Bush Meets the Press: Hits MoveOn Ad, Says Saddam Killed 'Mandelas'

[leftchick]

blech....


http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1003644162

NEW YORK President Bush on Thursday cited ``some unsettling times'' in the U.S. housing and credit markets as he sought to assure jittery Americans that the economy basically is in good shape despite worries about a recession.

``I say that the fundamentals of our nation's economy are strong,'' Bush told a White House news conference.

He denounced as ``a sorry deal'' and ``disgusting'' a newspaper ad by MoveOn.com that mocked Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. It accused Petreus of ``cooking the books'' on Iraq and asked: ``General Petraeus or General Betray Us?''

Asked about lack of political progress in Iraq, he said, ``Part of the reason why there's not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein's brutal rule. Sort of an interesting comment, I heard somebody say, `Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.''

It was a reference to the charismatic former leader of South Africa who helped reconcile his country after decades of racial division. Mandela is still alive.

Bush said that inflation is down, markets are steady, unemployment is relatively low, exports are up and corporate profits ``seem to be strong.''

``There is no question there are some unsettling times in the housing markets and credits associated with the housing market,'' the president told reporters at a White House news conference. But he said he didn't see that spreading to the broader economy.

[PraxMan]

Does he mean people like
[link:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hassan|Margaret Hassan] or [link:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Haq_%28Afghan_leader%29|Abdul Haq]

It's SOP for tyrants to murder and eliminate popular moderate leaders...like Steve Biko or Martin Luther King.

Always.

Oh for those too young to remember what people like Bush used to think about Mandela, South Africa and racism...

___________

"[Honouring Nelson Mendela is a] total political-correctness poster-boy thing... He was a Communist. He was a terrorist... The Liberals always deprive us unanimous consent on all sorts of provisions. They wouldn't allow us to honour the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen with regard to their wedding anniversary..."
- Calgary West MP Rob Anders, June 2001. [link:www.blogscanada.ca/egroup/PermaLink.aspx?guid=739f762e-5f69-406b-b99a-90915663e116|BlogsCanada]

___________

Cameron: We were wrong to call Mandela a terrorist
David Cameron has made another decisive break with the Conservative Party's past by admitting that Margaret Thatcher had been wrong to brand Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) "terrorists" during the struggle against apartheid.

The Tory leader, who met Mr Mandela during a visit to South Africa last week, said: "The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now. The fact that there is so much to celebrate in the new South Africa is not in spite of Mandela and the ANC, it is because of them - and we Conservatives should say so clearly today."
[link:news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1222259.ece|Independent]

___________

Winnie Mandela refused entry into Canada

TORONTO -- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was once revered as the Mother of the Nation by many South Africans, was forced to cancel a planned appearance Tuesday at a fundraising gala in Toronto after she was denied a visa by the Canadian government, organizers of the event said.

Madikizela-Mandela was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at "A Night in Soweto," concert with MusicaNoir, an organization which strives to promote cultural diversity in contemporary music.

The controversial ex-wife of Nelson Mandela, an anti-apartheid hero and South Africa's first black president, was forced to cancel her trip at the last moment on Monday, said Carole Adriaans, of MusicaNoir.

Madikizela-Mandela's daughter and two security guards were granted visas, but her application was declined, she said.

[link:www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070605/winnie_mandela_070605/20070605?hub=CTVNewsAt11|CTV]

___________

Brothers in arms - Israel's secret pact with Pretoria

"...Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state..."

(snip)

"We created the South African arms industry," says Liel. "They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.

"We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate."

(snip)

But South African apartheid was more than just separation. "Apartheid was all about land," says John Dugard, the South African lawyer and UN human rights monitor. "Apartheid was about keeping the best parts of the country for the whites and sending the blacks to the least habitable, least desirable parts of the country. And one sees that all the time here [in the occupied territories], particularly with the wall, now, which is really a land grab. One sees Palestinians dispossessed of their homes by bulldozers. One can draw certain parallels with respect to South Africa that, during the heyday of apartheid, population relocation did result in destruction of property, but not on the same scale as the devastation in Gaza in particular, [or in] the West Bank."

[link:www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1704037,00.html|Guardian]

________________

The ADL Snoops

The organization's main "fact-finder" was doubling as a spy for the white South African government while his buddy, a San Francisco cop who had tutored El Salvadoran death squads on the finer aspects of torture, was providing its officials with personal information on the organization's putative enemies when the story broke in San Francisco in December, 1992. The organization was the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL claims to be the nation's leading defender against prejudice and bigotry but in this instance its targets were members of the African National Congress and its supporters, and apparently everyone, Arab and non-Arab, who had the temerity to criticize Israel. This included some who drove to Arab community events where the ADL's "fact-finder," Roy Bullock, and the cop, Tom Gerard, took turns writing down their license plate numbers, which Gerard turned into addresses thanks to his access to California motor vehicle records.

Their spying efforts proved to be part of a much larger intelligence gathering operation that targeted some 12,000 individuals and more than 600 left-of-center organizations in northern California.

....

After indicating that the ADL would be charged with violating the California's Business and Profession's code, SF District Attorney Arlo Smith did an extraordinary thing. He made available to the public, merely for the copying costs, some 700 pages of documents incriminating the ADL in a nation-wide intelligence gathering operation run out of New York by Suall. One of the significant parts of that report was Bullock's admission that he was paid by a South African intelligence agent to spy on anti-apartheid activists (which he was already doing for the ADL.) He had reported on a visit to California by the ANC's Chris Hani, ten days before the man expected by many to succeed Nelson Mandela, returned home to be brutally murdered.

[link:www.counterpunch.org/adlspies.html|Counterpunch]

[DoYouEverWonder]

I don't think I can stand it anymore.

[truth2power]

but we already knew that. :asshole: