THIS IS TOTALLY TASTELESS...

DIALOGUE - SYRIAN STYLE

ROCK THE CASBAH - YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

BRUBECK'S "TAKE FIVE" -- Pakistani Style

STUCK INSIDE DAMASCUS (WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES again?)

I wake up in Damascus
To some noise out in the town
I open up the window
“Can’t you people hold it down?”

I spot a soldier standing
And I clear my throat, "Ahem!"
He sees me up above him
And he shouts, “You're one of them!"

I start to close the window
But he's Johnny-on-the-spot
He tells me I’m a pris’ner
Of the al-Mukhabarat.

He takes me to his Sergeant
In a room without a view.
Who says that he has proof that
I'm an agent of the Jews.

He shows me sev’ral photos
Of a club at Thomas Gate
“That bar’s a Mossad hangout
You were there. It’s check and mate.”

I sign a typed confession
And I thought that we were through.
But no, he tells the soldier,
“Take him up to the HQ."

The Captain at Headquarters
He’s a thug, his name’s Farooq
He takes one look and mutters
“Hell, that ain’t no Jewboy spook."

He tears up the confession
And he kicks me in the balls.
He says, “You’re in al-Qaeda
Give it up and tell me all.”

I rattle off a story
How I trained in Pakistan.
And taught Mohammed Atta
How to sneak through airport scans.

They type a new confession
And I sign my autograph.
Farooq decides to send me
To the Army Chief of Staff.

They toss me in a dungeon
In a place both dark and dank
They leave me there for six days
And the food they gave me stank

The seventh day this colonel
He is one of Bashar’s friends
He drives up to the prison
In a pink Mercedes Benz.

He glares at all around him
And he huffs and puffs and roars
His helpers cringe and tremble
As he calls for blood and gore.

He looks at me and hollers
“You’re a liar! You’re a fake!
You never were al-Qaeda.
Did you think you’d get a break?”

He tears up the confession
And he stomps and kicks a chair
“You’re CIA, I know it.
It’s a fact as clear as air.”

I sign a new confession.
As they watch the drying ink,
They post my face on YouTube
Then they throw me in the clink.

They tell the world they got ‘im
Both the plotter and the plot
They have it down on paper
How this "terrorist" was caught

Each Friday before Moslem prayer
They trot me out to say,
“I’m an agent of al-Qaeda
Of the Jews and CIA.”

So that is all my story.
And each word I swear is true
I’m stuck inside Damascus
Guess it’s better me than you

But if you ever go there
And you’re feeling in a rut
Don’t go looking for trouble, Dude,
Just keep the window shut.

And stay out of the daylight
And just sit there like a monk
And pour yourself a strong one
Hell, you might as well get drunk.
 
'Cause it's crazy in Damascus.
Like a parallel universe
Where all the cops are criminals.
It only can get worse.
 
And the President's a werewolf
His brother's a bombardier.
His wife's locked in a tower.
She stares into a mirror. 

The Parliament's a peep show.
The Prime Minister's a chump.
The Grand Mufti's a hunchback.
The Mosque's an ammo dump
 
Now what's that sound we're hearing?
Is it a wounded tiger's roar?
Or a regime in the throes of dying?
Let it die like the dinosaur.
 
Take care not to lose that ticket
It's for the last train to the coast.
You do not want to be stuck here
And end up being toast.


...

Download a copy of the poem here...

HITLER AND THE ARABS - nazis in the middle east

First, a quick story. A few years back, Christopher Hitchens, the famous British atheist, was in Beirut. And he was walking with friends to a bar when he passed a Syrian Nazi Party poster on a wall. I'll let a blogger tell the rest of the story:

...we come across a poster for the Syrian Nazi Party on an abandoned
bagel shop -- abandoned, if I had this right, after Hezballah had attacked
it last year due to the overly Jewish connotations of bagelry.

So Hitchens immediately takes out a pen and writes "No, no, Fuck You" on
the poster. In case you were wondering, the Syrian Nazis are very unpopular.
Neighborhoods have tried to get the posters taken down. But when they try,
the Nazis threaten people and cause problems. So the state leaves them up.

And to avoid getting them defaced or torn down, the Nazis pay these
out-of-work goons to stand there and keep an eye on the posters.

Well, when this Syrian Nazi goon saw Hitch do this, he confronted him and
kinda-sorta attacked him. I say "kinda sorta" attacked, because his main
intention was to delay Hitchens from leaving -- until the ten Nazi goons
he had just texted on his cell phone could arrive.

There was some kicking and pulling and hitting. Hitch and the others
attempted to get into a cab -- the Syrian Nazi goon got right in the cab
with them, still hitting Hitchens. They could not force him out. Eventually
they all exited, and attempted to get a fresh cab, but other cabbies were
now hip to the fact the Syrian Nazis had been riled and wanted no business
from them, so two cabs passed refusing their fare.

Now at this point the ten Nazi goons showed up (about five minutes into
this -- they came quickly) and Hitch and his friends were probably going
to get the crap beaten out of them, at best. However, they finally managed
to get a cabbie who was either brave or didn't know the trouble he was
getting into and got in, this time without the goon, and left the other
ten behind.

Now, as far as the damage Hitch suffered, it wasn't much. He did get some
lumps -- a knock on the leg, a scrape on the face. And also his writing
hand had been stomped on. He'd been roughed up, but didn't have "the shit
beaten out of him." Apart from a bit of pain walking and some more pain
typing, he was fine.




So. Nazis in Syria and Lebanon. Where did this shit come from? Read the rest and find out.

