So, a few mornings ago, I emerged from my REM fog to NBC video of Palestinian and Lebanese villages being crushed by tanks and missiles and F-16s and the sound of Matt Lauer yammering about Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Who knows, maybe it was just the hour of the morning, or perhaps I was really and truly revulsed by Israel claiming a right to “defend itself” — by using tanks, missiles, and F-16s against already beaten-down, occupied territories in a country that’s got no imperialist power backing them up, got no tanks, got no Patriot missiles, got no F-16s, got no nukes — not to mention having no food, no water, no medicine, no services…

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Is it just me, or did Secretary Of Snake Condolee-ee-ee-eezza Rice make one of her weirdest statements ever last weekend — even weirder than that NBC “Today” interview where she said “freedom is on the march” about half a dozen times? Oh, and I love the part where she says that “We’re going through a very violent time.” “WE”? What do you mean “we”, white woman?

All in all, though, quite a bout of birth pangs, there; shame it couldn’t have been a more quiet, serene and peaceful birthing experience, like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s baby.

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I saw on the morning news the footage of the first successful synthesis of uranium by the Iranians. I saw a scientist holding up this little capsule of radioactive gas with this theatrically triumphant attitude. As I heard the pundits clucking on TV, I reminded myself, “OK, Iran’s finally gone nuclear, but who’s the real nuclear threat in the Middle East?” Every time I asked myself this, I kept coming up with the same answer:

BIG HINT: it begins with an “I”, ends with an “L”, and has “S-R-A-E” in the middle. Has anyone else noticed how the US Press and the State are shitting themselves over Iran finally managing to produce some crummy-assed smidgen of enriched uranium, while failing to point out that Israel has enough nukes to make a ring of craters around itself?

Let’s take a calm, close look, here. On the one hand, we have a nation that’s just now reached the Pinky And The Brain stage of nuclear development; on the other, a nation with at least 200 functional nuclear weapons of various types — most of which were supplied by the USA — on standby, ready to light the place up. Those of us out here who aren’t profoundly retarded can see who the real nuclear threat is here, and would really appreciate it if the US Media would quit jerking us around.

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The State of Israel — headed at the time by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, architect of the 1982 brutalization of Lebanon as Israeli Defense Minister and quite possibly with the largest overall girth of any world leader — was going on another one of its recent periodic ass-stomping parties in Palestine, this time directed at the towns of Ramallah and Jenin. It was starting to look more and more like the Nazis moving into Warsaw every day, to the point where the comparison was far more accurate than your average overblown “Godwin Rule” Nazi analogy rant on Usenet. While comparisons to Warsaw 1940 and 1960’s South Africa are today made by everybody and their cat — including former US President Jimmy Carter — in early ‘02, with the big Crusade still going on in Afghanistan, to dare compare Israeli State behavior in Ramallah and Jenin to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw was taking a huge-ass chance not only with the rightist/zionist factions among Jewish America, but with the then-highly intimidated US Left as well.

A lot of folks here will also remember this piece in the context of the infamous Danish cartoon brouhaha because this fracas spawned the now-legendary Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by Hamshahri, the major Iranian daily paper out of Teheran. As you recall, the contest called on cartoonists around the world to submit Holocaust-themed cartoons as a challenge to people who claim to support free speech to put their money where their mouths are. Iranian president Ahmadinejad, himself a Holocaust denier, was expecting to see cartoons denying the Holocaust; what he got instead was an outpouring of cartoons critical of US/Israeli policy on Palestine, cartoons which compared the Israeli aggression in Palestine to the Holocaust — cartoons which, by their very nature, assumed not denial but acknowledgement of the historical fact and reality of the Holocaust. As I recall, there was a grand total of one — count ‘em, one — cartoon actually denying the Holocaust in the entire competition.

I, along with five other Americans, were participants in this contest and exhibition, to which I submitted the cartoon you see above, which basically asked what Prime Minister Sharon and others of a generation of Israeli leadership old enough to have lived through the Holocaust, exactly what they’d leared from it; my own answer was that they’d learned precisely the wrong things, as both history and recent events had shown they’d become that which they themselves hated generations ago.

Needless to say, I caught a shitstorm of howling criticism from not only the reactionary right-wing Zionist factions, but the reactionary US right wing, in the form of interviews I gave on a couple of right-wing talk-radio programs whose hosts bitched and fumed at me for being “anti-Semetic”, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the cartoon was not a slag on Judaism or Jews but a direct, pointed criticism of Israeli state behavior in Palestine. Talk about your great truth beginning as blasphemy; here we are three years later, and everybody from the UN to former US President Jimmy Carter is comparing Israel’s behavior in Palestine to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and to South Africa’s apartheid era.

It was tough going for a while, there, but man, it sure is nice to be right.

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