New face, same imperialism: Obama No Better Than Bush

Tariq Ali
October 6, 2010

     Digital image: Matt Davidson

After all the hope and hype, Obama's foreign policy mirrors the ugliness of the Bush years.

The election to the presidency of a mixed-race Democrat, vowing to heal America's wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad, was greeted with a wave of ideological euphoria not seen since the days of Kennedy. The shameful interlude of Republican swagger and criminality was over. George Bush and Dick Cheney had broken the continuity of a multilateral American leadership that had served the country well throughout the Cold War and after. Barack Obama would now restore it.

Rarely has self-interested mythology - or well-meaning gullibility - been more quickly exposed. There was no fundamental break in foreign policy between the Bush and Obama regimes. The strategic goals and imperatives of the US imperium remain the same, as do its principal theatres and means of operation.
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Obama's line towards Israel would be manifest even before he took office. On December 27, 2008, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an all-out air and ground assault on the population of Gaza. Bombing, burning, killing continued without interruption for 22 days, during which time the president-elect uttered not a syllable of reproof. By pre-arrangement, Tel Aviv called off its blitz a few hours before his inauguration on January 20, 2009, not to spoil the party.

Once installed, Obama called, like every US president, for peace between the two suffering peoples of the Holy Land, and again, like every predecessor, for Palestinians to recognise Israel and for Israel to stop its settlements in the territories it seized in 1967. Within a week of the President's speech in Cairo pledging opposition to further settlements, the governing Netanyahu coalition was extending Jewish properties in East Jerusalem with impunity

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Pro-Abort UK Columnist: A Loving Mom would Smother Disabled Baby

By Kathleen Gilbert

LONDON, October 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A pro-abortion UK columnist provoked outrage from advocates of the disabled and horrified her fellow panelists on a BBC television show after she enthusiastically supported the smothering of suffering infants.

Author Virginia Ironside, who has a regular advice column in The Independent newspaper, appeared on the BBC's Sunday Morning Live show to argue that killing unborn disabled children is a possible act of mercy. But the other women on the show quickly reacted in horror after Ironside indicated that she was willing to go much further than simply advocating abortion.

"If I were a mother of a suffering child, I would be the first to want - I mean a deeply suffering child - I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face," said the columnist. "And I would with any suffering thing."
Ironside added that she held that view because "my feeling of horror at suffering is much greater than my feeling of getting rid of a couple of cells, because suffering can go on for years."