You are empirically incorrect. You are proposing an impossible scenario, that somehow 1.5bn world wide are perfectly aligned, have some say over the actions of all the other people simultaneously and ergo bear some responsibility for any actions committed under the broad umbrella of "Islam"...

http://enews.fergananews.com/articles/2698

To speak of “Islam” as a homogenous phenomenon is analogous to speaking of “Christianity” as a single whole that includes Catholics and Orthodox, Protestants and Copts, and countless other sects, including such marginal ones as the Mormons, the Scientologists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of course, we never do so, because we intuitively recognize that the label loses all meaning when forced on to such a diverse group. We seldom have such qualms, however, when it comes to Islam, even though the label “Islam” covers just as wide a spectrum of geographic, cultural, and sectarian diversity as the label “Christianity.” If anything, it is even more internally diverse than Christianity, which crystallized around an institutionalized Church from the very beginning. In Islam, such an institution never developed. There is no religious hierarchy and no single individual qualified to pass final judgment on questions of belief or practice. Within thirty years of the death of the Prophet, the Muslim community had split on matters of doctrine. Since then, there have been multiple and simultaneous sources of authority among Muslims. Authority is located not in church councils and such, but in individuals who derive their legitimacy from their learning, piety, lineage, and reputation among peers. This gives Islam a slightly anarchic quality: authoritative opinions (fatwa) of one expert or one group can be countered with equally authoritative opinions, derived from the same sources, of another group, or one set of practices devotional practices held dear by one group can be denounced as impermissible by another. In more extreme cases, such conflict of opinion can turn into a “war of fatwas,” fought out, in the modern age, in the press or in cyberspace. (If Islam were held in a more positive light in the West today, this diversity would be described as a “free market of ideas”!) To speak of Islam as a homogeneous entity ignores this fundamental dynamic of its tradition.

This pluralism extends to the most basic level of belief. The major sectarian divide in Islam, between Sunnis and Shi‘is, goes back to the very origins of Islam. The two doctrines evolved in parallel, and therefore it is incorrect to see in them an orthodox/heterodox divide. All Muslims share a number of key reference points (the oneness of God, loyalty to the Prophet and his progeny, the need to prepare for the Hereafter, to take a few examples), but they have been played upon in different ways by different sects and movements. Nor do the two sects exhaust the diversity, for they both have many branches and various theological and legal schools within them, while many modern ideological groups straddle the divide between the two sects.

Or
http://wasalaam.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/the-myth-of-homogeny-in-islam/

I could provide link after link, discuss Sunni vs Shia, or any one of the innumerable other sects (70+ iirc), discuss Islams war with itself throughout history etc, all demonstrating that you are wrong.

You are portraying (demonising actually) Islam in the same way the two morons in the video are, by making all Muslims responsible for any action committed by a Muslim. You talk about enlightenment, but your post reeks of bigotry, hardly the hallmark of an enlightened person, right?

Incidentally, the "popular" view of Islam is of a homogenous group of people, us vs them, a group to be afraid of, or to attack. The average person on the street (ie. plumb ignorant, much like yourself) would not be aware of just how complex it is, far more so than Christianity. It's exactly why the talking heads who got schooled kept trying to make out that Islam was homogenous, and were proved wrong...

But give it your best shot trying to shoot down the considered opinions of Phd's, scholars, philosophers etc if you want to continue to make a fool of yourself.

That's not what he's saying at all.

The bible, or the Quran, or many other texts, just like historical events as they were, or works of literature, or other even historical texts as complex as this often have contradictory ideas. The US constitution is founded on a set of beliefs and ideas that almost all of us subscribe to, yet there are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, pragmatists, etc. all deriving very different ideas from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and more. The reason this is true is because those values often come into conflict, and can outright contradict each other. Freedom vs security, equality vs prosperity, I could go on and on.

With the Bible, you have Catholics, Protestants, subdivided into a plethora of different religions in their own right under the umbrella of Christianity. You have the running joke even within Catholicism that American Catholics aren't really Catholics at all. Not only do different Christians interpret the bible differently, the amount they count on the bible varies between fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses who take the bible extremely literally to extremely secular Christians who have absolutely no problem discarding any part of Christian doctrines when scientific evidence proves otherwise.

You have Christians who act as saintly as Mother Theresa to mobsters.

That's just Christianity. There are extremist Islamic groups that sound more like the Westboro Baptist Church than other Muslims.

But within Christianity, there's "honor thy mother and thy father" and "thou shall not kill". What if your parents are murderers?

