Rain Coming | Election Objection | 53 Cases | Mendocino Drowning | River Watch | Calling Crawdad | Near Yorkville | Jail Update | Pet Snow | Ancestral Inspiration | Coast Inn | Inmate Treatment | Union Lumber | Two Corrections | Bikers 1977 | Electric Lights | Noyo Clippers | Shadow Search | Yesterday's Catch | Neighbor Trouble | CA Impressionists | Vintage Jalopies | Sierra Nevada | Internet Bad | Unemployment Details | Original Playstation | Marco Radio | Sharpener 1959 | On Israel
RAIN will continue generally north of Mendocino County through today. A brief break in the rain may occur this evening before more widespread moderate to locally heavy rain moves into the region late tonight and on Monday. South winds will also be very strong during Monday, and heavy mountain snow will be possible across portions of northern Trinity County. After another break in the weather on Tuesday, rain and high elevation snow will return on Wednesday. (NWS)
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE has said he will support the bid by a dozen Republican Senators to overturn Joe Biden's election win in Congress next week. Marc Short, Pence's chief of staff, issued a statement Saturday saying the VP 'shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election. [Pence] welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.' Pence gave the plot his backing just hours after Ted Cruz has said he would be among the 12 GOP Senators trying to block the certification. Twelve Republicans have now said they will vote to reject the electors on January 6, after Missouri senator Josh Hawley became the first to announce his intentions this week to challenge the result. In a statement on Saturday with ten more GOP senators, Cruz demanded the appointment of an emergency commission to conduct a 10-day audit of the election returns in 'disputed states'. Until such a commission is appointed, they vowed to intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from those states - a largely symbolic move that has little chance of preventing Biden from taking office.
53 NEW COVID CASES reported in Mendocino County on Friday and Saturday, bringing total to 2611. Three deaths added, bringing that total to 30.
ONE FOUND DEAD IN THE OCEAN NEAR THE TOWN OF MENDOCINO
Multiple agencies including California State Parks and medical personnel were deployed for a water rescue to Mendocino’s Portuguese Beach where an individual was reportedly in the water off shore. According to scanner reports, the individual was recovered and found to be deceased when pulled onto shore. Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office was called to the scene.
kymkemp.com/2021/01/02/one-found-dead-in-the-ocean-near-the-town-of-mendocino/
NAVARRO RIVER WATCH, HWY 128
I expect some localized flooding of Hwy. 128 just east of the Hwy. 1 bridge next Tuesday, based on the National Weather Service Navarro River gauge forecast as of now.
This will be only shallow water flooding of a very short section of low lying highway caused by water backed up by the robust sandbar blocking the mouth of the river at Navarro Beach. However it may be enough for CHP to close 128 west of Flynn Creek Road temporarily.
Alternate routes to Anderson Valley and Cloverdale include Comptche Ukiah Rd to Flynn Cr. Rd. to 128, or the Philo Greenwood Rd and Cameron Rd. for the south side of the Navarro.
My prediction is based on a forecast by NWS as of this writing.
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=eka&gage=nvrc1
The link goes to a live forecast chart that is updated each time you load the page.
The forecast could be wrong, but the river level is already very high. It will be the first breach of the season, and it will not be easy because the sandbar is both tall and wide due to big surf building it up recently.
— Nick Wilson
GORDON BLACK WRITES: Dan Roberts will be playing an hour of Crawdad Nelson (w/music) Sunday 3pm kzyx.org. But nobody knows how to reach him – presumably still in Sacto – and tell him. I phoned the one Dale Nelson in the book but no. Emails bounce. Have you any lead?
COVID IN THE COUNTY JAIL, AN UPDATE
On December 31, 2020, the Sheriff’s Office received the results of the COVID-19 testing that was done on the jail population December 26 and 27, 2020. As expected, the number of confirmed cases amongst the incarcerated population rose to 63. Seventeen individuals have been released from isolation and 7 others were released from custody, having been released through the courts or being time served. This leaves the number of active cases in the jail at 39.
The confirmed cases are largely isolated to the original outbreak areas with a small number being discovered outside the quarantine area. We continue to identify these individuals and attempt to quarantine them away from unaffected inmates. Testing will continue in targeted areas to identify any new cases while on-site medical providers continue to monitor and care for those affected individuals.
Of the diagnosed inmates, one was transported to an area hospital this morning, January 1, 2021, where he was admitted for observation to monitor this subject due to concerns of breathing difficulties.
Staff testing is ongoing with 13 staff members quarantined to date. Although several new cases were identified amongst staff, some of the original staff members that were found to be positive were released to return to work. As of January 1, 2021, five staff members have returned to work having been cleared. Because we are continuing to receive results, these numbers are changing daily.
Testing amongst jail staffing has been increased to twice weekly. Staff are reporting to OptumServe for testing.
The Sheriff’s Office administration continues to work with our area and State partners to identify targeted testing audiences within the jail, we are also working towards constant surveillance testing. The goal is to continually develop the most effective mitigation protocols, and arrange for safe return of jail releases into the community.
(Mendocino County Jail Presser)
UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK
Lovely Snow does well with people and enjoys toys and going for walks. She has a very sweet side, and savors attention and belly rubs. Snow is an easy dog to walk on leash, and pretty mellow when she's inside. Snow is looking for a CAT-FREE home. Snow is a 3 year old, mixed breed beauty, weighing 58 svelte pounds.
For more about Snow, go to mendoanimalshelter.com. While you’re there, you can find information about our services, programs, events, and updates regarding covid-19 as it impacts Mendocino County Animal Shelters in Ukiah and Ft. Bragg. Also, check out our adoptable dogs and cats!
Visit us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/mendoanimalshelter/ For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.
WHAT WOULD GRANDMA DO?
by Justine Frederiksen
Lessons from a 1918 flu survivor — Thinking of all my grandmother survived helped me survive 2020
Nearly every day of Covid-infested 2020, I’ve felt my hope drowned by despair. And every time I went under I asked myself, “What would grandma do?” And she pulled my head back above water.
My maternal grandmother was a fiercely independent woman who carved a remarkable life for herself after being orphaned by the Spanish Flu in 1918. And I know if she were me right now, she would be happy to have a job. She would be happy to have a home. To have food to eat. To be healthy, and to have her loved ones be healthy.
Thinking of her has helped me to be grateful for what I still have even during the darkest days of this dreadful year. But sometimes, just thinking of her isn’t enough. And while I can’t turn to her directly for wisdom anymore, I can find comfort in her car: a tiny, old Toyota I still drive.
She bought that Tercel brand-new at Toyota Santa Cruz for $6,538.30 on Aug. 31, 1984. (I know all these details because she typed them onto a 3-by-5 card.) I remember thinking at the time that the car was too small and an ugly color, but she loved it. Every time we walked up to it in a parking lot she would gush, “Whose pretty little car is that?”
I had never heard my grandmother use that voice before. I only knew the one she used to complain about my father. Or to order me and my sister not to walk so far away from her. Or to ask why I wasn’t wearing the sweater she bought me.
I spent most of my life afraid of my grandmother and dreading our time together. But once I learned how much she lived through before I was even born, it helped me forgive her for being so difficult to be around.
She was put in a Masonic Home in Southern California with her brother after their father died of the Spanish Flu in 1918 when she was 4 years old. She came of age during the Great Depression, watching her older brother head out in a three-piece suit to carry his briefcase door-to-door in search of a job, and she tracked every penny she spent ever since.
