The Many Faces of US Politics...

[DaleCooper]

Not sure why you think I want Trump gone. Hes a gift

[JollyGreenGiant]

I think so. Fishback is in Florida. He is GOP and very anti Israel

I think many of those links prove the point that there is nothing there in the way of Palestinian Solidarity and its basic motivation is 'America First'. Hence why I do not believe that if America was to withdraw all support from Israel that the likes of Carlson would care about the fate of the Palestinian people. To my earlier point, if Carlson was speaking truth to power, and was interested in peaceful resolutions he would not have been the Western sycophant to offer Putin a Bully Pulpit in 2024.

The likes of Fishback (who is a nasty piece of work - and who like Candace Owens his agenda is far broader and more nefarious than a good-faith Zionist critical position) are not interested in things like equality, human rights etc. And therefore it is right and proper to question their motives as they volte face on issues like this. Occam's Razor would first and foremost lead to a conclusion that it is not about the interests of the Palestinian People.

[JoG2]

Not sure why you think I want Trump gone. Hes a gift

Could not disagree more, every hour that vile hoor is out and about gives legitimacy to child rape / rape..not only can it be tolerated / excused / hidden, you can rise to the very top. A poster boy / role model for the most disgusting fcukers about
He literally ticks every box that shouldn't be ticked

[DaleCooper]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

[JollyGreenGiant]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

From an Irish point of view that could be a dreadful outcome. Ditto for the EU and the UK.

No matter what your opinion on America is, it would be a disaster for it to 'collapse'.

[RedHand88]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

[Wildweasel74]

Can we go with 77million? What country has started more wars than anybody else!

[Armagh18]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

There's a sizeable chunk of them that are far from class and continue to blindly support a pedo and his murdering gang of scammers.

[JoG2]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

There's a sizeable chunk of them that are far from class and continue to blindly support a pedo and his murdering gang of scammers.

A fair old chunk alright , add in the gun culture, the levels of homeless, poverty, education levels for many , drug consumption, the health care system which bankrupts 100s of thousands / year etc,...blindly defending and saying America is class or great is strange behaviour.

[RedHand88]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

There's a sizeable chunk of them that are far from class and continue to blindly support a pedo and his murdering gang of scammers.

A fair old chunk alright , add in the gun culture, the levels of homeless, poverty, education levels for many , drug consumption, the health care system which bankrupts 100s of thousands / year etc,...blindly defending and saying America is class or great is strange behaviour.

Could use any of those issues to describe our own country my friend (except education and gun culture). Interestingly Ireland actually has a higher homeless per capita than America.
I have been in maybe 25-30 different states. Red states, blue states and everything inbetween. All of them were very nice people, my favourite was probably Tennessee or Alabama.
I think too many people base their opinion on a place by what they see on the Internet.

[DaleCooper]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

Americans need to experience consequences for their decisions.

Like most of the rest of the West they are enamoured with the punch and judy show of "democracy".

They are far too complacent and have allowed their country to be run by the vilest animals you can imagine.

Contrition isnt a national characteristic and many revel in Empire status. They have become an existential threat to Ireland and many European nations then have the gall to whinge about Islam in the UK etc.

[Puckoon]

Hes damaging the US internationally and odds of them collapsing.

Hopefully a brutal civil war follows. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.

America and Americans are class. Just because you don't like the president isn't as reason to malign an entire country with 300 million people you strange person.

There's a sizeable chunk of them that are far from class and continue to blindly support a pedo and his murdering gang of scammers.

Genius. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. What a Maroon.

[bennydorano]

Israel has finally lost the West
The Bibi chickens come home to roost
David Aaronovitch
Apr 30

For sixty years Israel has enjoyed an almost militant goodwill in America. The reason has not been the all-powerful Israeli lobby, though of course there is one just as there is an oil lobby, a Saudi lobby, a tech lobby, and most murderous of all, a gun lobby. To US administrations Israel represented an occasionally infuriating ally in a strategic but alien region.

But the support enjoyed from the American public was not primarily based on alliances or overt propaganda – it was centred on identification. There was the closeness of the Israeli foundation myth to the American one – huddled masses yearning to be free, escaping persecution and setting up a quarrelsome and lively democracy in a promised land.

Nearly 20 years ago I had just this argument in public during a "Doha Debate" in Oxford in which the former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, and I took on a journalist called Andrew Cockburn and Norman Finkelstein – possibly the angriest man I have ever met. What they wanted to portray as a form of conspiracy we argued was in fact the result of politics.

