand and sayI believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and JacobI believe in the words of the Covenant spoken many years agoI believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and JacobI believe in the words of the Covenant spoken many years agoI believeI will standYes I will standFor the kingdomFor the nationYou be strongThere’s a line in the sandWhere will you stand?

Read the full report here.

Does The Bible Make Americans More Violent?

By Valerie Tarico
Courtesy of "AlterNet"

My friend Li is an Evangelical Christian and, in keeping with her family values she keeps an eye on what her children view and read. In the summer, she took her 12-year-old daughter to the Hunger Games. “It’s the perfect movie for her,” Li commented. “No swearing and no sex.” No swearing; no sex. Just people stalking and killing each other.

The Motion Picture Association of America agrees with Li’s priorities. So did the writers of the Bible.  Our love-hate-love affair with violence goes way back.

It goes way back, and it also appears to be changing. In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Stephen Pinker lined up information from a wide variety of sources to show that human societies are less violent now than ever in recorded history. Violence dropped precipitously with the agricultural revolution, and then again with the Enlightenment and more recently, with the emergence of universal human rights. In the U.S., recent decades have seen a decline in murder rates and gun ownership. This finding is counterintuitive for several reasons. We have become more sensitized to kinds of violence that once were accepted as normal, like child and wife abuse; modern weapons of war have made killings more dramatic; we forget how brutish our ancestors really were; and thanks to media, modern incidents of violence produce shockwaves of trauma that once were impossible. All of this obscures a long and vast trend line toward—it sounds weird to say it—a kinder, gentler world. A medieval British man was fifty times more likely to die at the hands of another man than is his modern descendant.

We might be even farther along this path were it not for a love affair with fantasy violence that, if anything, appears to be growing.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been rating sex, violence and profanity in movies since 1968, with the goal of limiting how much of each children absorb—or at least giving parents a tool that lets them make the judgment call. In 2006, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed the top grossing movies since the rating system began.  In fact, they reviewed movies all the way back to 1950. They found that explicit sex and violence had both increased over time, but that “ratings creep” affected only violence. Explicit sex is still reserved for “R” rated films; explicit violence is not.

Many parents naively trust that media targeted at young children are developmentally harmless even though brain science suggests otherwise. They similarly tend to assume that a G-Rating means a movie is low on violence. In reality, it may mean simply that the violence is less realistic or designed to trigger laughter rather than fear. A Harvard study published in 2000 reviewed every animated feature film produced between 1933 and 1999, 74 in total. At the time, the findings made headlines because they were startling:

-- Every single film had at least one violent act. The amount of footage devoted to violence ranged from 6 seconds to 24 minutes.

-- Most of the films showed physical fighting as a means of resolving conflict.

-- Characters used weapons including swords and guns and every-day objects.

-- In half of the movies at least one character gave violence a thumbs-up at some point by cheering or laughing.

A follow up  in 2004 showed that G-rated movies, like all others, gradually are becoming more violent. A 2007 study sampled 77 PG-13 films and tallied 2251 violent actions, with nearly half causing one or more death.  Researchers classified most of the incidents as “happy violence” meaning it was “cool, swift, and painless.” Today, by the age of 11, the typical American kid has seen almost 8000 murders on TV. Why? Because we like it that way. Movies that are rated R for violence make more money than those that are rated R for other reasons. We are attracted to violence and we are inured to violence.  Most Americans—not just my friend Li--find murder to be more acceptable fare for children than sex or swear words.

Our peculiar hierarchy of priorities may be due in part to the influence of Abrahamic religion on Western Civilization and the unique standing accorded to the Bible in American Christianity specifically. The Bible amalgamates the mythology and legal codes of a specific kind of culture: a clan-based tribal society in which herdsmen struggling for survival in an arid and increasingly denuded environment. Males competed to control females and territory while maintaining the purity of bloodlines and inheritance; gods that were modeled on warlords competed for fealty. Consequently, while codes governing sexuality and blasphemy were strict, codes governing violence were complicated.

Yahweh himself originated as a war god. Non-Hebrews were regarded with hostility and indeed, much of the founding story of the Israelite people comprises tales of triumphal genocide. The violence in in the Bible is so extreme that it defines vast portions of the book:

[Edmund Leach] looked at the Bible through the eyes of a communications engineer and asked: what message are these authors trying to get through to the reader? The answer, Leach thought, was that they were trying to obscure the fact that mankind began through incest (Adam and Eve) and so the strategy was to compile a list of atrocities so heinous that, in the end, the original incest would come to look like a harmless act.

Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.

Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans see ourselves as peacemakers. During the midwinter holiday season, Peace on Earth is sung from choir lofts and hung in shopping malls. We complain about our role as “policeman to the world.”  And yet, if we could see ourselves as others see us, we would see a people who, like the ancient Israelites have created unparalleled archetypes of violence: the Rambo, the mushroom cloud, the Tommy Gun, the Cowboy. Hollywood ensures that, even independent of the world’s best funded military, violence is one of our top exports.