She became a bookkeeper, then became a single mother at 29 during World War II. (She wasn’t widowed, mind you, just never married my grandfather, whom she met while both were ice skating with Sonja Henie. According to the contract she kept, my grandmother earned $30 a week for that job.)
My father said once that my grandmother only kept my mother to prove to her mother she could. But it doesn’t matter to me why she kept her, just that she did. And then she helped her daughter pay for college. And helped my parents buy a house. Then helped me pay for college.
It took me a long time to accept that spending her money was how she showed love. Because I always wanted a grandmother who hugged us and laughed when we played, not one who loved to remind us of every naughty thing we ever said or did.
The only time I remember sitting in her lap was when she let me drive a car for the first time. I don’t remember why she put me behind the steering wheel that day, but I remember us all laughing as I struggled to guide the car through the empty parking lot.
The next time she gave me the wheel was two decades later when she took me to England so I could drive on the left side for her. The day after we picked up the rental car I woke up with a cold that she blamed on my walking around with wet hair. “You better not be too sick to drive,” she announced as I stared out the window above my bed, wishing I could just sleep.
Later that same trip she gave me a rare compliment when I miraculously drove us back to our hotel through thick fog with no GPS, maps or even road signs to guide me. “You’re a wonder,” she said.
Another 20 years passed before I drove for her again, but this time she didn’t ask me to. She also didn’t ask me to write out all her checks so she didn’t pay her rent twice, or to have meals delivered to her room every day when she stopped going to the dining room to eat. No, she fought my help every day until I finally cracked at the diner where she demanded to know why we weren’t at the French bistro she loved (knocking over all the tiny tables with her walker) and I snapped at her before running into the bathroom to finish yelling in a stall.
Afterward as I buckled her seat belt she said, “Are you sure you don’t want to just push me out of the car?” I sighed. “No, grandma. I don’t.” And I didn’t. But I did ask my husband to start driving her around after that.
Several years ago she died just shy of her 98th birthday, but she is still with me every time I drive her car. I still hate its color. It has no air conditioning. The radio doesn’t work. I can’t move the driver’s seat anymore, I can’t open the passenger side window anymore, and the rear-view mirror disintegrated long ago.
But I love driving it. Because now in that car I can spend time with the grandmother I choose: all the best parts with none of the bad. Inside her car, I don’t think about the woman who spanked me for spilling cereal milk on her bedspread. I don’t think about the woman I drove to doctor’s appointments after cleaning diarrhea off her shoes.
Instead I think about the woman who drove me to countless museums, operas, ballets and Broadway shows. I think about the 56-year-old who moved to Paris for a year so she could learn French. And the 80-year-old who walked miles and miles of that city with me during a transportation strike. The 83-year-old who took me to New York. The 90-year-old who filled her tiny car with everything that would fit and drove herself to her new senior apartment complex in Petaluma.
And I think about that little girl who thrived through sheer force of will after her father died during a pandemic, and I hope that the more time I spend with that determined, independent woman now, the more likely it is that I’ll not only drive safely out of this pandemic, but hopefully well into my 90s.
THE COVID CELLS
Editor,
I am writing this letter because of the poor level of care and neglect I am being given. I tested positive for the covid-19 virus on December 21, 2020. Since then I have been locked down in my cell 24 hours a day with my two other cellmates who also tested positive for covid-19.
We are not allowed to come out to have a shower or use the phone to tell our family that we are sick with the deadly virus. It has been eight days since me or my cell mates are taken a shower. We have been given baby wipes and no-rinse shampoo every other day starting on December 24, 2020. Our laundry was not picked up to be washed on wash day, so me and my comrades have been wearing the same dirty clothes for over a week now. We are not able to clean our cell either.
Also my cellmates and I have not been given any proper medical treatment, just cruel and inhumane treatment for having covid-19. They are also not following any guidelines by having four people in a three-man cell. We are overcrowded. They have people sleeping on blue plastic things called “boats” on the ground. I am writing this letter so that people know how they are running this jail and how they are treating us inmates with covid-19.
Georgie Hoaglin
Mendocino County Jail
Ukiah
CORRECTION:
YESTERDAY we wrote that Item 6b on Tuesday, Supes agend was “”THE ‘NUCLEAR’ OPTION to allow pot growers to apply for permits directly to the State is being made official.”
Item 6b: “Discussion and Possible Action Including Direction to Staff to Develop a Framework for Approving Third Party Planning Consultants to Avail Phase 1 Cannabis Cultivation Applicants with the Option to Directly Hire for Summarization of County Performed Review as Necessary to Meet Site Specific Environmental Review Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for Purposes of Seeking a State Annual License (Sponsor: Cannabis Ad Hoc Committee of Supervisors Williams and Haschak)”
Supervisor Williams corrected that description: “No, not at all. That option has always existed and does not require action. The item allows Phase 1 applicants to attempt the lower barrier reuse of county review for state license purposes at their expense and risk.”
ALSO YESTERDAY we highlighted Closed Session Item 9c: “Pursuant to Government Code Section 54956.8 - Conference with Real Property Negotiator - Property: APN 002-340-38, and Physical Address: 551 South Orchard Avenue, Ukiah, CA 95482. Agency Negotiators: Carmel J. Angelo, Janelle Rau, and Darcie Antle. Under negotiation: Property Acquisition, Price and Terms,” saying that “The Schraeders’ Redwood Community Services office is at is at 631 So. Orchard Ave where soon there will be a Rolls-Royce of a Crisis Residential Treatment Center. The Newly purchased $11 million Best Western motel being remodeled into a homeless shelter is a 555 Orchard Ave. 551 Orchard Ave. appears to be an office buildling next door to the Best Western.”
James Marmon clarified that “551 Orchard Ave. is Dick Selzer’s real estate office (Realty World and Selzer home loans). If anyone cares to remember, he was very upset when the County bought the Best Western for the homeless. I guess buying him out is better than a big court battle. I don’t blame him, the neighborhood is headed downhill in a hurry. I recognized the address immediately, it’s where I send my mortgage payment each month.”
(Mark Scaramella)
ONE SIDE OF THE GREENWOOD MILL is running full blast. The band saws do excellent work, and everything is satisfactory. The electric light is a great improvement, but can only be appreciated after having groped around machinery for some time in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. All places in which the company has an interest are illuminated with electricity, and consequently the town derives a great benefit therefrom. When will Mendocino wake up from her lethargy and pull up abreast with the times?
(Mendocino Beacon, Jan. 3, 1891)
ANYBODY KNOW SHADOW’S NUMBER?
Dear AVA,
I used to live in Albion as a bratty run-away and I was befriended by Dory Dan and Shadow. They were wonderful and I had no idea they were still in the area until I read about Dan's death.
I moved to Fort Bragg about three years ago with my husband who had had Asberger’s (ASD) and was not at all social. Then he got cancer and passed last January. I want to get back in touch with Shadow. I’m not sure if that’s the correct spelling. Marco McLean wrote the piece and I looked in the phone book and found a number for him but it just rings, no voicemail or anything.
I would be very appreciative if someone could give me Shadow’s or Marco’s number or if they’d give her my phone number and asked her to call me.
My name is Diana Barrett and my number is 530-554-0220. I am grateful in advance for any kindness.
Diana Barrett
Fort Bragg
PS. Great newspaper, keep up the good work!
CATCH OF THE DAY, January 2, 2021
ROBERTO BALANDRAN, Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI, no license, probation revocation.
KARL BARTH, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
TRACI HERNANDEZ, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
SHANE JONES, Kelseyville/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
DENISE SCHRADE, Nice/Ukiah. DUI.