That's a crude, and obvious example of conflicting values, but the 10 commandments are simple rules that don't completely resolve every situation.

What's stupid is to believe that you can know about a person's specific ideology just by their religion. Does their religion play a role in their ideology? Absolutely, but how it impacted their ideology has much more to do with their experiences, their natural tendancies, etc. than necessarily their religion. If you grew up in a mob family, honor thy mother and father was more likely the lesson you took from the Bible than thou shall not kill.

And if you look around you, this is plainly obvious. Even look within yourself. We're all a melting pot of lessons and ideas we've learned from school, personal life experiences, our religious beliefs, our parents, our socio-economic backgrounds, our friends, etc. That's why you are different from everyone of your religion, your friends, who you went to school with, your socioeconomic class, etc.

What he's claiming is that religions are not ideologies; that their doctrines don't influence the behavior of their followers or the cultures where they're adopted. Because, hey, "it depends on what you bring to it; if you're a violent person your islam, your judaism, your christianity, your hinduism is going to be violent."

That is frankly, and I use this word seriously, stupid.

Two days of great weather motivated me to pick up Naomi Klein's new book, Capitalism vs The Climate.

A mere ~160 pages in, I'm inclined to say that it's even more thought-provoking than The Shock Doctrine.

The early chapters include some digressions into the psychology behind climate change denial, at least with regards to its extreme forms within the US. I'll refrain from posting my own interpretation of her conclusion.

In any case, her reasoning is highly convincing to me, which made it all the more disturbing when I tried, and subsequently failed, to come up with a set of arguments to challenge this particular psychological/cultural root of absolute denial. It never occured to me to consider the enormous ramifications a step away from denial would have, given a certain cultural background...

Well, that was awfully abstract, so let me present my tl;dr:
If you haven't done so already, get the book -- it's right up your alley.

I absolutely HATE this kind of BS...it's as if racism and/or slavery in the past against one group makes it impossible for them to be racist today. To me that's simply insane and an unapologetic excuse for a group to perpetrate the behavior they claim they hate. It also ignores the actual history of slavery, where for most of history most slaves were white, and also ignores the fact that the people who captured and sold Africans into slavery were mostly 'black'.
Racism is making negative assumptions about or discriminating against a 'race' of people as a whole...making fun of (insert race here) people is racism. Period. No matter what your race is.
It effecting one group more than another is a red herring and has absolutely no bearing on it being 'racism' or not...neither does the race of the racist.

rac·ism [rey-siz-uhm]
noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

@RedSky
that is not entirely accurate to state that it was friedmans economic policies that gave rise to chile.

i will agree to an extant that the original groundwork could be attributed to friedman and his economic plans but those plans were not all sunshine and rainbows.it was the chilean government who began to enact and implement solid policies to turn that state around after pinochet.dismantling much of what friedman had started.i.e: private pensions,schools,water etc etc.

and @Yogi does have a point.friedman is quoted often as saying that in times of crisis,it is a perfect opportunity to exploit that crisis in order to implement a policy that otherwise would have been rejected.

now we can argue just how responsible friedmen is in regards to a government who uses/abuses this tactic,but it does not change that fact that friedman was the author of "shock doctrine".

just as in this video,and one of those rare times i agree with friedman.the information should be public and governments only role in business should be that of "fraud police".it comes down to who is responsible.

which brings me to my final point.
economists are the charlatan snake oil salesmen.they consistently get it wrong,almost always.

economies are creations by and for people.
the human element seems to confound these intellectuals.
what plays out brilliantly on paper almost never does in real life..or at least for any protracted period of time.

which is also why i find friedman to be an insufferable cunt.
if there ever was a spark of humanity in that man,i have yet to see it.

No doubt, Milton Friedman was a genius. With his brilliant command of Neo-Liberal policies his "Chicago Boys" basically destroyed Chile. There's a reason why places that are under American control are set way further back than countries in the same region with about the same resources. Milton Friedman has many great ideas that have been used to destroy countries, knowingly to enrich those who invested in the country and not the people of that country who should actually benefit from it's resources.

Anyone want to read something enlightening about Friedman's ideas and policies and the mark they've left on the world can check out "The Shock Doctrine". It's an excellent book by Naomi Klein.

I'd like to point out that the American system of Capitalism doesn't follow it's own doctrine because we bail out the corporations and fund their projects. The rich control the society and make sure that they don't have to keep to the Capitalist system, but that the poor do.

Two things in all this stand out as really worrisome to me. First off, the hateful quote was almost a paraphrasing of the bible. And not the old testament parts that Christianity will dismiss as being supplanted/fulfilled by the coming of Christ, but the new testament. First Timothy 9 and 10 are:

We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine...