I once rode a bus to a then small town in Mexico called San Cristobal de las Casas. The ride was my introduction to a new phenomenon that would become a bane during subsequent budget travel: video on buses and trains. It was also my first awakening to the level of violence we Americans export to the world as storytellers. Real dialogue can be hard to translate; psychological or social nuance almost impossible. But sex and violence are universals, which means they are even more ubiquitous in the movies that cross cultural and economic lines than those that don’t.

On this particular bus ride, the gratis entertainment was about a serial killer who was making snuff films. As we swayed around mountain switchbacks, the sound blared. Men, traditionally clad women, and small children pressed against each other, with no option but to face the screen depicting death scene after death scene. My savage hope was that the other passengers were motion sick like me and that the pairing of the film and switchbacks was conditioning a permanent visceral aversion to sexual violence.  Later that year, on an all-night bus, I would find myself assaulted by my first movie about people hunting people. The male lead was a hunky white supremacist, a farmer by day who secretly liked to hunt Blacks.

In movies, of course, it is the bad guys who do the unprovoked killing. Any violence perpetrated by the protagonist, meaning by us at a fantasy level, is vengeance or justice. Most people are deeply ambivalent about violence. We are both attracted and repelled by it. We enjoy and fear it. It turns us on and it horrifies us. Consequently, to get the satisfaction of a good blockbuster we need those bad guys to instigate things. The violence we like best is righteous violence, and—in movies and stories--most violence is just that. It protects innocence and restores justice. It safeguards women and children and the homeland.

Ironically, those who most relish the fantasy power of righteous violence are those who in real life are most likely to perpetrate unrighteous violence. Masculinity, the substance of action films, is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary thus: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men: a need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. Hypermasculine men hit women more, and a woman being pregnant is no deterrent. In the real world, tough guys are good guys until suddenly, sometimes, they are not. In the real world, most murders are triggered by the same motives we find so satisfying on the screen: righteous anger, a sense of violated fairness or honor, the outrage of feeling wronged, the conviction that the one murdered was the bad guy.

Most of us will never kill. These days, most of us don’t even hit. Even so, if we hope to continue the trend toward less violence, the challenge is not whether we can call up the heroism to face down villains and demons like those in our stories but whether we can continue to face away from our own dark fascinations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed the painful conundrum: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Who of us is willing even, to miss the next blockbuster? In The Hunger Games, the bad people are the citizens of the Capitol who demand that outlying districts provide sacrificial contestants for their high tech version of the Roman Coliseum. Movie viewers and readers root for the kids and scorn those who give them no choice but to kill or be killed, those who watch the blood sport for entertainment. But the books and movie work only because we, as readers and viewers, ignore the disturbing obvious: we arethe Capitol. The Hunger Games were staged for us; we are and always were the only intended audience.  Suzanne Collins offered us a chance to watch kids hunting and killing each other, and we ate it up. Did she laugh we flocked to the book stores and theater, as we downloaded DVD’s and shared dog-eared copies and checked sequel release dates? Did she cry? Did she care? Do we? 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Israel Lobby Should Not Have Veto Over US

If you care about the direction of this country but think you don't have time to pay attention to what the Israel lobby is doing, you may want to think again. This is no conspiracy theory - it is all in broad daylight and the stakes are big, in fact they are matters of life and death right now. As we communicate, the Israel lobby is teaming up with the neocon right to prevent President Obama from choosing his Secretary of Defence.

... Chuck Hagel, a Republican Senator who would normally also be easy to confirm in the Senate, as Obama's choice for Secretary of Defence. But unlike in the case of Susan Rice, there are real, substantive objections to real substantive positions he has held: he was an early critic of the Iraq war; he wants to get out of Afghanistan, soon; he does not want a war with Iran; and he has supported cuts in military spending. This makes him neocon enemy number one, someone who must be crushed.

Loyal To A Foreign Government

So, Hagel once said he was a US senator and not a senator in the Israeli government. And for this he has been vilified. This really completes my argument. Is there any other country in the world where a legislator can be denounced for not being sufficiently loyal to a foreign government? This is worse than the McCarthy era; at least back then you had to swear loyalty to the US government.

And he once used the term "Jewish lobby" instead of "Israel lobby", thus denying credit where credit is due, to right-wing evangelical Christians and other fine citizens who also would like to see a war with Iran and fight for the foreign policy agenda of Israel's far right. 

Last week, Elliot Engel became the first important Democratic Congressman to attack Chuck Hagel and oppose his nomination as Secretary of Defence. Engel is part of the Israel lobby and unfortunately he is now the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs committee. One of his first acts after being elected to Congress was to sponsor a resolution declaring Jerusalem to be the undivided capital of Israel, an extremist position even by US State Department standards. 

