The New Bullies: Grandma Peace Activists, Christian Feminist Bloggers, and Consumer Advocates

photo © 2007 Simon | more info (via: Wylio)Did somebody say Wookie?

There's a cynical and ironic phenomenon that I've noticed most glaringly in US foreign relationships in the Middle East and is now manifesting itself in the financial / political world as well as the Evangelical social media world in the States: Bullies like to call anybody who holds them accountable a bully.

Israel does this any time her stranglehold on Palestinians is challenged. Likewise, WORLD Magazine (a Neo-Conservative Christian bulwark) called Rachel Held Evans a slanderer for calling out mega-pastor Mark Driscoll's irresponsible, homophobic, and trans-phobic behavior (with a bit more civility than I would probably afford him). And now House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-CA) and spokesmouth for corporatocracy, is calling Elizabeth Warren, consumer advocate, a bully who would target the poor, little, downtrodden banks and loaning institutions and give them swirlies and wedgies and all that mean stuff.

Small pockets of men and women (and most recently, grandmas) try to get into Gaza, armed only with senselessly banned material - including harmless school supplies. At one point, they are gunned down at point-blank range by Israeli soldiers. At another point, Greece enforces Israel's rules for them, in the hope of international aid favor from the US. Illegal settlements are being sprouted up on top of Palestinian homes, bulldozing and setting ablaze homelands, groves, and families that have resided there for hundreds and thousands of years. The Palestinians are denied pencils, buildings, and jobs in their own homeland.

And yet, it's the international, hippy grandmas that are the bullies...

Author and blogger Rachel Held Evans demonstrated occasion after occasion of Mark Driscoll's dehumanizing taunts towards women, feminists, "effeminate" males, and queersteh gays. And then she asked her readers to address their concerns to the board of elders at his church. While Driscoll (of a large church in Seattle named Mars Hill) offered some sort of apology, WORLD Magazine writer Anthony Bradley belittled the criticisms and offered his amusing perspective that, "There is nothing loving about calling a pastor a “bully.“"* The rest of the paragraph sends a message that this male writer can only interpret as, "Woman no talk to manly man such way." (Considering that - without any evidence - Bradley calls her a liar who spreads false testimony, I'm left to believe that the problem isn't the testimony itself, but the testifier. After all, in biblical times, woman no important.)

So, it isn't the influential, authoritarian pastor who, once again, ridicules so-called effeminate men who needs to be corrected. It is the woman who dared stand up to him...

Issa is a bit of an extreme example in an extreme time of extreme extremities. It's common (though often ignored by pro-corporatists) knowledge that the recession is a direct result of predatory lending, borrowing and all means of deceit by big banks and other financial institutions - much at the hands of the poor and middle class. Warren, who has a proven track record of looking out for that important buffer - the middle class - as well as for those on the margins, is trying to protect the rest of us from the horrible practices that make a few very wealthy, very fast, on the backs of the rest of us who are left with fewer and fewer options. But she, not the banks that foreclosed on millions of hard-working Americans, is the bully? Because she would rather that these institutions not eat the poor and devour the middle class?? Really?

I suppose Orwell is shaking in his grave. It got awfully chilly.

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*Obviously, nobody has informed Bradley of the practices of spiritual abuse rampant in fundamentalist churches, specifically. I'm sure that if he were dealing with questions of his own sexuality in such a church, his perspective would change.

Shalom Shall Not Come Without Justice, Prime Minister

What came first, the terrorist or the oppressive regime?

Representative Peter King has no problem glorifying the IRA. He sees them as heroes in a fight for the oppressed Northern Irish against the British Empire. And I could see why. The Irish have historically (and up to present, still poorly) been treated amongst the worst in Western Europe. Much of what was later practiced on African-derived populations was first practiced on them.

So, to Peter King, blowing up cars and pubs was a small sacrifice for liberating the Northern Ireland majority and allowing Irish Catholics to control their own fate while receiving economic and political justice.