It's not hating on gays or comparing them to murderers, it is just listing off a laundry list of behaviors deemed sinful and thus contrary to God's will. Even getting drunk and swearing count, so it's no more hateful against gays than it's hateful against any other non believers choices and lifestyles.

I am worried by our society as a majority looking upon that and either classing it as hatred, or worse still, using it to justify their hatred.

My next beef is the entire liberal side of the country that state like the guy in the video, freedom of speech doesn't mean A&E isn't also free to fire the guy for what he says. I don't disagree with that though. My problem is that if that same hillbilly came out and spoke about his abiding support for same-sex marriage and then A&E exercised their 'freedom' to fire him for his speech, those same Liberals would be up in arms at the injustice. That rankles me something fierce.

@A10anis
while i do truly appreciate your change of tone,you fail to address that your original comment was smug and condescending.
which is what i was addressing.

and the word "ALL" is most certainly a blanket statement.

there are 4500 known religions (many defunct at present).
so maybe you can understand why i criticized your commentary as being overly generalized.

and i would also like to clarify a few things.
1.i find you to be an intelligent and insightful sifter.which is why i called you out.NOT to be an ass or to be confrontational but rather because i think you are a person who is better than your original comment.there are many i wouldnt have wasted my time on.

2.i am not a huge fan of organized religion.i have some serious issues with those highly influential institutions.

3.i actually agree with your basic premise:religion is control by use of fear.
so my issue with your original comment was not your basic premise but in its delivery.

4.dont be too quick to judge ALL religions solely based on doctrine and dogma.at its core religions are just human kind trying to make sense of reality and their place in it.religion is the beginnings of philosophy,and while it can be steeped in superstition and magic thinking,it has also offered some incredibly profound insights and understandings.
socrates,aristotle,plato..these were the beginnings of secular philosophy but before that? it was religion that tackled the big questions.

5.you really should watch the video.the book of enoch is...well..a bizarre apocryphal book.

anyways.i always enjoy your commentary and i hope you take my response with the humanity it was intended.

@alien_concept

I'm used to people just getting incredibly angry at me whenever I take a position that is in some way in opposition to some facet of feminism, so thanks for not doing that.

And yeah, it's possible that I'm taking it way too literally. It just feels like I've heard this stuff so many times, and it always makes me sad. I mean, I'm Swedish, and here in Sweden, radical feminism is essentially ubiquitous. A bit less than half of all the female teachers I've ever had have been so aggressively feminist that they've made their ideology part of their curriculum no matter what their subject has been, and have passed off doctrinal truths as scientific fact.

And... it wears down on you. Not the stuff about equality or treating women like people because all of that stuff is just FANTASTIC. Rather, it's all the stuff people either won't talk about, or will attribute to some insane radfem groups they'll claim are so small that they almost can't be said to exist at all. In other words, it's all the stuff people usually don't want to admit is there.

@gwiz665
this doesnt even fit into any definition of religion.
how you extrapolated religion from this video is a stretch of logic.
disagree with premise? thats fine.
calling it religion? not a chance.i dont see any dogmatic approach based on doctrine.do you?

which brings me to @Engels commentary.
this video proposes an alternative way of dealing with bi-polar.this alternative has been proven to work in some cases.
does this mean that we should dump modern psychology?
well this video does not make that assertion.

it simply offers an alternative way of dealing with people in crisis.
who are you to judge the validity or success of something that may work for some people?

or has psychology answered all the questions pertaining to consciousness and i just missed the memo?

i understand your skepticism concerning methods such as represented in this video but as @eric3579 suggested.if you have never experienced:depression,mania,psychotic episodes then you are already at a disadvantage in your understanding.

medication is not the end-all be-all of answers.sometimes compassion,understanding and empathy are far better fascilitators in helping a person overcome episodes of depression or mania.

when we consider just how prevalent diagnosis and medication have become:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030185

we should all stand up and take notice.
or do you feel the 1 in 5 numbers are correct?
that even pre-teens can be bipolar?
and if so.could you please tell me the conclusive test a psychologist uses to determine if someone is bipolar?

i am in no way by my commentary dismissing the exceptional works psychology has brought to the human table.i am just saying that it is still a work in progress and the field of psychology has not answered every question.

on a side note.freud along with his nephew edward bernaise helped create mass marketing and propaganda systems.
so....yeah.fuck freud.

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A leaked top-secret order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Business customers. Last night The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on a, quote, "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the content of the communications. The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over records for both international and domestic records. It also forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the court order. It is unclear if other phone companies were ordered to hand over similar information.