Promoting The Israel Lobby

Engel is a good example of how the Israel lobby, in alliance with the much weaker neocons, influences much more of US foreign policy than just the Middle East. Until the Democrats lost the House in 2010, he was Chair of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. What was he doing there, since his main interest is Israel? He was there to use the Committee to try to advocate for Israeli foreign policy in this hemisphere. Of course, he had allies among neocon Republicans like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, fanatical Cuban-born Florida right-winger who is the current (outgoing) Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Though the Republicans were more extreme, Engel shared their hostility toward left governments - now governing the majority of Latin America - that didn't fall into line.  This included of course avowedly socialist governments such as Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela; but in 2010, when Brazil, together with Turkey, tried to broker a nuclear fuel swap arrangement with Iran, in an attempt to defuse the escalating confrontation between the US and Iran, Engel was quick to publicly denounce and threaten Brazil for doing, actually, what Washington had asked them to do.

It is important to understand that Engel's commitment to the foreign policy of Israel is not the result of Jewish voters in New York's 17th Congressional district. Jews are less than 14 percent of his district, which is majority African-American and Latino. And most American Jews do not agree with the extremist policies of the Israeli government, which Engel represents. This is a problem of an ideological and political commitment of someone working with a powerful lobby to influence US foreign policy.

Engel was one of 81 House Democrats who went against the majority of their party in the House and voted to authorise George W Bush's invasion of Iraq. Most of these 81 Democrats had strong ties to the Israel lobby, distinguishing them from the Democrats who voted against the war. Would Congress have authorised that war without the influence of the Israel lobby?

It's difficult to say, just as it is difficult to say how much their influence will be decisive if we end up going to war with Iran - a cause that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has lobbied for on national US TV and that the Israel lobby is eager to promote. But this country can no longer afford to have this kind of influence on such important decisions. 

The fight over the Hagel nomination, which would never have been a fight if not for the Israel lobby, is just the latest example. Hagel's presence in the Obama cabinet could easily, in some circumstances, make the difference between war and peace. 

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

The Christian Right Is A Fascist Movement

By John W. Whitehead,

“I’m a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it.”—Ann Coulter

“To a large extent, Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.” —Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey

In his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former war correspondent Chris Hedges contends that today’s Christian Right resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century.

Known primarily as Dominionists, these Christians promote the belief that they are destined to take over and rule the world by taking “dominion” over the political process and reinstituting biblical law. Many perceive this as a campaign to use America to create a global, Christian empire. And statements by evangelical leaders like D. James Kennedy, who has declared that “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost,” only serve to foster this perception.

For those on the outside looking in, it might seem as if there is reason to be alarmed. As professor Charles Marsh notes in a New York Times editorial, American evangelicals “have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history.” This power, which can be traced to a handful of evangelical leaders with decided political agendas, reaches into the Oval Office and deep into the bowels of Congress.

Indeed, Dominionist-influenced leaders often have a direct line into the White House. For example, James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, reportedly held weekly telephone conversations with Bush advisor Karl Rove during the 2004 campaign. And as Jerry Falwell remarked to Vanity Fair, “Everyone takes our calls.”

In a recent interview with me, Hedges stated:

“The neo-cons view these people as the useful idiots. I think it is reversed. I believe, in the end, that the neo-cons will be the useful idiots. I think that however buffoonish figures such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn, Paul and Jan Crouch and many of the others may appear to be, there are tens of millions of people in this country who take these people with deadly seriousness. And whatever buffoonish qualities the Falwells, et cetera, may have on the outside, on the inside these people have a very different stature.”

Calling this particular confluence of religion and politics “Christo-Fascism,” Hedges argues that today’s Christian evangelical movement has many of the same characteristics as fascism: a claim for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians; blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God; intolerance toward non-believers; and disdain for rational intellectual inquiry.

Ann Coulter, a spokesperson for the Christian Right, is adept at magnifying her personality through her own useful idiots, the media. A darling of right-wing talk shows, Coulter embodies some of the above qualities, especially the tendency to demonize one’s opponents.

As Susan Estrich points out in Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church Of Hate (2006), Coulter “has called the 9/11 widows ‘witches’ and ‘harpies,’ referred to Muslims as ‘ragheads,’ called Al Gore a ‘total fag,’ and said that both New York Times editor Bill Keller and antiwar congressman Jack Murtha deserved to die.”

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, remarking about those who want to impose their version of “righteousness” on others through the hammer of law, wrote in October 2006, “Our movement must avoid the temptations of power and those who would twist the good intentions of Christian voters to support policies that undermine freedom and grow government.”

