Can We Get Some Fucking Heads Rolling?

Massive incompetence on the Chalk River nuclear facility, one-billion dollars totally wasted on "e-health Ontario," war crimes in Afghanistan, the torture of Canadian citizens, RCMP murdering Robert Dziekanski and then lying about it, cynical abuse of prorogation, ass-fucking parliamentary oversight with a screwdriver, two years of top-secret dithering on a volatile Aboriginal land claims dispute in Caledonia, McGuinty's violation of First Nations' rights and abuse of power to serve mining corporations ... and now one billion dollars wasted on harper's G20 shit-fest, ego-trip, in which McGuinty DID pass a secret unconstitutional law and fascist shit-for-brains police chief Blair invented powers for himself that didn't exist, stupidly allowed vandals to riot and destroy property (as if this "justified" the billion dollars spent and doesn't, instead, make him look like a fucking incompetent idiot) and then savagely tramples Canadians' Charter of Rights and Freedoms like a jack-booted thug.

Blair should be fired. And then tossed in a jail cell with harper in one of the new prisons that fat diaper load wants to waste more of our money on.

Fuck. The shit these "conservative" mother-fuckers (and i mean that literally) expect us to swallow.

harper and mcguinty have got to go

They are authoritarian monsters and a threat to the Canadian way of life.

BIG Lawsuits (with an added reflection)

Some right-wingers, who fancy themselves as "libertarians" and "rugged individualists" always on-guard against the intrusive fantasies of the state, like to bewail things like cash settlements to Canadians who were tortured as a result of government incompetence. They believe that people like Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, and Abousfian Abdelrazik should just suck it up and shut the fuck up.

Such right-wing morons will no doubt scream and bitch about the inevitable cash payments that will be the result of the numerous class-action suits of the hundreds of Canadian citizens whose Charter Rights and Freedoms were violated to give the psychopath stephen harper is tawdry ego-trip in Toronto last weekend.

Tough shit.

If you don't want your taxes going to pay cash settlements to torture victims and people abused by the forces of the state, get your government to stop abusing people. Full stop.

And, while I'm handing out advice to you mother-fuckers, maybe you guys can dig into your wallets and pay for the one billion dollars wasted on this summit, since it's you morons who voted for that stupid turd harper and his gang of imbeciles.

Edited to Add: Of course, these same right-wing "libertarians" who don't give a damn about the state's trampling of Canadians' political, civil, and legal rights and freedoms, are the same people who tell us to fall to our knees in worship of the glorious troops who are fighting for those same rights and freedoms ... BY PROPPING UP A GOVERNMENT OF THIEVES AND PEDOPHILES IN AFGHANISTAN?!?!?!?!?

I remembered why I think those people are blithering idiots.

The Important Stuff That Happened in Toronto

No. Not the rocks through the windows and the car that the cops left out for the "Black Bloc" and the media photographers.

Here's Naomi Klein from CommonDreams on the hideous austerity package planned for us and the cowardly failure to tax the insane world banking system:

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

And here's the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's response to the authoritarian actions of our supposedly democratic government:

Reporters arrested, CCLA civil rights monitors arrested, over 500 people in detention, police unwilling to provide access to lawyers, cellphones seized, what is going on? Police will say that 4 to 7 police cars were set on fire and that there was much looting and spray painting, pop cans and rocks were thrown and more vandalism was planned at the fence or elsewhere. Is the policing proportionate to the threat?

Public Works Act indeed. Fuck you McGuinty, you loathsome piece of shit.

But What Does thwap Think About the G-20 Protests?

Well. THAT wasn't worth one-billion dollars!

Ted Rall on Political Learned Helplessness

I thought it a good summation of the disarray among the populace in both the United States and Canada - "In Dire Straits, Americans Whimper Instead":

Battered and bruised, with no apparent way out, the American electorate has plunged into a political state of learned helplessness. They've voted Democratic to punish rapacious Republicans. They've voted Republican to get rid of do-nothing Democrats. They've tried staying home on Election Day. Nothing they do helps their condition. They're flailing.

Put on your thinking caps class!

Say! Look at this! Something else from Common Dreams about the bankruptcy of traditional political choices in the USA - "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages Them":

What to make of the latest Gallup poll showing that a mere 20% of Americans like the way Congress is doing its purported job? With a Democratic majority doing a piss-poor job of many things, this seems to tell the experts that, what, 80% want those other guys, the stupid evil self-serving ones?

