Reopening of Jewish synagogue infuriates Palestinians

Fights break out in Jewish settlement areas

This is perfect that people can receive the <a href=

reply

Every one acknowledges that modern life seems to be very expensive, however some people need money for various things and not every person gets big sums cash. Therefore to get quick <a href=

SAY NO to American tax dollar to go to Jews' pockets.

Once the Israelis fart to Joe Biden’s face, you US Congress and Senate DON’T say thank you to the Jews and that’s smell good, please vote for me again then, our American tax dollar to aid Jews is the ransom for blackmail the American politicians. AMERICANS SAY NO to American tax dollar to go to Jews' pockets.

Joe Biden is to dense to understand the why.

Odd how the media picks up on some things and chooses to ignore others.
If it bleeds it leads menatility NEEDS to change.
Obumbler can’t have it both ways.
Zero is failing and failing hard at every endeavour he pursues.
He chooses all the wrong paths and winds up alienating everyone in the process.

From the AT.

March 16, 2010
Obama to Israel: 'Drop Dead'
By Richard Baehr
It took awhile, 14 months to be exact, but both the ADL and AIPAC have issued very solid statements condemning the President’s new verbal war on Israel, and asking for the Administration to curtail the public berating of its supposed ally, and work with Israel in a more diplomatic fashion on both the peace process and Iran.

What is disgraceful is that so far, exactly one elected Democrat in Congress has done the same: Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Nevada. Sadly, Democrats seem to care far more about passing health care legislation this week, than protecting the US-Israel relationship from Obama’s assault. It’s apparent that indifference i f not hostility to Israel’s survival is at work. The infamous New York Daily News headline about Gerald Ford’s response to New York’s fiscal crisis was less fair to him (he never said these words) than the title of this article is to President Obama.

It is interesting that David Axelrod, who blasted Israel on network news programs on Sunday, and is a proud standard bearer of the Millard Fillmore label when it comes to the history and politics of the Middle East conflict (for the record, Fillmore headed the Know Nothing Party back in the 1850s), will be honored by the NJDC (National Jewish Democratic Council) at a coming event. Axelrod has pretty much a perfect record of having avoided any connection with any pro-Israel or Jewish communal activity in his long political career, with the notable exception of raising money from Jews for Democratic candidates.

This Obama does well too. In Obama’s case, the handwriting as to his sympathies in the Middle East conflict (not to be confused with his lies delivered to AIPAC conferences), were pretty well documented well before he was elected — the 20 years he listened in rapture to the sermons of Reverend Wright; all those dinners , and babysitting, and chit chats with Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah; the close friendship with Samantha Power (who sought an international force to invade the West Bank and liberate it from Israel); the years spent in the most anti-Israel hothouses in America — the neighborhoods where elite colleges are located.

Martin Peretz has it right that America elected its first third world President, and he is behaving accordingly. His sympathies lie with the Palestinians. He is, after all, a redistributionist on all issues, and will always favor the group or state he perceives as weaker. The flak attacks by Hillary Clinton, other State Department officials, and Axelrod will do nothing to advance the peace process, ostensibly the goal of the Administration. Since Oslo, the Palestinians for over 15 years spoke directly to Israelis, without intermediation, even during the intifada.

When Obama launched his Presidency with a call for a 100% settlement freeze on all land beyond the green line, including natural growth of settlements, he enabled the Palestinians to avoid coming back for talks without those conditions being met. Why would the Palestinians be more pro-Israel than the White House, and accept less than the White House was demanding of Israel? Now the PA can hang back some more and honor some more mass murderers of Israelis while they wait for Obama to deliver more Israeli concessions before talks begin (prisoner releases, extending the settlement freeze to Jerusalem, eliminating more roadblocks ,easing the blockade of Gaza. ).

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right to let the Americans know that Israel will continue to build within its capital. To please the Americans and not establish facts on the ground, only new housing for Palestinians would be allowed. Of course, when the ten month freeze on new settlements in the West Bank was agreed to, Bibi came in for high praise. Bibi specifically excluded Jerusalem from that freeze.