The influential Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer went one step further when he stated that Christians must avoid joining forces with the government. “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country,” Schaeffer writes. “To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”

Via: "The American Muslim"

Fanatical Right's Diatribe Could Unleash A Wave Of Domestic Terrorism

Anders Behring Breivik's 'Sieg Heil' Salute

By Joshua Holland
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

In a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain morale among a Republican base that disdains its standard-bearer, a number of conservative media outlets are pushing an alternate reality in which Mitt Romney is leading in the polls by wide margins and American voters have a decidedly negative view not of the challenger, but of Barack Obama.

It's an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he'd have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there's a very real danger that this spin -- combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right -- could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, butintentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene's piece for more on the right's new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama's a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and ineligible felons voting in this election (with the help of zombie ACORN). They've been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney's 47 percent.

They've also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans' firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they've been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what's to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama's America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama's supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America's wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

These kinds of fringe views aren't relegated to the fever swamps of the right-wing blogosphere – they're often reinforced by elected Republicans. Reps Steve King, R-Iowa, Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, Louie Gohmert, R-Texas and others warn that the Obama administration has been infiltrated by Islamic Extremists. An elected judge in Texas advocated a tax increase – yes, a tax increase! – in order to better arm local sheriff's deputies whom he claimed would serve on the front-lines of the civil war likely to come should Obama be re-elected. “I’m talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms, get rid of the dictator,” he said.

They've been hammered with the idea that while these facts are obvious for those whose eyes are open, the media is covering it all up. Rather than a Democrat with whom people tend to connect running a good campaign against a flawed Republican candidate, many on the far-right will see an illegitimate president colluding with an array of perfidious forces, both foreign and domestic, to deny them the right to finally 'take their country back.'

Obviously, there's no need to fear a massive rebellion from millions of engraged Glenn Beck fans in their Hoverounds; rather, the danger is that in the aftermath of such an election, a small number of dangerously unstable anti-government extremists will take matters into their own hands -- and even a small number can do significant damage.

After the 2008 election, there was a run on weapons and ammunition, and gun sellers are expecting another bonanza if Obama wins a second term. We've seena dramatic wave of right-wing domestic terrorism since Barack Obama's election. Recently, four active-duty soldiers – and five others – based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, were arrested after murdering two compatriots they suspected of betraying their plot to assassinate Obama. The group had been “stockpiling weapons and bomb parts to overthrow the U.S. government.” With $87,000 in weapons and explosives -- and combat training courtesy of Uncle Sam -- this was a potentially devastating plot. Just think about the havoc that a few heavily-armed men with military discipline were able to wreak in Mumbai in 2008.

It's a real threat, but political correctness keeps it in the shadows. At a senate hearing last week, a former Department of Homeland Security official named Daryl Johnson testified that “the threat of domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the U.S. government.” He continued:

Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity, specifically from violent right-wing extremists. While violent left-wing attacks were more prevalent in the 1970s, today the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing.... Since the 2008 presidential election, domestic non-Islamic extremists have shot 27 law enforcement officers, killing 16 of them.

That the “unskewed” polls show Romney heading towards a blow-out win is likely to lead more disturbed people to see themselves as victims of a dark plot to undermine America's “traditional values.” It's not the only iteration of the alternate universe that the right has conjured up in recent years – just ponder, for a moment, that the creator of “Conservapedia” – a hilariously inaccurate right-wing version of Wikipedia – has undertaken to write a distinctly conservative version of the Bible (one in which Jesus presumably inveighs against taxes and regulation dragging down job creators, and doesn't constantly blather about the poor).

But while those efforts are often laughable, the unintended consequences of offering the hard-right a Bizarro World analysis of the 2012 election may prove deadly serious if Obama pulls out a win.

The U.S. Military’s Crusade For Christ

Robert Weitzel states in "Global Research":

Military Religious Freedom Foundation, foiled a Pentagon plan that would have allowed the shipment of “freedom packages” to soldiers and Marines in Iraq. The parcels were put together by the fundamentalist Christian ministry, Straight Up, and contained Bibles, proselytizing tracts in English and Arabic, and the apocalyptic “Left Behind” computer game, in which Christian Tribulation forces convert or kill infidels—nonbelievers, Muslims and Jews.

On May 1 the Senate approved the promotion of Brigadier General Robert L. Caslen Jr. to Major General. Currently the commandant of cadets at West Point, he will become the commander of the 25th Infantry Division. He is also president of the stridently fundamentalist Officer’s Christian Fellowship, whose vision is a “spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit”

General Caslen was promoted despise the Defense Department’s recommended disciplinary action against him and several other senior military leaders because they had “improperly endorsed and participated with a nonfederal entity while in uniform” by participating in a promotional video for the Campus Crusade For Christ’s Christian Embassy, an evangelical organization that ministers to Beltway politicians and sponsors weekly Bible studies at the Pentagon.

