[Peace-discuss] FW: [ufpj-activist] Skipping The Speech for All the Wrong Reasons

[Karen Aram]

Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:35:52 -0500
From: davidcnswanson at gmail.com
To: david at davidswanson.org
Subject: [ufpj-activist] Skipping The Speech for All the Wrong Reasons

Skipping The Speech for All the Wrong ReasonsBy David Swanson
http://warisacrime.org/node/69285

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu's speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:
It's too close to Netanyahu's election. (That
 doesn't persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, 
un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then "politics" wouldn't
 be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing 
things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want 
them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don't want the 
U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech is hardly 
the same as backing coups in Ukraine and Venezuela or giving Israel 
billions of dollars worth of weapons every year.)
The Speaker didn't ask the President.
 (This is likely the big reason that Democrats are promising to skip the
 speech. I'm actually amazed more of them haven't made that promise. 
Netanyahu seemed to me to miss the extent to which the United States has
 become a term-limited monarchy. Congress typically wants to pass the 
buck on wars to the President. The President typically controls one of 
the two parties quite tightly. But do I actually care that Congress 
didn't consult the President? Hell no! Imagine if, during the run-up to 
the 2003 attack on Iraq, Congress had offered a joint-session microphone
 to El Baradei or Sarkozy or Putin or, indeed, Hussein to denounce all 
the bogus claims about WMDs in Iraq? Would you have been outraged by the
 impoliteness toward President Bush or delighted that a million people 
might not get killed for no damn reason?)
These kinds of reasons 
do have a practical weakness: they lead to calls for postponing the 
speech, rather than canceling it. Some other reasons have more serious 
flaws.
The speech damages bipartisan U.S. support for Israel. (Really?
 A slim minority of the President's party skips the speech for a laundry
 list of lame excuses and suddenly the United States is going to stop 
providing all the free weapons and vetoing every attempt at legal 
accountability for the crimes of the Israeli government? And that would 
be a bad thing if it actually happened?)
The speech hurts the critical effort of negotiations to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (This
 is the worst of the bad reasons. It pushes the false idea that Iran is 
trying to build a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it. It plays 
right into Netanyahu's fantasies of poor helpless nuclear Israel the 
victim of Iranian aggression. In reality, Iran has not attacked another 
nation in modern history. If only Israel or the United States could say 
as much!)
As I said, I'm glad anyone's skipping the speech
 for any reason. But I find it deeply disturbing that an enormously 
important and deeply moral reason to skip the speech is obvious and 
known to every member of Congress, and while most are acting against it,
 those acting in accordance with it refuse to articulate it. The reason 
is this: Netanyahu is coming to spread war propaganda. He told Congress 
lies about Iraq in 2002 and pushed for a U.S. war. He has been lying, 
according to leaks this week of his own spies' information and according
 to the understanding of the U.S. "intelligence" services, about Iran. 
It is illegal to spread war propaganda under the International 
Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a party. 
Congress is struggling to keep up with the wars President Obama is 
continuing, launching, and risking. Here's one war Obama seems not to 
want, and Congress is bringing in a foreign leader with a record of war 
lies to give them their marching orders. Meanwhile, an agency of that 
same foreign government, AIPAC, is holding its big lobby meeting in 
Washington.
Now, it is true that nuclear energy facilities create 
dangerous targets. Those drones flying around French nuclear plants 
scare the hell out of me. And it is true that nuclear energy places its 
possessor a short step away from nuclear weaponry. Which is why the U.S.
 should stop spreading nuclear energy to countries that have no need of 
it, and why the U.S. should never have given nuclear bomb plans to Iran 
or sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to prison for allegedly revealing that 
act. But you can't accomplish good by using horrific mass murder to 
avoid horrific mass murder -- and that's what Israeli-U.S. aggression 
toward Iran means. Stirring up a new cold war with Russia in Syria and 
Ukraine is dangerous enough without throwing Iran into the mix. But even
 a war that confined itself to Iran would be horrifying.
Imagine 
if we had one Congress member who would say, "I'm skipping the speech 
because I'm opposed to killing Iranians." I know we have lots of 
constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member 
secretly thinks that. But I'll believe it when I hear it said.


-- 



David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.

Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.  
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