Like I said, time for some serious thinking.

What is the Connection Between Retrograde Values and Being a Chump?

I thought I'd ask the googlebots and porn-spammers who visit my site; Why is there such a good fit between voters who are inspired by religious delusion, homophobia, prudery, racism, and law-and-order hypocrisy, and political parties that are the political shills for corporate scum-bags who want to fleece the public?

Why is (for example) harper's "Conservative" Party of Canada so able to rely on the voters who oppose gay marriage, abortion, immigrants, and responding intelligently to the limits of the environment?

Or is it all just perception? Decent progressives will cling to the Liberal Party of Canada or the Democratic Party USA to preserve things like gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, and neither of those parties are worth a damn on economic matters either.

CSIS Chief Richard Fadden Under Sway of US Government

Richard Fadden, director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, fresh from whining about how mean everybody is to his agency of drooling idiots who torture Canadian citizens by proxy, has decided to embarrass himself further by babbling the following to the Canadian news media:

Canada's spy agency suspects that cabinet ministers in two provinces are under the control of foreign governments, CBC News has learned.

Several members of B.C. municipal governments are also under suspicion, Richard Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told CBC News in an exclusive interview.

"We're in fact a bit worried in a couple of provinces that we have an indication that there's some political figures who have developed quite an attachment to foreign countries," Fadden said.

"The individual becomes in a position to make decisions that affect the country or the province or a municipality. All of a sudden, decisions aren't taken on the basis of the public good but on the basis of another country's preoccupations."

He said the politicians and public servants see it as a long-standing relationship and have no idea they are being used.

In other words, Fadden and his gang, by looking at the public pronouncements of various politicians, has discovered that they might like other countries and maybe view them favourably. No shit sherlock. But let's read this part again:

"All of a sudden, decisions aren't taken on the basis of the public good but on the basis of another country's preoccupations."

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/22/spying-csis.html#ixzz0rhRpjnuS

Obviously, this got me thinking. The continentalist morons like Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, and now stephen harper, have all gotten Canada into the criminally useless Afghanistan quagmire, we were within a hair of getting dragged into Iraq, we sign "free trade" deals that give them preferred access to our oil and water regardless of domestic considerations, ... it all started to add up.

So I took the liberty of abducting stephen harper and having him rendered to an unspecified location where we beat the soles of his feat with a thin metal wire, all the while asking him questions about the extent of his devotion to the United States of America. Then, in a burst of inspiration, I thought to ask harper whether or not Fadden himself was a tool of a foreign power. And, while I'm not sure whether harper was just telling me what he thought i wanted to hear, but he said that Fadden was. Alarmed, I asked if Fadden was sharing secret information with the American, harper again, affirmed this. When I asked if Fadden would trade the civil liberties of Canadians to advance US security interests, again I was told yes.

I'm only using this evidence (compromised as it obviously is) to save lives.

We will be apprehending this servant to a foreign power within twenty-four hours.

stephen harper is Evil

Example Number 62,547:

Three Canadian CITIZENS, identified as "terrorist suspects" by mouth-breathing CSIS cretins during the Liberal era, tortured by the Syrian government (whereupon the aforementioned mouth-breathing CSIS cretins passed along other questions for the Syrian torturers to ask them, you know, while they were torturing them and all) ... cleared by a Canadian judicial inquiry (and by the Syrians who couldn't torture anything out of them) ... a Canadian parliamentary committee says that Canada owes them an APOLOGY, COMPENSATION, and THE CLEARING OF THEIR NAMES ....

and what does stephen harper do?

He REFUSES to apologize, compensate them, and clear their names.

INSTEAD, the sick, cowardly fuck forces them to take the Canadian government to court, and then tries to withhold evidence from them on another trumped-up argument of "national security."

Truly, a loathsome, revolting, nauseating person.

Shooting Unarmed Humanitarian Volunteers In The Head Is A Bad Thing

... and saying that doesn't make you "anti-Semitic."

How debased is our political culture that one even feels the need to say that?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

The Cheney Vase!!



It's got Darren McGavin!

Now I should start the dishes.

Parliament CHOOSES to transfer its power

That's how Eugene Forsey Liberal sees it. And while I think he's fucked-up sometimes, I agree with him on the importance of Parliament. So this is a bad deal and it's bad for our democracy.

A Sadly Plausible Argument

... about the spinelessness of harper's opposition from Democracy Under Fire.

