Update: Watch Death in Gaza. [Thank you, The Proletariat.]

It's way past time for silence on this issue from the progressive community.

One rarely reads of the US-supported Israeli atrocities committed in Gaza and the occupied territories. I mean what's Gaza, and are Palestinians really human beings?

They are. And what's being done to the Palestinians is an obscenity, a bloody siege described in a widely-distributed pamphlet at a 2002 demonstration as a "macabre saga of violence and methodical repression (Islamic Circle of North America)". It's unclear that if the violence and repression were to be featured on broadcast TV what the reaction would be.

In Sunday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof calls for the establishment of a Truth Commission to document and investigate the human rights violations of the United States government under the Bush administration.

Kristof writes:

The first step of accountability isn’t prosecutions. Rather, we need a national Truth Commission to lead a process of soul searching and national cleansing. ... Both Barack Obama and John McCain should commit to impaneling a Truth Commission early in the next administration. This commission would issue a report to help us absorb the lessons of our failings, the better to avoid them during the next crisis.

Good idea on not prosecuting the perpetrators, as any rational accounting could sensibly hold most of us reading these words accountable. And that's not so realistic.

This video shot last year is appalling.

Footage showing Irish Noble Peace Prize recipient, Mairead Maguire getting shot by Israeli army who opened fire at peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 20, 2007, following the international conference on popular resistance (April 18-20, 2007). Maguire was shot by a rubber-coated-metal bullet in the leg. Maguire speaks after she received first aid. [Footage by Ana Nogueira]

Thousands of innocent Palestinians getting shot, imprisoned and killed is appalling.

I read Norman G. Finkelstein's preface, an angry challenge to Barack Obama, and then watched the video.

We need more, not less anger at what Israel (with American complicity) has now become, and what we have all become. What a travesty.

American progressives often fret that the Israel-militarism issue will split the Democratic Party, parting the way for radical Neocon dominance of American politics for generations.

But do we add our voices of condemnation and challange Israeli-American aggression and human rights violations, or ought we be silent?

Despite the fact that U.S. citizens are now overwhelmingly against the Iraq War, the Bush Administration is pushing through plans to develop 50 military bases and occupy Iraq indefinitely.

They want permanent war, regardless of the November presidential election in the U.S. And they want to control Iraqi airspace, arrest Iraqi citizens, and have immunity from prosecution for all military contractors.

Hey, somebody's gotta provide security for people standing in line to ride a roller-coaster in a war zone and enjoy golfing!

Get Uppity! Contact people who represent you and tell them what you think about this.  Maybe something will change. 

via mal contends

Comes up every once in a while. My girlfriend so proud of her dad talking about what she knew of her late father's service in World War II. And from both of our parents (my father was a veteran recruited by the CIA but he went to grad school instead to have me), we hear of the society-wide, shared sacrifice to defeat some pig NAZIs and fascists.

War profiteers, they were a pariah. Not like today when they are protected by the Bush DOJ.

Via Mal Contends -

Rational Americans look on with concern like passengers on the Titanic as a hare-brained, messianic president enmeshed in a neocon ideological bubble sends signals of a coming strike against Iran.

A ex-military source working in a Midwest industry in a position to observe qualitative changes in military traffic on American rails and highways notes an increase in military-related traffic like that that has preceded military excursions into Iraq twice.

The source believes a strike against Iran is coming.

But as many have noted, such a strike is lunacy.

As Joseph L. Galloway writes in McClatchy (Inexorable March Toward War With Iran?):

... The more thoughtful military and civilian advisers can rattle off a dozen reasons why an American attack on Iran at this juncture would be foolish in the extreme and risk setting the Middle East afire.

Just some of those reasons would include: