Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
I strongly recommend to everyone this article in the Christian Science Monitor on "Mixing Prophecy and Politics," which lays out the concrete connections between the end-of-the-world Christian fundamentalists that support Israel's colonization of the West Bank as a gateway stage to the battle of Armageddon, and their political hooks in the United States.
This whole political-religious framework is also known as 'premillennial dispensationalism,' which means that A) we live with the End Times and 'millennium' in our future and B) God dispenses goodies to good people, that is, he blesses those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel, in part. In other words, an interventionalist God, the type who would, as Jerry Falwell described it, punish the U.S. directly via Sept. 11. The problem with this kind of thinking, as the article makes clear, is that people who are thinking 'eschatologically' sometimes act to make their prophecies self-fulfilling, by financially supporting West Bank settlements, for example. In turn, this kind of garbage could easily incite World War III if clear-thinking politicians don't intercede. But of course this is Bush we are talking about, and he implies all the time that God intended Sept. 11 as some kind of avenging task generator. As an atheist, all this stuff scares the hell out of me, for reasons I hope are obvious. I think about it a great deal.
If you ever wanted to hear what a right-wing peacenik does when he collides with flashy left-wingers reading poetry, read the very amusing latest from Justin Raimondo. He also addressed the Hersh and BBC reports about the Israelis, leading round to his usual thesis that Israel was the only country that really stood to benefit from the war on Iraq.
I will say again that I always take Raimondo with more than a grain of salt, but has he been proven wrong thus far?
In an effort at damage control, the Israel lobby is making a concerted effort to smear whomever states the obvious: a great deal of the "intelligence" used to lie us into war came directly from Tel Aviv and was "stovepiped" into the White House by neocon White House advisors, and that, in retrospect, this war has been to the strategic advantage of one and only one nation on earth: Israel.If "Israel was never near the top of the list" when it comes to motives for this war, then how is it that Tel Aviv turns out to be the chief beneficiary in so many ways? As the Mossad infiltrates Kurdistan, demands recognition from the Iraqi "government," and even sends its skilled torturers to help the American occupiers subjugate and degrade their Arab charges more effectively, the demonstrable evidence that Israel's most loyal supporters led the way to war is not so easily brushed aside.