Truth about Israel must not get out! (video)

Pat Macphersonn, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Sheldon S., Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org, 7-24-14), Max Blumenthal and Sonali Kolhatkar (Uprising)
(The War Around Us) Sherine Tadros reports from Gaza on the deadly blockade and full restriction of movement in or out of Gaza and its effects on the people from filmmakers.

VIDEO: Amidst "Brutal Operation in Our Name," Israeli military reservists declare that they refuse to serve -- refusing to engage in Israeli government's war crimes

Why does Netanyahu lie to promote war?

The truth about Israel must not be allowed to get out. And yet this book got through the cracks somehow to sell enough to become a best seller. As a Jew Max Blumenthal should hang his head low to be telling the truth at a sensitive time like this:

Everyone knows that in a war, any war, truth is the first casualty. This is true even in an obscenely lopsided ground invasion by a professional army -- the fourth most powerful in the world (aided and abetted by the first) -- of impoverished, blockaded civilian ghettos. But Israel has gone above and beyond to perpetuate lies about its criminal activities.

(WAU) The illegal "collective punishment" of indigenous Palestinian civilians trying to stay alive in a racist apartheid "State of Israel" -- Sherine Tadros reports on Israel's war that leaves thousands of displaced people in Gaza, Jan. 2014

Israel has overwhelming firepower raining down from the air in bombing raids testing new and illegal munitions (which will help sales and benefit the booming Israeli arms trade and its many officers' weapons dealers serving the rest of the world, which naturally keeps silent so as not to be denied access to their sophisticated new weapons from the five UN Security Council permanent members, who coincidentally are the top weapons traders) while bloodthirsty Israelis, many of them blood-lusty nationalists and Jews crying out for racist revenge and the utter extermination of indigenous Palestinians.

Will there be justice for Palestine, Max Blumenthal?

Sonali Kolhatkar (UprisingRadio.org, July 24, 2014) 

Israeli tanks hit a United Nations school in Gaza today killing 15 people who were seeking shelter there and injuring ten times that many people on the 16th day of the internationally-condemned assault on civilians called "Operation Protective Edge." Nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed [now more than a 1,000 with countless more severely injured, maimed, and driven to PTSD], a major portion of them children.

• AUDIO: Listen to Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and child victim of Israeli brutality 15-y.o. Tariq Abu Khdeir

The completely unbiased New York Times is reporting this morning that Israel is defending its actions claiming that a small band of resisters called "Hamas" is embedding it resisters among the only place they have as ordinary civilians. The paper cited as unquestioned fact, “Hamas fighters have set traps for Israeli soldiers in civilian homes and stored weapons in mosques and schools.” 

 

The United Nations in recent days has decided to launch an investigation even as the attack continues on potential Israeli war crimes. More

• GUESTS: Ali Abunimah, Palestinian-American journalist, co-founder of electronicintifada.net, author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine; Tariq Abu Khdeir, 15-year-old American boy who survived a brutal filmed beating and subsequent illegal imprisonment by Israeli police; and Max Blumenthal, award-winning journalist and author of Goliath.

Moving to California, Barry?

Question: Why does the completely unbiased Los Angeles Times have a picture of crying Israeli soldiers burying a fellow state-sponsored terrorist militant? The terrorist militant was "only following orders," which just happened to be to kill women and children in defense of a flag, an ideal, a second homeland, more territory, and total security from people who get no such security from the world's fourth strongest army (backed by the first).

Answer: This and other such examples of the severe pro-Israeli bias in the U.S. mainstream media drums up sympathy for war criminals, war criminals favorable to the US that is. It makes average U.S. citizens think there are two more or less equal sides to the story and that Israel is probably right, whatever their side may be: No need to tell us because we already side with you -- as does our House and Senate -- and have next to no idea what's happening to the millions of Palestinians who are being starved, oppressed, and now killed with "pinpoint" accuracy or what U.S. Sec'y of State John Kerry (and former president except that he caved so quickly when faced with G.W. Bush's false claims to the throne) calls "some hell of a pinpoint operation."
 

Noam Chomsky: What drives U.S policy?

That's the way Americans want it, not American-readers, but American public relations firms, military contractors, spying agencies (like our beloved Company the CIA), Pentagon, Mossad, and the friends and family of dual citizens and militants (every Israeli citizen has to join the military, except for the orthodox, and even they may lose their exemption in the future). So get your free trip to Israel, get armed, get trained, and revenge-mindedly help kill some Arabs (pronounced aaa-rabs).

Israel bombs and shoots Gazans in their civilian homes and occupied streets

It's almost as if Jesus Christ were a Palestinian... Wait he was a Palestinian? But we thought he was a "Christian"? What, there are Christians in Palestine? Does the Vatican know about this? Wait, what, there are no Christians in the Vatican? Come on! What about those savage Swiss guards?

Boycott, divest, and sanction Israel: Pressuring Israel, Presbyterian Church divests from firms tied to [illegal] Occupation of Palestinian land. In what is being hailed as a major milestone for the global campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel over its criminal treatment of Palestinians, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to divest from three...

• VIDEO: Never Again for ANYONE (Dawud Assad)

The Real and Fairytale "Jesus" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich ("Letters & Politics," Dec. 24, 2013, KPFA.org, Berkeley), Dr. Reza Aslan (rezaaslan.com, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth)
Fox News' Lauren Green attacks historian Prof. Reza Aslan, Ph.D., why a former Christian and current Muslim would write about Jesus. It's reactionary, Islamophobic FOX "News" at its best.

BESTSELLER: Zealot (amazon.com)

Religious scholar Dr. Reza Aslan has discusses his fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography about the historical Jesus [Yah'shua].