Glenn Greenwald on Obama & Right-Wing Democrats

From: "The Democratic Party and Blanche Lincoln":

In light of all this, the next time some "conservative" Democrat such as Lincoln plays the Villain Rotation game and opposes some Good, Progressive Bill which the White House pretends to support -- but, gosh darn it, just can't get the 60 votes for -- are we going to have to endure the excuse from Obama loyalists that Obama has no leverage over Democratic members of Congress?

Arggh.

Self-Defeating Turn to Austerity

Read it and weep. From Progressive Economics Forum:

In line with a major shift in thinking at the OECD and the IMF on the most appropriate timing for “exit strategies” from fiscal stimulus, the G20 finance ministers dropped the usual call for continued stimulus through 2010 from their June 5 communique, and highlighted the need for more or less immediate fiscal consolidation. God knows what lies in store for us in Toronto.

Yes, it's worth spending over ONE BILLION DOLLARS to have this gang of shit-heads decide to blunder their way to another mega-crisis.

Forgotten Haiti

A couple of links about Haiti:

Haiti: A 'Forgotten' Country

Port-au-Prince, Haiti – It is 2 p.m. in what used to be the neighborhood of Croix des Prez in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. After the “catastrophe” of Jan. 12, it became Camp Croix des Prez, only one of the many camps in which more than 600,000 Haitians still live. Four months after the earthquake, it looks as though the destruction took place yesterday. Concrete dust, rubble, trash, half-collapsed buildings, rusted tin and tents make up the geography of Croix des Prez. It is a landscape on tilt.

&

Killing Haitians With Kindness

Some innocently ignorant Americans are sending piles of second-hand and confiscated clothing to Haitians. Thanks, but no thanks.

It’s not a bad idea to consider the probable consequences of your actions. In fact, our legal system demands it. So, North Americans engaged in this project need to understand how our economy works. The North American economy is already seamlessly woven into the Haitian economy from the production to the destruction of each garment.

Prog-Blog Liberals Don't Like Coalition????

[Don't read this. In the words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, "Never mind." Apparently some weirdos are floating the idea of an actual Liberal-NDP merger. That's crazy talk.]

It made perfect sense to me. But a number of Liberal bloggers appear to positively hate the idea. Which strikes me as perfectly absurd.

Listen people: The harpercons are terrible for this country. An international embarrassment, a national disgrace, and a threat to democracy. Much as I despise the Liberal Party of Canada, I realize that Liberal supporters are generally a better bunch of people than harpercon supporters and that this is reflected in their party's policies.

stephen harper's party commands about thirty per cent of the electorate. That isn't going to change. The NDP tends to get about 15-20 per cent of the vote. We're not going away either. The Liberals' former stronghold of Quebec goes about half for the Bloc Quebecois, eroding the base that previous Liberal majority governments. The Chretien years were an anomaly as the "conservative" vote was split between Progressive Conservatives and Reform/C.R.A.P. incarnations.

And, for the record, Chretien-Martin's brutal slashing of public welfare spending soured a lot of progressive voters, and Chretien-Martin-Dion's FAILURE on the environment pissed-off a lot of progressive green voters, and Paul "Mr. Dithers" Martin's idiotic minority government soured a lot of ordinary Canadians on the Liberal brand.

There isn't going to be any return of the Liberal hegemony for a long time to come. Quebec is gone. The right-wing isn't split. There's a Green Party leeching both Liberal and NDP votes. And your brand has out-lived its usefulness and validity. If you want to govern you need to accept reality. You will have less votes than the idiotic harpercons and you will need to build stable coalitions with the NDP.

Moscow Victory Celebration - 1945

I didn't really have anything to say today, or the time to think of anything. I've been reading about the Second World War recently (also, Montefiore's Court of the Red Tsar) and for the heck of it, I look for films of the various actors. While looking for footage of Marshall Zhukov, I saw this victory celebration snippet, and I was touched by the emotion on the faces of some of those soldiers. If ever a country had had a hard-won victory, it was the monstrous Soviet Union in 1945.

$1.1 Billion - Because Canadians are S-O-O-O-O Violent

Bull-fucking-shit. Goddamned "radical" Canadians line-up 98% to condemn a rock thrown through a department store window!

It's a fucking joke. harper's turning Toronto into a ghost-town for the G-Whatever conference. Because in his authoritarian brain, only a city of the dead is safe enough for him.

Except we're paying for it. Defeat this government. NOW!

