Why There Cannot Be Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians

What's actually outrageous is United States cutting funding to the U.N. education and science agency UNESCO

Why should the US directly or indirectly by way of the UN support a terrorist state?

what harm is there in being kind to those that we disagree with?

U.S. Military Spending

Really, has there ever been such a gullible bunch of dupes?

Clearly your fat ass hasn't been woken up at gunpoint in the middle of the night just to be told his house is about to be bulldozed and that you don't even have time to gather any of your belongings.

Is the new Red Dawn a blast from the past?
A remake of the 1984 film swaps Soviets for North Koreans. But really, it's all about America's fear of China

The fact that the 1984 cold war film Red Dawn has been remade is more than just another sign of Hollywood declining into pastiche and repetition. It shows that, in a moment of deep capitalist crisis, the Red Peril is back.

The original version depicted American kids engaging in guerrilla resistance against a Soviet invasion. The twist this time is that the invading army in the new Red Dawn was Chinese, but has been digitally changed in post-production to North Korean. The ostensible reason for this switch is that the film-makers didn't want to alienate the Chinese market. More likely it's because North Korea is an old-style, comfortable communist threat, distant from the US both ideologically and culturally, whereas 21st-century China is altogether too close to home.

The first Red Dawn was made at a time when Hollywood didn't stint in its use of Russian stereotypes. Cold war capitalist ideology construed the Soviets as different for two reasons – not only did they belong to another political-economic system, they didn't seem to possess the same emotions that "we" do. Sylvester Stallone's Rambo was tortured by pitiless Soviets, while, in another Stallone franchise, Rocky Balboa went toe-to-toe with Dolph Lundgren's granite-faced Ivan Drago: emotionless, ruthless and also a steroid-abusing cheat.

Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if "the Russians love their children too". Even a sophisticated take on the cold war such as John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, brilliantly adapted by the BBC in 1979, and disappointingly remade as a film by Tomas Alfredson last year, played on the supposed otherness of the Soviets. George Smiley's adversary, the KGB masterspy Karla, was both his double and a steely-eyed demonic fanatic, lacking the passions which characterise the "common humanity" for which Smiley claims to stand.

No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the "Arab threat" to emerge. True Lies, the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz. According to Jack Shaheen, an academic who has tirelessly exposed the use of Arab stereotypes in Hollywood, Aziz typified the depiction of Arabs in American cinema in that he was dangerous and incompetent.

So what to make of the new Red Dawn? The reality is that a Chinese invasion of sorts has already happened, but it didn't require any military force, and can't be resisted by brave American youth taking up weapons. Such is the level of American debt to China that it in effect owns the US economy. And so there is a double trauma conveyed in Red Dawn: one, China's economic eclipse of the US, and two, the way this deprives the US of an Other to fear. China in the 21st century is not the Other in the way that the Soviet Union was, or North Korea is. North Korea remains satisfyingly distant, both ideologically and culturally. China, meanwhile, although still officially communist, is also the world's leading capitalist power: the place where many leading-edge commodities are manufactured, and the country that many neoliberal ideologues are now insisting that the west must imitate. This, surely, is the raw nerve Red Dawn 2012's makers didn't want to touch.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/new-red-dawn-blast-from-past

A dizzyingly implausible new 'Red Dawn'


By JAKE COYLE
The Associated Press
Published: Thursday, November 29, 2012 at 7:36 a.m.

The army invading the United States in "Red Dawn," an ill-advised remake of the campy 1984 original, was changed in post-production from Chinese to North Korean. With a few snips here, a few re-dubs there, the filmmakers re-edited and re-shot, fearful of offending China and its increasingly important movie-going market.

But why stop there? Can't we blithely make any nation our enemy for movie-sake? Let's try a version with Iran! And don't we have reason to be suspicious of Sweden? Do we REALLY know what's in all those giant Ikea stores??

The ridiculous "Red Dawn" is the supreme example of Hollywood's Cold War nostalgia, when the Russkies offered up an easy, de facto villain. Today's terrorism paranoia, apparently, is too complex and too faceless for some. No, we need a clear-cut enemy. Do you have something in red?

The awkward updating of "Red Dawn" came after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had produced the film back in 2009, went bankrupt. Not surprisingly, the market was weak for a film that reportedly cost $60 million to make and suggested modern China was the equivalent of Cold War-era Soviet Union. So the switch was made and distributor FilmDistrict picked it up.

Like the original, "Red Dawn" is about a band of high-schoolers whose hometown (now Spokane, Wash., instead of small town Colorado) is suddenly taken over by parachuting foreign troops. With most adults locked-up and military response not coming, the kids develop into a gang of insurgents, dubbing themselves the Wolverines.

...

http://www.theledger.com/article/20121129/NEWSCHIEF/211295001/1308?Title=A-dizzyingly-implausible-new-Red-Dawn-

Jewish settlers in Palestine: the most notorious squatters in the world.

Part 1
Israeli settlers have been slowly nibbling away at Palestine's West Bank territory for four decades. 300,000 setllers now occupy outposts that range in size from plywood shacks to full-blown suburban housing complexes. Their abundance has grounded the much-ballyhooed two-state solution to a halt. VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travels from Tel Aviv to the remote West Bank outposts where young Israelis squat for the sake of their heritage. But first, Simon pops in for some quick counter-terrorism training with a member of Israel's Special Forces, just in case.

Part 2
Israeli settlers justify their expansion into the West Bank by digging up ancient artifacts that supposedly prove that they've occupied that patch of land for longer than the Palestinians. The twist is that the settlers have the Palestinians do the actual digging under the "supervision" of the Israeli army. Simon stumbles upon one of these infamous archaeological digs and finds that the Israelis are less than eager for their operation to be caught on camera.

Part 3
Meet Simcha and Yosef, a pair of teenage settlers at the Havat Gilad outpost in the West Bank doing what Israeli settlers do best: building and re-building houses without a permit.

Part 4
Simon gets mixed up in the West Bank Land Day protests, where Palestinians annually clash with the Israeli army.

Part 5
Simon travels to Asira al-Qibliya, a Palestinian town that is learning how to defend itself against attacks from the Israeli settlers one hill away.

Jewish settlers in Palestine: the most notorious squatters in the world.

Their abundance has grounded the much-ballyhooed two-state solution to a halt.

JTT why have you not responded to the last replies that I have made such as my own mother getting the facts wrong even though I see her as a loving person?

We all get the facts wrong and I think that if we try and engage others without compassion we will not get very far.