ROMAN SOTO, Manchester. DUI, probation revocation.
AMANDA STOCKTON, Ukiah. Domestic battery.
RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS
Editor,
Am I a voice crying in the Berkeley desert, or do other places also have a law that if a neighbor takes over your property long enough it becomes his?
I have owned my home for 40 years. However, when having my daughter 30 years ago a contractor took the little house to my south and pushed it forward and spread it out like a cake without a pan and put a second story on it, taking my light (who cares about artists?), my view, and sense of space and my land! The city advised that they would do nothing but if I had $20,000 to sue him I would win! Since I was going through a divorce with an infant and three teens, friends advised against borrowing to do this especially since my thyroid had shut down entirely which took 15 months to diagnose. I accepted it, nice neighbors, pick your battles, etc.
Twelve years ago a new neighbor! I was under my house and he said I was actually on his priority now. I didn't respond and foolishly let it go. There have been two or more features he's put in to narrow the space (what was left of it) between the houses. Now after cutting ruefully my magnolia, he claims he's going to do more, just not now. He has a tag number but the city does not say what it’s for either. Another neighbor claims it will be a drainage ditch under my windows, deck and nose as it runs the whole side of the property.
A real estate lawyer says he cannot help. No survey, no sharing of info of my house, and in the slide zone it would cost $10,000 for a survey. Is there a genius with an answer? A pro bono angel?
After teaching art for over 30 years part-time and raising four kids alone on SSI which pays $879 a month, after each assault on my property I complained with appropriate paperwork but the city let it go. How can a city penalize a senior with extensive learning disabilities as well as health problems who is still grappling with the death of her son at age 43?
I have attempted a move, but a condo to get near the beach and be close to home does not replace my extensive bay view and space for my art and garden. I will not go into all the control issues this man has but I feel like I am being attacked by predatory wasps and the city sits back counting additional revenue. I still pay all my taxes on all that has been swiped. I am so burnt out and it seems you are my last hope for reaching any wisdom with kindness since I am unable to use the Internet or any digital media.
Too many sleepless nights to be any more coherent, sorry.
Sincerely,
Susan Knopka
Berkeley
PS. The house is paid off. I won't touch it with any money or take out any programs for the cost of moving. All my savings was stolen eight years ago from a safe. To move I would incur sellers costs, taxes and other hidden costs. And I would need a car plus insurance, gas, special moving crates and over $1000 for the many art pieces, canvases and paper. Plus a moving van and movers. There would also be an SSI transfer or reapplication plus all the myriad of low income programs to register for such as utilities and phone.
CALIFORNIA AS A RELIGION
Impressionism, which is associated with the French school of painting, also had a California presence. While it is the 1874 group of Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Degas that we think of first, by the 1920’s a group had formed in the United States, and especially Southern California, that practiced what was becoming known as “plein air painting”.
For both groups it was all about capturing light; registering the sometimes fleeting images of color that nature produces in abundance, in a single session. Rejecting the current “academic” style of making a painting over days, weeks, or months this new style favored painting outdoors, in nature, using a more scientific sense of color. It seemed they were just trying to capture an impression, one critic noted, and the term Impressionism stuck.
In order to get a sense of vibrant color, the artists had picked up on a scientific paper published in 1839 by Eugene Chevreul which explained that the controlled juxtaposition of color was more important than the color itself. This was an idea born in the study of the optics of the eye. It has more to do with how our mind interprets what we see than just trying to reproduce what is there.
Chevreul wrote that “…the apparent intensity of color does not depend as much on the inherent pigmentation…as it does on the hue of the neighboring color” and that “The greater the difference between the colors, the more they mutually beautify each other; and inversely, the less the difference there is, the more they will tend to injure one another.”
If a painter were to paint an object in strong yellow light he should paint it’s cast shadow in purple, the opposite color of yellow. “Even though the natural color of that shadow is not purple, the contrast of yellow and purple is the strongest contrast and the effect would be true” wrote Chevreul. Not only would it be true, it would be vivid.
By the 1880’s Van Gogh had almost abandoned the capture of images and devoted his paintings to what he thought was the more important role of exploring the emotional power of color itself.
The California group was not as rigid in its’ thinking as the Europeans, yet they painted in an evolving style that was strongly influenced by their counterparts in France. Between 1890 and 1930 these artists captured the natural landscape and rural lifestyle of California and many of their works can be seen at the Irvine Museum in Irvine, California which owns the largest collection of California Impressionist paintings in the world.
When one of these artists was asked about his religion he smiled and said, “My religion? My religion is California.”
SIERRA, NOT SIERRAS
Mark Twain would be referring to creative spelling of words, not the misrepresentation of a region as something plural. It's the Sierra not the Sierras, like the Pacific not the Pacifics.
The definitive explanation -
"The Spanish word sierra means ‘range of mountains,’ and is usually found in combination with other words, such as Sierra Blanca (White Range), Sierra Madre (Mother Range, or Central Range), and Nevada (Snowy Range). Occasionally las sierras is used to designate a group of mountain ranges or ridges. In the Spanish narratives of exploration una sierra nevada is frequently found written without capital initials, referring simply to a snow-covered range of mountains. It was in this that our own Sierra Nevada was first designated. Early in the nineteenth century it was sometimes called the California Range by American explorers, but gradually the Spanish phrase prevailed, and after a while it became a specific name and took its place on all maps. The Sierra Nevada is distinctly a unit, both geographically and topographically, and is well described as "una sierra nevada." Strictly speaking, therefore, we should never say ‘Sierras,’ or ‘High Sierras,’ or ‘Sierra Nevadas’ in referring to it. Nevertheless, these forms are so frequently found in the very best works of literature and science that it would perhaps be pedantic to deny their admissibility. It becomes, therefore, a matter of preference, and for our part we rather like to keep in mind the unity of our great range by calling it simply ‘The Sierra’ or ‘The Sierra Nevada.’
Having thus promised not to look askance at ‘Sierras,’ we may perhaps be spared the pain of hearing ‘Sierra Nevada Mountains.’ Surely one does not say ‘Loch Katrine Lake,’ ‘Rio Grande River,’ or ‘Saint San Francisco.’
[This note by Francis Farquhar, the authority on Sierra place names, first appeared in the Bulletin (Sierra Club) in 1928. Largely owing to his editorial effort, the name ‘Sierras’ is even less admissible now than it was then. Some speakers and writers have gone farther than Farquhar would wish: they drop the terminal s all right, but, forgetting the unity of the range, they consider the name to be plural, e.g., ‘The Sierra are…’ The name ‘Sierras’ is still stuck to by a few recalcitrants who probably concluded that logic has nothing to do with the acceptance place names, and who could cite, in accepted nomenclature, many redundancies such as Little Chico Creek (Little Little Creek).
We cannot argue logically with persons who deprecate logic; nevertheless, we can call them names. So we aver that the man who will say ‘Sierras’ will also say ‘Frisco,’ and is probably on a par with the printer who would letter-space lower case type. Such a printer, said Goudy, would steal sheep.]
Excerpt from the 1947 Sierra Club Bulletin. ed. David Brower "
(via David Gurney)
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
Here’s a prediction for you: Collapse of the Internet Culture. The internet was a great thing when it first came along. Now, it’s turned into a sewer and shaming prison and grand person erasure device. Beyond that, it is The Internet which allows people to not go into school or the office or the store or to meet up with other people. Without the Net, we’d all have to do those real-people-oriented things again. In other words, we would become human again. The internet is sucking the life out of humanity. It will either continue to do so until nothing of us remains, or the damn thing will be shoved back into its cage for bad behavior and be taught how to serve us humanely.
