At the risk of repeating myself, I want to put yesterday’s post in a wider context:

As spring makes demonstrating less uncomfortable, Europeans are taking to the streets by the tens of thousands to protest the austerity measures their leaders have come up with to combat the crisis induced by the 2008 financial debacle.

In a tribute to the movement that began more than a year ago in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and and is still on-going, yesterday, tens of thousands, fed up with 25% unemployment, gathered in Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol and and in 80 other cities across Spain.

In London, hundreds of protesters gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where an Occupy protest camp was removed in February, and marched peacefully through the financial district.

Smaller protests have taken place in the Portuguese capital Lisbon and in Germany’s financial centre, Frankfurt.  German demonstrations come as the 13.2 million people eligible to vote for the state legislature in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous and industrialized state, elect a new regional government.  Not all Germans agree with Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures, which have included greater freedom to fire workers, putting about one fourth in temp positions.

1,000 marchers converged on Tel Aviv to protest the cost of living, with marches also reported in other Israeli cities. Prime Minister Netanyahu has just consolidated his power by bringing the main opposition party Kadima on board, none too soon to undertake domestic reforms. Fareed Zakaria noted today that he can no longer invoke the fragility of his support to delay making peace with the Palestinians, while Iran’s Ahmedinejad noted that this failure represents a greater danger to Israel than any military attack.

The common thread in all these situations is epitomized by the oft heard criticism of the international Occupy Movement of failing to offer concrete proposals for change. But at this point popular pressure, combined with brutal government crackdowns, may make the emphasis on reform too little, too late.

If you think this is an exaggeration, Iraq Veterans Against the War are circulating an on-line petition asking the commander of the Illinois National Guard to refrain from sending in the National guard when they gather for the NATO Summit, where they will as I wrote yesterday:

“…..ceremoniously return our NATO service medals to denounce the disastrous 11-year war in Afghanistan.

The Illinois National Guard Deputy Director of Domestic Operations recently stated publicly that he stands ready to deploy National Guard troops on peaceful NATO protesters.

Send an email to Major General L. Enyart, head of the Illinois National Guard, and urge him not to activate troops against fellow veterans.”

A few minutes after I signed the petition and hit ‘send’ I received the following email:

‘Symantec Mail Security detected prohibited content in a message sent from your address. (SYM:13657982411663453303).’  

It was from the IL-ExchangeService@ng.army.mil, Recipient, MG Enyart.

When I went to look for the Vets’ email in my inbox, it had been remotely moved to the trash.

While European protesters have inherited a long tradition of solidarity, the heritage of American activists emphasizes individualism. As a result, the latter campaigned for changes to SOPA in the name of the free sharing of artistic works. It was, it seems, less motivated to prevent the Patriot Act from assimilating citizen organizing through “wire, oral and electronic communications’ to terrorism, which brings us back to the beginning of this post.

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Americans know little about French political life, and many readers may be to young to have been aware of the 1981 French Presidential election which brought the socialists to power for the first time since the the late nineteen fifties.

Francois Mitterrand’s election was greeted with the same euphoria as Francois Hollande’s, and the bouquet of red roses presented to Hollande upon his victory was a clear reference to the symbol of the Socialist Party under Mitterrand.

Although Mitterrand served two seven year terms, during which many social programs were enacted, his presidency is remembered as the caviar left.

If Francois Hollande is to garner a different reputation, he will have to continue as Mr. Normal, his chosen nickname. That shouldn’t be too difficult: until now he has zipped around Paris in a three-wheeled scooter, and is reported to never have worn smart suits, even when he was a graduate student at the posh National School of Administration.

Hollande’s three degrees – administration, politics, economy – having made him a policy wonk, they should serve him well as he launches his campaign to bring Europe back from the brink, opposing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence on austerity.

Francois Mitterrand was elected at the end of the growth period known as the Thirty Glorious Years. For sure, life for his socialist successor will not be a bed of roses.

American ignorance about the socialist movement, and the timidity with which even MSNBC hosts refer to a more than 100 year old worldwide holidy, was just brought home to me as I watched the end segment of Chris Hayes’ weekly show ‘Up’ on MSNBC.  It could be called ‘Peeping Out of the Closet’.

