Daily Archives: 26 January 2011

America’s Middle Eastern Puppet Regimes Falling Like Dominoes

open quoteWhile some Americans assume this is a “Arab affair”, the fact is that Egypt’s president Mubarak is a yes-man to the U.S., and the fall of the Tunisian and now Egyptian leaders are really the ouster of U.S. puppet regimes in the Middle East.

. . .

Mainstream Islamist parties in the Mideast have nothing to do with al-Qaida (which barely exists any more) or anti-Western programs. Their primary concern is getting rid of the western-backed oligarchies that keep the Muslim world backwards and in thrall. Their platform is sharing resource wealth, social welfare, education, uprooting thieving oligarchies and fighting endemic corruption.

The big question now is will Tunisia’s dramatic events be a harbinger of other explosions across the volatile Arab world? All eyes are on Egypt, the home of a third of all Arabs. Egypt’s 83-year-old military ruler, Husni Mubarak, is a giant version of Tunisia’s Gen. Ben Ali.

Mubarak was engineered into power by the US after the killing of longtime CIA “asset” Anwar Sadat. Gen. Mubarak has ruled Egypt like a modern-day pharaoh ever since, crushing both violent extremist and legitimate political opposition. Mubarak’s rigged elections, winked at by Washington, are every bit as egregious as Tunisia’s.

So could the flames of Tunisia’s revolution spread to Egypt?

Today, we got the answer.close quote (Read more from washingtonsblog.com)

Israel rejected Palestinian offer of almost all Jerusalem: leaked documents

open quoteDocuments to show ‘intimate level of covert co-operation’ between Israel, Palestinian Authority

“Desperate” Palestinian negotiators offered Israel almost all of Jerusalem as part of a peace deal, only to see the offer rejected as inadequate, leaked official Palestinian documents show.

Documents leaked to Arabic news channel al-Jazeera and obtained by the Guardian show that senior Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia made the offer to Israeli negotiators in June of 2008, at a meeting attended by then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and then Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Qureia’s offer would see all of East Jerusalem, except one neighborhood — Har Homa — handed over permanently to Israel as part of a peace deal.

“This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition; we refused to do so in Camp David,” Qureia reportedly said, referring to the peace negotiations held under President Clinton, which fell apart in 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada.

In response, “the Israeli side refused to even place Jerusalem on the agenda, let alone offer the PA concessions in return for its historic offer,” al-Jazeera reports.

The Guardian reports:

Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni is recorded as dismissing the offer out of hand because the Palestinians had refused to concede Har Homa, as well as the settlements at Ma’ale Adumim, near Jerusalem, and Ariel, deeper in the West Bank. Israel’s position was fully supported by the Bush administration.

“We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands, and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it,” Livni said.

“These documents could discredit among Palestinians the very notion of negotiation with Israel and the two-state solution that underpins it,” Jonathan Freedland wrote in a comment piece at the Guardian.close quote (Read more from rawstory.com)

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Also, via Twitter: Al Jazeera will release the 1st of more than 1,600 documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 20GMT

Airplane! vs. Zero Hour!

open quoteThe late Leslie Nielsen first gained comic notoriety for the 1980 film Airplane!, which is often portrayed as a parody of 1970s-era disaster films like Airport. In fact Airplane! was a satirical remake of the little-known 1957 film Zero Hour! Filmmakers Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahms were taping late-night television commercials, looking for material to spoof, when they realized the movie that was airing “around” the commercials — Zero Hour! — provided a riper target.

A number of scenes and dialogue in Airplane! are lifted directly from Zero Hour!, as this montage demonstrates:

The Zucker-Abrahms group acquired the legal rights to Zero Hour! to avoid any problems. But the point here is that far from devaluing the original film or “pirating” anyone’s “intellectual property,” the Airplane! creators took an otherwise forgettable movie and reworked it into a modern comedy classic. Sure, the initial idea wasn’t original. But artistic success isn’t about “originality” so much as it’s about having the talent to execute — or re-execute — an idea in such a way as to create value in the minds of consumers.close quote (Read more from blog.mises.org)