Phat: Look it up as I had to. Try Wikkipedia

Time.com has a piece called "How Phat conquered Palestine". The title of the piece itself got to me enough that I had to check it out.

Seems there's a Palestinian Hip Hop group who likes to make rhymes about politics in the region.

What really got my attention though was something I read on line that they are similar to a group in Israel with which they have had "scant" contact. Why scant, why not contact?

Could it be that there are those for whom peace and getting along, is the last thing they want to promote, because they only make their fortunes in conditions of conflict?

I'm going to leave this here for now, but I have a lot more to say about this.

Lee





Stuff like this punches a button in me, causing an eruption of a kind of psychological/emotional acid reflux, a regurgitation of my cynicism.





Peace in the Middle East might be difficult, but it is surely obstructed by those who have a stake in continued conflict.





Richard Ben Cramer published a book a couple of years ago entitled "Why Israel Lost". He identified himself as a Jew who was critical of what Ariel Sharon was doing vis a vis Arafat.





"If you don't understand something follow the money." I put that statement in quotation marks because it is, to my way of thinking, a universal truth. And also because Iwrote about that on another of my blogs, Lighthouse Keeper.





Richard Ben Cramer made a strong case that Sharon and Arafat had a kind of Faustian compact which ensured that both of them had power and control over the huge amounts of money involved in the selling by Israel to the Palestinians of all kinds of goods and services. Their plans and their goals were not motivated by any semblance of an altruistic nature.



Ben Cramer wrote that Sharon and Arafat made huge amounts of money from the skimmings, commissions, paybacks and payoffs they got(choose your own label) from arranging, facilitating and the greasing of skids, which resulted in the availability of basics which the Palestinians needed, and which the Israelis could supply.



As I have written many times, If you don't understand something, follow the money.



The essence of Capitalism, as a belief system, is its dependence and reliance on the reality of supply and demand in the free market for goods and services. The key word of course is "free", including the implication that it is also "honest", as opposed to "corrupt".

Here's what I'm thinking, (and I'm going to try my best to limit my Voice Crying in the Wilderness to issues of my own time, the span of years I've been alive, and which experiences and reactions to them have informed my view of life. However, as you read what I am "Crying in the Wilderness" about, I suspect that you will, if you have any sense of history, realize and come to understand that what I am crying about is only the most recent history of the problematic impact of humans on earth.)

C. G. Jung, a Swiss physician and a colleague of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th Century, introduced the idea of personality and temperament as important to any understanding of behavior.

How's that for an introduction? If you opted out at this point, I'd understand.









Since the end of WWII, two plus generations, supposedly adult humans, have continued to talk about, and profess commitment to, making peace on earth, but continue to make war on earth. They claim that their supposedly sophisticated inteigence, military prowess and diplomacy are all designed to optimize "our" chance to Make Peace on Earth.

The key word here is "Our".

Those who make money by supplying the instruments of war, want us to believe that they are only making and supplying those intruments of war for our benefit, and in our interest. They are skilled, talented and adept at using surrepticious devices to convince us that we should believe and accept their version of reality, what they want us to believe and accept as essential to our well being, when in fact it's their own well being they care about and are assiduously working on.


As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, when he didn't agree with the plan, "What's this Me kemosabe?" (My phonetic attempt at spelling what Tonto said.)



In the Middle East, it seems that we have the current generation(s) embracing an African/American cultural phenomenon as a way to connect to and get the attention of their own people. Why have the contacts between the Palestinian version and the Israeli version been scant? Apparently because our current so-called adult humans block it.

It's my nature to ask why, or more to the point, what for?

I continue ask my friends why our American administrations have, since the end of WWII, which saw the establishment of the State of Israel, continued to play games with, and in, the region.(The games are not confined to Palestine; one can see the evidence of them all over the Middle East, going back at least to the late forties. And even before that the British empire was the inventor of games and their own rules in the region.)

It's important to acknowledge and understand, contrary to our wishes for fairness, that the one who choses to play games( the outcome of which is supposedly subject to either chance or the reality that the better team wins) defines and makes up the rules of the game, and even during the game, for their own benefit and advantage. (At the risk of adding even more to what I hope my readers will tolerate, I have come across some writings of people who were in school at Yale with George W. Bush, who related their experiences of him as one who, when faced with the prospect of losing, tried to renotiate the rules of the game.)

Dwight David Eisenhower tried to warn us.

He was the guy who commanded and led the allies, with his essential vision and skills, in the campaign to defeat the Nazis. He relied on, and benefited from the incredible response to the challenge and the ability of the combined efforts, dedication and people powered efforts in and of our country to provide him with what it took to overwhelm the enemy, warned us about the power and danger of that same military/industrial machine. The key word is Establishment. He was grateful to the machine, but was wary of it as an Establishment

James Carroll of the Boston Globe published a column in that paper last Sunday in which he detailed the rise of the Department of Defense(have you ever found a more euphemistic label?), compared to the Department of State. One little part of that article grabbed me as a way to grasp the significance of the huge disparity between Defense and State. Secretary Gates, of the Defense Department said that the State Department budget was smaller than the health care budget of the Defense Department.

So, let's go back to the beginning question.