The announcement of the 1,600 units in a neighborhood where 16,000 Jews already live was step 4 in a 7 step approval process, with no construction for 3 more years. So yes, maybe it was an ill-timed announcement with Joe Biden in town, given how everyone needs to walk on hot coals to avoid giving the PA another excuse to not negotiate even indirectly with Israel.

For the Obama Administration to blow up over this as some grave insult is ridiculous, but telling. This is a real and deliberate provocation, by Obama, not Israel. This was an opportunity for the Administration, to let Israel know which side Obama backs.

Sad to say, even J-Street has been better than Obama this week. The White House had nothing to say (no condemnation to be sure) about the Palestinian Authority honoring a terrorist mass murderer of Israeli Jews last week. Even J-Street said this was a provocation and condemned it.

Murdered Jews and Jewish apartments: Obama evidently finds the latter more repellent than the former. Then again, Obama was silent on the mass murder of hundreds of Christians in Nigeria by Muslim marauders. Never will an unkind word be said about Muslim murderers or Palestinian killers that might detract from his charm offensive to the Muslim world, the one that so far has accomplished only a projection of weakness, and cowardice, and a loss of any ability to weigh competing claims fairly.

When democracy renames old streets

salaam,
Did democracy taking away ownership value,
when re- nameing old streets ?
So why did democracy not take away ownership entitlements when changing name upon locational aspecting ?
Lost recognition of ownership values ?
So why do they not call Harry Truman & Chamin Weizmann as KING OF THE JEWS whom brought to them stolen revenues ?
feeamanellaah

Fig branch is no olive branch

salaam,
Tiller by name is no garden by name,
Israel = tiller,
Palestine = garden,
so whom would settle for less than TRUTH ?
Presentation does matter !
feeamanellaah

reply this post

Various people all over the world receive the <a href=

There already is a One-State Solution!

Palestinians already have a homeland! It’s called Jordan. Mighty King Abdullah welcomes you! All Palestinians should hop in their donkey carts and head to Amman NOW!!

The whole world should be upset! infuriated!!

I N T E R N A T I O N A L
Havana. March 16, 2010



TRUNCATED RIGHTS
Just press the button and see

Elsa Claro

IN early March, the tribunal created by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and named after him met in Barcelona. It was originally constituted to judge the war crimes committed in Vietnam, and subsequently in Latin America, and other lamentable situations around the world. This time, the Russell Tribunal issued a ruling on the European Union, finding it guilty of failing to influence Israel in order to prevent the launch of Operation Cast Lead which, from December 2008 to January 2009, caused the deaths of 1,412 Palestinians and destroyed the scant infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. The testimony of Belgian Euro Deputy Véronique de Keyser, member of the Flemish Socialist Party, revealed in those sessions that the European Commission knew beforehand about the plan to bombard Gaza, because former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni had personally communicated Tel Aviv’s military intentions during a meeting with the EU Foreign Affairs Commission. That body, far from trying to avert the military operation, agreed to strengthen its ties with Israel. For that reason, this moral court, comprising prominent individuals from very diverse tendencies and creeds, considers the EU to be complicit in the massacre.
That outcome inevitably leads one to the assumption that if the countries that currently make up the EU had had a 'common position' of pressure and criticism with respect to the Pinochet coup in Chile in the 1970s, or to any of the dictatorships in the American Southern Cone, it is possible that those illegitimate, bloody, dehumanized processes would not have lasted so long.
With the honorable exception of countries like Olof Palme’s Sweden, the allegedly hyper-democratic parliamentary deputies of the Parliament that brings together representatives of the European Community in ideological groups that profess such concern about right and wrong, did not oppose with the necessary force the U.S-authorized barbarity in those countries. These are not irrelevant events, because what occurred in Honduras last year confirms the duplicity or moral weakness of those who utilize the big stick and falsification against persons in their sights, based on their own decision or as part of the pro-empire (read USA) chorus.
An initial impulse prompted them to condemn the kidnapping of Zelaya and the usurpation of his post, but they did not hesitate to follow the steps oriented by Hillary Clinton and right-wing extremists in the United States, and proceeded to withdraw the timid sanctions they had announced. They repeated the permissiveness shown toward Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Central American nations in the 1970s and 80s, when in all of those countries people were being disappeared, tortured or killed, including Americans and European citizens.
Except for one or two trials, almost always promoted by relatives, and in a bilateral context, there was no condemnation of usurpers who forcibly removed from power governments elected in the sacrosanct Western style of representative democracy, nor was there any condemnation (or not with the necessary force) of the inexcusable events that continue to affect thousands of families 30 years later. Because, while some at least recovered their grandchildren, many were not even able to bury the bodies of their loved ones who were thrown into the sea or into communal, Nazi-style graves. That is something that is being uncovered today in Colombia, and admitted by the paramilitary killers themselves, without anybody in Europe being scandalized.

