Ponerology/Psychopaths/Condoleeza Rice

Ponerology, psychopaths, does she speak for you??
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Signs of the Times for Mon, 24 Jul 2006

Signs Editorial:

Condoleezza Pregnant: Giving Birth to Monster
by: Laura Knight-Jadczyk


Rice sees bombs as "birth pangs"

Condoleezza Rice has described the plight of Lebanon as a part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire."This is a different Middle East. It's a new Middle East. It's hard, We're going through a very violent time," the US secretary of state said."A ceasefire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo."Such a step would allow terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing and to threaten innocent people, Arab and Israeli, throughout the region."

I have to say that, as the mother of five children, these remarks stopped me cold in my tracks. Aside from the obvious question "what can Condoleezza Rice - a woman who has never given birth - know about "birth pangs"? - there is another more compelling question: what kind of human being can be so callous as to say such a thing when tens of thousands of mothers in the Middle East have suffered the unimaginable grief of seeing their beautiful babies crushed under the jackboots of rapacious Imperialism and religious fanaticism?

In Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, he writes:
In the course of preparing the chapters of this book devoted to Israel's human rights record in the Occupied Territories, I went through literally thousands of pages of human rights reports, published by multiple, fiercely independent, and highly professional organizations - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel - each fielding its own autonomous staff of monitors and investigators.

Except on one minor matter, I didn't come across a single point of law or fact on which these human rights organizations differed.

In the case of Israel's human rights record, one can speak today not just of a broad consensus - as on historical questions - but of an UNQUALIFIED consensus. All these organizations agreed, for example, that Palestinian detainees have been sytematically ill treated and tortured, the total number now probably reaching the tens of thousands.
Yet if, as I've suggested, broad agreement has been reached on the FACTUAL record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the impassioned controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine conflict?

To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first of all, that a fundamental distinction be made between those controversies that are real and those that are contrived.

To illustrate real differences of opinion, let us consider again the Palestinian refugee question.

It is possible for interested parties to agree on the facts yet come to diametrically opposed moral, legal, and political conclusions.
Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948.

Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan" of Palestinians.

However repellant morally, these clearly can't be called FALSE conclusions.

Returning to the universe inhabited by normal human beings, it's possible for people to concur on the facts as well as on their moral and legal implications, yet still reach divergent POLITICAL conclusions.
Noam Chomsky agrees that, factually, Palestinians were expelled; that, morally, this was a major crime; and that, legally, Palestinians have a right of return. Yet, politically, he concludes that implementation of this right is infeasible and pressing it inexpedient, indeed, that dangling this (in his view) illusory hope before Palestinian refugees is deeply immoral.
There are those, contrariwise, who maintain that a moral and legal right is meaningless unless it can be exercised and that implementing the right of return is a practical possibility.

For our purposes, the point is not who's right and who's wrong but that, even among honest and decent people, there can be a real and legitimate differences of political judgment.

This having been said, however, it bears emphasis that - at any rate, among those sharing ordinary moral values - the range of political disagreement is quite narrow, while the range of agreement quite broad."
Let's run that by one more time: The scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and Israel's leading historian, Benny Morris, thinks that this was a good thing.
And now, Condoleezza Rice thinks that further ethnic cleansing of the Middle East by the psycho-bullies of Israel is just "birth pangs" of a "New Middle East."

Most Westerners have been brainwashed to think that the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" is some kind of old, historical hatred, a "cosmic clash of religions, cultures, civilizations. This is what Finkelstein refers to as a "contrived controversy." It is all bunk and mystification and it serves to blow smoke on the so-called "Two State Solution" that is the favored political gambit of most normal, decent, humane and moral people. Noam Chomsky favors this view to some extent, but I sometimes wonder how a person can have any moral fiber at all if they, on the one hand, agree that a deed is totally morally reprehensible, and on the other hand, suggest that righting the wrong is not feasible.

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