Ignatieff Makes Sense: Coalition Possible

It's all over the "Prog-Blogs" site. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff says that a coalition is entirely legitimate, and he'll consider one after the next election. (There will be no talk of the parties merging or an electoral arrangement.)

Fine. If another election produces another harpercon minority government, the Liberals and the NDP have all the evidence they need (blatant contempt and hatred for our system of government, all-brinkmanship-all-the-time legislation, abuses of power, etc.,) that stephen harper and his gang of idiots are not fit to govern. If Canadians find going to the polls such a tiresome bother, then they ought to take comfort from the fact that a sensible Liberal-NDP coalition, representing (as it would) a majority of the electorate, will provide more political stability than the harpercons with their constant games of legislative "chicken" and their deliberate provoking of one constitutional crisis after another.

There will be some pissing and moaning from the politically illiterate supporters of the harpercons; the same old bullshit about "coups" and "Canada's elected government" and all that crap, but besides the wailing of some sub-morons on the internet and occasional incoherent rants in newspaper letters, that will be about it.

Bye-bye harper. It was unpleasant knowing you.

One of the more chilling aspects of the harpercon government's recent challenge to supremacy over the Afghan detainee documents was the repeated resort of the anti-democratic, pro-war, "conservative" crowd to babble that they would stand up for "the honour of the Canadian military" against the MPs who wanted to see the documents.

Militarism is a blight. It is one of the first slippery-steps to authoritarian dictatorship. It is antithetical to Canada's political traditions. But I read self-described "conservatives" professing just such values. (Obviously, there's been a consistent encouragement of militarist values on the part of our chicken-hawk harpercon government, to help drag our political culture down this level.)

And, what makes this even more revolting is that it's often the same anti-democratic stooges who will haul out the tired old inaccurate doggerel that we owe our freedom to the soldiers!

They'll say this while they demand that Parliament not be allowed oversight over the troops' actions in a war-zone. All the while they insist that to even question the mission the soldiers are on is treason. When Parliament DEMANDS to have oversight they call for Parliament to be resisted in the name of the honour of the Canadian military.

"I won't tell you what I do with my prisoners. It's a question of defending my honour!" It's absolutely insane. If they have any honour then they won't be afraid to account for their behaviour. If the politicians who put them in the war-zone have forced them into a dishonourable position then force those politicians to be accountable.

"Freedom" is something more than a word shouted by anti-Semitic actor-director Mel Gibson before a battle scene. "Freedom" is something more than something that "isn't free" but which comes with a video-game.

Some people need to grow-up.

Jay Currie's World (Satire)

[Disclaimer: The following is a work of satirical fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. To the author's knowledge, nobody sharing the names the characters in the story have done anything similar to the fictional events depicted therein.]

Jay Currie is a semi-articulate blogger with a passion for defending Israeli imperialism against all comers. He also takes a sadistic glee recounting the sufferings of its victims, who he describes as deranged, sadistic, psychopaths. Recently, he (along with others of his ilk) has been defending the government of Israel's attack on an unarmed humanitarian aid flotilla attempting to break its illegal blockade of Gaza, by pointing to video evidence of the members of the flotilla resisting the Israeli attack, as well as photographic evidence of unopened canisters of pepper-spray, an axe, assorted knives from the ships' kitchens, and other such laughable items. (To make things even more insane, some of the photographic evidence appears to have been created before the entire incident occurred.)

Sane people have asked themselves how Jay Currie can maintain this stupidity with a straight face so consistently, and earnestly. Back channel information shows us however, that Currie (and his brethren) is completely genuine in his sympathies. While the following episode does not provide a complete parallel with the story of Israeli commandos attacking an unarmed aid-ship, it does have enough similarities to allow us to see that extreme fearfulness, cowardice, inability to conceive and describe the concept of "proportion," and the sad inability of moronic sociopaths to grasp the extent of their anti-social stupidity, thereby making Currie's recent blogging behaviour explicable.

Last October, Jay Currie had invited his sister and her family over to have a Halloween party and go trick-or-treating. During the party, Currie's three-year-old niece (dressed as a scary but adorable witch) decided to play a trick on Currie. She hid herself in the closet in the master bedroom and when Currie opened it, she jumped out shouting "Boo!"