In a 1980 study, the Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that U.S. foreign aid had 'tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which tortured their citizens… the worst violators of basic human rights in the hemisphere.' More extensive studies undertaken by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. It is not surprising that U.S. aid tends to be correlated with a climate favorable to business,, which by and large improves with the assassination of workers and farmers’ leaders and human rights activists, plus monumental violations of human rights, Noam Chomsky noted in an article in which he also stated that torture was the least of many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, as is the case with other major powers.

Giving an example of his formulation, the prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor said that in the last 60 years, the CIA employed up to 'one billion dollars per year' for its reprehensible methods of obtaining information by inflicting unbearable pain on its victims. Those methods were preferably employed outside of the United States, and the most famous facilities for such practices were the secret prisons set up by George Bush Jr. in Europe, where they were tolerated by the local governments.
A November 2, 2005 article in the Washington Post was the first to refer to the fact that the CIA were holding suspected members of Al Qaeda in various Eastern European, Asian and Middle Eastern countries. These 'black sites,' as they were called at the time, emerged after September 11, 2001, and the stopovers made in various countries by U.S. planes transporting those individuals, deprived of all their rights, caught the attention of European civic organizations, which exposed them.
When the matter assumed scandalous proportions, was charged by the European Council instructed the Swiss senator Richard Marty to head up an investigative commission on the issue. His first report appeared nine months later (June 2006), and stated that 14 European nations, including Switzerland, were actively or passively involved in the detention and transfer of those prisoners. A second finding exhaustively backed what had been confirmed.
In late 2007, Bush defended the CIA’s methods, just as Richard Cheney did 12 months ago, and as Karl Rove – the power behind the throne of the Republican administration and one of the devisers of the kidnapping/torture/murder network justified by the attacks on the World Trade Center – has just done this March, in an interview with the BBC. This is an individual capable of insisting on the usefulness of torture and of affirming with pride that he had created a legal framework for that abhorrent practice.
Precedents of the implementation of psychological and physical punishment date are much older, but it was in the 1950s that it became systematic. According to authorized studies, what was uncovered in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had already been put into practice in other locations – Latin America, for example. In no case has Europe reacted vigorously to those acts of perversion.
It would seem that researcher Allan Nairn, considered by various eminent U.S. figures to be serious, objective and courageous, had those precedents in mind when he said: 'What Obama’s (ban on torture) cancels is merely that small percentage of torture that is not being engaged in by Americans, but it maintains the overwhelming entirety of torture as a system, employed by foreigners under U.S. patronage.'
He was referring both to soldiers trained in places like the School of the Americas by gendarmes acquired in occupied countries, and mercenaries who, as 'contractors,' take charge of dirty work, such as inflicting suffering on defenseless human beings.
Barack Obama suspended the application of torture shortly after becoming president, but he did not proceed to punish the guilty, thus leaving intact the systems that continue to function both inside and outside the country.
On March 10 in Geneva, Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, criticized the U.S. president for that very reason, accusing him of not having investigated charges of torture under the Bush administration, despite the fact that the United States, as a signatory to the International Convention on Torture, has legal responsibilities requiring an exhaustive investigation and bringing the guilty to justice.
The fact that Karl Rove, smiling and sarcastic, can venture to say that he doesn’t care that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq and, with murderous vehemence, has defended the use of torture as a method for obtaining questionable revelations, indicates that Nowak is right.

