Thanks for posting.

thanks for philip weiss's piece, arendt.

i'd just had reason to feature this essay by sam husseni i'd seen on twitter this a.m. in a reply to Pluto's Republic on my OPCW final report on Douma chemical attacks, kinda echoing one of the things i'd said about omar (she could have gone Large on Zionist war crimes), while critiquing some of the D elected officials who being: 'yes, dictator maduro should let the humanitarian aid in', but then...i don't consider Guaido the President of VZ', or 'assad is a dictator who gassed his people, but i don't support regime change' and things akin to that. here it is for your, and other readers' consideration.

'Rep. Omar's Choice', sam husseini, posthaven.com i'll just copy paste the bits i'd included on my thread, but it's worth reading in its entirety, i think. lotta context left to read.

he's very nuanced in his considerations of what omar's words meant/seemed to have meant...and hadn't spoken to, but he's in agreement with my contention that she should have widened the discussion.

the choices he mentions are: fold, continue w/ the current pattern, which he critiques by way of pros and cons...for her.

but his Get Specific, Expand the Critique (in which he mentions she's not the first to speak against the power of AIAPC in recent history by any means, and names them, but i'll paste in some of those paragraphs:

"Much of Rep. Omar's comments to date have been about herself, about her relationship to Jews and Jewish constituents. What they have been insufficiently about is actual Israeli and U.S. government policy towards the Palestinians and others.

For example talking about U.S. policy being literally "all about the benjamins" is highly dubious. Money is certainly a needed ingredient, but the U.S. government’s backing of Israel more than anything has to do with geopolitics, most obviously Israel effectively crushing Arab nationalism in 1967, preventing the development of the region along lines remotely responsive to the people of the region.

Rep. Omar can highlight such critical aspects. Some are timely: The recent UN report on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.

Some are long crying out for public discussion: The U.S. government refuses to acknowledge -- as a matter of policy -- that Israel has nuclear weapons. I know, I've asked numerous politicos about this. In 2011, when Mike Pence was on the House Foreign Affairs Committee -- the same committee Rep. Omar is on now (and what AIPAC is quite clearly aiming to get her off of) -- his response was nearly comical. (w/video)

With Rep. Omar being the center of much attention just now, her highlighting Israeli criminality and nuclear threats to humanity itself could have an immeasurable positive effect. Indeed, perhaps the most potentially profound of Omar's recent tweets are ones like this: "I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel. I find that to be problematic and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks."

This all depends on how you define the U.S. and how you define Israel. I increasingly don't see countries. I see forces. And what many mean when they talk about a "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel -- whether they acknowledged it or not -- is the settler colonial pattern they have both followed.{ [snip]

That is, the most gruesome part of the Old Testament was used as justification for settlers in what would become the U.S., killing and robbing the native inhabitants. And the same mentality is now used once again in the land of Canaan. At a very high standard, Rep. Omar cannot claim that she is free from anti-Israel bias if she singles out Israel's settler colonialism but engages in mythology regarding the U.S.'s settle colonialism and continued imperial politics. This includes a worldwide system of bases, divide-and-rule practices in the Mideast and elsewhere, a renewed explicit commitment to the Monroe Doctrine now targeting Venezuela to mention a few.

She did confront some of this when recently questioning U.S. envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams, a criminal abettor of genocide. She questioned Abrams far more strongly than any of the other congressional representatives, but when he claimed the U.S. government wanted democracy [in Venezuela], she extraordinarily agreed.

(he links to tweets i'd embedded)

"The criminal rot of imperial polices that is highlighted by the U.S.-Israeli "special relationship" rests on lies and ridiculous absurdities and is therefore vulnerable, but it runs deep and it will take a very determined critique to dislodge. Many are now saying #StandWithIlhan, but a huge question is how firmly she will stand."

my high school friends were critical of Israel (they called it "Zioimperialism)Those people are now in their early sixties - no surprise to me that support of Israel regardless of morality is no longer mandatory - except to Pelosi and Schumer et all.

and I just downloaded and printed Hannah Arendt's whole 30 pages of Zionism Revisited to read at my leisure. It it contained within this publication...

https://pensarelespaciopublico.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hannah-arendt...

With a government approved religion, based on maternal bloodline or religious conversion to qualify for citizenship (to participate in that government) that it would lean towards a theocracy. Wikipedia has this to say:

The term was initially coined by Flavius Josephus in the first century A.D. to describe the characteristic government of the Jews. Josephus argued that while mankind had developed many forms of rule, most could be subsumed under the following three types: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. The government of the Jews, however, was unique. Josephus offered the term "theocracy" to describe this polity, ordained by Moses, in which God is sovereign and his word is law.[5]

I guess in having a nation of Israel, it's the only form of government that could develop. But like our nation, it didn't have to go down the road it did.