Freedom Of Speech Doesn't Apply To Those Who Are Saying What They Don't Want You To Hear

Remember when you were a kid, and if somebody told you something you didn't want to hear, such as it's time to go to bed, you would stick a finger in each ear and say "LaLalalalalalalalal" very loudly? It didn't work, because that very act alone told your parents that indeed it was time for you to go to sleep. Well, this is kind of like that. Jewish groups are asking member countries to stand up and walk out when Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addresses the U.N. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference on May 3.

“Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability poses a threat to the region and the entire Western world. To have President Ahmadinejad address this review conference makes a mockery of the efforts of many countries to prevent nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism from becoming the gravest global threats of this century."

Mockery? Really? How about Israel deploring IAEA and UN calls for Israel to sign the NPT and join the IAEA while trying to simultaneously deciding whom that august body should and shouldn't be listening to?
The president and executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the group that is calling for the boycott, then goes on to state that:"It is dismaying that, once again, the U.N. is allowing the head of a regime, foremost in the sponsorship of terrorism and the abuse of human rights, who defies U.N. resolutions regarding its nuclear ambitions, to appear before the international body."
Really? You want to go there? Israel, an apartheid state where it's Palestinian peoples are treated as second class citizens, where the Goldstone report has listed numerous war crimes and abuses of Human Rights, a country that has defied more UN resolutions than Iraq, and rejects UN resolutions regarding it's nuclear ambitions, and now you want to criticize Iran, which, once again has not diverted one isotope towards anything but it's nuclear energy program, nor has it been found to be developing a weapons program?
Which is likely what Ahmadinejad will be discussing at the conference, which is what pro-Israel groups do not want the world to hear. That and the fact the US has not lived up to it's obligations under Article 4 of the NNPT. (It's unlikely that the Iranian president will be discussing the continued violation of it's own Symington amendment by the US either) So, once again, we have the US standing behind international criminal state Israel while making false claims against one of Israel's enemies in the region. Pot. Kettle. Black.

It Would Be Better If We Paid You No Mind At All

One of the greatest problems facing our country is the fact that our foreign policy is decided on not what's best for America, but instead, on what's not best for America.
Take stark raving neocon Billy Kristol. He claims it would be better for the US to attack Iran than Israel. Better for Israel, that is. Ultimately, it would be better for no one to attack Iran, since they actually haven't been found to be doing thing which violates any law, but reasoning with a neocon is impossible, because they make their own reality, and insane people are impossible to rationalize with in any debate.
Kristol, it should be noted, was one the loudest voices calling for an attack against Iraq, but there's no use beating that dead horse. He is probably the last person anyone should listen to regard US foreign policy in the Middle East, but it doesn't stop the corporate media from putting him on anyway.
But there is a whole list of things that it would be better for America to do first.
As an example, it would be better if the US government would stop breaking it's own laws, and obey the Symington Amendment. The fact that both major parties seem to disregard this law is an apt illustration of why we need to dump them both in favor of a party that actually obeys laws instead of bowing to powerful lobbies.
It would be better if politicians ran as a friend of all Americans instead of as a friend of another country. The US should not be playing favorites with any country in the Middle east, especially one with so many UN violations against it.
It would be better for the US, already mired down in two wars-without-end, to not start a third one that will endanger more of our troops and cause the loss of more American lives. It would be better for the US not to be seen as an agressor in a region where many people already have developed a negative opinion of us. It would be better if we didn't needlessly harm more civilians tha the over one million Iraqis we have already killed in a genocide designed to calm Billy Kristol's paranoia.
The cost of the Iraq War is already three trillion dollars, another war in the region isn't going to be any cheaper. It would be better for the US if that money, on top of the $1.6 trillion in aid were reinvested in this country to rebuild our economy.
And in the end, it would be better for Mr. Kristol, wealthy publisher of The Weakly Standard and paid Fox News commentator, to buy his own fighter jet and fly it over to Iran himself. But unfortunately, Mr. Kristol hasn't met a war somebody else's kids lives couldn't be spent fighting so Mr. Kristol continue to be a drain on society by advocating US involvement in wars it would be better off not fighting.

Don't Cut Into My Racket

"To include these other groups diminishes their memory.......These people are not in the same category as Jewish people..."-Assemblyman Dov Hikind
Is he referring to the Armenian Genocide? No, he's discussing the inclusion of Gays, Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses in a Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial. (Why Brooklyn needs a Holocaust Memorial isn't even being discussed). Sure, the Holocaust(TM) was horrible for millions of European Jews, but, like 9/11, the Holocaust has been very good for Israel.
It has allowed them to invade Syria and seize the Golan Heights. It has been the reason for numerous military incursions into Lebanon by the IDF. It has even been used as a justification for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as threats against Iran by the Israeli government.
And as for the fears that inclusion of other groups sought out for persecution by the Hitler regime might lead to people forgetting about the horrible suffering inflicted upon the Jews, that ain't gonna happen. Television shows, movies and books appear every couple of months to retell the story of the Holocaust, even if some of those stories turn out to be complete hoaxes.
All over the planet, at any given time, one group of people is trying to eradicate another. Iraq, Darfur, Cambodia, Gaza, Armenia, the list goes on, and now, Assemblyman Hilkind, you are being just as bad by trying to eradicate others who suffered alongside your people from the list of victims of the terrible Nazi death machine.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 8 (IPS) - The devastating Israeli firepower, unleashed largely on Palestinian civilians in Gaza during two weeks of fighting, is the product of advanced U.S. military technology.

The U.S. weapons systems used by the Israelis -- including F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions -- have been provided by Washington mostly as outright military grants.

The administration of President George W. Bush alone has provided over 21 billion dollars in U.S. security assistance over the last eight years, including 19 billion dollars in direct military aid as freebies.

"Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," says a background briefing released Thursday by the Arms and Security Initiative of the New York-based New America Foundation.

Everyday you go to work, the government takes a chunk of what you earn, and sends it to Israel in the form of aid, or military equipment. The harder you work, the more money you make, the more you are contributing to the slaughter of Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, because white phosphorous does not look for a cross or a crescent, it just burns the skin to the bone. Smart bombs are not intelligent enough to ascertain whether they are hitting a school or a bunker.
You think that this being a democracy, if you were appalled you might try to reach your congressperson and try to force an end to the senseless slaughter of human beings being funded out of your pocket. But this is no democracy. What we have a military-industrial corpocracy. Your role in it is to keep making dollars for the government to spend on weapons to send to Israel to test out on Palestinians.
You are as trapped as the people of Gaza, virtual slaves to a machine that only kills for them, while doing nothing for you except insuring the enmity of people who are not afraid to die because their life is shit now anyway.