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84f5b26
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Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always--and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject--what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming--I want to say 'unsettling'--precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then--belatedly you may say--to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not be a moral or ethical action.
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andalusia
antisemitism
ariel-sharon
azmi-bishara
baath-party
balkans
bill-clinton
bosnia-and-herzegovina
bosnian-war
caliphate
catholics
chemical-weapons
christians
cia
edward-said
fanaticism
fascism
fatah
gaza
halabja
halabja-poison-gas-attack
hamas
henry-kissinger
imperialism
iran
islam
islamism
israel
israelis
knesset
kosovo
kosovo-war
leftists
muslims
national-security
nazism
noam-chomsky
oil
palestinians
plo
politics-of-israel
propaganda
religious-extremism
saddam-hussein
spain
takbir
theocracy
united-states
war-crimes
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Christopher Hitchens |
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a868ce8
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There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green grasshopper pumps...A dozen ravenous steel insects sucked at the shit-caked loam in the mile-square meatfield of empty pens where the beeves, when there were beeves, milled waiting for the knife. (125)
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oil
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Katherine Dunn |
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3e70324
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Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan.
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oil
satan
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Christopher Buckley |
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ea51db2
|
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.
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israel
israeli-palestinian-conflict
jerusalem
jews
mediterranean-basin
moses
oil
ottoman-empire
palestine
palestinians
religion
settlements
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Christopher Hitchens |
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4dcb552
|
So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it.
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ba-ath-party
ba-athist-iraq
bill-clinton
crime-family
fascism
genocide
genocide-convention
invasion-of-kuwait
iraq
iraq-war
kuwait
militarism
national-socialism
nationalisation
nuclear-reactor-technology
oil
privatisation
psychopaths
serial-killers
stalinism
united-nations
wmd
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Christopher Hitchens |
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2b11445
|
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
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corn
cows
factory-farms
food
industry
oil
petroleum
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Michael Pollan |
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b34b769
|
Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.
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middle-east
oil
oil-reserves
petroleum
petroleum-politics
politics
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6f97cef
|
New Rule: America has every right ot bitch about gas prices suddenly shooting up. How could we have known? Oh, wait, there was that teensy, tiny thing about being warned constantly over the last forty years but still creating more urban sprawl, failing to build public transport, buying gas-guzzlers, and voting for oil company shills. So, New Rule: Shut the fuck up about gas prices.
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gas
gas-guzzlers
gas-prices
humor
oil
politics
urban-sprawl
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Bill Maher |
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0ab0a60
|
Many have blamed the gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations in 1973 on the Arab Oil embargo of that year. However, the shortages and long lines began months before the Arab oil embargo, right after price controls were imposed.
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oil
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Thomas Sowell |
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a290de2
|
Faced with our addiction to oil, what does our leadership say? Get more of it! Strange when you consider their answer to dependence is to cut off the supply.
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analogy
dependence
drugs
gas-prices
oil
politics
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Bill Maher |
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10315cb
|
So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she'd married money -- crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.
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husband
money
oil
refine
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Margaret Atwood |
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71d3825
|
"New Rule: Stop talking about "the gas prices under Obama." As if he's the guy out there changing the numbers on the sign with that long pole. And while they're at the gas station, Republicans who still think human activity doesn't affect air quality should poke their heads in the men's room."
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gas
gas-prices
humor
obama
oil
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Bill Maher |