Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 2015 Source: Trentonian, The (NJ) Column: Passing the Joint Copyright: 2015 The Trentonian Contact: http://www.trentonian.com Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006 Author: Edward Forchion, NJWeedman.com For The Trentonian HAVE WE BECOME THE EVIL EMPIRE? I am a peaceful, proud, patriotic pothead. As such, I relish the rights afforded to all Americans by the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and political expression. As a patriot I feel it's my duty to express my opinion on things my government does, whether it's popular or not. This is what I've always believed as I openly spoke out against our nation's war on drugs. Because of Mike Huckabee's presidential announcement, this column is dedicated to exercising my free speech rights again by voicing my opposition to America's daily bombing of the Middle East's Muslim populations. Which we've done for decades now, in the name of the goodness Huckabee-like Americans think we dole out. This is the real reason some of them want to attack us or bomb us back as Osama bin Laden did - not because they're jealous of our freedoms, as that self-righteous idiot from Texas claimed. What a scary thought: President Huckabee. In his announcement speech he said current President Barack Obama "can't watch a Western movie from the '50s and figure out who the bad guys are." I bet he could, but Huckabee wouldn't like his answer. FYI, 1950s Westerns glorified the genocide of Native Americans. Likewise, Huckabee glorifies the genocide of native Middle Easterners as good rhetoric in his quest to support the European colony of Israel. Is Israel the 51st, and most important, state? Listening to Huckabee, it sure sounds like it. My choice would be Puerto Rico, which by the way just legalized marijuana. Half of Huckabee's speech was dedicated to the "war on terror." We call it that, but in reality it's a half-century Christian Crusade by our nation's leaders to force Middle Eastern Muslims to accept Western philosophies, customs, and political forms of government such as democracy with F-16s and drone missiles. They aren't over here imposing Sharia law, as Huckabee claims; we traveled 6,000 miles to impose our form of government on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other countries we undermine like Iran. We justify our bombing by calling anyone opposed to our crusade a terrorist. Americans who only get their info from the government boob tube (TV networks) think the "war on terror" started on 9/11/2001. Ironically, that was while I was in Riverfront Prison, imprisoned for a plant our Christian do-gooder leaders deem evil, like Muslim leaders deem alcohol evil. Totally not so - it started in 1948. Our war on Muslims really began when we imposed the creation of Israel on top of Palestine. Talk about taxation without representation: The Palestinians of the last half-century have been treated like the Native Americans depicted in the 50s Western movies Huckabee referred to. Palestinians were treated the same: In 1948 a European colony (Jews) was imposed on them via UN mandate; the Europeans took the land using laws they created to justify their action (similar to British kings' land grants in the 1600s). That was the beginning of our unpalatable Middle East diplomacy, which spread hatred of the West throughout the region. To these people we are the Evil Empire, and Huckabee proudly boasts his intention to wage war for Isreal. When the USA, England, and France created Israel via United Nations Resolution 181, the Palestinians had no say as their land was grabbed from those fleeing the 1948 war. (I call this the only successful Christian Crusade.) They've been fighting to get it back ever since - the right of return. Once it was just the PLO; now there's the elected government of Hamas, but we hypocritically don't recognize Muslim democracy-again, we call them terrorists. As a kid in the '70s I remember watching news footage of U.S.-made F-4 fighter-bombers bombing Palestinian and other Middle Eastern targets. Last summer we all watched as apartheid Israeli soldiers, again using our weapons, bombed the Palestinian ghetto of Gaza. Our weapons have been assaulting the Middle East since the 1940s, hundreds if not thousands of times a year. Three weeks ago was the two-year anniversary of the Boston bombing. "Boston Strong" has become our battle cry - for this one bombing! Imagine being from a Muslim country that we bomb dozens of Muslim neighborhoods in the Middle East and Asia daily, we kill multiple thousands of Muslims. Last weekend some Muslim men from Arizona attempted to attack an offensive "cartoon contest of Muhammad" put on by Christian antagonists in Garland, Texas. I believe they, like the idiots at Charlie Hedbo, got the reaction they sought. Now they have more Christian propaganda to spew - it costs a couple lives. The Huckabee crowd is salivating about that. As a kid I identified the word "propaganda" as a method other governments use to indoctrinate their people. As an adult, I know it happens here too. Our government does it, our media does it-under the guidance of government officials, I believe. Most of the mainstream media engages in it; FoxNews (Huckabee) is the leader of disinformation and spin, especially in its demonization of Islam, its followers, and anything not white. For example: The current portrayal of the fight in Yemen We constantly undermine Middle Eastern governments; now we caused a civil war in Yemen, and we call the rightful government forces "rebels." They are Houthis, and their forces compelled our puppet, President Hadi, to flee. The Houthis are winning, so our media disparages them by calling them rebels; through deceptive media tactics they are made out to be terrorists and ISIL members. In reality, both Hadi and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh (Houthi) are opposed by Al-Qaeda, which has staged numerous deadly attacks from its strongholds against them both. They opposed Saddam Hussein too, but a certain born-again Texan fixed that in 2003. We've now deployed aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to the Gulf of Aden to prevent the Houthis from being resupplied by the Iranians. Isn't that how the Gulf of Tonkin incident (didn't) happen? Hopefully we won't have any Stockdales claiming they were being fired upon. Thanks to our government-and-media misinformation (propaganda), most Americans don't realize ISIL largely consists of "Baathists," former Iraqi army soldiers. Sure, there are a few thousand European mercenaries (idealist Muslim kids mostly) who've joined the fight to liberate Iraq from the government created by the Evil Empire, but they are the minority. However, our media uses such instances to scare us. This is reminiscent of Viet Cong freedom fighters (we called them terrorists too) retaking South Vietnam from our installed puppet government in 1974 after we removed our troops in 1972. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom