Saturday, May 17, 2008

Mourning 60 Years of Colonization with Black Balloons

May 15 Bush was speaking to the Israeli Knesset -- about the only people besides nutty American Christian Zionists who support him any more -- on the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel on mostly Arab land. Meanwhile millions of displaced or occupied Palestinians were engaging in various forms of protest and mourning, including sending up thousands of black balloons to fly up out of their defacto concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza and over Israel, to tweak Israeli's poorly developed consciences. (More Facebook photos here, story here. See Associated Press, UK Reuters story.)

Bush, of course, was ranting his malarkey about "appeasement" - insinuating that talking with governments you have problems with is defacto appeasement. That gave Barack Obama lots of air time to explain why Bush (pressed on by his only buddies mentioned above) is the war-aggressing Hitler of our time. He didn't do much to stand up for the Palestinians, however.

And of course it lead to this great television theater on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews badgering the young and ignorant talk show host Kevin James to explain just what it was that British Prime Minister Nevil Chamberlain did in the late 193os that was appeasement. James clearly did not know it had something to do with Chamberlain's concession's to Hitler's Germany - or was too stupid to explain it. (Of course, many of the concessions would have been just or practical ones given the punishment of Germany after World War I, but ones empire builders like Hitler take advantage of.) Anyway it's pretty amusing viewing and shows just how little substance there is to Bush and company's war mongering.

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