According to the DoD Inspector General’s report, one of the generals involved “asserted that Christian Embassy was treated as an instrumentality of the Pentagon Chaplain’s office for over 25 years, and had effectively become a ‘quasi federal entity.’” Arguably, he believed his participation in the video was in the line of duty.

Considering both the Pentagon’s evangelical proclivity and a 2006 Pew survey which found that of the major religious groups in America, evangelicals have the most negative views of Islam and Muslims, the U.S. sniper who was recently caught using the Quran for target practice in the Baghdad neighborhood of Radhwaniya might be excused for thinking the book was a legitimate target upon which to perfect his craft . . . excused for thinking hewas acting in the line duty.

And is it any wonder that with evangelicals and fundamentalists at the very top of the military’s officer corps —to say nothing of their Commander in Chief—that an enlisted Marine was passing out Christian “witnessing coins” inscribed in Arabic at a checkpoint in Fallujah? One side of the coin asked, “Where will you spend eternity?” An evangelical favorite, John 3:16, was on the flip side.

Sheik Adul-Rahman al-Zubaie, a tribal leader in Fallujah who was outraged by the Marine’s proselytizing said, “This event did not happen by chance, but it was planned and done intentionally.”

While the Marine’s proselytizing is not the official policy of the predominately Christian force occupying the predominately Islamic Iraq, it was done “in the line of duty” with a wink and a nod from his chain of command. Think Abu Ghraib!

From Fort Jackson, the Army’s largest basic training facility, where trainees are encouraged to attend Campus Crusade’s weekly “God’s Basic Training” programs, to the U.S. Air Force Academy where students are pressured to attend the Crusade’s weekly “cru” (short for crusade) Bible study, American military personnel are, as Campus Crusade’s Scot Blom gloats, “government paid missionaries” when they complete their training.

As the demands of fighting a perpetual war against “radical Islam” begins to strain both the military’s resources and the country’s resolve, the Pentagon has begun outsourcing larger chunks of the war to private contractors. Predictably, our “government paid missionaries” have become more expensive and much less controllable or accountable.

Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, a staunchly conservative Catholic, has also served on the board of directors of Christian Freedom International, a crusading missionary organization operating in the overwhelmingly Islamic countries of Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Prince envisions an evangelical “end time” role for his warriors, “Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.”

No one in the last decade has contributed more to end time, apocalyptic evangelism than John Hagee, a televangelist seen by millions of viewers weekly and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church. Hagee preaches that in order to bring about the Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture of true believers, Islam first has to be destroyed.

In a 2006 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, Hagee told her, “Those who live by the Quran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.” He went on to claim that there are 200 million Muslims waiting for the chance to attack Israel and the United States. From his pulpit, Hageemakes it clear to his congregation and the radio and television audience what they can expect from American Muslims if such an attack ever took place, “While American Muslims live in America, 82 percent are not loyal to America and are not willing to fight and defend America.”

In his book, “Jerusalem Countdown – A Warning to the World,” Hagee warns that the war between Islam and the West “is a war that Islam cannot and must not win.”

John Hagee is not just a mad evangelizing prophet. He is the mad evangelizing prophet who is courted by a war president, a hawkish presidential candidate and members of Congress from both parties. His Islamophobic bilge has trickled down from Capital Hill, through the labyrinthine corridors of the Pentagon, and into the chamber of a sniper’s rifle and the hand of a Marine guarding a checkpoint in Fallujah.

Officers in the military are expected to lead by example. Enlisted personnel are expected to follow that example. If the recent incidents at Radhwaniya and Fallujah are not just the acts of renegades, then the chain of command seems to be working the way it was designed.

The Mask Of Sanity Is Slipping From The GOP

Romney's Not The Only One In Trouble, As The GOP's Senate Prospects Have Soured Significantly As Well

By Paul Rosenberg, 

A popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Returning the American financial system to its unregulated pre-New Deal state and expecting everything to work perfectly would certainly qualify as insane under this definition. So, too, would Ron Paul's "solution" of abolishing the federal reserve and returning America to the gold standard, effectively returning us to the 19th century, with its repeated pattern of financial panics, prolonged recessions and enormous concentrations of wealth. Equally insane, by this folk definition, is the path of today's Republican Party as a whole, trying to unseat President Obama by offering America, in essence, a third term of George W Bush.  

It isn't working.  

And because it isn't working, we're seeing signs of increasingly bizarre behaviour on the right. Most recently, large swaths of the GOP faithful have swiftly embraced the delusional fantasy that national pollsters - even Fox News - are deliberately skewing polls to favour President Obama and the Democrats, when Romney is actually leading by more than seven points! To understand how the GOP got to this bizarre place, we need to consider a variety of different perspectives, including more technically precise ways of defining insanity and related cognitive deficits. 