GET THE MONEY WHERE IT’S NEEDED
Editor,
“Most expected to save, not spend, the $600” hit the nail on the head. Handing money to people who have remained fully employed is a callous waste of money that won’t even stimulate the economy.
Politically, though, it must be a better calculation to please everyone rather than only help the smaller numbers who’ve really been hurt by COVID. Most disgraceful is how hybrid unemployed workers (whose incomes were mostly 1099 but who also made a small amount as employees) were sold out again.
Ever since April, thousands of these workers have been forced into tiny unemployment awards as low as $40 to $60 a week when they might have gotten as much as $450/week if they were allowed to apply for pandemic unemployment assistance like other contractors. Many couldn’t even qualify for the summer’s extra $300 benefit because their unemployment was less than $100.
Instead of Democrats fixing this, as they have been promising for nine months, workers get a miserly extra $100-a-week consolation prize.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Democrats are making headlines pushing for $2,000 for all! That money should be going where it’s needed — the unemployed, the underemployed and our many struggling small businesses.
Leonard Levy
San Rafael
THE VERSATILE INTERROBANG.
"There is a part of Mount Everest known as the Rainbow Valley. It is named not because there are rainbows there, but because of the brightly-colored jackets on the frozen corpses that litter it."
The recording of last night's (2021-01-01) Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on KNYO-LP Fort Bragg is right here: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0417
Further, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering the show together. Such as:
Restoration. What a beautiful color. In the very early 1980s I paid an extra $20 at Earl Scheib on Arden Way ($79.95 instead of $59.95) for that special color paint on my third-or-fourth-hand Rambler. (You can see one like it by searching for aqua 1963 Rambler Classic.) When that car died utterly, every part of the motor and drivetrain and brakes and all hopeless, it still looked like a gem, and the neighbor bought it from me just to leave it in his barn and sit in it with his wife. True story. https://boingboing.net/2020/12/31/amazing-restoration-of-a-soviet-era-motorcycle.html
Enhance. https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2020/12/labourers-in-victorian-england-1901.html
And a shoebox of old photographs. I have questions about some of them. The double-exposure with the noose, for example. It used to be that every thrift store had a box of random families' old photographs all mixed up together because people would die with no family and the estate sale people wouldn't want to throw them away. For many reasons, I'm sure you can think of a few, that resource has dried up, and it's a shame, because there are all sorts of creative uses for old photos (see Trachtenberg Family Players). I had one for a long time that I remember getting for 15 cents, a professional photo of a pretty, young woman of about a hundred years ago now. It said in pen, "Delia, love, Glady." Remind me to tell you sometime the incredible story of the headstone of Elizabeth Vivian. https://flashbak.com/the-shoebox-negatives-joan-ruppert-found-photos-435623/
PS. If you want me to read on the radio something that you've written, just email it to me and that's what I'll do on the very next Memo of the Air. That's what I'm here for.
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
MIKE KOEPF'S CUT-AND-PASTE LIBEL via Wikipedia of Phil Giraldi is answered below by Jeff Blankfort.
Mike Koepf:
Philip Giraldi — All below is available on Wikipedia for anyone favoring journalistic curiosity.
Noah Pollak wrote in Commentary magazine in August 2008: “In Giraldi’s world, scratching the surface of almost any event exposes the sinister machinations of international Jewry.” He has been accused by Max Boot in The Washington Post of using the term “neocon” as a cover word for Jews. Giraldi has been criticized for Holocaust denial, as well as antisemitism. He has written: “The so-called holocaust was an historical event that took place in Europe seventy-five years ago. It has an established but very debatable narrative that pretty much has been contrived over the past fifty years for political reasons.
The imposed holocaust narrative is full of holes and contradictions in terms of who was killed and how, but it is impossible for genuine academics to critique it if they want to stay employed.” In September 2017, Valerie Plame encountered much criticism on Twitter when she retweeted Giraldi’s Unz Review column “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” and it was reported she had retweeted his previous 2014 column “Why I Dislike Israel” among other articles he has written making claims about Jewish influence in American foreign policy. In the article, Giraldi asserted American Jews pushed the United States into war with Iraq, were fueling a war machine against Iran; had a “dual loyalty” to Israel; and controlled U.S. media. Giraldi said American Jews should not be put “into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted.”
Jeff Blankfort:
Phil Giraldi, a former CIA case officer for over a quarter of a century, is one of the very few journalists who has dared to write the truth about the Israel Lobby in the US and its pernicious influence on our political processes at every level, from the White House, through Congress and state legislatures down to those elected to run America’s largest cities. (Thanks to the power of the Israel Lobby and disregarding the 1st Amendment, 28 states have made boycotting of Israel by businesses in those states against the law, including California where only one member of both the state assembly and the senate had the guts to vote against it. Only the Israeli and US Jewish press reported it. More evidence that there are few publications, online or print, that are willing to run articles that call attention to Jewish political power.
It is a subject which is considered taboo in the US media that is also under the thumb of the same pro-Israel interests which, as the late Alexander Cockburn pointed out at his last Mendocino appearance in Fort Bragg, “is observable.” And yes, Alexander was branded an “anti-Semite,” long before that for shamelessly taking the side of the Palestinians.
For the curious, the Noah Pollack item cited above, was identified in 2010 as the Executive Director of the Emergency Committee for Israel <http://www.committeeforisrael.com/> (ECI) that, as another alternative media journalist, Jim Loeb, wrote was “based out of the same office as the old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq <http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Committee_for_the_Liberation_of_Iraq> (CLI), suggesting that, Yes, Virginia, the same people who led the march to war in Iraq are behind the new Emergency Committee,” These were the same neocons that Giraldi has written about and who Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their bestselling book, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2007) blamed for pushing the US into the war on Iraq, as I had earlier (https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/warforisrael.html).
That Pollack would write his attack on Giraldi in Commentary, is not surprising since even among the overwhelmingly Jewish neocons, it was, under Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, considered the mother ship of the neocons whose names became familiar to the public in the run-up to the Iraq War, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Regarding Iran, the day after 9/11, a Jewish group emerged in New York, calling itself the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It had nothing to do with either but rather became the leading Washington beltway think tank dedicated to overthrowing the government of Iran, The media, which frequently quotes its director, Mark Dubowitz, never mentions its origins or political leanings. The same goes for UANI, United Against Nuclear Iran where you’ll find Dennis Ross and former senator and Iran hawk, Joe Lieberman which seems to have a direct link to the Treasury Department’s special “anti-terrorist” line. In truth, there is almost no end to these tax-exempt hawkish pro-Israel “charities.” And they all existed pre-Trump.
Giraldi’s other accuser, Max Boot, is an interesting fellow. Russian-born, but without the slightest trace of an accent, Boot is a firm believer in the righteousness of US armed interventions across the globe, not just the more recent ones, but all of them, going back to the invasions of Mexico and the Philippines. Back in 2003, I interviewed him on my Takes on the World program on KZYX about his book on the subject, “The Savage Wars for Peace,” (Liveright, 2002), which is an extraordinary account of the crimes of US imperialism, all of which he justifies, and asked him about the bitter criticism of such interventions by former Marine General Smedley Butler who had been involved in some of the worst. Boot, whose bowels would quiver if he ever stepped on a battlefield, dismissed the general as having been naive.