This exact argument came back to me following the revelations that Binyamin Netanyahu had talked Donald Trump into the attack on Iran. That reality merged with a dangerous sentiment on both the left and the right in the US that their country's interests were now subordinate to those of a foreign nation – one with which they no longer sympathised. Jason Willick in the Washington Post earlier this month put it succinctly:

Contrary to the notion of an 'Israel lobby' dictating American policy toward Israel, the U.S. has often supported Israel because the American people want a pro-Israel foreign policy, The corollary: If the American people don't want a pro-Israel policy, the policy will change.

At the end of March the Pew Research Centre conducted a poll involving 3,500 respondents. The top line from this poll was that just 37 percent of Americans viewed Israel favourably a few weeks into the Iran war, compared with 60 percent who viewed it unfavourably. That minus-23 net approval compares with a minus-8 approval a year ago and a plus-13 approval the year before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Israeli response. Those who had a "very unfavourable" view of Israel had nearly tripled since 2022, from 10% to 28%. This negativity is more pronounced among younger Americans, Democrat, independent and Republican.

Much of this is likely to be down to Gaza, where initial support for Israel has been worn away by the scale of Palestinian suffering. Note too to some Jewish News readers that you can't really blame the BBC for this one.

But in the US and in the West generally the behaviour of the Israeli state and government towards others has now become intolerable. To take one small example, earlier this month Itamar Ben Gvir – that celebrator of Baruch Goldstein – persuaded the Knesset to pass a law to provide for expedited executions of convicted Palestinian terrorists – but (in effect) not convicted Jewish ones. As the Atlantic magazine's Daniel Shapiro put it, "the performance was gross and gloating." And very public.

And more people now have eyes on the West Bank, where the Netanyahu government has accelerated its policy of de facto annexation and therefore its corollary of effective apartheid. When recently Chancellor Merz repeated Germany's opposition to annexation, Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, responded by telling Merz that there would be no return to "the days when Germans dictated to Jews," adding, "Our return to the Land of Israel — our biblical and historical homeland — is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologise for it for a single moment."

L'Espresso Cover on West Bank Abuses Draws Enraged Response from Israe
In Italy L'Espresso magazine carried a cover story on the behaviour of settlers and the Israeli military on the West Bank towards local Palestinians. The picture on the front showed a male settler in military fatigues taunting a Palestinian woman as she tried to harvest her olives.

The Israeli ambassador to Italy thought it politic to condemn, not the behaviour of the settler, but the magazine itself. Jonathan Peled complained that "the image distorts the complex reality with which Israel must coexist, promoting stereotypes and hatred." Other Israeli sources claimed the photograph was faked.

But it wasn't. And the readers and the Italian public knew it wasn't. Just as the German public almost certainly agree with their conservative chancellor.

So what (in my perception) has opened up is a credibility gulf in which Israel's leaders and institutions can no longer be believed or trusted by people in the West. The identification with the country is being lost and a generational aversion is being created. Which is manna for the antisemites., but is not even mainly the product of their efforts. One casualty of this are the Jews in diaspora, about whom Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and the assorted Likudniks, Kahanists and Jewish ultranationalists do not give a fig.

Suspect arrested after two Jewish ...
Postscript: Two days before I published this on here a man stabbed two "visibly" (the chief rabbi's description) Jewish people in the suburb of Golders Green, an area close to where I live and which I often visit. The Police said the suspect had a "history of serious violence and mental health issues" but nevertheless were treating the incident as a case of terrorism. What was particularly ominous about this was the idea that this man had identified obvious Jews as a target for his rage. Contrary to what many believe, Jewish men wearing kippahs are still often seen on buses and tube trains (I was squeezed up next to one on the Northern Line yesterday). But it must take some courage now, even if the statistical chances of attack are low.

Immediately after the attack, as has become its habit, the Israeli government blamed the British government for somehow allowing the attack, as though there is a world where a single figure carrying a concealed knife on a suburban street can always be stopped before he attacks someone. There is, I think, a kind of dark chutzpah to an allegation like that. I can't sit inside the addled brain of this week's attacker, but my guess is that it's their supposed association with Israel that may well be behind his murderous assaults, rather than the Jewishness per se of his victims. Which is no consolation at all to the Jews of Britain.

[DaleCooper]

The venerable Caroline Glick is in the news again. She has been given the job of relocating Palestinians to exotic places like Somalia and the Congo.

Born in Texas. A Texan. An American some would argue.

Observe. They utterly despise Europeans even more so than Palestinians.

https://mondoweiss.net/2014/12/caroline-european-diplomats/

[Main Street]

Can we go with 77million? What country has started more wars than anybody else!

Since  1917 it has to be Russia,  aka USSR for a while. The lie that is embedded in history is that Russia had a civil war post 1917, whereas in fact it was Russia who waged war against  various republics, subsequently occupied them and absorbed them into the USSR.