The Psychopathic Mask Of Sanity 

In his classic book, The Mask of Sanity, first published in 1941, Dr Hervey Cleckley provided the first detailed clinical description and analysis of psychopathic behaviour. In his formulation, the psychopath does not suffer from any relatively common form of mental disorder, but lacks the normal core of human personality structure, which enables us to have deep and lasting emotions, relationships with others and an internalised sense of right and wrong. Hence they can give the outward appearance of sanity - even extreme sociability and charm - while entirely lacking the meaningful inner life that we all assume goes on inside one another. 

The psychopath suffers from "a different kind of abnormality from all those now recognised as seriously impairing competency," Cleckley wrote. In contrast to other abnormalities, one does not observe "a more or less obvious alteration of reasoning processes or of some other demonstrable personality feature". Instead, "The observer is confronted with a convincing mask of sanity. All the outward features of this mask are intact; it cannot be displaced or penetrated by questions directed toward deeper personality levels. The examiner never hits upon the chaos sometimes found on searching beneath the outer surface of a paranoid schizophrenic. The thought processes retain their normal aspect under psychiatric investigations and in technical tests." 

Of course, the mask does slip in the real world, outside the confines of the psychiatric encounter, which is how Cleckley came to encounter them in the first place. Indeed, as Cleckley described them, psychopaths tend to be wantonly destructive, so lacking in long-term purpose that they are as destructive to themselves as anyone else - or even more so. Because they are incapable of feeling normal emotions, they are risk-takers who may well develop a taste for the extreme and bizarre. They are manipulative, if not predatory, but most are not violent. However, those who make up a disproportionate share of serial killers, the manifestation of psychopathy that has most captured the public imagination. 

As I noted in an earlier column,  Ayn Rand modelled her first prototypical hero, Danny Renahan, on an infamous psycho-killer of her day, William Hickman, as described by author Michael Prescott, who quotes an excerpt about Renahan, from Rand's journal: 

[Renahan] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness - [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.

The organ that Renahan lacks is what we humans know as conscience. And this "heroic" lack of conscience is what large swaths of today's Republican Party has - rather shockingly - come to revere. This represents a dramatic shift, since as recently as the late 1990s the internet was awash with more conventional libertarians heaping scorn on Ayn Rand's brand, known as "Objectivism", which they justifiably derided as a cult. Times have clearly changed.

This is not to say that Mitt Romney, or even Paul Ryan is himself a psychopath - even though Ryan repeatedly praised Ayn Rand over the years and gave his staffers her books to read. But it is to say that Romney and Ryan have risen to the top of a political culture that actively praises the psychopath's lack of conscience and attacks those who have a conscience as being socialists and communists.  

Obama kicks off bid for second term

This in turn creates an environment in which more overtly psychopathic behaviour thrives. Romney and Ryan may have long-term life-plans and stable family lives atypical of psychopathic individuals, but Newt Gingrich's repeated fits of self-annihilation are disturbingly close to the typical psychopathic pattern, as is his use of money-making scams, well documented by Rachel Maddow. Indeed, almost all of Romney's failed competitors in the GOP primary exhibited some form of self-destructive behaviour.  This may be less a sign of their individual psychopathic tendencies than it is an indication that such behaviour is no longer commonly recognised in Republican circles as aberrant, troublesome, dangerous or destructive - at least not until it's far too late. 

This brings us to another aspect of the GOP's recent unravelling. Romney's not the only one in trouble, as the GOP's senate prospects have soured significantly as well, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is even talking aboutDemocrats regaining the House. This is partly the result of changing voter attitudes, reflected in the fact that fewer people are identifying as Republicans, and more are identifying as independents and Democrats. But it's also the result of individual Republican candidates inadvertently revealing their true colours - or else having them exposed against their will. Thus, we have Missouri Senate candidate Todd Aikin's remarks about "legitimate rape", Wisconsin Senate candidate Tommy Thompson's bragging about his credibility in getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid (thus confirming PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year"), Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's attack on Elizabeth Warren for claiming her Native American heritage - and the racist taunting of his senate staffers that echoed his remarks. 

It's not that any of these are necessarily symptoms of psychopathy, though they do have some of its flavour. More importantly, they reflect a political environment in which such behaviour is generally tolerated, even celebrated, an environment in which traditional norms of civility, decency and personal responsibility have utterly eroded, and in which an ordinary concern for others is regarded with contempt. They signal the emergence of wild-eyed, high-risk attack mode as the new normal in Republican politics. And they are just a few of the more well-known examples.