As far as Giraldi’s article, “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” other than that the title should have noted that it was a dedicated minority of American Jews who arguably, do put Israel’s interests first, the allegation was true concerning Iraq and it has been true regarding US intervention in Syria and has been true regarding the sanctions and buildup towards a war on Iran, as the now departed President Obama acknowledged in his recent memoir for which he has been excoriated by the US Jewish and right wing Israeli press.
Do people not remember when, in 2011, without informing the White House, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak to a joint session of Congress and after telling our elected representatives to oppose the negotiating efforts by their president designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program, he received 29 standing ovations (when he should have been grabbed and put on the first plane back to Israel).
Such an obscenity did not go unnoticed by the courageous Israeli columnist Gideon Levy who was in Washington the following week for a speech that would go totally unreported by the media. After that performance, “This should be called the United States of Israel,” Levy told his National Press Club audience.
In the NY Times, after watching its members jump up and down like trained seals after every Netanyahu critique of Obama administration policy, its premier columnist, Tom Friedman, strayed from his usual support of Israel (but not of Netanyahu) to write that Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby,” an honest comment that predictably drew the wrath of the media’s Israel-firsters.
As for Giraldi’s alleged “holocaust denial,” I should point out that such criticism is leveled at anyone who merely questions any aspect of the “official narrative,” which makes it unique among historical events. Straying from that narrative is simply not permitted among academics or journalists and 16 European countries have made doing so a crime punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both. (As we have seen, however, the same restrictions do not apply to those making wild claims about Islam.)
Given that in less than three years after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, European Jews who had immigrated to Palestine before the war began the ethnic cleansing of another people, in this case the indigenous Palestinians, from their homes and villages, it should have come as no surprise that, coupled with remnants of Europe’s pre-war antisemitism, questions would be raised about what actually happened, how many Jews actually died from disease or starvation or were deliberately murdered. Even what I pointed out in that last sentence would subject me to the ongoing inquisition and, in fact, did, some years back, thanks to the poison pen of Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro.
As Professor Norman Finkelstein, both of whose parents survived the camps, says, the obsession by the Jewish political establishment with the Nazi Judeocide and how the supporters of Israel have used it to justify Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, led him to write a slim book exposing the operation, entitled “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,” (Verso, 2000). The result was an attack led by Israel-Firster Alan Dershowitz which got Finkelstein fired from a teaching position at DePaul University and effectively ended Finkelstein’s ability to get another job at a US university.
And by the way, there is nothing wrong or immoral about disliking Israel. I have spent several months there and, apart from having several Israeli friends plus some distant relatives, I’ll own up to sharing that opinion myself.
Mr. Blankfort. There is nothing wrong about disliking Israel. There is something wrong about disguising a diatribe that is surely just pure hate for Israel as something akin to an intellectual thought pattern. It’s not. Perhaps you know about China’s influence in this region? Perhaps you know about China’s influence in this region going back 1000 years? No country is an island. We are all interacting with each other for our own best interests. It is not in the best interest of the United States to do anything that would further the interests of the current government of Iran. The United States does a lot of things that are not in its best interest. The list is long. Turning our back on Israel does not have to be one of them.
Actually, Brian, I thought I had pulled my punches. I have spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East, my direct introduction to the subject having been the four and a half months I spent photographing the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon in the summer of 1970, and meeting Palestinians who had been booted out of their homeland to make room for, among others, some well to do cousins of mine from Beverly Hills who had never been victimized as Jews any day in their lives.
One day on that trip, I stood between two young Palestinians who had been born in what then and for centuries had been known as Palestine (even by the Zionist Jews who have since tried to erase it) and realized that I, a Jewish American with a US passport in my back pocket who also, had never been victimized by antisemitism, had more of a right to live in what is now Israel than these two young men who were born there. As I have written and said in speaking engagements since I first returned to the states, it was immoral then and remains immoral to this day.
In the summer of 1983, I returned to the region, intending to revisit Lebanon and Jordan but also to visit Israel with the intent of interviewing Israeli reservists who had refused to participate in Israel’s barbaric invasion of Lebanon the previous year or who, while opposing the war, thought, mistakenly as it turned out, they could do more by speaking against their government’s action among their fellow soldiers on the front lines. They saw more than enough of the atrocities that their buddies were committing so they, too, (there were more than 1200 in all), refused to return to the front and formed an organization, Yesh G’vul, which in Hebrew means both “there is a border” or “a line” which must not be crossed.
The tank commander, in whose home I stayed, told me that the Israeli army with its tanks, had blown holes in every building from the Israeli border to Beirut which until I made that trip myself in a taxi I thought had to be an exaggeration. It wasn’t. In Lebanon, I had more than one opportunity to see Israelis as an occupying army and the emergence of Hezbollah as a resistance movement when the Israelis whose anti-Arab racism is imbibed with their mother’s milk began treating the Shia, many of whom had welcomed them, as they treated the Palestinians, with total contempt and the desire to humiliate them by doing such things as pouring olive oil in their flour and flour in their olive oil, writing “Death to Arabs” in Englsh and Hebrew and shitting in their mosques.
I visited the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila on Beirut’s outskirts where a year earlier, following the direction of Ariel Sharon, the former general and Israel’s “defense” minister, Israeli troops stood guard while Christian Falangists slaughtered approximately 2000 Palestinians, predominantly women, children, and old men since the Palestinian fighters had left for Tunis under a US negotiated deal in which the arch war criminal Sharon who had agreed that the camps would be off limits for the Falangists and his army which not only provided food for the killers and bulldozers to help bury the bodies while lighting flares so the killing could continue through the night. And to be sure the killers wouldn’t be short of victims, Israeli soldiers guarded the entrance/exits to the camps so nobody could escape. An Israeli commission would later find Sharon guilty of allowing the massacre to occur. He should have been hung but instead, thanks to Israel’s supporters among American Jews who couldn’t wait to fill his pockets with cash when he visited the US in the massacres aftermath, he was able to recover his career and become Israel’s prime minister, a post previously held by two self-styled Jewish terrorists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
I do agree, however, that turning our back on Israel is not in our best interest as those many Palestinians (and their families) who have been shot in the back by the Israeli wehrmacht have learned.
Leonard Levy, San Rafael is correct. Too bad no one in media has seen the same, and reported it. Most people in “essential industries” are working. That is most people. Some are doing very well, and have profited from the pandemic. Most people don’t need $600, let alone $2,000. The money, maybe $2,000, maybe more, should have gone to those who actually needed it. Note to media, just because Bernie Sanders says it, doesn’t mean it’s true. And a job is better than a handout.
My dear George, aren’t you being the teensiest bit hypocritical here? Have you totally abandoned your beloved Reaganomics, and the brilliant Trickle-Down theory?
Tunnel vision causes our wars, not Israel. America is founded on a war economy. Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East. Did you know allies were ordered to avoid dropping bombs on the rail lines that fed the death camps? Death camps were fake news during the war just like Spanish Flu was fake news because of war.
Both Jews and BLM hold tunnel vision making it all about them. They are not the only ones who suffer in our world.
Until Israel’s neighbors accept their right to exist Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon will be violent places.
Until Israel learns to follow g-d and stop trusting their own power will they see what Moses promised. Look at history, Jews have been important world wide advising kings for centuries. They always land on their feet.
Such a refreshing piece by Jeff Blankfort. The views expressed are becoming more popular as American citizens are starting to wake up and ask the right questions.
I’ve known a handful of friends and classmates who were killed, injured, or otherwise broken fighting Israel’s forever-wars in the desert. Those wars certainly weren’t started for oil as the mainstream media likes to push.