It calls into question everything Westerners in Judeo-Christian societies thought we knew about Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher (rabbi) and miracle worker [siddha] walked across the Galilee, gathering followers [as an anti-imperial rebel like many modern Palestinians] to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” 

Good St. Issa as a bodhisattva

The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

 

Two decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God. 

 

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Dr. Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. 

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 24, 2013, 10:00 am
• PLAY AUDIO NOW (in own media player)
• DOWNLOAD clip (MP3, 10.28 megabytes)
• Whistleblower journalist Glenn Greenwald excerpt at Minute 48:00

Jesus became a Pagan Roman god

Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs [which always simply meant someone aiming to save Jews from Roman rule] traipsed through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. 

 

This is the age of zealotry -- a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

 

Fairytale: white savior like Thor

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Dr. Aslan explores this diverse and turbulent age and, in doing so, challenges the conventional portraits of Jesus of Nazareth. He describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction:

• a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords;
• an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret;
• and ultimately, the seditious “King of the Jews” whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime.

Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary.

• [Biblical scholar Allegro points out that the Jesus cover-story came from an entheogen-using Jewish cult, possibly the Essenes, whose sacrament and "cross" was the magic mushroom. It provided them direct mystical experiences. The BBC documents that Jesus was a Buddhist monk. He returned from 18 lost years in India with long hair to continue his rebel and messianic activities to free the Jews.]

Vishnu, I'm going back to Palestine. - Good luck.

And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself (as a Jew, a "messiah," a "god," and a man), the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot questions what we thought we knew about Jesus of Nazareth -- even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of his life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.

 

“Riveting...Aslan synthesizes Scripture and scholarship to create an original account.”

—The  New Yorker

“A lucid, intelligent page-turner.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Fascinatingly and convincingly drawn.”

—The Seattle Times

“[Aslan’s] literary talent is as essential to the effect of Zealot as are his scholarly and journalistic chops. . . . A vivid, persuasive portrait.”

—Salon
“This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

ZEN RADIO: Alan Watts (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich (Letters & Politics, 9-9-13, KPFA.org), AlanWatts.com

1. Disappointment, 2. Craving, 3. Freedom -- a clean cut Alan Watts on American TV

  

Mystical Watts in 60s California

Pacifica Berkeley's beloved history buff Mitch Jeserich finally went overtly Buddhist coordinating an entire show about the late great British-born Zen, Taoist, Eastern Philosophy master Alan Watts. It was the first day of the fund drive, and he would be following up the next day (today) with an all meditation show featuring salesman George Quant and his post-TM "IQM." The wonders of meditation were extolled but slightly sullied by Quant's crass salesmanship. It was like listening to a motivational speaker wing it on stage while thinking that nobody is noticing all the speech errors and redundancies, the misused terminology and overreaching to sound scientifical. At least he has the background for it (with TM and Deepak Chopra Foundation credentials and what he learned in one day at UCLA), and goodness knows selling mantras as a panacea has been in vogue since the 1970s. Just think of that funny scene in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" at the California party. But sales are sales, and it is a fund drive. And if it helps Jeserich meditate more, then it was all for aught.

• PLAY NOW! (Oct. 9, 2013, 10:00 am, download MP3 clip, 10.28 MB)

 

Who cares about Watts (RIP)?

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly

The Buddha initiated a missionary movement

It all started in Berkeley, but Alan Watts changed our lives in Los Angeles. KPFK FM remains the only Pacifica Radio station to regularly schedule segments of Watts from the archives. Thanks are due to Roy (of Hollywood) Tuckman, whose Sunday morning show (8:00 am) and overnight ("Something's Happening," 12:00 am-5:00 am) Thursday broadcasts keep Watts alive in our ears and minds. 

Watts was perhaps the first Westerner in America to really understand Zen, the way of the Tao, Asian culture, and Mahayana Buddhism more generally. He, of course, had help from the early Occidentals, those British, German, and French scholars of the Pali Text Society and their Wisdom of the East (Orientalist) translations and interpretations. 

What we have today by way of accurate accounts of the historical Buddha's words and teachings in English owe much more to the work of these European pioneers than that of the ordained monastics in Asia whose missionary efforts tried to carry the message across the sea in the tradition of the Buddha's earliest disciples. 

It was the Buddha who began to set in motion the Wheel of the Dharma by teaching five hearers then sending out 60 enlightened disciples, no two in the same direction, to spread the news that enlightenment was possible for ordinary householders regardless of caste, socioeconomic status, gender, race, or other social barriers. 

Those Buddhist missionaries apparently succeeded far outside of India to the west even before the Dharma spread east to the shores of Vietnam (Indochina) on the South China Sea. They (and their own followers) traveled from modern day Afghanistan and Iran (Baluchistan) up through Central Asia and, centuries later, through the future Indo-Greco empires of Bactria and Sogdia, into Israel (cosmopolitan Jerusalem) and Europe (Kalmykia), Mongolia, Russia, Siberia, and China. The message even seems to have reached Catholic Rome through the Church Father Origen.

Jesus the Buddhist

A wild eyed householder Watts who drank

Saint Issa (Jesus of Nazareth) apparently heard something that called his attention to travel to India/Ladakh/Tibet in search of truth and a mission of his own. (But few Christians will stand for that story being widely told; fortunately, Holger Kersten, Elmar Gruber, the BBC, and others do tell it widely. 

Few would believe that Buddhism was in an arm of ancient Greece (the "West") before it made it to China. Fewer would believe that the Buddha's teachings first came to the Americas from China a thousand years ago. But that incredible journey is documented in Rick Field's How the Swans Came to the Lake. Of course, truth has always been stranger than fiction. And now as then the world get the universal Dharma from all directions. Do we understand it? Alan Watts did.