By its very nature as a clinical diagnosis, the psychopathic model is ill-suited to definitively describing political phenomena. It is much better suited to raising questions - such as what sort of social ideal the GOP has in mind - rather than answering them. But there are other ways of understanding how the GOP has gone off the rails.
One such approach is to study the unshakable belief in disproven "facts", which in the GOP's case justify continuing disastrous behaviour which can be deeply destructive of human well-being. This was illuminated by a 2009 paper, "'There Must Be a Reason': Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification", (reported on by Science Daily here), which found that Bush voters who believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks did not change their minds when presented with correcting information -even when it came in the form of a quote from Bush himself denying that any connection had ever been made. One powerful factor influencing their reasoning was "inferred justification", as the researchers explained, "the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11". Of course, it wasn't just the fact of the war, but also the belief  that it was just, and thus had some just cause behind it. Otherwise, why try to justify it? 

The GOP's New Delusion: The Pollster's Conspiracy 

However mistaken the Saddam/9-11 belief might be and however tragic the consequences, it had a relatively limited scope in terms of American political beliefs. But a similar sort of logic could help explain a much more far-reaching pattern of contemporary conservative thought, fixated on justifying the belief in American democracy as a white male Christian creation - a pattern that stretches from the historical revisionism of turning the largely Deist Founding Fathers into a flock of evangelical Christians, to the hyper-current effort to suppress minority voters and to deny that America's first black President is actually eligible to hold the office. 

Inside Story US 2012 - Are US Republicans  abandoning Romney?

The most recent manifestation of this pattern - fuelled by conservative media - is the previously mentioned wildfire growth in the belief that all the polls showing Romney losing to President Obama are “skewed” by liberal pollsters oversampling Democrats, in an effort to discourage conservatives and thus suppress their votes. Leading the way is the website unskewedpolls.com, which re-weights polls to match the highly atypical partisan weighting of Rasmussen Reports - the only major pollster that shows more Republicans than Democrats in its voter model. Using this neat trick - which even Rasmussen owner Scott rasmussen has criticised ("You cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another" he told BuzzFeed.) - Unskewedpolls turns out poll after poll showing Romney winning by anywhere from 3 points up into double digits. 

Back in the real world, there's a much simpler explanation: partisan identification is relatively fluid and the number of self-identified Republicans has plummeted since peaking around the time of the 2010 midterms. Pollsters reflecting this are simply reflecting reality, hard as that may be for conservative Republicans to take.
Of course, Republicans themselves remain remarkably oblivious to all this - those who haven't already left the party, that is. This is only the latest in a whole series of such delusional conservative beliefs -from birtherism to "death panels", to "climategate", to "Sharia law" - and its rapid spread indicates that the Republican political world is now hard-wired to adopt implausible persecutory delusions virtually at the drop of a hat.

As I explained in an earlier column, these are examples of the ego defence mechanism of delusional projection. These are "grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature", which eminent philosopher and psycho-analyst Karl Jaspers, first characterised in terms of \three basic criteria: "[1] certainty (held with absolute conviction) [2] incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counter-argument or proof to the contrary) [and 3] impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently untrue)."

In that column, I identified as an example the birther delusion, as well as a less well-known belief - held by a majority of Republicans in a November 2009 poll, that Obama had not actually been elected President, but that the election had been stolen... by ACORN. This belief clearly depends on another delusional belief - the belief in widespread voter fraud, since Obama actually won the election by almost 10 million votes. Yet, somehow, the Bush Justice Department saw nothing amiss! The newest delusion fits well within the framework established by these earlier delusions, which no doubt helps explain its rapid and rabid acceptance on the right.
But there are a few other twists worth noting as well. First off, the belief that the polls are all skewed sets the stage for another round of false "voter fraud" allegations, when the election results fail to show a 7 or 8 point Romney victory. The vaster the conspiracy, the more convincing, for true believers. But for the rest of us, is it surprising that it comes off as a bit nuts?

Secondly, the issue of projection - the pot calling the kettle black - has intruded once again into the GOP's voter fraud narrative with the news that a top GOP consulting firm working in multiple battleground states has been engaged inserious voter registration violations.

State and national Republicans who had hired the firm swiftly sought to cut all ties and pretend to be shocked, shocked! "We have zero tolerance for any threat to the integrity of elections," said RNC spokesman Sean Spicer in a typical statement. But they were at least eight years too late. As blogger and voting irregularity specialist Brad Freidman reported, "The firm appears to be another shell company of Nathan Sproul, a longtime, notorious Republican operative, hired year after year by GOP Presidential campaigns, despite being accused of shredding Democratic voter registration forms in a number of states over several past elections." I first encountered Sproul's handiwork while writing a series of stories about potential voter suppression leading up to the 2004 election. His firm was making local headlines in both Oregon and Nevada - and not in a good way. Democratic voter registrations were systematically disappearing under his watch. But the national media failed to take notice and Sproul escaped unscathed. Nothing has changed since then, except his firm's name. 

