Meanwhile in the US...

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No Tough Love for Wall Street
What an insipid anticlimax! Rising to “a challenge more complex than our financial system has ever faced,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that malignant complexity. For all the brave talk about transparency and accountability in the banking bailout, he gave the swindlers who got us into this mess yet another blank check to buy up the “toxic assets” they gleefully created.

According to the Congressional Oversight Panel created by Congress to monitor the bailout, the Bush Treasury Department overpaid by $78 billion of our money in the first 10 purchases of those assets. Yet Geithner tells us “Congress acted quickly and courageously” in throwing that money at Wall Street without requiring any accountability. At the same time, there is still no commitment to directly help what Geithner admits are the millions of homeowners already foreclosed out of their homes, with millions more to come. The leaks from Treasury promise that $50 billion will eventually be allocated directly to helping homeowners, which is a day late and a dollar short in chump change compared to the trillion dollars that Geithner on Tuesday committed to the purchase of more bad bank debt.

Gobby Jews

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Christians in Jerusalem want Jews to stop spitting on them
A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.

The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been subjected to abuse of this kind. For the most part, they ignore it but sometimes they cannot.

On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop's 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.
Anti-Spittlism on the Rise
The curse of anti-Spittlism can be stopped if Christian leaders take firm action. They must pull their flock into line without delay. “Not all Jews are Spittlists and not all Spittlists are Jews. This brazen attempt to equate the two is hate speech – akin to a blood libel. These are shameful smears on the Jewish people” said an anonymous source. “To avoid putting inter-faith dialogue at risk, Christians must avoid using the word ‘Jew’ entirely, unless properly authorized by a qualified Rabbi” he added.
Via Jinjirrie

Jewish thug, nothing less

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If not fascism, what is it? Without censure, a growing current in Israeli politics is calling for the outright killing of Palestinians
Many Israeli intellectuals dub Lieberman as the secular equivalent of Meir Kahana, the slain founder of the Kach terrorist group who advocated genocidal ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in Israel-Palestine. Kahana was assassinated in Manhattan, New York, in 1990 shortly after giving a speech in which he called for the annihilation and expulsion of Palestinians from "the Land of Israel".

A nightclub bouncer-turned-politician, Lieberman formed the Yisrael Beiteinu Party in 1999 when he was first elected to the Knesset. Without controversy, Lieberman's political and social ideas can be described as racist, even genocidal. In recent weeks, he was quoted as suggesting that Israel should use nuclear weapons against the Gaza Strip.

"The time has come to shock the Gaza population with actions thatuntil now have nauseated us -- actions such as killing the politicalleadership, causing hunger and thirst in Gaza, blocking off energysources, causing widespread destruction, and being less discriminatingin the killing of civilians. There is no other choice," he wrote.

In 2002, Lieberman called on the Israeli government, under Ariel Sharon, to blanket-bomb Palestinian population centres in order to force Palestinians to flee to Jordan. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted Lieberman as saying during a cabinet meeting that the Palestinians should be given an ultimatum: "At 8am we'll bomb all the commercial centres... at noon we'll bomb their gas stations... at 2pm we'll bomb their banks... while keeping the bridges open."

In 1998, Lieberman called for flooding Egypt by bombing the Aswan Dam. In 2001, as minister of national infrastructure, Lieberman proposed that the West Bank be divided into four cantons, with no central Palestinian government and no possibility for Palestinians to travel between the cantons. In 2003, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide buses to take them there.

Further, Lieberman has proposed that a "loyalty test" be applied to those "Arabs" who desire to remain in Israel. Those committed to making Israel a state of all its citizens, including the Palestinian minority, would be stripped of their voting rights. In April 2002, Lieberman stated that there was "nothing undemocratic about transfer".

Volcanic Icelanders

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Rebecca Solnit: A New Era of People Power in the Streets?
Can a Hedge-Fund Island Lose Its Shirt and Gain Its Soul?

Iceland is now a country whose currency, the króna, has collapsed, whose debt incurred by banks deregulated in the mid-1990s is 10 times larger than the country's gross domestic product, and whose people have lost most of their savings and face debts and mortgages that can't be paid off. Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment are skyrocketing, and potential solutions to the crisis only pose new problems.

The present government may differ from the old, but not as much as the Icelandic people differ from their pre-October selves. They are now furious and engaged, where they were once acquiescent and uninvolved.

American dream turns to nightmare

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In Florida, Despair and Foreclosures
Desperation has moved into this once-middle-class exurb of Fort Myers, where hammers used to pound. Its straight-ahead stare was hidden amid the chatter of 221 families waiting for free bread at Faith Lutheran Church on a recent Friday morning; and it appeared a block away a few days earlier, as laid-off construction workers in flannel shirts scavenged through trash bags at a home foreclosure, grabbing wires, CDs, anything that could be sold.

“I knew it was coming,” said Gloria Chilson, 56, the former owner of the house, as she watched strangers pick through her belongings. “You take what you can; you try not to care.”

Welcome to the American dream in high reverse. Lehigh Acres is one of countless sprawling exurbs that the housing boom drastically reshaped, and now the bust is testing whether the experience of shared struggle will pull people together or tear them apart.

Holy war

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Did the Israeli Army Wage a Jewish Jihad in Gaza?
Jonathan Cook - Nazareth:
Extremist rabbis and their followers, bent on waging holy war against the Palestinians, are taking over the Israeli army by stealth, according to critics.

In a process one military historian has termed the rapid “theologisation” of the Israeli army, there are now entire units of religious combat soldiers, many of them based in West Bank settlements. They answer to hardline rabbis who call for the establishment of a Greater Israel that includes the occupied Palestinian territories.

Their influence in shaping the army’s goals and methods is starting to be felt, say observers, as more and more graduates from officer courses are also drawn from Israel’s religious extremist population.

“We have reached the point where a critical mass of religious soldiers is trying to negotiate with the army about how and for what purpose military force is employed on the battlefield,” said Yigal Levy, a political sociologist at the Open University who has written several books on the Israeli army.

The new atmosphere was evident in the “excessive force” used in the recent Gaza operation, Dr Levy said. More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, a majority of them civilians, and thousands were injured as whole neighbourhoods of Gaza were levelled.

“When soldiers, including secular ones, are imbued with theological ideas, it makes them less sensitive to human rights or the suffering of the other side.”

Is it coz I'm Jewish?

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normblog: One-Eyed in Gaza
I have waited till now to set out my thoughts on this subject, because when the air was thick with fury and denunciation, charge, counter-charge and denial, the chances of being calmly heard were small.
He needn't have bothered. It's the same old predictable bollocks:
To hold Israel to the standards of international humanitarian law, the elementary standards entailed by codes of human rights, is only right and proper. But to hold Israel to those standards, but not also its regional adversaries, suggests a special hostility towards it that needs some explanation. Not all of this hostility can be accounted anti-Semitic. But some of it is. Only the blindest can ignore the plain manifestations of anti-Semitism now evident both amongst Israel's regional adversaries and within the worldwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza and disfiguring them. As worrying is the fact that the same liberal-left aforementioned that populates these protests and in doing so looks away from the crimes of Israel's opponents, a liberal-left that is, to a man and a woman, proud of its anti-racism, proud of its sensitivity to 'Islamophobia', is silent about this growth of anti-Semitism, shamefully silent, having forgotten in just the one case its avowed duty of solidarity with the victims of prejudice everywhere.
Via Sullivan

Toughen 'em up with a good piss-take

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Sarah Ebner: Just say no to anti-bullying campaigns?
Dr Helene Guldberg:

For some children – a very small minority - bullying is a profound problem. Some stories about the extent of children’s suffering are heartbreaking – and they are precisely why we need to handle the issue with care and, above all, with some proper perspective. Today’s knee-jerk call to eradicate all bullying can do more harm than good.

Much that is defined as bullying today is not bullying at all. It is boisterous banter or everyday playground disputes that could and should be resolved without adult intervention. Of course, being called names or ridiculed may not feel very pleasant, and may indeed be traumatic for some children. When I was nine years old and moved from Bergen in Norway to Trondheim further north, I was laughed at and teased about my distinctive accent. To me – a rather oversensitive child - it was absolutely mortifying. I was deeply unhappy and longed to move back to Bergen. But I got through the experience – without adult intervention - and maybe toughened up a little.
Here is my response to Ms Guldberg:

As an adult would you have put up with having your accent mocked by adult colleagues? Of course not! So why should children have to put up with it based on the spurious reasoning that it might toughen them up? Part of growing up is to learn good manners and respect for other people. It would be preferable if this were achieved at home but, alas, we know that in some families this is just not going to happen. So schools now have to deal with it by applying rules of behaviour.

Children should not have to put up with behaviour which adults find unacceptable. That includes physical punishment, teasing, mockery and bullying in all its forms. The fact that experiencing these things might just 'toughen' up some children is, frankly irrelevant.


Toughen 'em up

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Sarah Ebner: Just say no to anti-bullying campaigns?
For some children – a very small minority - bullying is a profound problem. Some stories about the extent of children’s suffering are heartbreaking – and they are precisely why we need to handle the issue with care and, above all, with some proper perspective. Today’s knee-jerk call to eradicate all bullying can do more harm than good.

Much that is defined as bullying today is not bullying at all. It is boisterous banter or everyday playground disputes that could and should be resolved without adult intervention. Of course, being called names or ridiculed may not feel very pleasant, and may indeed be traumatic for some children. When I was nine years old and moved from Bergen in Norway to Trondheim further north, I was laughed at and teased about my distinctive accent. To me – a rather oversensitive child - it was absolutely mortifying. I was deeply unhappy and longed to move back to Bergen. But I got through the experience – without adult intervention - and maybe toughened up a little.
Here is my response to Ms Ebner:

As an adult would you have put up with having your accent mocked by adult colleagues? Of course not! So why should children have to put up with it based on the spurious reasoning that it might toughen them up? Part of growing up is to learn good manners and respect for other people. It would be preferable if this were achieved at home but, alas, we know that in some families this is just not going to happen. So schools now have to deal with it by applying rules of behaviour.

Children should not have to put up with behaviour which adults find unacceptable. That includes physical punishment, teasing, mockery and bullying in all its forms. The fact that experiencing these things might just 'toughen' up some children is, frankly irrelevant.