A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

The United States, land of the Jesus lover:

It’s rather staggering to consider that more than two centuries after our Constitution codified the absolute separation of church and state, we’ve never had a single top court justice who was an atheist.

A unique interview in the US this week between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

Stephanopoulos: If you did know that Osama bin Laden was in Tehran, would you show him hospitality? Would you expel him? Would you arrest him?
Ahmadinejad: I heard that Osama bin Laden is in Washington DC.
Stephanopoulos: No, you didn’t.
Ahmadinejad: Yes, I did. He’s there. Because he was a previous partner of Mr Bush. They were colleagues in fact in the old days. You know that. They were in the oil business together. They worked together. Mr bin Laden never cooperated with Iran but he cooperated with Mr Bush.

Later:

Stephanopoulos: But you deny categorically that he’s in Tehran today? He is not, Osama bin Laden is not in Tehran today?
Ahmadinejad: Rest assured that he’s in Washington. I think there’s a high chance he’s there.
Stephanopoulos: I don’t agree. Thank you for your time, Mr President.

In case anybody was unsure, this story in Politico includes a key point about the profound hypocrisy of America’s foreign policy (and the situation is little different in Australia). It’s alright for Jewish, American citizens to visit Israel and kill Arabs in the name of “fighting terrorism” but anybody caught on the side of the devil (insert name here, ie. Hamas, Hizbollah etc) will be punished. Somehow I suspect this proposed bill will be a complete failure:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) thinks he’s found a work-around on the whole Miranda rights debate for U.S. citizens accused of terrorism: Strip their citizenship and ship them to Guantanamo.
Lieberman plans to introduce a bill that would amend a decades-old law aimed at yanking citizenship from U.S. citizens who fight for a foreign military.

“I’m now putting together legislation to amend that to [specify that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization, as defined by the Department of State, would be deprived of their citizenship rights,” Lieberman said Tuesday.
Such a law would potentially cover terror suspect Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born American citizen charged in connection with the attempted car bombing in New York City’s Times Square. He was apprehended Monday night at the city’s John F. Kennedy airport after he boarded a flight to Dubai.
“If you have joined an enemy of the United States in attacking the United States and trying to kill Americans, I think you sacrifice your rights of citizenship,” Lieberman said.
There is one exception to the existing law: Americans are allowed to serve in the Israel Defense Forces without losing their citizenship.

That’s quite a democracy you have there:

Only six of the 439 Knesset workers are Arabs, according to a report on minority employees at government institutions submitted on Wednesday by United Arab List-Ta’al MK Ahmed Tibi.
According to the committee report, only 1.3 percent of workers in the Prime Minister’s Office are Arab. In the Finance Ministry, 1.4 percent of all employees are Arab, while the figure in the Construction and Housing Ministry is 1.8 percent.
The situation in government-run agencies is similar: Arabs comprise 1 percent of the workforce at the Geological Survey of Israel and 1.3 percent at the Israel Electric Company.

We always hear that Hamas are rejectionists who will never recognise Israel or Jews.
So what about Likud’s charter?
See: www.antonyloewenstein.com