RANCID EUROPE

Nowak is an Austrian attorney who, as the UN special rapporteur, has visited various prisons throughout the world, including those of certain prominent countries. Last year he informed the media that several nations had refused to allow him to examine their prisons. In any event, he discovered that approximately 10 million people were being held in unacceptable conditions. 'The majority of them are in conditions that violate human dignity,' he affirmed. One million of that total comprised children aged 9 to 10, who were detained with adults, subject to diverse abuse or beatings by the jailers themselves as a method of 'disciplining them.'

International organizations have confirmed these extreme findings and refer, moreover, to the detention of immigrants, because the European Union has 180 prisons for holding foreigners without documents, in addition to those imprisoned in ordinary jails.

The problems with prisons in Europe are many, according to another report, reflecting overpopulation and lack of hygiene, in addition to insufficient personnel and a lack of safety, including sexual attacks, issues that are touched only by the alternative media. In 2008, these irregularities prompted several hundred prison officials to demonstrate outside the Council of Ministers in Brussels to protest those anomalies, which also lead to a high rate of suicide. Prison suicides occur above all in the United Kingdom, Norway, France and Slovenia, according to the study.

The above is deplorable, as is the content of an Amnesty International dossier: 'The role played by some European states in secret handovers and detentions has wavered between ‘active participation and tacit connivance.’ European agents have detained or held suspects and left them under the custody of the United States without any legal process. They directly participated in illegal arrests; in one case, helping U.S. agents kidnap a suspect in the middle of the street in Italy before his extraordinary handover to Egypt. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has freely used European airports to operate aircraft which transported victims of extraordinary handovers, hooded and chained, with the aim of subjecting them to interrogation and abuse while they were held incommunicado in secret prisons all over the world, including Europe. Agents of European states took advantage of the illegal detention of some of the individuals held to interrogate them without doing anything to alert their families as to their whereabouts or to try to solve the illegal detention, which in and of itself constitutes a human rights violation.

The investigations undertaken discovered the existence, from 2003 to 2005, of CIA-run secret prisons in Europe, where detainees were the victims of forced disappearances, and were held ‘in conditions that would constitute torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.’'
Let’s place an ellipsis at the end of this account which, sadly, is a long and compromising one for those immaculately dressed persons who issue unfounded statements solely because they are not in agreement with the accused, despite the large volume of dirt swept under their carpets.


PRINT THIS ARTICLE






Editor-in-chief: Lázaro Barredo Medina / Editor: Oscar Sánchez
Granma International: http://www.granma.cu/

time is now

the left wing love having a go at the jews.and now the left wing is catching on in america,i do wonder where all this is leading.all this has been fore told in scripture.

` ~galljdaj+;191909:
I N T E R N A T I O N A L
Havana. March 16, 2010


Granma International: [URL]http://www.granma.cu/[/URL]

More Commie lies that this moron posts.

Prove your point, GirlyBoyjihad.

But NO Commie loving, dictator supporting state rags will be accepted.

American dollar comment

Dear Kawahchan, if you hate Jews so much why are you looking on a Jewish site? Wouldn’t you be better off sticking your arse in the air screaming Allahu Akhbar, much more productive.

Dear obtuse

Unregistered;192018:
Dear Kawahchan, if you hate Jews so much why are you looking on a Jewish site? Wouldn’t you be better off sticking your arse in the air screaming Allahu Akhbar, much more productive.

What site might that be?
Certainly you don’t mean this site which is hosted in Australia but the owners are out of Dubai?