Currie screamed loudly with his face transfixed in extreme terror for over five-seconds. The screaming and the crazed look on her uncle's face caused the toddler great fright herself and she screamed. That was enough to send Currie over the edge, and he pushed her roughly with both hands back into the closet, intending to slam the door and run from the house to his car to parts as then undecided and unknown but far, far away.

His niece was temporarily winded by the force of the push, but did not hit the closet wall thanks to the thick barrier of clothes hanging behind her. Within seconds she was able to try to run out of the closet away from her insane uncle to the comfort of her parents' loving arms. Unfortunately, Currie interpreted her running to get past him as an attempt to attack him and mindlessly punched her in the jaw with all his strength to stop the imagined attack. Currie is by no means the strongest man in Canada, but his punch was enough to break the three-year-old's jaw.

Relations between Currie and his sister became somewhat strained after that. She and her husband (and others) ran to the bedroom to see what was the matter. When Currie saw them, he instantly began berating them for their horribly incompetent parenting, yammering about their daughter's supposedly crazed and violent behaviour. Not surprisingly, that was the last contact they had with Currie (aside from court appearances). Their sympathies for their daughter cause Currie no end of irked amusement. He occasionally refers to them as the enablers of a psychopathic demon-child to the amusement of his own family as they all eat cat-food off of ancient newspapers on the kitchen floor for breakfast.

When the Criminal Court Judge (one Justice Goldstone) did not see things Currie's way, Currie began to write numerous lengthy letters to his local newspaper, describing the nature and extent of Goldstone's irrational hatred of him. To date, he has produced 4,000 pages of prose, none of which have been published.

Currie does have his supporters though.

Marky Mark says that there are two sides to every story and that it's best we hold off judgment. He asks what Currie's detractors would have had him do? Simply lie there prone on the bedroom floor while his niece disemboweled him?

Mike Brock said something very similar before launching into a lengthy diatribe about how Halloween creates a dangerous predisposition to socialism what with its traditions of giving out candy to children for absolutely no reciprocal offerings on the children's part other than the withholding of the threat of a "trick" should no candy be forthcoming, which is very similar to the bullying extortion of communists and their kind. Brock goes on much further to add that while he would not ban Halloween what with him being a consistent libertarian and all, he would nonetheless .... and that's where I always tend to stop listening to him.

Krygnthatisu-abusureifald (or something) writes inane limericks to the effect that Currie's niece is an inbred monster who belongs in a lunatic asylum and that all of Currie's critics are pedophiles.

Currie and his three friends often go to the blog "ghost of a flea" written by a mysterious individual who says that he would like to violently kill Currie's detractors, justifying himself with essays detailing their violent tendencies. Currie, Mark, Brock and whatsisface heartily concur and make little jokes about what ridiculous people there are in the world.

Stupid Pierre Poilievre

While I'm on a roll today. Via Impolitical, I saw YouTube action of John Baird getting a deserved smack-down from the Liberal Operations Committee member Siobhan Coady. That video led me to this one from the May 25th Ethics Committee hearing. In it, Bloc Quebois committee member Carole Freeman wants to discuss what the Committee is going to do about the non-appearance of Dimitri Soudas before discussing whether to hear from John Baird.

It's then that stupid Pierre Poilievre enters into a plodding, stammering monologue about how the opposition MPs are trashing "centuries-old traditions" of ministerial responsibility.

His whole diatribe is (as usual) a complete waste of time. Because the innovation that's being introduced is the harpercon government's trashing of "centuries-old traditions" of Parliament's power to Send for Persons, papers and Records by refusing to allow departmental staff to appear before Parliamentary committees.

So, with Poilievre, what we have is an stupid obnoxious twit, dressing up anti-democratic harpercon innovations in a shabby rag of self-righteousness, delusion, incoherence and hypocrisy.

Defeat this government.

Stupid Obama

I'm calling him "stupid" because as a Harvard trained constitutional scholar and a master of understanding and appealing to his fellow human beings, Barack Obama ought to have been smart enough to know that he's destroying his presidency with each passing day by resorting to the same old, cynical, inhuman, deluded, corporatist neoliberalism and imperialism.

The people who were inspired enough to elect him were angry at bush II's shredding of Constitutional civil rights. What does Barack Obama do? Shit all over them and the Constitution by maintaining and expanding his predecessor's assaults.

The people who were inspired by him were angry at bush II's unending, illegal, corrupt, murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What does Obama do? Leave his soldiers in their permanent bases in Iraq and dramatically ratchet-up the war in Afghanistan (to prop-up the corrupt, pedophile-druglord Karzai regime).

