Israel should grant land to Palestinians if Îgood friend'

Charles Givre claims that Israel is the United States' best and most important ally in the Middle East in yesterday's guest commentary, "America's steadfast Middle Eastern ally." It is incredible how much it costs to have such a good friend: American taxpayers send off nearly $3 billion in aid each year, over half of which supports the Israeli military. Since 1949, the United States has given Israel nearly $92 billion, the flow never ceasing after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories. [Read article]

Now that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a nation of more than 7,000 years of civilization, has been cruelly unleashed, we can perhaps understand what millions of people around the world have been saying: That the United States is the leading terrorist agency in the world and the greatest threat to world peace and security.

George Bush never intended to support the United Nations' process of peaceful disarmament of Iraq nor accept Iraq's unconditional cooperation with the U.N. because he and his "oil-igarch" buddies had decided over two years ago that the Iraqi government had to be overthrown so that they could control Iraq's oil wealth. Bush's entire plan of aggression against Iraq was crafted by oil-hungry barons and pro-Israeli hawks, some from as early as 1992, predicated on a continuous and uninterrupted trajectory of lies: from the lie that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger (which was certified to be a hoax by Mohamed El Baradei, secretary general of the International Atomic Energy Agency) to the lie that the Iraqi regime was connected to al- Qaeda and thus to Sept. 11 (another fabrication disproved by U.S. and French intelligence). To those who believe that the invasion of Iraq is about weapons of mass destruction or about Saddam Hussein or democracy: Free yourselves from the vitiation of the truth by the propaganda machine of the U.S. government through all forms of media. [Read article]

There are men and women who love their work, whose lives have purpose and joy, and whose productive achievement is the fountainhead of Western civilization. They refuse to give up their lives to fate or chance, or to let the traditions, prejudices and demands of others dictate their direction. They work for their own pleasure, accepting money as their material reward, and the values they create bring life-giving benefits to countless others. Who are these romantic individuals? [Read article]

The time has come to move on, or so we're told. At every available opportunity, salivating reporters soak up and spit out ÷ with a cautionary word or two ÷ the official dictums of the State Department and the Department of Defense, the two of which have become alarmingly indistinguishable over the past few months.

We ÷ the American people, especially those who don't support the war ÷ are told that the time for protest is over. Many swallow it, proving that they didn't quite get the point in the first place. Preemptive protest was a new peace tactic, to confront a new war tactic: preemptive attack. Protest, however, is not something that ends when the thing protested begins; that's where it rightfully starts. [Read article]