In a time-limited soundbite, one of Chris’s guests, whose name I regrettably did not catch, noted that events in Chicago over a hundred years ago gave rise to a holiday which has ever since been celebrated around the world – but not in the U.S., which celebrates Labor Day in September.

Pursuing the history, the only detailed article I found on the internet at www.marxists.org/glossary/events/m/a.htm#may-day, relates the Haymarket riots in Chicago, which occurred in 1896 after employers had been refusing to institute the eight-hour day demanded two years earlier by the U.S. Federation of Organized Trade and Labor.  A general strike on May 1st, 1886 in which 350,000 workers participated countrywide, turned bloody on the third day in Chicago when police opened fire.

You can read the details at the above link, but what I want to point out here is that three years later, in 1889, the Second Congress of the Socialist International voted to commemorate the Haymarket massacre, and the following year, massive demonstrations were held across Europe, calling for an eight-hour day and other benefits.  Gradually May 1st became workers rights day throughout the world – except in the United States.

While the European campaign for the eight-hour day followed the American campaign, American workers were deprived of a potent symbol of worker power. They are allowed a day off at the end of summer, in an emasculated version a holiday which, in the rest of the world, emphasizes workers‘ rights.

Better late than never, this year the Occupy Movement is putting May 1st back on the American labor calendar.  See your local Occupiers for details.

When discussing the ‘threat’ of the Islamization of Europe, it is useful to be aware of some historical facts, as well as of 20th-21st century South/North population pressures.

What is known historically as the Muslim conquest lasted from the 8th (eighth) century to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922.  By 750 A.D., successive Muslim Empires encompassed North Africa and the Saudi Arabian peninsula, whence they stretched to Northern India.  Muslims conquered India between the 13th and 16th centuries, converting part of the population from Hinduism.  (In 1947, after India became independent, part of India’s Muslim population was transferred to the new sovereign state of Pakistan.)

Between 1095 and 1291 European Catholic monarchs organized no fewer than seven Crusades in a futile attempt to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim rule.

Undeterred, Muslims conquered Eastern Europe all the way to Hungary: anyone having lived in Hungary cannot escape learning that two fateful battles against the Muslims were fought in the town of Mohacs, in Southwestern Hungary in 1526 and 1687, marking the beginning and the end of Ottoman domination of that country.

What relevance do these facts have for current efforts to prevent the Islamization of Europe?

The first is that by the time the Ottoman Empire fell, Islam had been a powerful force for more than a thousand years.  The second is that at present, after a decline of less than a century, Islam is once again a rising force, as the second largest world religion (23% of the world population versus 33% for Christianity).

Add to this South/North population pressures, and it is difficult to believe that Europe will remain a predominantly Christian region forever.  Islam is the largest religion in Africa, just across the Mediterranean, which is home to one fourth of the world’s Muslim population.

Presently, the French presidential election nears, in which immigration, mainly from Africa, is a hot issue; a Norwegian stands trial for having assassinated some 70 people in cold blood to ‘protect’ his country from multiculturalism; the United States continues to indulge in wars against Muslim countries of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, while its citizens are protected from prosecution by ‘stand your ground’ laws that facilitate racial killings, a few more statistics may possibly help forestall at least some bloodshed:

I have written elsewhere that Caucasians constitute an absolute minority on the face of the earth.  But the world Caucasian is a loaded term, but let us say for the sake of argument that it refers to populations who are neither Asian, Indian nor Black.  A website called nationsonline.org divides the world population according to continent:

For a total world population of just under 7 billion, Africa accounts for over 1 billion, Asia over 4 billion, the Americas, 900 million, Europe, 739 million and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) 35 million. That makes ‘Caucasians’ barely 2/5ths of the world’s population.

Besides being the dominant religion in the Middle East, Islam is the religion of forty percent of the population of southeast Asia, and is the fastest growing religion worldwide.

In its quest for dwindling resources the world needs to avoid waging what is surely destined to be (once again) a losing battle over God.

Yet again my apologies for not writing.  Just want o let people know that Julian Assange will start a program on RT (see your local publi ctelevision channel) this coming Tuesday, with a presentation tomorrow Monday.

That’s what I heard this morning on RT, the Russian English language news channel available in many parts of the U.S. on public stations.  Though not mentioned on either RTs website or those of CNN or the BBC, this is very big news.