The people who believed in him wanted genuine healthcare reform. What did Obama give them? a bloated monstrosity of legislation that tames some of the most glaring abuses of the private insurance industry while costing the tax-payers' more than single-payer would have and forcing people to buy private health insurance plans that still don't offer sufficient coverage.

People were angry about having their tax dollars going to bail-out the Wall Street crooks whose own insane greed brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. What does Obama do? Sabotages genuine attempts to reign-in Wall Street while mouthing insincere populist platitudes.

People are furious over how B.P. caused a gigantic ecological catastrophe as a result of the deregulation of the oil industry brought about by bush II's VP Dick Cheney and his top-secret negotiations with his fellow oil industry scum-bags. What is Obama doing? Continuing to mouth stupid platitudes about his "concern" while allowing B.P. to conduct the response to their catastrophe all their own way, always giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The fact that Obama faces a challenge from the even more deluded, even more intellectually bankrupt Repugnican Party isn't an excuse. There's a voting base out there that would be galvanized by the reversal of his failed politics, indeed, it's the same fucking voting base that he has to thank for becoming President of the United States of America! But Obama is all about playing the game as it has traditionally been played in order to succeed within that system, and the USA's political culture is so debased as to be incapable of recognizing when policies are toxic, insane and self-destructive. Even after everything they've done turns to shit, they still call the shots and the formal media culture grants the neo-liberal, imperialist, corporatist viewpoint its hegemonic power.

Legal Reality of Israel's Attack

From Glenn Greenwald, Craig Murray:

A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. ... The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place
on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody's territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory. ...In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions.

Where might this all lead?

There Was NO EXCUSE For Israel's Attack on Aid Flotilla

In the comments section of a news story reporting the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla trying to break the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, some anti-Arab racists posted links to YouTube videos showing the activists on board the ship Mavi Marara attacking the Israeli commandos as they drop down to the ship from helicopters.

Boo-fucking-hoo.

Survivors of the Israeli attack are accusing the Israelis of opening fire first, but the activists would have been justified for their actions anyway. Because the IDF has a history of cowardly and brutal attacks on innocent men, women, and children. Not even the most dogmatic advocate of non-violence can deny that if those people had passively allowed themselves to be boarded the results might well have been their being handcuffed, incarcerated, and tortured.

When you spend decades torturing innocent men, women, and children, people stop trusting your benevolent intentions.

The Israeli government is insisting that they had offered to house the activists in "air-conditioned tents" if they'd turned away from Gaza and turned their aid package over to the Israeli government which would distribute it for them. Besides the fact that the whole point of the exercise was to challenge Israel's illegal blockade, there was no reason to trust the Israeli government's word because they're shameless serial liars and thieves.

They steal land, they torture, they attack other countries and they lie all the damned time.

So, when a fleet of Israeli military helicopters appears above you, and armed Israeli commandos begin to descend from them on ropes, when these soldiers serve a military that brutally abuses innocent men, women, and children, what do you expect sane people to do?

The Israelis confiscated all the activists' recording devices, no doubt because the lying, cowardly fucks will be shown to have been the aggressor in this instance if the world were allowed to see them.

They have lost all right to be trusted.

Paul Craig:

Americans will never hear from the US media that Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan declared that the aid ships were carefully inspected before departure from Turkey and that there were no terrorists or arms aboard: "I want to say to the world, to the heads of state and the governments, that these boats that left from Turkey and other countries were checked in a strict way under the framework of the rules of international navigation and were only loaded with humanitarian aid."

Turkey is a US ally, a member of NATO. Turkey’s cooperation is important to American’s plan for world hegemony. Erdogan must wonder about the morality of Israel’s American protector. According to a report in antiwar.com, the Turkish government declared that “future aid ships will be dispatched with a military escort so as to prevent future Israeli attacks.” Will the CIA assassinate Erdogan or pay the Turkish military to overthrow him? Murat Mercan, head of Turkey’s foreign relations committee, said that Israel’s claim that there were terrorists aboard the aid ships was Israel’s way of covering up its crime.

Mercan declared: "Any allegation that the members of this ship is attached to al-Qaeda is a big lie because there are Israeli civilians, Israeli authorities, Israeli parliamentarians on board the ship."

Israeli Government:

"Duh, ... all we did was attack them with helicopters, ships, and commandos! Why did they become violent?

Dumb-asses.