And here comes Brian, darting like a rat out of the woodwork, shilling so hard for more wealth and lives to be sacrificed for the Zionist ambition. Don’t worry Brian, your neocon buddies haven’t “turned their back” on Israel. Hell they just scored another cool $500 billion + for Israelis while Americans might get another few weeks unemployment and a few hundred shekels. Mr Blankfort’s article only scratches the surface and leads to many more questions, e.g. why do we fund a border wall for Israel when media and politicians tell us doing such on our own border would be racist?
Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
No more American blood spilled in wars for Israel.
Well well well, what have we here: I’ll be danged If it isn’t our old anti-Semite correspondent, Mr. Kittle, masquerading as a “Guest.” How ya been, Pat? Still an avid AVA reader, I see. But weren’t you banned from this page for some of your more acidic views?
There’s a saying that the flak always gets heavy when you’re over the target. Ad hominem attacks and deflection don’t address anything I or Mr Blankfort wrote. Those old tactics of the Zionist shill are losing effect, and will only hurt your credibility further. Reply and address the points if you wish, but I don’t think either you or mr k are really willing to have this discussion
There’s no such thing as “having a discussion” with a fanatic like you Kittle — and let’s leave Blankfort out of it for the nonce — I’ve told you before that your source, Wikipidea, is not trustworthy, on the plain evidence that they can’t even get a simple thing like the mighty AVA down correctly. Still, you insist, in your homicidal zeal that it is proof-positive that the Jews master-minded the 911 attacks. You are a nutcase, Kittle, and that’s why you were banned. My only point in replying to you today is to alert the readership that you’ve snuck back onto the comment page in the guise of a “Guest.”
Stop hitting yourself. Truth is there will be no discussion because you’d rather cut off your nose to spite your face.
This Kittle character sure has rustled your jimmies. Why do you offer him so much of your precious little real estate? Rent-free at that!
All that’s missing is the sideways smily-face signature, :-).
Not even close to the past writing style of the person you reference, Mr. McEwen..
I’ll bet you $25 that it is Kittle. Let’s wait and see how things shake out, and if I’m correct, you owe me a year’s subscription to this site — if not, I’ll pay your subscription for a year. Deal?
I don’t owe you the time of day. In my opinion you credit your supposed opponent as having far more cleverness than he has ever demonstrated here.
A euphemism for yardbird droppings springs to mind…
Regarding your assumption regarding the identity of “Guest”, McEwen?
Christ on a crutch, Reading, that’s really lame! Is your reasoning as crippled as your soul?
You are lameness personified, McEwen. Don’t you have a toilet to clean?
And, you have yet to provide any justification, or evidence, whatever for your continuing assertion that Kittle and “Guest” are one and the same. As usual, you wander off onto dead-end trails, perhaps explaining why you wound up in Mendo.
Well let’s see. My original post attributed quotes to Wikipedia. However, the AVA’s anti-Semitic ghost-eraser took care of that. What is telling here is that in the entire history of this little newspaper there have been consistent attacks on Israel, a Jewish state, and quite often—always obliquely—Jews themselves up to and including publishing one of the worst anti-Semitic cartoons ever, which was internationally condemned by reputable journalists. Has there been any balance here? Nope. Anything good about the most advanced country in the Middle East. The Jewish people themselves? Nope. Anything bad about the Holocaust? Nope again. No country is perfect. That includes Israel; that includes mine. However, in this newspaper the term “Zionist” has been reduced to a pejorative akin to the German word “Juden” in the vernacular of fascist Germany, 1933. PS. Alt-progressive, anti-Israeli Jews, let this be a warning to you. There were Marxist Jews in the Weimar republic, who detested Zionism too. And what was gained by that? A one-way ticket on a cattle car.
Michael Koepf Awarded: “Zionist of the year, 2019,” by Bruce Anderson. I’ll take mine over his: “Anti-Semitic useful fool.”
If any of what you say were true, why would the AVA ban Pat Kittle — the fellow who relentlessly blamed Israel for the 911 attacks, citing the same source as you, Wikpedia? You and Kittle seem to be two sides of the same extremist coin, both fanatics.
Both ways Bruce. But ,see below for a peek into his dark closet.
The term is ‘useful idiot.’ You’re at least half qualified.
The term, Juden, as you well know, Mr. K.oepf, did not (and still does not, in itself) relate to taking over someone else’s land and ethnically cleansing them as does Zionism, and that was before 1967 when the relatively infant state found itself economically stagnant with more Jews leaving Israel than those making aliyah, and American Jews electing to take their summer vacations in Rome, Paris, Greece, etc,. rather than the beaches of Tel Aviv. The wave of enthusiasm from American Jews at the birth of the state had ebbed. What was to be done?
To do what have other governments faced with a crisis have done: start a war. At the time, the late General Matti Peled, a friend of mine, believe it or not, who was in large of logistics in that war, argued that it was a war of choice and later that came to be the verdict of Israel’s military elite but too late to make a difference.
But in the US cities with significant Jewish communities, where the fear of another holocaust, this one to be perpetrated by Egypt, had Jews frightened stiff, the speed and ease in which Israel defeated it enemies and grabbed huge chunks of their territories created such a sense of triumphalism that one might have thought that the Jews of Los Angeles, where I was at the time, had done the fighting themselves.
Although I had grown up during World War Two and was aware as anyone of what the Nazis had done to Europe’s Jews and already had met survivors, I had not transferred by sentiments for the survivors to Israel, namely because of the stories that I heard from Jews who had immigrated to Israel from the US early on but had left because of their opposition to the treatment of the 150 thousand Palestinians who had remained. And their stories were consistent. Whenever a Palestinian or group of Palestinians who had been forced from their homes would launch an attack on a Jewish town or settlement–which was understandable in retrospect–the Palestinians inside Israel, living under military rule, would be subjected to what these visiting Israelis, called a “pogrom,” a term which before and since I have always associated with the treatment of the Jews in Czarist Russia.
In any case, what they told us made an impression on me as well as my parents who were never Zionists but had supported a bi-national state and because of my parents’ involvement in the Jewish community, my they had hosted the head of the Haganah, Moshe Sneh, and Israel’s first representative to the UN, Reuven Daphne.
Over the years, as they watched Israel’s transgressions increase, both became anti-Zionists which cost them a number of their close friends who were what are today called PEPS (Progressive Except for Palestine). That was a downside. But, as my father explained it, he didn’t keep a double set of books when it came to human rights and my mother was the same.
I don’t own hip boots and this thread is getting deep!
Everyone is an expert.
The people of the book have returned to their land three times.
Most of the book as we know it today was consolidated after return from Babylon.
Prophecy of Moses, Baalam, Samual, David, and many others continues to be fulfilled.
“I will bless those who bless you I will curse those who curse you”
Name another people on earth who compare in history
Name another people singled out for persecution as often
Name another people who have reconstructed a nation destroyed.
The Souix have clear legal title to Black Hills granted by Act of Congress yet they starve at Pine Ridge while we cry about Middle East injustice.
One of the things, perhaps the most significant, that the US and Israel have in common, is that the founders of both countries shamelessly stole the land from the indigenous peoples who had long inhabited it and neither they nor their descendants recognize what they had done was a crime.
One doesn’t have to as far as the Sioux to recognize the crimes against Native Americans. The settlers in California, beginning with the Spanish missions followed by Europeans devastated the Indian populations and our own Mendocino County, was one of the worst. Yet try and find a word about that history taught in any of our county’s schools which the present generation of predominantly Pomo students attend.