According to the Brotherhood’s website /www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=29843, delegates held talks starting Monday of this week with U.S. news media and think tanks.  Today they are holding a conference on Islamist movements in power at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

The delegation will also participate in other public events at Georgetown University, the US Chamber of Commerce as well as meeting with the Egyptian community and US officials.

Meanwhile, Brotherhood leader and founder of the “Egyptian Business Development Association” (EBDA), Hassan Malik has been reassuring investors that their money will be safe in Egypt.  (On March 24 he organized an international conference ‘to support Egypt’s economy through business’).

The Brotherhood’s new Freedom and Justice Party won a plurality in the recent post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, and yesterday it announced that it would run a candidate for president, reversing a previous decision. In other news from the website:

(The Chairman of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood), ‘Dr. Morsi asserted that the FJP puts the Palestinian issue at the forefront of its interests, because it is an issue linked to the national security of Egypt and the Arab and Muslim world. He highlighted the importance of overcoming the differences between Palestinian factions, working to complete national reconciliation efforts, and ending the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip. These, he added, are key stepping stones on the way of defending Al-Aqsa Mosque and liberating the Holy City of Jerusalem.

‘Further, the FJP Chairman said that the Palestinian issue and the siege of Gaza were two key factors in sparking Egypt’s January 25 Revolution, which confirms the great importance of the Palestinian cause to the Egyptian Government and all the Egyptian people. Dr. Morsi added that this prompted FJP members in the People’s Assembly and Shura Council to push for lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip, and the visit by the Egyptian parliament’s Arab Affairs Committee to Gaza….noting the party’s support for providing the people of Gaza with electricity and diesel fuel and other necessities. Dr. Morsi also pointed that members of Egyptian People’s Assembly have engaged many parliamentary mechanisms to warn of the danger of Judaization operations carried out in the Holy City of Jerusalem.’

In other words what is probably the Muslim world’s largest and oldest organization (founded in 1928), wants to reassure the Egyptian street of its support for the Palestinian cause, while attracting economic support from the American business community.  An undertaking that will be worth watching.

The piecemeal nature of the information that reaches the American public prevents us from seeing discrete events within a larger framework, the ‘big picture’ that I have been writing about for years, and which, by the way, is now the title of Thom Hartmann’s excellent show on Russia’s English language TV channel, RT.

What is happening across the Middle East?  1) Our client governments use increasingly brutal methods to keep their people down; 2) The United States tries to prevent these governments from losing power, not mainly because we need their oil, but because a radical shift toward any kind of people power in that region puts Israel in real danger (as opposed to the boogeyman dangers it has been crying wolf about for decades: first Iraq, now Iran).  (Likewise, Russian support for Syria may be about retaining port on the Mediterranean, or a carved-in-stone policy of not supporting enemies of the state, but it is also about supporting the ‘front-line state’.)

One can only wonder why Israel is focusing so obsessively on Iran’s  putative nuclear program, when it is surrounded, if not by hostile regimes, then certainly by hostile populations.  Israel has been brutally occupying Palestinian lands for decades, acting as a veritable Goliath vis a vis a weaker Arab people, and the Arab street know that its rulers have been American puppets for decades, as part of the U.S.’s commitment to defend Israel.

As they fixate on the supposed deleterious influence of Islam, our politicians take no account of ideology. Across the Muslim world, the 99% wants more equity, while we want docile regimes run for and by the 1%.  On Israel’s southern border, it is no surprise that the Muslim Brotherhood is defying the military rulers of Egypt after seeming to support them after Mubarak’s ouster: the Brotherhood’s new generation of leaders are more interested in seeing their country break free of American domination than in checking on headscarves, while the military would be inclined to continue Mubarak’s subservience to the U.S., its weapons supplier.

As far as I have seen, no news channel has viewed the Syrian crisis in terms of the Arab world’s greater or lesser hostility toward Israel.  The Assad regime has constituted a resolute enemy on Israel’s northern border, and Israel would feel more secure if Syria were run by American puppets.

