Talk on Israel eye-opening
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Editor,
On April 30, I attended a meeting in Polson that was astounding. Alison Weir, former journalist and now executive director of “If Americans Knew,” spoke for an hour and a half on “What Americans Need to Know about Israel/Palestine: Beyond the Headlines.”
The truth surrounding this whole situation bears no resemblance to what we Americans are told. Did you know that we are sending $8 million to Israel per day? That’s more than $3 billion a year. The list of misinformation is long indeed. This meeting points to the much larger picture than just Israel and Palestine.
From Washington we get carefully filtered news from politically controlled large media corporations. We are not being represented honestly. “We the People” are not actually influencing policies and legislation. Through the majority of our legislative bodies, our so-called “democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people” is being carried out by huge money interests, large corporations, and industries such as pharmaceuticals, oil and such. This is not a democracy. This is a plutocracy — “rule by the wealthy.”
In any nation, after years of physical violence and repression, it is almost a ‘given’ that eventually its people will rise up in revolt against the physical violence and repression. But after years of this more subtle repression of ideas and influence, it is not a given that its nations people will rise up in revolt.
We and our system of government fall under the spell of greed and money-power. “We the people” become slowly infected with a sort of attitude that says, “Well, there is really not much I can do about this,” or, “Things are not too bad, and I’m getting along okay,” or “What the heck can I do against all these billions and trillions of dollars being thrown around?”
Last evening’s gathering on the subject of Israel and Palestine was an important step, for me, to once again attempt to speak out for what is right for America, right for “we the people,” and right for attempting to reclaim our democracy.
Bob McClellan
Polson