On February 1, 1944, two unlikely allies in the United States Senate—Robert Wagner (D-New York) and Robert Taft (R-Ohio)—introduced a resolution that caused shockwaves around the globe. Their initiative advocated American support for “free and unlimited entry of Jews into Palestine for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth.” This was a bold move and one that put the Roosevelt administration on the spot.

Nearly five years earlier, the British government had released a White Paper on the issue of Palestine—one that largely abandoned the Jewish people in that region. Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and during the period of the British Mandate they had been largely supportive of Jewish migration to Palestine and the idea of a Jewish state there. In essence, the White Paper changed all of that. It advocated severe limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine—this at a time when European anti-Semitism was reaching critical mass.

The gang in Berlin was pleased.

Interestingly, at the time of that 1939 White Paper, two men who would later strongly support the creation of the modern state of Israel saw things differently. Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons on May 22, 1939 “as one intimately and responsibly concerned in the earlier states of our Palestine policy,” and insisted that he would not “stand by and see the solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside.” And in the USA, Senator Harry S. Truman from Missouri —- who had no clue at the time that he’d be a major player on the world stage in a few years –- also issued a forthright condemnation that was inserted into the Congressional Record:

Mr. President, the British Government has used its diplomatic
umbrella again, this time on Palestine. It has made a scrap of
paper out of Lord Balfour’s promise to the Jews and has added
another to the long list of surrenders to the Nazis.

But instead of embracing the ideas put forth by Taft and Wagner in 1944, the White House, State Department, and other powerful entities in the government pulled out all the stops to make sure that the idea of proposing a homeland in Palestine for Jews went away. They did this even though they knew very well about the ongoing mass extermination of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

The standard answer to the obvious question as to why the Holocaust evoked little official response from our government until near the end of the war has been to cite “isolationism,” or “economic Depression,” or “xenophobia” in our nation. Presumably, the idea of doing anything overtly “pro-Jewish” was politically untenable — so goes the argument.

But a closer look reveals something else going on at the time—and ever since.

The most lasting legacy of the toxins that created an epochal global conflict is the fact that elements of Nazism in many ways survive to this day in Islamism. The short-sightedness of FDR’s cronies was corrected in part by his successor, a man of courage who chose to recognize the new State of Israel eleven minutes after its birth in May of 1948. But the question remains: Why did FDR and company not get on the bandwagon, even while millions of Jews were being slaughtered?

Sadly, the real reason has a lot to do with U.S. surrender to Nazi propaganda—its power and content.

Largely overlooked or dismissed in the years since is the fact that the Nazi propaganda machine, the distortion factory that shaped attitudes in Germany throughout the duration of the infamous Third Reich, had its most lasting impact far away from the boroughs and beer halls of Deutschland. In fact, Hitler’s nightmarish vision of ridding Europe of Jews was only the beginning of what he wanted to do—he wanted to extend The Final Solution to Palestine.

And he had been preparing the hearts and minds of the Muslim world for many years.

Jeffrey Herf, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, has written an eye-opening book about the effectiveness of Nazi ideas in the Middle East during the Second World War called, “Nazi Propaganda For The Arab World.” In it, he describes the Nazi campaign for the minds and hearts of the Arab world in great detail—particularly the Axis radio programs that ran in Arabic around the clock from late 1939 until March of 1945.

These broadcasts spewed venomous anti-Semitism and pushed every demagogic button imaginable. They were also highly effective. In fact, long after the last vestige of Nazi rhetoric faded from consciousness in Europe, the poisonous seeds planted back then are still bearing deadly fruit.

The mind-set that gave way to the Third Reich is very much alive and well in the Muslim world of the Middle East.

When those two senatorial strange-bedfellows offered their visionary resolution in 1944 about a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” were way ahead of the story. Mr. Herf has accessed a significant cache of transcripts and leaflets produced by the Nazis during the war—materials that have not been adequately examined—until now.

So back in 1944, any hopes a couple of well-intentioned voices in Washington might have had to garner widespread national support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine were dashed by forces largely influenced by the hate-speak of Nazi propagandists. Berlin, broadcasting in Arabic, referred to Taft and Wagner as “criminal American senators,” while announcing, “a great tragedy is about to be unfolded, a great massacre, another turbulent war is about to start in the Arab countries.”

And in phraseology that sounds eerily familiar to what we still regularly hear from Islamists, the Nazis described the stakes as kill or be killed:

Arabs and Moslems, sons of the East, this menace threatens
your very lives, endangers your beliefs and aims at your wealth.
No trace of you will remain. Your doom is sealed. It were better
if the earth opened and engulfed everybody; it were better if
the skies fell upon us, bringing havoc and destruction; all this,
rather than the sun of Islam should set and the Koran perish…
Stir up wars and revolutions, stand fast against the aggressors,
let your hearts, afire with faith, burst asunder! Advance your
armies and drive out the menace.

Bear in mind that this is a 1944 Nazi broadcast to the Arab/Muslims in Palestine. Of course, the relationship between Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, is well known and documented, but the broadcasts from Berlin to Palestine are just now beginning to be examined. And what is being found is further evidence that to refer to Islamists as Nazi or Fascist-like is no smear—or stretch.

The rhetoric broadcast to the Middle East 70 years ago is still being noised about—and even more pervasively and effectively. Back then, the attitudes it reinforced, complete with distortion, hate, and prejudice, caused U.S. officials, from FDR on down, to “go wobbly”—as Margaret Thatcher would say.

It is sadly clear that the most lasting impact of the Nazi propaganda machine is that murderous ideas espoused back then are alive and well in our day and age and still being used to demonize and kill Jews.


READ IT IN LARGE PRINT HERE


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