American nervousness over the composition of the rebel movement is not about whether it is democratic, but about the attitude toward Israel of those who could replace Assad.  We would like to cherry pick the political figures who will replace Assad, but we really have no way of knowing which ones will go along with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

If, like many progressive Americans, you despair of the major news channels, but are lucky enough to live either in the Northeast, D.C., California, the Chicago area, or the Carolinas, you have an alternative:  Russian Television, coyly known as ‘RT’ has been available since October on your local MIND TV channel.  Staffed with American, British and other native English speaking newscasters and hosts, and featuring progressive writers like Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, and many others, RT  broadcasts 24/7 to over 100 countries on five continents from its studios in Moscow and D.C.  It’s motto is: “Question More”.

Of course you’ll get Russian news with a Russian slant, but you can allow for that, whereas the world news covered by RT is usually absent form MSNBC or Democracy Now (though some of it may be found on Grit TV – I haven’t checked).

Today, Friday, March 23, I learned that the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, unanimously approved a new law which should make it easier to create and register political parties, requiring only 500 members instead of the 45,000 threshold that contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with the last election.  Also, major Russian energy companies have been trying to delay or opt out of the government’s ambitious privatization program ahead of an imminent power change in the Kremlin.  (You can see these stories at RT.com.)

In international news I learned that a European Security Conference is wrapping up in Moscow, at which President Medvedev called on the United States to get with it: although the U.S. is participating in this conference, Americans don’t hear about it.  Someone may mention in passing that the Russians want our guarantee that a projected missile defense shield will not be targeted at them in writing, making it sound like an unreasonable demand.  This item is particularly interesting because it illustrates the fact that other major players, such as the European Union, are increasingly united and bold in their opposition to America’s plans to rule the world.

RT reporting on the Syrian crisis tends to mirror Russia’s support of President Assad, but it also features members of the opposition.  Of late it has been highly critical of Al-Jazeera’s handling of the crisis, which tends to mirror the American position.  About a week ago RT reported with obvious glee that several anchors and at least one high-ranking manager had quit over what they considered ‘the supposedly third-world friendly’ Dubai-based channel’s pro-Americana bias.

In American news, RT reported today that a woman was injured Wednesday during a police crackdown on OWS, and that the Occupy Movement is calling for a general strike on May first.  This date will probably not mean anything to most Americans, but it has been the rest of the world’s Labor Day for decades.  The call itself is highly significant, since the last time a general strike affected large parts of the U.S. was in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike.

There is a lot of business news on RT, including what sounds like pretty detailed analysis by several of the channels young, female anchors perched on high stools in short tight skirts.  (Most of the male feature anchors tend to be older and not very attractive…)

Who would have thought that some day Americans would have to rely on Russian Television to find out what’s going on in the world – and at home:

A Marine based in Camp Pendleton, California, created a Facebook page called “Armed Forces Tea Party,” which currently has approximately 19,000 likes and slogans such as “NObama” and “One Nation, under Obama, with poverty and unemployment for all.” Authorities say he has been under the microscope since 2010.

Serendipitously, only days after it cleared Congress, President Obama signed H.R. 347, which makes it a felony to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

A feature currently being shone analyses our infatuation with guns, featuring lengthy interviews with Virginia gun owners on the occasion of that state’s lifting of the law the limits gun purchases to one a month.

In sum, all our dirty laundry is hung out to dry by the country we think we defeated twenty years ago. Worldwide.

Birgitta wrote: “Dear Deena Stryker - you can help by raising the awareness about the injustice all of us has to deal with by not having the same legal rights online as we have offline. Like someone said in relation to my case: we have all become Americans now- and not in a good way.”

As we watch, helpless, the Greatest Imperial Power the world has ever known is allowing itself to be propelled into the Greatest War Ever Fought in pursuit of the oil that will enable it to continue to grow until it snuffs out human life. The presence in the White House of an eminently educated, aware man, has been no match for the Darth Vader like forces intent on seeing the 99% march lemming-like off a cliff.

