You Will Anyway: Invited for a Talk

Monday, October 6, 2014

Invited for a Talk

Israel has summoned Sweden's ambassador in Tel Aviv after the Scandinavian country's newly elected prime minister pledged that his government would recognise a Palestinian state.

Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Stefan Lofven was rushing to a decision without understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What he means is without understanding just how much shit he’s going to be in with Israel and the US.

Sweden's ambassador to Israel, Carl Magnus Nesser, "will be invited for a talk at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem," but did not say when.

[...]

Lofven met the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah in 2012 and told him that Sweden would recognise Palestine should the Social Democrats return to power.

Sweden voted in favour of Palestinian observer status at the UN in 2012, which was granted despite opposition from the US and other countries.

[...]

"We believe international recognition of a Palestinian state is premature," said the US state department's spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

Reacting to the US remarks, new foreign minister and former EU commissioner Margot Wallstrom said criticism had been expected and that "it is not the US that determines our policies".

Ouch.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

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"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.