Comments on Reads 8/4

MEMRI: Hamas: We Will Not Relinquish Any Piece of Palestinian Land

Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: We in Gaza conducted a plan of resistance in order to drive the occupation out. The plan was accomplished, and not a single settler or soldier remains on the Palestinian land in Gaza. Our plan is to continue this approach. Today, we have completed the liberation of Gaza, and your plan does not… At this moment in time, we say to you, first of all: We want Palestine in its entirety – so there will not be any misunderstandings. If our generation is unable to achieve this, the next one will, and we are raising our children on this. Palestine means Palestine in its entirety, and Israel cannot exist in our midst.

Interviewer: But that was your past rhetoric. Today, you are talking about the 1967 borders…

Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: I swear by Allah, this is what is on our minds.

Interviewer: Today, you are talking about the 1967 borders.

Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: Fine, but this is a phase. This is just a phase.

Interviewer: When Abu Ammar [Arafat] used to talk about conducting struggle in phases and about give and take, you accused him of treason…

Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: No, we never accuse anyone of treason. We talk about security cooperation and leave the interpretation up to you. Let me explain to you the difference between Fatah and us on this issue. We talk about the liberation of the pre-1967 territories, but we do not recognize Israel on a single inch of our land. In other words, this land will remain ours, and when the balance of power changes, we will regain it. We will regain the land, even if we have to do so inch by inch.

FP:They have been saying this since their inception in Arabic. The only significance is that now they keep saying it in English because they realize that the world is either ignoring, whitewashing, or  has accepted it (just see how the interviewer insists on the 1967 borders despite the explicit statements to the contrary). And now Israel has an opposition party and a segment of society who actively want to facilitate their phase strategy. With the West and the Arab world where they are, not very promising would be the understatement of the year.

What Do They Want to Achieve? The Tent City Protests

On the other hand, having discovered who the lead protesters are, I am not surprised by their antidemocratic tendencies. The disturbances were initiated by Daphne Leef, an employee of the New Israel Fund, which is known for funding organizations that work to stigmatize Israel and the IDF, and to promote boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.
Another leader is Stav Shafir, a self-avowed semi-anarchist in the employ of the news company Yediot Aharonot, which opposes Netanyahu and has been covering the protests nonstop.
Other prominent participants include Asaf Nadiv, who was convicted in 1989 of membership in the Trotskyite terrorist group Derech Hanitzotz; writer Anat Rosilio, who in December 2008 strongly opposed Operation Cast Lead against rocket fire from Gaza; Tzvika Besor, a self-described devotee of communist Dov Khenin; and more than a few other communist and anarchist activists.
The leaders are aided by teams of academics and operatives from fringe political organizations that coordinate protesters’ messages and see to the expulsion of opponents who make themselves heard.

FP: Just as I thought: Israel’s Tahrir. The anti-Israel radical left hijacking and exploiting a legitimate cost of living protest to bring down the elected government.

IDF strikes targets in Gaza in retaliation to rockets

Grad rocket lands within Ashkelon city boundaries; police say road damaged; earlier rocket lands near Kiryat Gat; 5 hurt while running for shelter; attacks represent escalation in firing longer-range rockets.

FP: The UN is going to recognize a state whose government includes a genocidal terror organization shooting rockets at cities.

Matt Taibbi: Evil Corporate Tax Holiday Deal Still Alive

The action revolves around a bill sponsored in May by Texas Republican Kevin Brady (and co-sponsored by Utah Democrat Jim Matheson) called the Freedom To Invest Act, which would “temporarily” lower the effective corporate tax rate to 5.25 percent for all profits being repatriated.Essentially, this is a one-time tax holiday rewarding companies for systematically offshoring their profits since 2004 – the last time they did this “one-time” deal.
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For people interested in this story, I definitely recommend reading this Bloomberg article focusing on Cisco, one of the biggest lobbyers in favor of the tax holiday. This is a company whose CEO, John Chambers, wrote an editorial last October in the Wall Street Journal predicting that the tax holiday would generate a trillion dollars in repatriated earnings, money that Chambers insisted would outdo even Barack Obama’s stimulus as a job-creation engine:

The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses.

And yet: Chambers’s company, Cisco, would not commit to creating so much as a single job if the tax holiday is passed. As it is, the company has already committed to a wave of layoffs. When asked a question about Cisco's plans w/regard to a potential tax holiday, the company’s spokesman, John Earhardt, declined to answer. From the Bloomberg piece:

It’s unclear whether any jobs would come from Cisco, which announced plans in May to shed an unspecified number of workers. Earnhardt, the spokesman, declined to comment on hiring plans for the company, whose customers include Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and AT&T Inc. (T)

FP: Exposes the logic of one way in which the corporate welfare state (CWS) has been bringing the US down, why it’s not sustainable and why after so many years of it, recovery is unlikely. The CWS is a kleptocratic alliance between corrupt politicians and corporations who are robbing the taxpayers blind until nothing is left. The failure is not exactly that of capitalism and free markets (which are illusions and have never truly existed), but their distortion by the CWS.

Anti-Jewish tirades at Hungarian newspaper provoke outrage

Anti-Jewish comments from the Hungarian daily Magyar Hirlap and the passage of a restrictive new media law in early July by Hungary’s conservative government have prompted sharp criticism from American and Austrian media outlets.
Zsolt Bayer, a columnist for the right-wing daily, had referred to Jews as “stinking excrement called something like Cohen.” Bayer has a journalistic track record of attacking Jews, according to critics. In 2010, he asserted that the Hungarian Academy of Science has been infiltrated by Jews.
Responding to Bayer’s anti-Jewish rhetoric earlier this year, Karl Pfeifer, an Austrian-Jewish journalist who writes for papers in Hungary and Austria, called Bayer a “fecal anti-Semite”in the Austrian daily Die Presse. Pfeifer’s commentary triggered a Magyar Hirlap article and a wave of alleged anti-Semitic reader comments on the website of the Hungarian paper. Pfeifer, who escaped the Holocaust, was termed a “gaschamber deserter” in the reader comment section. Other readers invoked the terms “Jewish scabs” and “Jewish lice,” stating that “the Israeli-Jewish occupiers...bring only conflict and ruin, while sucking our blood like parasites and draining our vigor.”
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Speaking from Israel on Monday, Pfeifer, who lives in Vienna and is visiting family, told the Post that Bayer has close ties to the right-wing government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party. These close relations, Pfeifer says, help explain why the media oversight authorities are refusing to take action against Bayer’s diatribes against Jews.

FP: The new Europe is much like the old Europe. It reverting to its good old self—when it comes to Jews. Hungary was a member of the fascist axis during WW2.