Hyperbole?  I don’t think so: Even in the good old days of the Cold War there were enough weapons around to wipe out most of humanity: now they have proliferated, and a very small country is playing a game of chicken with the rest of us, supposedly to save itself from annihilation. Israel has not signed the non-proliferation treaty, and no one (except perhaps our president) knows how many nuclear weapons and delivery systems it has. The Jewish state claims to fear annihilation by Iran, which claims it’s not producing weapons but nuclear fuel for the day when its oil runs out.  (Unrelatedly, but similarly, Greece, which teeters on the brink of a default which could, theoretically, bring down the carefully nurtured ten year old Euro system, claims, with similar dramatic emphasis, that it is being ‘threatened’ by a fellow NATO member, Turkey, forcing it to cut pensions and salaries in order to preserve its military budget. Is there something about Mediterranean peoples that inclines to overstatement?  The Greek-Turkey standoff has been going on for so long that it isn’t even worth my while to Google it. My eighties book on the (then) potential for reunification of Europe, has an annex on the Greek/Turkish standoff.  I haven’t revisited the issue since, but it seems that nothing has changed.  (Cyprus comes into this equation, but it is more complicated than that.)

The Sunni/Shi’a divide, epitomized by Iran and Saudi Arabia, as I pointed out in a recent blog, is as relevant to all of this as the survival of a small state that refuses to play nice because it has a powerful backer – or the geopolitics of oil. Iran had a democratically elected president in 1953, (Mossadegh) who was overthrown by the CIA.  Then, in the eighties, when Sunni-ruled Iraq waged an eight-year war on Shi’a Iran, we backed Iraq (under the same Saddam Hussein whom we would overthrow in 2003…). That ultimately gave us Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution (a modern outcome of Shi’a ideology). Iran’s client state Syria has been ruled by a Shi’te sect, the Alawites, for decades.  Putting an end to the civil war that opposes a mainly Sunni population to President Bashar Al Assad via military intervention of one type or another is not so much going to ‘isolate‘ Iran, as it will protect Israel. (Syria has been known as ‘the front-line state‘ by Palestinians and their supporters, because unlike Israel’s other border states – but like Iran – it has been a staunch Palestinian ally.)

European progressive blogs suggest the U.S. intends to choose a ship that has outlived its usefulness and sink it in the Straits of Hormuz, claiming it to be an act of war by Iran. If this sounds far-fetched, Franklin Roosevelt, who knew of the Japanese intent to bomb Pearl Harbor, moved our newer ships out of harm’s way.  And of course there was the shelling of the Maine off of Havana in 1898, used as a pretext for war with Spain and the acquisition of Cuba.

We can expect war with Iran and regime change in Syria, unless the thought of the combined capabilities of Russia and China forces Washington to rethink its justification for supporting Israel, right or wrong. Our closest ally Britain, is already involved in preserving the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s Bahrain base, where the ever down-trodden Shi’a of the Arab world are saying ‘Enough!‘  (A former high-ranking member of Scotland Yard, forced to resign in the wake of the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, quickly found new employment training the Gulf monarchy’s police…..)

While the U.S. is still behaving as though together with its allies like Israel and Great Britain, it dictates world outcomes, the world goes about its business without us. On February 20, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan held their third trilateral conference – this one focusing officially on counter-terrorism – in Islamabad, but also providing a venu for Iran to affirm its rights and its position in the region.

Brinksmanship is only justified in a world in which one major game is being played.  The information isolation of Americans, feeling safe between two giant seas, is a tragedy, for it leaves them ignorant of the other games being played on the world stage.

I recommend replacing MSNBC with Al Jazeera, which can be found once a day in most areas, and also, RT, the coy acronym for Russia’s English Service, which, with the participation of American and British journalists, gets Putin’s message across, but also much of importance to Americans.

Observers seem surprised that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has accepted to create a multi-party system, even as he goes on killing his people. A Facebook comment by a young Iranian woman a few days ago, tells why: all systems, all regimes, are equally undemocratic.

So Syria’s Russian allies must have suggested that a parliamen-tary system wouldn’t change anything, and after all, it’s an elegant way out.

Although that fact is staring them in the fact on their own streets, they didn’t realize that  the Syrian rebels, whoever they are, like the young Iranian woman on Facebook, have known for some time that democracy is only a word, and that in one way or another, to one extent or another, leaders always manage to get around it.

Until the 99% get the gist.

