Israel Ignores Historic Saudi Peace Plan

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

--The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Stride Toward Freedom" 1958



"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering."

--Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca), Roman rhetorician, in "Letters To Lucilius, 1st Century AD



Just once, I would like to hear that the United States Government was not behind the latest bloody, anti-democratic coup thwarting the will of the People and spreading fear, terror and panic across the land.

But alas, it is apparently too much to ask for America to act democratically: Reports have surfaced linking the Bush Administration to the failed coup in oil-rich Venezuela.

News organizations around the world have caught Shrub & Co. with their hands bloody and their hearts hate-filled. The Guardian, one of Great Britain's largest newspapers, describes how specialists from the dirty wars of the Eighties under Rancid Ronald Reagan, and brought back into Shrub's Administration, encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez, the democratically elected leader chosen by the People of Venezuela to be their President.

These dirty war specialists from Rancid's Administration have apparently been brought back to kill, rape and plunder anew. The sociopaths involved in the coup include hard-core criminal Elliot Abrams (officially pardoned by sleazy Bush Sr. for his crimes against humanity), bloody John Negroponte, sponsor of right-wing Death Squads and nun rapers in Honduras in the 80s, and Otto Reich, fanatical right-wing Cuban American Death-Dealer-Extraordinaire.

The Guardian describes how these Bush Administration terrorists "gave the nod" to the putsch-leaders in Venezuela. These same plotters were found to have visited the White House many times in the months leading up to the bloody coup.

Reports indicate that the coup attempt was discussed at length during these visits.

And The New York Times has discovered that in the past year "the United States channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to U.S. and Venezuelan groups opposed to President Hugo Chavez, including the labor group whose protests led to Chavez's brief ouster this month."

And even before the Bush Administration ties of the Venezuelan coup-plotters were discovered, "President" Bush, in the words of The Times "embraced" the coup until its failure shortly thereafter. Dumb Dubya, Condoleeza Rice, and other coup enthusiasts in Washington were busy blaming Chavez for the overthrow, lending aid and comfort to the enemy (not to mention helping plot the takeover) and generally cheering on the bloodletting, chaos and destruction of democratic institutions.

It was sick stuff, folks. Real sick. Over one hundred Venezuelans perished during the bloody overthrow and thousands more were put in grave danger.

Yet there was George Dubya and his fellow putsch plotters, for all the world to see, dancing on the corpse of Venezuelan democracy and dreaming about all that Venezuelan crude that their Big Oil campaign sponsors were going to get once their puppet dictator was installed into power.

When the coup was suddenly reversed, the red-faced Anti-Democracy Brigade at the White House beat a hasty retreat.

But the damage was done. The whole world had seen the ghastly sight of Bush & Co. cheering violence and helping to destroy democracy and laughing like idiots when a government fell.

And the whole world discovered that the United States was still practicing its century-old and much-cherished tradition of overthrowing democratically elected governments in order to serve the interests of its Big Business Backers, who hate left-of-center populist leaders almost as much as they hate actually working for a living. (Why work when you can live off tax breaks for the rich and incorporated, government subsidies, handouts and other welfare from the state? It is much easier, and many times more profitable, to purchase Congress, make them write the laws you want and live off of Free Money from the American taxpayers for the rest of your natural life.)

So, Stupid Shrub has now completely undercut whatever credibility he once had (which wasn't much even then) in the world of international affairs by showing the U.S. to be just as undemocratic and enthusiastic in its support of terrorism and violence as any tin-pot tyrant on Earth.

Now, any dictator in the world can point to our hypocrisy and laugh at us the next time we demand free elections, a war on terrorism or political freedom from a country's citizens. (Of course, the whole world has been laughing at our hypocrisy for a very long time now.)

Our allies too now have a much tougher job of convincing their voters to approve any Washington-based initiatives.

Way to go, Stupid Shrub.

In other developments, we find that Israel has successfully blocked a United Nations inquiry into Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the Occupied Territories. Like Saddam Hussein with U.N. weapons inspectors, Ariel Sharon wanted to control every aspect of the inquiry into his country's death and destruction of Occupied Palestine.

Imagine if our criminal justice system worked the way Bloody Sharon expects the UN to work--a criminal defendant charged with murder gets to choose the prosecuting attorney who is going to try him, the judge who would hear his case, all of the jurors, the length of the trial, what evidence could or could not be used against him and what could or could not be said in the courtroom.

According to Bloody Sharon, that is what the Israelis should get. But who can blame him for acting like he and his country are above the law?

No other country on Earth, except of course the United States, has been allowed to ignore international law, United Nations Resolutions, and common decency for so long and with such complete impunity.

Assassinations, torture, occupation, land confiscation, state-sponsored terrorism, mass arrests, group punishment, war crimes, massacres and more--you name it and Israel has done it. And not just once or twice, but over and over and over.

Is it any wonder that the governments of Israel and the United States are the two most hated on the planet? Of course not.

And in what should have been a huge breakthrough in the Middle East Conflict has become not much of anything: the historic Saudi Peace Plan offered to Israel in exchange for withdrawing to its pre-occupation borders and disbanding its illegal settlements. Included in the plan is an agreement by all of the Arab countries to give Israel full diplomatic and international standing and the peace and security that it claims it wants.

And what was Israel's response to this generous offer, which Arafat welcomed and readily agreed to?

Nothing.

Nothing besides more foot-dragging, endless additional demands, political rhetoric, posturing and vague assurances in some faraway future.

And so the truth, ladies and gentlemen, has emerged yet again--Israel doesn't want peace. It wants the rest of the Palestinian's land.

This insanity must stop: The U.S. and Israel, the two loose cannons on the global ship of state, must be brought back under control by the rest of the law-abiding world. The lawlessness and violence of these two countries' governments is hazardous to the health, safety and well-being of the planet.

The leaders of the rest of the world must do something they have not done much of for decades--lead.

For God's sake, find the cajones, or female equivalent thereof, and DO SOMETHING. Anything.

Send in your own peacekeeping force into the Occupied Territories. Enforce your United Nations Resolutions. Arrest coup plotters, terrorists and other destroyers of democracy and put them on trial, regardless of who they are or how powerful.

Take action. Make decisions. Lead. You cannot, you must not, sit back and do nothing while the rulers of the United States rape and pillage the globe like a crazed tyrant intent on committing evil and despicable acts wherever he goes. Doing nothing is just as bad--so do something.

The future of our world may depend on it.