I wouldn't go so far as King in the least. Not just because King is selective in the types (colors) of terrorists that he supports. I don't like Hamas or any other group that uses terror tactics to try to make their point or get ahead. But I can see where they're coming from. If my family were brutalized, humiliated, killed, tortured, displaced, disappeared, and ostracized like many of theirs were, I'm not sure I'd be so happy myself. I'm not so sure that I'd be able to fight exclusively in a non-violent way.

But that's just it. Palestinians have been fighting and resisting non-violently (passively) for generations upon generations. And how are they rewarded? They're ignored. Called "terrorists". Shot with bullets. With "might, power, and beatings."

And you wonder why any of them would consider taking that route?

And yet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the US Congress (the United States, by the way, has been funding the entire empire state of Israel and is largely responsible for this genocide) and declares that he will not re-establish the 1967 borders of Gaza and the West Bank, but yet he is willing to make "painful compromises" to establish peace in the land.

What "painful compromises" are you willing to make, Netanyahu? To *not* shoot any Palestinian you see? To allow them to find paying jobs? To allow aid in to Gaza? To not applaud Israeli terrorists? To discontinue to illegally take their homes, land, and crops from Palestinians who have been there for eons? To recognize their right to self-rule?

And then what kind of "compromise" are the Palestinians going to have to make in turn that they haven't already? Are they going to have to "swap" more land?

Or are the "painful sacrifices" just that more Palestinian children will have to die in order to secure "peace."

Not shalom, mind you. Not biblical peace. Roman, occupational "peace."

And yet it's my American Christian brothers and sisters who most adamantly defend the practices of Israel. They maintain that they are honoring the Israel of the bible by standing with them no matter whom they harm. I doubt that most Christians who "honor Israel" are doing it out of any other Biblical precept except to fulfill end-times "prophecy."

They certainly aren't looking at the Old Testament prophets. Or the histories of ancient Israel...

Helen Thomas, Palestine, Israel, and Going Back Home

Helen Thomas just quit. Which is fine by me. Not for the reasons that it’s good with many of her detractors. I’m a fan of strong, intelligent women that voice the plight of the oppressed. And that’s what Helen Thomas was. And I would say still is. I am fine with her leaving her post in the White House Press Corps because she has done her time, and now she should be allowed to freely speak her mind (even if she was the rare one doing so in the face of the presidents or their lackeys and we will now miss that beat).

What she said that caused her a bit of a trolley is that Israel should go back home to Poland, Germany and the US. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the context which she had in mind in speaking that way. First, Thomas has a thing about empires occupying other lands (which she makes a note of whenever she got a chance at the WH in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan). And that is exactly what has been happening in this section of the MidEast for the last sixty years.

Secondly, the state of Israel is running a pogrom of their own against the Palestinians. The situations of which were so inhumanely horrible, the events that we are all rightly recalled to never forget, the huge, mechanized ethnic cleansing that European Jews were forced into roughly three generations ago, are being repeated and conveniently forgotten by those same people whom were attacked in the first place.

The victims are now the victimizers. This is tragic human history, an epoch that continually turns again and again. But saying that doesn't excuse the state of Israel for its crimes against humanity.

The Holocaust was a large-scale setting (a horrible exaggeration) for what Zionists are putting the Palestinian people through now. Instead of using trains, they’re using bulldozers. Instead of establishing ghettos, they’re instituting blockades . Instead of gas chambers, they arm settlers*.

Many Palestinians may *say* that they want to wipe Israel off the map, but Israel is *actually* wiping Palestine off the map.

As per the flotilla, it would be best if Palestinians and their allies (and certainly their governing bodies) practiced non-violence. They would certainly win more support for their side if people could see how they are being victimized.

But then again, I would like for MY government to practice non-violence - as well as Israel. And if you send soldiers to attack a boat flying another nation’s flags in the high seas, why shouldn’t you expect to get attacked? That’s a bit like forcefully entering someone’s house and complaining that they shot you.

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*Those very same settlers, in turn for cheap property, are turned into agents of the state. I blame the state and those that blindingly support the state for that action. Brother should never be turned against brother.