As for “another people who recreated a nation destroyed,” you assume, without a scintilla of proof that the white European Ashkenazi who look nothing like and are not related to the actual Middle Eastern or Mizrachi Jews who are indigenous to the region, re-established in what was known for a far longer time as Palestine or Falastina, a state with which they had no known proven connection besides a belief based on a book that they believe their ancestors wrote.
As for measuring which peoples have suffered the most, which certain Jewish organizations have made into a profitable industry, we really only know or think about those who are in a position to blow their own horn. The ten million dead Congolese, workers in the rubber plantations under Belgium’s King Leopold in the latter part of the 19th century suffered far more deaths and far greater cruelties than did Jews under the Nazis and for a longer time, but who ever hears or reads about them? Approximately five and a half million more died there from war, disease, and starvation, in the last century but how many among us know or care to know about them?
In California’s schools, student curriculums must include The Letters of Anne Frank and Night by Eli Wiesel whereas there are no comparable obligations to teach any book that deals with the four centuries of American slavery or the genocide against Native Americans.
Is it more important that American school children learn more about Anne Frank than Emmet Till? A recent US history text that covers our history from 1865 to the present has an eight page section on the Nazi holocaust. What is it doing there? Why do we have holocaust museums, from the huge one in Washington, to smaller ones across the country when the crimes they depict occurred in Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc,? It is certainly not because Americans are a humane people, cognizant and caring about other people’s suffering. Our wars have proved that.
It is only recently that a museum was built on the National Mall honoring Black history and the one commemorating Native Americans focuses on their culture, surely making the visitor wonder what happened to them which is not a problem in the holocaust museums. Because unlike the latter, the perpetrators of crimes against Native Americans and the slave holders were red-blooded, God-fearing Americans, and we are the shining example for the rest of the world to follow. We never ever say we are sorry. Israel is just a smaller version of what we are and what we’ve done.
Israel did not break 400 treaties
RE: CLOSED SESSION ITEM 9C
Dick Selzer’s objections to the purchase of the Best Western for the homeless facility next door to his office building can be heard at the September 22, 2020 BoS meeting during public expression.
http://mendocino.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=214
Mr. Selzer is a very influential voice in and around the Ukiah community. The County should do what’s right. Putting the homeless next to his office building without proper notice or conducting public hearings was just plain wrong. I support the county’s purchase of his office building.
Marmon
Measure B money will pay for the facility eventually. It can be converted into a PHF.
Marmon
A satellite view of the future Schraeder complex. RCS, Best Western, Selzer PHF, and the new CRT center vacant lot.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1465935,-123.1985553,203m/data=!3m1!1e3
Marmon
here’s a better view of the 4 properties. The one on the lower right is RCS now.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1465691,-123.1978532,101m/data=!3m1!1e3
Marmon
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE
The fascist scum will never give up. And, the neoliberals take it all, lying down, like the cowardly–wealth-serving–scum they are. When will the people of this country ever awaken to the fascist police state level to which they have sunk? It’s just about–maybe already–too late. A people that stupid deserve whatever bad things happen to them as they doze, complacent as they serve their wealthy masters.
I believe it was the great H.L. Mencken who wrote, “Never underestimate the stupidity of the American people.” I may not be quoting him verbatim, but close enough and spot on for the idiocy of these times.
The exact quote was “the taste of the American people,” but I prefer “the intelligence” but all of them apply.
I read a lot of history. One theme recurs. The winners of a war take what they want, and the losers are left with whatever the winners grant them.
Since 1948, the Palestinians have participated in four wars and seven military operations against Israel, per Wikipedia. With the exception of gaining control of the Gaza Strip, these have all been failures. To summarize the box score, the Palestinians have been defeated in 10 out of 11 military actions against Israel.
Given these historical facts, I am amazed at the history-blind audacity of some of your correspondents when they state that Israel must not object to a Palestinian nation. Reduced to its basics, your correspondents’ demand that the Israelis supply a nation to a people who have sworn to wipe out every Jew on earth. Reread that last sentence, and tell me how it makes the least bit of rational sense.
Because, George, the Palestinians were there first and the Israelis have agreed to a two-state solution also supported by roughly half of Israelis (the non-fascist half) as demonstrated in every Israeli election.
Oh, got it. Half of all Israeli citizens are fascists. Gee. I guess their predecessors had no real reason to leave Germany, Mr. finally-out-of-the-closet when it comes to the Jewish people. I knew you were hiding in their somewhere.
History 101, very short version:
3500 BC. Sumarians and Akkadians up first followed by Canaanites and Jews. Then we’ve got Romans, Jews and Christians. Islamic Arabs show up around 900 AD to enslave what’s left of the Jewish and Christian survivors. Palestinians descend from Arabs, and Arabic is the language that Palestinians speak.
Come on professor, give us the modern lesson! Why do we send Americans to die in the desert? Why do we send billions of dollars in aid to Israel every year? I’ve got more questions, but I’ll take the answers to these for now!
The Palestinians are not a race they are a political people in a melting pot. There is no Palestinian DNA just like there is no American DNA. Jews can prove their history in that land predates Rome and the religion Muhammad began. Jews and Muslims lived together in peace for centuries.
The nation Israel is a slap in the face to modern Muslim teachings that Jerusalem was of great importance early in their history.
Palestinians are the immigrants that collected in the land, never a nation of their own. Israel attempts to allow them self government but the few who launch rockets from the middle of civilian populations destroy the peace.
I am not sure where you get your information but the white Ashkenazi Jews who founded political Zionism and the state of Israel have no DNA that connects them to what for centuries was known by the entire world and by the Zionists themselves, until 1948, as Palestine.
They are physically and genotypically different from the Mizrachi or Middle Eastern Jews who had lived in the region for centuries, more times on good terms with their Muslim Arab neighbors than not. Before Israel in whose creation they were neither involved nor consulted they were simply Arab Jews and physically indistinguishable from their Muslim and Christian neighbors.
One of the tragedies of Zionism was that it led to end end of Jewish communities in the Arab Middle East, not immediately but largely after a Mossad ring in Egypt made up of Egyptian Jews was busted which made Jews in the other Arab countries targets for suspicion. But not in every one. In Morocco, the king urged the Jews to stay and in Algeria in December 1970, I visited a Jewish village, Beni-Yeni whose inhabitants had been making beautiful coral and silver jewelry for centuries.
There’s also no specifically Jewish DNA, no Jjewish” gene. It’s likely there never was, any claims of the zionists notwithstanding. They have been interbreeding with other nationalities (and religions) since biblical times, and they still do.
Palestinians may well have descended from the Jewish farmers and herders who were allowed to remain where they were by the conquering Muslims–after they agreed to convert to Islam–when the Muslims ran the upper classes, very Hellenized Jews, out (Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). That would make Palestinians the more realistic choice as the rightful owners of the former Palestine, rather than a bunch of northern Eurasian invaders.
In my opinion, the survivors of the Holocaust should have been given control of Germany after the war. The Germans would have deserved that outcome, unlike the Palestinians.
Oh, got it. Half of all Israeli citizens are fascists. Gee. I guess their predecessors had no real reason to leave Germany, Mr. finally-out-of-the-closet when it comes to the Jewish people. I knew you were hiding in their somewhere.
History 101, very short version:
3500 BC. Samarians and Akkadians up first followed by Canaanites and Jews. Then we’ve got Romans, Jews and Christians. Islamic Arabs show up around 900 AD to enslave what’s left of the Jewish and Christian survivors. Palestinians descend from Arabs, and Arabic is the language that Palestinians speak. t of the year, 2019,” by Bruce Anderson. I’ll take mine over his: “Anti-Semitic useful fool.”
Let’s remove funding and military support from the United States. Could Israel stand on its own given those circumstances? Would they still put the boot to the Palestinians and destabilize neighbors? I can tell you the they will not continue to “win” military engagements without their US military golem. Threatened with loss of United States support they would probably resort to large scale terror a la nine eleven, or maybe the sampson option.
Of course It’d be cool if Israel just decided to play nice with the neighbors.
The center of conflict in the Middle East is between Muslim sects, and always has been. Sure, Muslims find Israel unacceptable, but conflicts involving Israel are a sideshow. Trump has done a good job of demonstrating that, whether he intended to or not. Don’t expect any reintroduction of the Iranian nuclear deal without a lot of coordinated Sunni Muslim opposition in concert with Israel. Turkey might be the coy Sunni exception. Turkey appears to want to return to the past as the primary power in the ME.
Gimme a break, George. Get your head out of the lunatic fringe slop pot.
Sure, there has always been sectarian conflict in the Middle East. While significant, I wouldn’t call these struggles central to the current situation. Shia-Sunni clashes will have less importance going into the future-see Arab spring. But it is undeniable that Israel has leveraged and stoked sectarian violence to cruel effect since the 40s. Consider their manipulation of the US military golem into middle eastern action-see Iraqi freedom/enduring freedom. Destabilizing to the extreme. Biden or Harris will likely be eager to dive back into Syria again or maybe even Iran. When that cracks off the mainstream media will have a good cover story for the masses to eat up, I’m sure. It’s not much of a surprise to see turkey and Israel cozying up against Iran. The honeymoon probably won’t last long.
Undeniable, Really? Look at history. The Christian Crusaders managed to hang on for two hundred years for the single reason that the Muslims were occupied fighting themselves. Then a Muslim unifier called Saladin came along and easily defeated the Christians. Muslims are now, and have been, trying to replicate the same today against Israel. So far no luck, and their competition for Muslim dominance has become so intense that survival has required a Sunni alliance with the “unacceptable” non-Muslim Israel. Increased Muslim competition for dominance has more to do with the billions of dollars of oil money being available to wage war, than the presence of Israel. Trump is right, they, meaning Muslims in the ME, have been fighting among themselves for a long time, a very long time. Long before there were Muslims, or Jews first came to Israel during the time of the Pharaohs. So please spare me the narrative that Israel has stoked violence. If they have, it would be like they brought fire to Hell. And Hell is, and has been a very good description of the Middle East.
Oops, sorry! I was taking you seriously for a moment, but then you turned into an unpaid advertisement for Zion Don and his boss kushner.
Anyone who challenges the “Israel created conflict in the ME” narrative must be a Zionist. More like, anyone who blames Israel for conflict in the ME is likely anti-Semitic, or ignorant, or blind of history.
I don’t know anyone from the ME. So there is much more that I don’t know than I know. My view is the view of someone who would like the US to disengage, without Iran having the bomb. I like what Trump has done there. Hard to believe, or to say, but he seems to have more wisdom than the last presidents in my memory, and hopefully not the next one.
More spiritual pure musical nectar…
http://ajabshahar.com/featuredcontent/
There is an obvious disconnect when someone who claims to “read a lot of history” then immediately turns to Wikipedia as a source which depending on the subject can either be very reliable or, as in the case of such controversial and weighted subjects, little more than pure propaganda. That’s is as much a case with Wikipedia’s information on the Israel-Palestine conflict as it is with that reported by the US media. The latter tends to ignore news items that rate headlines in Israel’s English editioned press and the American Jewish press but are blanked out here by the mainstream media because they would reflect badly on Israel in the eyes of most Americans who have no vested interest in what happens either to the Israelis or Palestinians.
I am not sure what Wikipedia entry provided Mr. Dorner with the information that the Palestinians participated in four wars against Israel but that sentence is simply nonsense unless he considers Israel’s bombing raids against largely defenseless Gaza, what one Israeli official described as “mowing the lawn,” as a war.
When hostilities began in 1947, no state of Israel existed. The Palestinians who participated were simply fighting for their native land against a well armed collection of Jews from all parts of the world who had been surreptitiously armed by their supporters in the US and, finally, and decisively, by Czechoslovakia, under Stalin’s orders when he still entertained hopes of wooing Israel into the Soviet camp.
The Palestinians were not involved in Israel’s 1956 invasion of Egypt nor in the 1967 war when Israel took advantage of Jordan’s weak leadership to take over the West Bank, nor in the 1973 war when Egypt and Syria attempted to take back the land Israel had occupied in 1967. In that instance, Moshe Dayan’s threat to use Israel’s nukes pushed the Nixon administration to provide a huge airlift of arms that help Israel take its chestnuts out of the fire.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with over 80,000 troops, backed by air and sea power. While there was some resistance from Syrian troops there, the PLO, never much of a fighting force, wilted as the Israeli army quickly made its way to the edge of Beirut where what remained of the Palestinian’s fighting contingents withstood a siege of 76 days until the US and UN negotiated an agreement for its fighters to leave for Tunisia after Ariel Sharon, as evil a figure to ever stain the modern political scene promised that the Palestinian civilians remaining in the country’s refugee camps would be protected from harm, a promise he quickly broke, enabling the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
As an excuse for launching the war, Menachem Begin, a proud self-proclaimed terrorist, architect of the massacre of over one hundred Palestinians in Deir Yassin, of the blowing up of the King David Hotel killing 97 people, most of whom were British soldiers and the father of the letter bomb, a number of which were sent to British officials in London, claimed that the Palestinians were firing missiles into Israel from across the Lebanese border.
It so happens that an Israeli friend who would become a well known stage director and who I had interviewed in 1983, had been stationed where Begin claimed the missiles had landed and he told me that the story was a complete fabrication. Consequently, when he came to San Francisco shortly after I returned to the US, I arranged for him to be interviewed on the Owen Spann morning show on KGO, the most popular program on the city’s AM radio.
After my friend, Sinai, had described his experience serving on the border and Begin’s lie about the shelling, Spann opened the phones to callers. One of the first, with a heavy European accent, angrily asked: “Who’s responsible for putting this communist on the air?” Even though my friend’s on air appearance had been arranged through a producer, Spann gallantly took responsibility for his presence, saying, “I am.” It would be one of his last comments as a KGO program host as he was soon replaced by an Uber Zionist, Ronn Owens, the regular emcee of Israel in the Park annual celebrations, who would host the morning show for the next four decades.
I have a letter in my files from the late Jim Eason, another popular KGO talk show host who wrote me after I attempted, without success, to get retired Israeli general, Matti Peled, (who would become my friend) on the air. Eason wrote, asking that I not make the contents public, that after he had interviewed another anti-Zionist Jew, Prof. Alfred Lillienthal, on his program, he had been subjected to such vicious attacks from pro-Israel Jewish listeners that he decided never to air the subject on his program again. We can see from the posts on this thread that the problem is still with us.
Jim Eason, boy there’s a name from the past.
How about Rodney Corcran?
“Do what you can, but behave yourself…”
Jim Eason, KGO, SF
As always,
Laz
Wow, my computer has been down a few days, now working for a few minutes, will soon be out again. What a day at the AVA Comments page!!!!!….but will move on to the weather forecast now….