Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, June 8, 2007, 4 pm PST
This Week's Show
Guest: Col. David Antoon
Col. David Antoon was with us last week and we did not nearly finish our discussion of the genocide in Palestine, in fact, we barely glazed the surface. So this week we will delve more deeply, especially since now all signs point to an increase in killing both in Palestine and throughout the Middle East. We begin with a question and a few preliminary answers. Tune in for more. Here is where we begin.
What do Osama Ben Laden, George Bush, the Board of Directors for GE, and Tammy Faye Baker have in common? The answer is not their choice of eye liner.
They all profited, or are still profiting, from genocide. Of the group the only one who objected to what was going on, and not for the reasons that would strike Americans as appropriate, was Osama Ben Laden.
The conflict in the Middle East is escalating as the tides of death rise throughout the region. This is the ugly reality that America has tolerated. It is an ongoing genocide that began in Palestine in 1948 and which has continued, an open secret to which Americans remain largely oblivious as children are used for target practice by Israeli soldiers and peace workers are mangled.
There are more questions than anyone can answer in one interview, more questions than can be answered in a life time, most likely. But the broad strokes are here and those provide the mapping for the territory we will be exploring.
It has been claimed by many that Palestinians celebrated when they heard about the attacks on the Twin Towers. Not only was this untrue, it was an intentionally fabricated lie was was rolled out using film from an event years before almost immediately. Our anger stilled potential protests.
For the last more than 50 years America has poured money into Israel, more money than is received in foreign aid by all other countries combined. America pays for Israeli weapons that Israel then uses to kill Palestinians, using those Palestinian children for target practice.
Israeli's today live a prosperous life style; Their economy continues to prosper. Americans who subsidize them through taxes experience economic downturns from every direction.
Nothing about American foreign policy and Israel makes sense, least of all the eradication of a country to make way for the condos and clubs that are displacing the rightful owners of the land that in 1948 was Palestine.
But if you take into account the flow of funds through the fingers of the avaricious it all makes perfect sense. When you understand the who, what, why, and how they all profit the pieces come together like a jig saw puzzle. You need to know because every day your life is impacted by those lines of greed.
You thought they were unrelated. You were mistaken. The world is fraught with congruence, most of it leading today to the pockets of around 28,000 individuals.
Evangelical Christians have cooperated in this annihilation of human life and with the stripping of property from families that lived and worked on the land for hundreds of years in many cases. They do so because their eyes are firmly fixed on Heaven, where some portion of them believe that they will see Jesus Christ descending at any moment. Most of the faithful really believe that. Those who collect their offerings every Sunday mostly do not.
Where did these people come from? Who is responsible for their odd set of beliefs? The answers are horrifying, but interesting.
The several factions of theologically based post and pre millennialists have managed to make their followers believe in a revisionist Bible; they claim to have discovered their solemn absurdities at a time when the world is headed in the direction of piercing the veil of ignorance that has both frightened and intrigued humanity for uncounted generations. It is as if a subset of the most intellectually challenged of the American culture decided that if the unvarnished truth meant their would lose their power then they would simply cancel whatever it was that was causing the problem for them.
At the same time Americans and the rest of the world was moving towards an enlightened sense of spiritual connection these folks were looking for the reverse gear.
Ideas most Americans had rejected, for instance the idea the world was flat, that we did not actually land on the Moon, among others, didn't even make them blink. Given what they were used to tossing ideas like the separation of church and state in the dust bin was easy.
Economically and socially their beliefs were marginalizing them, making them unable to compete in the larger world. Mostly white men who regretted the final installation of civil rights for Blacks in the South, they harkened wistfully to a time when sitting around theorizing did not bring them face to face with the need for objective proof. They were looking for a way out. The exit came with dollar signs from Big Oil using the only medium available to them, theology.
This low end trailer park trash, who spent their time scrunching up their faces to redefine words translated any number of times from languages having a culture of which they were entirely ignorant, were capable of any self-serving illusion. Those who funded them from those corporations simply nodded and wrote the checks. They understood what they were buying, having also purchased Palestine for hysterical Zionists as the perfect medium for injecting themselves into the Middle East, in close proximity to all that lovely oil.
Politics entered the equation with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Jack Abramoff, and the cadre of other Young Republicans who decided in the 70s that the way to hold on to control of a GOP, that was then moving towards responsible social and environmental policy, was to change the party's demographics.
They looked around and found some likely candidates in the marginalized Yellow Dog Democrats who inhabited low end Southern Churches.
Money can accomplish a lot when you are inherently deceitful and have no discernible ethical or moral qualms.
Suddenly big infusions of cash and an abrupt shift in party allegiance had accomplished what most people thought impossible. The source of the money was major corporations who were getting what they paid for. The intermediaries were their new NeoCon employees. We can be sure they were well compensated.
And so time and social progress reversed itself through the lead provided by Rovian, Reedian, and Robertsonian acolytes of fantasy land and the retreat to a bizarre Antebellum South began.
These same people today own their own jets, multiple residences, and hob nob with Presidents – who they put into office. They indulge their own fantasies as we watch a genocide play out in Palestine and the price of war in the Middle East rises in a wave of Corporate orgasmic excess that the world will never forget.
At home the pumping sound of American blood provides a counter point that marks the flow of funds.
The bottom line of human action is always either sex, power, or money. The three are really interchangeable for most of those involved.
The TheoCons provide the political matrix through which that 180 degree turn away from a steady rise of standards for all people originated. They did it with a mythology that worked on the uneducated and credulous and which liberals treated kindly because they pitied those who were so obviously, they thought, retarded.
Col. Antoon graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1970 and served nearly three tours of duty in Vietnam. During his tour of duty in that war zone he received 3 Air Medals, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Meritorious Service Medal. He retired from the Air Force in in the early 90s and now flies a 747 for a major airline. He has received two graduate degrees and has lived in the Middle East and has traveled extensively around the world, including the middle east. His last job before retiring was oversight of part of the construction of the B – 2 Bomber.
In the early 80s Col. Antoon became a father, he and his wife, Linda, a former AF Major and neonatal ICU nurse, have four children and it was fatherhood that made him revisit the issues he had encountered while first in the military. Col. Antoon wanted answers and he found them.
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