When you hear Republicans spin wild fantasies about ACORN, voter fraud and stolen elections, the script they're reading from is effectively Nathan Sproul's perennial sales pitch to GOP campaigns. That's projection, baby. Remember it, the next time a conservative calls you scum. You're not the one who's crazy. They are. And they're only going to get crazier after election day.

Via: "Al-Jazeera"

Building An Evangelical Army To Defend Zionism

Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United For Israel (CUFI), has been at the forefront of pro-Zionist propaganda and integral in the building of an evangelical army ready to defend the agenda of the Zionist movement.

CUFI is holding a two day conference to discuss the “critical decisions [that] are going to be made about Iran, Israel and the world” as they are supportive of the Obama administrations false flag assertions that Iran is hiding a nuclear program that intends to procure or produce a nuclear weapon.

Some of the speakers at the conference include:

• Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann
• Pastor John Hagee
• Senator Joseph Liberman
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Steven Emerson, author and journalist
• Ari Fleischer, former spokesperson for the George W. Bush administration
• Sgt. Benjamin Anthony, combat veteran and reservist for Israel Defense Forces (IDF)

The IDF are the military forces for the State of Israel. However, they are involved in societal issues and influential in controlling and dissemination of propaganda by directly participating in the local economy, culture and political venues. Since 1967, the US has had close ties to the IDF with regard to developing cooperation on military technology and defense systems.

The CUFI Conference will provide training sessions that will instill pro-Zionist perspectives on the Israeli-Arab conflicts. During the “Myth and Facts: Refuting the Negative Myths About Israel” workshop, attendees will be schooled as to defending the Israeli “battlefield ethics” in regard to the mass executions of Palestinians that continues to this day. While paralleling Israeli military experts who can “reveal the truth behind the headlines and empower you to respond to Israel’s accusers with confidence” Sgt Nadav Weinberg, veteran Israeli combat solider will speak on the justification of the slow extinction of the Palestinian people on the Gaza Strip.

Educating evangelical Christians on the ins-and-outs of Christian Zionism is all important to the agenda of this conference. While the movement appears to support the Christian belief that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land (Jerusalem) will usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ (also referred to as Restorationism); the actual agenda is much more sinister.

The Globalist Zionists have used chicanery to convince the encompassing evangelical movement to dedicate their unwavering support to Israel because a Jewish return to the Land of Israel, along with the parallel idea that the Jews ought to be encouraged to become Christian, as a means fulfilling a Biblical prophecy has been common in Protestant circles since the Reformation. Yet the only event they are assisting in preserving is the creation of a One World Government.

Jewish Zionism is the primary advocate of the State of Israel and seeks to protect the movement from anti-Semitic discrimination, exclusion and persecution from other societies. By equating the Jewish people with Zionism, the global Elite have been able to hide in plain sight and become the over-reaching influence that we call by many different names. Historically, Zionism is a political credo introduced by the Rothschild family. The perfect cover of establishing a State of Israel has allowed the global Elite to use the influential power of government to advance their interests and manipulate an entire group of people for the sake of ensuring One World Government.

In support of Israeli and Zionist agendas, the Obama administration created the Atrocities Prevention Board (APB). This group is headed by Samantha Power, who is a member of Obama for America; a Blue State Digital organization that conducts surveillance on American citizens through social media sites to better market to them for the purpose of coercing them to support and ultimately vote for Obama in 2012.

Obama’s APB will monitor and seek to eradicate anti-Semitism in foreign nations in support for Israel’s schemes. The APB and Obama’s executive order called “Blocking the Property and Suspending Entry into the US of Certain Persons with Respect to Grave Human Rights Abuses by the Governments of Iran and Syria via Information Technology” will give the US government obligation to reprimand corporations on behalf of the Jewish community that use the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center (RMRAC) lobbying firm to represent them.

The CUFI are a national association that supports Israeli agendas by infiltrating “every pro-Israel church, para-church organization, ministry or individual in America.” They intend on converting as many Christians to their pro-Zionist movement as they can through coercive programs of “education, outreach and events.”

Like the clergy response teams deployed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), CUFI use the Bible to keep their congregations under the directives of the US government like blind followers who are intimidated into going along without question because of Roman 13. As Durell Turberville explained: “. . . because the government is established by the Lord, you know. And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith. That’s what’s stated in the scripture.”

The CUFI Conference in Washington, DC will bring together elected officials, representatives of the Zionist Elite, and the congregations of evangelical Christians that will be the “grassroots” voice that will demand efforts be made to usher in Global Governance; under the covering of expediting the stability of Israel so that Jesus Christ may return.

Religious coercion is a powerful weapon, and one that the global Elite have been working like puppet masters behind the scenes for centuries. Zionists hold key positions of absolute influence in entertainment, mainstream news media, banking and multi-national corporations. They are now gearing up to push their agendas through all avenues of control.

Pay attention, and you can see them coming.

Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism.

Via: "Information Clearing House"