Yesterday’s news made me realize I had neglected a fifth item in my last blog.  Several channels mentioned the Shi’a in their coverage of the troubled Muslim countries of Bahrein, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria.  It should be clear by now that a very old antagonism hovers in the background of the story about oil.  Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan are the largest majority Shi’a countries.  But Shi’a constitute nearly forty percent of the total Muslim population of the Middle East. The Shi’a arc begins in India, where they constitute around one third of the Muslim population of that predominantly Hindu country.  Shi’a constitute a majority in Azerbaijan, with significant minorities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kurdistan. Iran and Iraq and tiny Bahrein have majority Shi’a populations. but Shi’a also make up over 35% of the population in Lebanon, over 45% in Yemen, approximately 30% in Kuwait, over 20% in Turkey, and 15% in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roughly speaking, the Shi’a constitute a northern arc beginning in central Asia,  and encompassing up to 200 million people.

The Sunni arc occupies the southern rim of the Middle East and Near East landmass, starting at the tip of the Arabian peninsula in Yemen, and centered in Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Sunni country, where religious authority is held by the puritan Salafists, whose Wahhabism inspired Al Qaeda. Along the Mediterranean lies Egypt, which since the days of Nasser has had a strong national and secular component, followed by have the countries of the Magreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, the Western Sahel and finally, up its west coast, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

The Sunni/Shi’a fault line of the Eurasian continent where these two arcs meet is deepening, and the current fight over the future of Syria is the first round in a larger fight between Islam’s Sunnis and Shi’a as to which will dominate the Middle East. A resurgence of the traditionally down-trodden Shi’a across the Muslim world is a subset of the Arab Spring, but its ramifications go beyond the Arab or Muslim world.

Repeated visits by Iran’s President Ahmedinejad to Latin America do not seem incongruous if one considers the fact that Shi’ism has always been the revolutionary form of Islam, making it a natural ally of left-wing secular regimes, however far-flung.  In the seventh century, Mohammed’s cousin and designated successor, Ali, was brutally struck down by representatives of the merchant class. His followers, most of whom are ruled by wealthy Sunni majorities, represent the Muslim 99%.0   A must read if one is to understand the importance of Shi’ism today, is Resistance : The Essence of the Islamist Revolution by the British international civil servant Alastair Crooke. It gives the lie to lose talk about ‘terrorism’, and shows just how handicapped our diplomates would be in a philosophical conversation with them.

The Iranian Islamic revolution, changed the Shia–Sunni power equation in Muslim countries from Lebanon to India, arousing the traditionally subservient Shia, to the alarm of traditionally dominant Sunnis. What makes Syria unique is that it involves a reverse Sunni-Shi’a divide: strongly backed by Shi’a Iran, the Alawi minority, a Shi’a sect, rules over a majority Sunni population while its neighbor Lebanon, which it dominated militarily from 1975 to 2005, continues under the influence of Hezbollah, a fighting Shi’a minority.

When the veil of ignorance about Shi’ism is torn away, it becomes clear why both Russia and China have opposed strong measures against Syria: In a special section of the January 21st Economist , both these superpowers are described as paragons of State Capitalism.  What is significant about this assessment by a conservative publication is that the purpose of State Capitalism is to create greater equality among the classes. (On a more prosaic note, Russia must also bear in mind the majority Shi’a population in Azerbaijan, and China must be mindful of the 2% of Muslims, located mainly in the areas that border Central Asia, Tibet and Mongolia, i.e. Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu and Qinighai provinces,  known as the “Quran Belt”.

America’s commitment to Israel – the main thing that interests many Americans  - must be seen in this light. It was born of belated shame for Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to grant asylum to Jews being slaughtered by Hitler.  Then, as things evolved in the neighborhood of the Jewish Homeland, Israel, founded on modern, democratiic principles, was our natural ally against the majority Others: ‘backward’ Arabs, whose oil we coveted.  The Janus tail of oil supply and Zionism is now wagging the American dog, forcing us to permit behavior by the one that endangers the other.

It is folly to believe that we can somehow make everything right for Israel, but if we follow the daily news, we can see that America is determined to steer the political turmoil among her neighbors to its advantage. There is nothing new about this.  The Eurozone crisis is the long-term consequence of America’s post-World War II domination of Western Europe, which began with the ‘generous’ Marshall Plan: we saved Europe from the Nazis in order to remake it in our cowboy capitalist image. Then, using the tools of the late twentieth century, we did the same to Eastern Europe. Now, as the European 99% rebel against the world America created, and the remedies being forced down their throats after its failure, we are determined to steer the Arab Spring toward political/financial regimes that will espouse that model.

Fortunately for us and for them, its people see the writing on the wall.