On that note!
There is not and never has been a Country or State called Palestine. it follows therefore that you cannot be a refugee from it and neither can it be OCCUPIED.
The Mohammedan ARAB Invaders ( know why they are called ARABS its because they come from ARABIA) already have TWO States in what was the Mandate of Palestine they are called SYRIA and JORDAN and along with the EGYPTIAN OCCUPIED Sinai they comprise OVER 75% of what was the original Mandate. But now the Mohammedan ARAB Invaders want ANOTHER State too carved out of guess yep thats right ISRAEL the HISTORICAL owners of ALL the Mandate but who ONLY have less than 25% of it (in REALITY they want ALL of Israel but they will never admit to that out loud so they will just keep chipping away bit by bit FOREVER). Logic TRUTH and equality are strangers to Islam but HYPOCRISY is not.
But face it its not about land it never has been about land its just a Mohammedan excuse to KILL JEWS.

Well lil billy expert(?)

The point is proven in the article your afraid to read! If your going to be a coward where it proudly like your mama’s lil man!

Otherwise read the article and make your argument use quotes from the article, provide your evidence and make your conclusion argument !

If your correct expect that I will acknowledge your Truth! However, if you post falsehoods, expect me to be critical!

Everyone knows your history, so are you going to surprise? or be the same ol' lil billy shouter?

` ~galljdaj+;193850:
The point is proven in the article your afraid to read! If your going to be a coward where it proudly like your mama’s lil man!

Otherwise read the article and make your argument use quotes from the article, provide your evidence and make your conclusion argument !

If your correct expect that I will acknowledge your Truth! However, if you post falsehoods, expect me to be critical!

Everyone knows your history, so are you going to surprise? or be the same ol' lil billy shouter?

I am always looking for truth.

But I will NEVER find the truth from Granma or any other Commie rag news source.

Since you are so dedicated to Commie rags, will you admit you are a Commie lover?

I believe that's what my post says, you'll never read... ,

...and of course its your fear, other wise you’d be capable of finding something wrong, if what you claim is true! You have failed to ever post one single bad, or one single good! That says you can’t read any of the posts.

You see in your mind the word commie and you freeze up like any common messianic that republicans leaders groom.

I understand, I was a republican leader that left the party because wonderful ronnie’s demand we cultivate messianic like you!

Come on pilgrim

Dude what’s up with the commie sh^t what era are you from like circa 1948 commie invasion ahhhh!!!! Breath man communist died out 30 years ago. It’s all about the money boys. Fack Israel, Iran, Japan Hochiman your Jurassic generation keeps starting these crazy wars and screwing up the environment and economy. Dude I’ve read some of your post and you are one sick puppy; destroy the world to save it right. Sharon and Reagan ended up stuttering slobbering idiots in the end a very undignified way to die. All you hawks need to cluck over and die off your cold war crazy crap is bringing this world down. Go get buzzed and roll a fat chick and cool the Fack out please!!!!!!!

Commies! Commie! Commies!

Pontotoc Bill;193856:
I am always looking for truth.

But I will NEVER find the truth from Granma or any other Commie rag news source.

Since you are so dedicated to Commie rags, will you admit you are a Commie lover?

Another baseless claim form a village fool.

` ~galljdaj+;193869:
...and of course its your fear, other wise you’d be capable of finding something wrong, if what you claim is true! You have failed to ever post one single bad, or one single good! That says you can’t read any of the posts.

You see in your mind the word commie and you freeze up like any common messianic that republicans leaders groom.

I understand, I was a republican leader that left the party because wonderful ronnie’s demand we cultivate messianic like you!

Look at how you avoid like the plague answering direct questions.
You have not led anything in your life unless you count being voted top village idiot.

Stop smoking that crap and wake up

John Wayne;193881:
Dude what’s up with the commie sh^t what era are you from like circa 1948 commie invasion ahhhh!!!! Breath man communist died out 30 years ago. It’s all about the money boys. Fack Israel, Iran, Japan Hochiman your Jurassic generation keeps starting these crazy wars and screwing up the environment and economy. Dude I’ve read some of your post and you are one sick puppy; destroy the world to save it right. Sharon and Reagan ended up stuttering slobbering idiots in the end a very undignified way to die. All you hawks need to cluck over and die off your cold war crazy crap is bringing this world down. Go get buzzed and roll a fat chick and cool the Fack out please!!!!!!!

Commies! Commie! Commies!

Our President stupid ass Barry Soetero aka zerO is a damn Commie!
He is destroying AMERIKA as we speak!
Here comes 30-40 million illegal aliens to destroy the work force of America....Job what jobs!
You don’t have a clue.

What does lil billy hogeye mean???

'I’m always LOOKING for the Truth'

No one is more blind than the man that will not see!

Its obvious he can see out of one eye, unless of course mama reads to him. That’s just too hard to even immagine for more than a second.

He sees a word like Cuba or Venezuela and he shuts down into a mental collapse like one of those advertising light billboards that rotates the power to the lightbulbs on old movie theatres with the name commie followed endlessly with another commie... !

So just what does lil billy hogee mean, he sit waiting for the rest of the message??

We can be assured he does not read the messages or articles, he’s incapable of answering or finding a question, or a topic of good or bad, So is it just the word galljdaj+ that shut the power oof in lil billy? Unless the second eye can get as far as cuba or venezuela and it too shuts down? How long is it before he can file a post of his shouts?

I believe that lil billy hogeye must be a mediacl marvel! You have to wonder if lil billy was on the Rommey Brainwash Tour!

` ~galljdaj+;194143:
'I’m always LOOKING for the Truth'

No one is more blind than the man that will not see!

Its obvious he can see out of one eye, unless of course mama reads to him. That’s just too hard to even immagine for more than a second.

He sees a word like Cuba or Venezuela and he shuts down into a mental collapse like one of those advertising light billboards that rotates the power to the lightbulbs on old movie theatres with the name commie followed endlessly with another commie... !

So just what does lil billy hogee mean, he sit waiting for the rest of the message??

We can be assured he does not read the messages or articles, he’s incapable of answering or finding a question, or a topic of good or bad, So is it just the word galljdaj+ that shut the power oof in lil billy? Unless the second eye can get as far as cuba or venezuela and it too shuts down? How long is it before he can file a post of his shouts?

I believe that lil billy hogeye must be a mediacl marvel! You have to wonder if lil billy was on the Rommey Brainwash Tour!

Yes, you are too blind to see the truth when faced by it GirlyBoyJihad. You have not posted truth here, only socialist lies.

Try again, mental midget.

My goodness our lil coward finally answered a question!

He addmits to beingmedical marvel and on the romney brainwashed tour.

So its understandable now how it is he cannot find a good or bad in any of my posts! Here I thought it was only when he saw the Words CUBA AND VENEZUELA, THAT THE CRAMP ENGAGED HIS LIL TWO CELL BRAIN. Obviously 'galljdaj1' has to be added to the list.

I wonder if mama read his email first and she helped him whether he liked it or not.

To You The Collectivist Stooge

` ~galljdaj+;194544:
He addmits to beingmedical marvel and on the romney brainwashed tour.

So its understandable now how it is he cannot find a good or bad in any of my posts! Here I thought it was only when he saw the Words CUBA AND VENEZUELA, THAT THE CRAMP ENGAGED HIS LIL TWO CELL BRAIN. Obviously 'galljdaj1' has to be added to the list.



I wonder if mama read his email first and she helped him whether he liked it or not.

The truth is revealed.
You post nothing of any consequence or worth simply regurgitating the State propaganda.

“[The] left became so ideologically attached to anti-Americanism and pro-communism and Third Worldism that I believe we have a problem on our hands” - Eldridge Cleaver

A Washington Post columnist by the name of Colbert King recently compared the “Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers” to the angry mobs who used threats, intimidation, and even murder to prevent the “landmark civil rights laws” of the 1960s. According to King,

The angry '50s and '60s crowds threatened and intimidated; some among them even murdered. That notwithstanding, Americans of goodwill gathered in the White House to witness the signing of landmark civil rights laws.


