The Dark Historical Roots Of Our 'Thanksgiving'

By Mitchel Cohen with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh
and others whose names have over the years been lost
11-26-3

The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.
 
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
 
"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
 
And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island."
 
You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:
 
"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."
 
Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
 
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
 
All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
 
The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.
 
In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to death.
 
By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
 
And then the Pilgrims arrived.
 
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
 
Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
 
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.
 
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again.
 
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.
 
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million.
 
The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything, whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
 
There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything -- even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
 
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
 
"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so slaughtered them.
 
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First Thanksgiving.
 
My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of us who are not Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
 
Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
 
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state.
 
The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened -- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house was trashed.
 
Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should "keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.
 
Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism -- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole.
 
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front).
 
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home as well.
 
Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
 
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.
 
The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!
 
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
 
On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the engagement."
 
In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
 
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.
 
First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
 
What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this "holyday commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.
 
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians.
 
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA, http://www.greenparty.org, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition, http://www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn Greens.
 
 
In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving
 
From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
 
 
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
 

 

 
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
 
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.
 
Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
 
"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."
 
Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.

What about how as we feast on Thanksgiving, we think about how the Palestinians, Iraqis, & Afghans are affected by our dark foreign policy--- caring only about the "security" (on-going campaign of Zionist hegemony and subjugation of the Arab world) of Jews in Israel, and never addressing how the Arab world has been wronged by England, the US (and France to a lesser extent) and this is continuing grossly to this very moment in time, when most Palestinians have to survive on one meal a deal according to even mainstream media, thanks to US-funded Israel (IsraHell). How about we focus on what we CAN do NOW to correct these gross injustices that are leading the whole world to Armeggedon? It can be avoided if we FOCUS on achieving justice, equal rights and liberty for ALL regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or gender NOW.

Windy Out Wendy, the Israeli imperialism and Jewish world domination occurring within your own mind shouldn't be replaced by your brand of imperialism and occupation of Israel.

To all you pro-Israelis, I got a message and to quote the lyrics of a popular song: If you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck.

Indeed, I went through yahoo slideshows this evening: First, Iraq and then Palestine. It's not surprising that Zionists, such as the one posting above, don't give a fuck about hunger in Gaza or the West Bank.

I think it bears repeating, and seriously, you supporters of ghetto walls, and ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians from their homelands, "if you don't give a damn, we don't give a fuck".

It's not your cold and hardened hearts and minds we are trying to change. Not at all. We get our message out through direct actions... through little meetings in church basements... through word of mouth and over the internet. We may be shut out of mainstream media, but you cannot and never will shut us down. The illegal and unjust occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, is the number one moral imperative of the 21st Century. You're on the wrong side of history and are not judged kindly now, nor will you be in the future.

No, I will not do what you supporters of Israel tell me to. I will not behave in a fashion pleasing to lefty Zionists such as Naomi Klein. You can spend your entire life, flaming me on IMC's, but it won't stop me.

I am unconquerable. I stand for justice. I am thankful for many, many things, but most of all that I am a proud supporter of Palestine and Palestinians.

As for Thanksgiving itself, it might more aptly be called "National Genocide Day".

This article is just another example of the anti-European racism and lies that have come to dominate the "intellectual" debate in America.

The article is wrong in stating that Europeans only visited America in the early 17th century. Europeans have been visiting America for at least a thousand years, and probably much longer. Celtic and Scandinavian rock carvings can be found throughout the eastern US and Canada.

Thanksgiving is an extension of traditional British feasts that occur when the herd animals that can't be kept through winter are slaughtered, hence the focus on the turkey or ham. These are the "dark roots" of Thanksgiving.

It is telling that when Europeans are under attack, they are not allowed to defend themselves from slander and lies, but must resort to taking up the cause of other people who are under attack, such as the Palestinians. That is what is really going on in this case. European people are simply trying to defend themselves by proxy, since they are not allowed the luxury of defending themselves directly. That would be "reactionary," according to authorities on the matter.

He/she says: "Windy Out Wendy, the Israeli imperialism and Jewish world domination occurring within your own mind shouldn't be replaced by your brand of imperialism and occupation of Israel. "

Oh, so it's all in WoW"s mind that Israel and Zionists aim to makeover the world to subjugate it to Zionist tastes? If only that were so.

Zionists just WISH people like WoW would not notice such things, but alas, it is ever so OBVIOUS to anyone who takes the time to read and talk to others.

By the way, the Zionists really are in absolute FEAR that people like WoW's brand of "imperialism" will indeed come to pass, since all people like WoW want is equal rights, liberty and justice for ALL regardless of religion, ethnicity, race or gender which just so happens to be in line with true American ideals as expressed in our US Constitution, and our Declaration of Independence.

It's high time to declare America's declaration of independence from Zionists and Zionist Israel!

As more and more Americans learn about racist, apartheid Israel, and how it has NEVER ever been a true secular democracy, and how it has always resorted to ethnic cleansing and apartheid to create a racist, ethnocentric Jewish state, they will say HELL NO to that hellhole Israel (IsraHell).

For more info, check out http://www.cactus48.com and read "Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" written by the Jews for Justice in the Middle East and also check out http://www.nkusa.org to learn how not all Jews are Zionists. Thank God for that.

The above article is definately anti-European, a kind of hate which certain people relish in promoting, however the fact remains, that no matter what one's background, it is definately possible and probable that most people who are outraged about what's happening to the Palestinian people are simply outraged because it is completely and grossly immoral as well as causing world unrest.

That doesn't make it not true.

It isn't true. It is a pack of lies crafted only to bludgeon European-American children with a cudgel of false guilt.

These are hateful lies; the kind that are meant to justify abuse of America's majority.

1. Vince:

Dude, perhaps you never gave a fuck about the hardships the Israeli Jews have been in "thanks" to the Palestinian terrorists - something I care about. But don't you put words into my mouth saying I don't care about hunger in Gaza. The problem is that "peace activists" like you always appear top put all the blame on the Israelis and none on the Palestinians. Naturally you'd rather avert your eyes from the reality that: the hunger in Gaza in 1994-Oct '00 had been Arafat's fault (he stole the foreign aid donated by many countries), didn't let the refugees among the Gazans to get better lives; the hunger from Oct '00 to the present is *mostly* the Palestinians' fault,- a consequence of the unjustified terroristic campaign known as the intifada. Only the remainder is the Israelis' fault.

No matter how many times you repeat your childish, misleading and false descriptions of ghetto walls and "cleansing of indigenous Palestinians from their homelands" (what, now you admit there's more than one homeland for the Palestinians? Am I missing something here??), they won't come true by virtue of such repetitions.

Yeah, I know you're trying to turn the tide of public opinion in America. What's the issue? You're entitled to do that just like any other segment of the American public. What's unfortunate is the fact you don't realize that your constant repetition of those misleading, exaggerated, inaccurate, myoptic, immoral, unjust, dishonest and many times anti-Semitic and nonsensical descriptions, myths and canards only serve to keep you marginalized. "Zionist" Jews have been deemed to be on the wrong side of history for almost 2000 years now (if one extends Zionism to mean the support of a Jewish homeland throughout recorded history), so there's nothing really new about this.
You appear to have a cold and hardened heart to the sufferings the Israeli Jews have endured at the hands of the Palestinians. I really don't think any of them would beg you to consider their side of the story as you appear to sympathize ~only~ with the Palestinians.

No, you don't stand for justice. You stand for a particular travesty of justice since you want to horribly wrong Israel and its Jews in order to better the Palestinians' situation. What's even sadder is you don't realize it's the Palestinian terror groups and Arafat & Co. that are the greatest obstacles in the Palestinians' way toward statehood and substantial betterment of their lives.

2. Windy Out Wendy:

It's quite amusing that you noticed aims of Jewish world domination and Israeli subjugation of Arab states occurring within your own mind. As someone else pointed out, you fool yourself all of the time. And - of course - one would have to be a nut bar like you or a neo-Nazi to talk to others, read for those "things" to be obvious to him/her.

The funny thing is your set of ideas about "equal rights, liberty and justice for ALL regardless of religion, ethnicity, race or gender which just so happens to be in line with true American ideals as expressed in our US Constitution, and our Declaration of Independence" is thought around much (if not most) of the world as American imperialism, but you fail to see the this point. More importantly, your NK, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other allies abhor this particular stance of yours.

Given the rates of attendance in your demonstrations, rallies and vigils, it's fair to assume the "Zionists" aren't really trembling because of your ilk.

What are you trying to say here, that these things didn't actually happen? if so, how do you explain away the overwhelming preponderance of evidence?

Don't kid yourself, jerk. Zionists know it too and they ARE concerned about the anti-Zionist activists, because Israel is going to have to conform to the American (humanisitc) ideals built into our Constitution with equal rights for ALL regardless of religion, ethnicity or sex, or else Israel is going to be cut off from its apron strings, Uncle Sam. Tough love is what is needed for Israel--- and Israel will be set free to do its dirty work all on its own. The whole world will then be against Israel (the whole world is already except for the US). No one is an island unto him/herself and Israel will have to conform unless it wants to continue on its path of sociopathic self-destruction.

Any country who expects money from US taxpayers must conform to American ideals as expressed in our Constitution.

If countries do NOT expect money from the US, such as Syria or Libya for instance, they can have whatever government they want, such as a fundamentalist Islamic government. As long as they don't bother others, such as neighboring countries.

But Zionists and Israelis LIE all the time about Israel, claiming to be a democracy when it really is a theocracy with an apartheid regime that has been GUILTY of ethnic cleansing from the day Israel was created in 1948 when White European countries gave away Arab land that was NOT theirs to give away in the first place to Eastern European Zionist Jews aka as Jewish White Supremacists.

The Zionists have always been intent on militarily creating and maintaining a Jewish state that discriminates against and persecutes non-Jews, especially Muslims and also Christians, when Palestine had always been a naturally multi-cultural land where the people lived in harmony until the Zionists came to Israel in the late 1880s with their racist agenda.

We Americans have the right and the duty to demand that our government stop supporting the state of Israel in any way, financially or diplomatically, until Israel is transformed into a true, secular democracy with equal rights for all regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or sex, including for all the Palestinian refugees who have the right to return to their ancestral homeland according to UN Resolutions, International Law and world opinion.

For more info, check out http://www.cactus48.com and http://www.nkusa.org.

what part of "we don't give a fuck" don't you understand, you contemptible supporter of concentration camp walls in the West Bank and on West Bank land belonging to the Palestinians.

Truth of the matter is that I could probably claim Israeli citizenship, if I were so inclined, by the sole reason of my maternal German Jewish heritage. I cant think of anything more hideous and racist and what is exactly wrong with this picture.