King reminds his readers that although “[s]choolhouse doors were blocked and little children were demeaned," the “bigots didn’t get the last word. Justice rolled down like a mighty river, sweeping them aside."

And while comparing present-day Tea Party anger to the abuse, lies, insults, and vandalism characteristic of yesteryear’s George Wallace brigades, King is confident that “progress” today will prevail as it did back in the '60s:

Those angry faces won’t go away. But neither can they stand in the way of progress. The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.


While reflecting on Colbert King’s words, I too began to reminisce about some of the violent, angry faces in my own past.

Back in the early 1980s, I was sitting in Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley with hundreds of other students, waiting rather impatiently to see a man who clearly embodied much of the turmoil, outrage, and overall ethos of the 1960s: ex-Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

Cleaver combined his roles as radical philosopher and warrior for the oppressed to serve the Black Panthers as Minister of Information shortly after his release from Folsom prison in 1966. Cleaver hit the national stage in 1968 when he published a collection of his prison writings, Soul on Ice, which combines a visceral hatred for America with black liberation theology, admissions about “insurrectionary” rape, a spiritual odyssey, and a search for personal meaning in a racist environment.

Perhaps Shane Stevens of The Progressive captured the essence of Cleaver’s book best when he said in a review, “The hell is there, and its name is America." Indeed, the raw power of Cleaver’s remarkable and revealing eloquence in Soul on Ice made him a favorite on college campuses and also among legions of leftist intellectuals.

I read Soul on Ice as a teenager and was floored by the radical difference between the violent and turbulent streets of Cleaver’s young life and the strawberry fields and apple orchards that girded the quiet dirt roads I strolled along during my own youth on a farm.

Cleaver’s life took yet another violent turn in April of 1968 when he helped organize an ambush of the Oakland city police. The resulting shootout left fellow Panther Bobby Hutton dead, two police officers injured, and Cleaver charged with attempted murder. To avoid more time in prison, Cleaver left the country for Cuba and other communist destinations such as North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, where he was heralded as a celebrity by authorities in each government, who also helped provide for his living.

By 1975, however, Cleaver had learned firsthand about the crushing weight of the state in the communist world. He experienced a personal transformation that left him longing for life back in America. And despite being vilified and called a traitor by his colleagues on the left, Cleaver began openly defending American values and traditions in speeches and interviews upon his return.

Sitting in the crowd at UC Berkeley some years after Cleaver’s repatriation, I again thought about what this compelling and exotic man might be able to teach me about America. When the audience began hissing and sneering, I realized that Cleaver had arrived.

It has been over twenty-five years, but I still remember Cleaver’s imposing figure strolling across the stage, unfazed by heckling and howling that met him from some in the audience. As Cleaver rested his large, black hands on the podium, I heard voices in the back snapping with anger and calling out in rapid succession, “You’re a traitor, Cleaver!"

As I remember, Cleaver began his speech by defending the conservative American values of self-reliance and entrepreneurship and warning against the dangers of statism and collectivism. Shortly into his speech, however, as the heckling reached intolerable levels, dozens of protesters began marching down the aisles of the auditorium, headed for the stage.

Sitting near the podium, I turned to watch as some of the marchers leaped onto the stage, dragging a giant American flag that had been squeezed into a thick noose. After they swatted the stage several times with Old Glory, I remember them stomping the flag with their boots and accompanying the chaos with an eerie chant of some kind.

Cleaver stood above me only a few rows away, sizing up the anarchy as it unfolded around him. What I’ll never forget is the kind of smooth composure this larger-than-life figure displayed despite the impending threat — like a panther, as one protester would soon learn to his dismay.

Realizing the inaction or disappearance of the campus police, the apparent ringleader of the mob raced over to a table near the podium, grabbed a pitcher of water, and splashed its contents over Cleaver’s face and chest. With the reflexes of an experienced prizefighter, Cleaver knocked the angry young man clear off the stage with a simple but frightfully quick jab, and then he waited calmly for more.

While the leftist thugs rioting near Cleaver had second thoughts about their next move, the campus police finally arrived and cleared the stage after a short scuffle. Cleaver continued speaking, but I was so overwhelmed by the rapid succession of violent events that my memory even now leaves me somewhat helpless beyond that point.

Several years later, Cleaver met with the editors of Reason Magazine for a profound, enlightening, and at times rather poignant interview about recent American history, the dangers of welfare-statism, the role of ideology in politics, and what he learned while living under socialist rule abroad.

Cleaver learned that most importantly, “it is a quality of human beings that when they are trying to tear something down[,] they don’t pay enough attention” to the relationship between ideology and “the form of government that comes out of that ideology." Having studied Marxism “on paper” as a Black Panther, Cleaver was ill-prepared to realize how efficiently the state manages to crush the very individual Cleaver himself had intended to liberate.

When asked by the Reason editors whether government welfare programs end up harming or helping its recipients, Cleaver had this to say:

My life, I think, spans the whole era of the welfare state. I was born in 1935. I remember when people were ashamed to be on welfare and receive state aid and all that, but we developed a situation where black people to a large degree and a lot of other groups such as elderly people, children, and a lot of poor white people ended being harnessed by political forces, especially the Democratic Party. In return for the federal appropriations that we are now dependent upon, our leaders were obligated to get out the black vote for the Democratic Party. So this put us in a negative relationship with the economic system. We were dependent upon the federal budget — a very precarious situation, because when the political winds change, we get our living cut off.


Cleaver believed that the solution to this kind of dependency on the Democratic Party is a series of private-sector entities that help bring these groups into a more positive relationship with the economic system:

If we do it through the state, like, say, President Roosevelt did with the New Deal, you augment the power of the state. ... I don’t want to see government get control of the economic system as a whole and the livelihood of all the people, because I have seen that, and it’s a no-no.


Since Cleaver’s “great, burning desire” was to “help enlarge human freedom," he was able to recognize the debilitating effects that Democrat welfare-statism had on the black population here at home.

Eldridge Cleaver passed away in 1998, but today, writers like Colbert King are likening Americans who are simply alarmed, as Cleaver was, at the growth of Big Brother to the racists, bigots, and murderers who stood in the way of civil rights legislation. This is a deplorable and disingenuous charge, since the Tea Party phenomenon is simply aimed at thwarting the rapid augmentation of the state, not at any of the civil rights legislation.

As Eldridge Cleaver understood, when the individual is crushed, so is his sense of self-respect and self-reliance. Since LBJ’s Great Society initiatives, billions of dollars have been spent augmenting the state in relation to the individual lives of most black Americans. Is Colbert King happy with the results? Is socialized medicine as important to the black community as the staggering numbers of children who grow up without a father in the home?

Back in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi was asked a question about the prospect of a state-controlled economy in newly independent India. Gandhi replied:

I look upon an increase of the power of the state with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress. We know of so many cases where men have adopted trusteeship [charity], but none where the State has really lived for the poor.


It is the “fear of freedom and responsibility," said Tzvetan Todorov, that creates “the attraction of a totalitarian system."

Listen to the panther, Colbert King. If you think you’re on the right side of history, then Eldridge Cleaver may have already seen your future.

` ~galljdaj+;194544:
He addmits to beingmedical marvel and on the romney brainwashed tour.

So its understandable now how it is he cannot find a good or bad in any of my posts! Here I thought it was only when he saw the Words CUBA AND VENEZUELA, THAT THE CRAMP ENGAGED HIS LIL TWO CELL BRAIN. Obviously 'galljdaj1' has to be added to the list.

I wonder if mama read his email first and she helped him whether he liked it or not.

What are you trying to say, mental midget?

This is totally bizarre and without meaning.

Want to try and expand on just WHAT you meant?

I find plenty bad to say about your posts since they are nothing but regurgitation of Commie lies and propaganda.