AMY GOODMAN: According to legal analysts, the Obama administration relied on a controversial provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of, quote, "any tangible thing relevant to a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation." The disclosure comes just weeks after news broke that the Obama administration had been spying on journalists from the Associated Press and James Rosen, a reporter from Fox News.

We’re now joined by two former employees of the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the NSA. He resigned shortly after the September 11th attacks over his concern over the increasing surveillance of Americans. We’re also joined in studio here by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

First, for your legal opinion, Shayana, can you talk about the significance of what has just been revealed?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. So I think, you know, we have had stories, including one in USA Today in May 2006, that have said that the government is collecting basically all the phone records from a number of large telephone companies. What’s significant about yesterday’s disclosure is that it’s the first time that we’ve seen the order, to really appreciate the sort of staggeringly broad scope of what one of the judges on this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved of, and the first time that we can now confirm that this was under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which, you know, has been dubbed the libraries provision, because people were mostly worried about the idea that the government would use it to get library records. Now we know that they’re using it to get phone records. And just to see the immense scope of this warrant order, you know, when most warrants are very narrow, is really shocking as a lawyer.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, some might argue that the Obama administration at least went to the FISA court to get approval for this, unlike the Bush administration in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. Well, we don’t know if the Bush administration was, you know, getting these same orders and if this is just a continuation, a renewal order. It lasted for only—it’s supposed to last for only three months, but they may have been getting one every three months since 2006 or even earlier. You know, when Congress reapproved this authority in 2011, you know, one of the things Congress thought was, well, at least they’ll have to present these things to a judge and get some judicial review, and Congress will get some reporting of the total number of orders. But when one order covers every single phone record for a massive phone company like Verizon, the reporting that gets to Congress is going to be very hollow. And then, similarly, you know, when the judges on the FISA court are handpicked by the chief justice, and the government can go to a judge, as they did here, in North Florida, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, who’s 73 years old and is known as a draconian kind of hanging judge in his sentencing, and get some order that’s this broad, I think both the judicial review and the congressional oversight checks are very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is just Verizon, because that’s what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian got a hold of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other orders for the other telephone companies, right?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Like BellSouth, like AT&T, etc.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: As there have been in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Yeah, those were—those were companies mentioned in that USA Today story in 2006. Nothing about the breadth of this order indicates that it’s tied to any particular national security investigation, as the statute says it has to be. So, some commentators yesterday said, "Well, this order came out on—you know, it’s dated 10 days after the Boston attacks." But it’s forward-looking. It goes forward for three months. Why would anyone need to get every record from Verizon Business in order to investigate the Boston bombings after they happened?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Binney, a decades-long veteran of the NSA, your reaction when you heard about this news?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, this was just the FBI going after data. That was their request. And they’re doing that because they—if they want to try to get it—they have to have it approved by a court in order to get it as evidence into a courtroom. But NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. That’s one of the main reasons they couldn’t tell Senator Wyden, with his request of how many U.S. citizens are in the NSA databases. There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, let’s go to Senator Wyden. A secret court order to obtain the Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going asked senators, "Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?" The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Ron Wyden. He and Senator Udall have been raising concerns because they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee but cannot speak out openly exactly about what they know. William Binney, you left the agency after September 2001, deeply concerned—this is after you’d been there for 40 years—about the amount of surveillance of U.S. citizens. In the end, your house was raided. You were in the shower. You’re a diabetic amputee. The authorities had a gun at your head. Which agency had the gun at your head, by the way?

WILLIAM BINNEY: That was the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: You were not charged, though you were terrorized. Can you link that to what we’re seeing today?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s directly linked, because it has to do with all of the surveillance of the U.S. citizens that’s been going on since 9/11. I mean, that’s—they were getting—from just one company alone, that I knew of, they were getting over 300 million call records a day on U.S. citizens. So, I mean, and when you add the rest of the companies in, my estimate was that there were probably three billion phone records collected every day on U.S. citizens. So, over time, that’s a little over 12 trillion in their databases since 9/11. And that’s just phones; that doesn’t count the emails. And they’re avoiding talking about emails there, because that’s also collecting content of what people are saying. And that’s in the databases that NSA has and that the FBI taps into. It also tells you how closely they’re related. When the FBI asks for data and the court approves it, the data is sent to NSA, because they’ve got all the algorithms to do the diagnostics and community reconstructions and things like that, so that the FBI can—makes it easier for the FBI to interpret what’s in there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after he blew the whistle on mismanagement and waste and constitutional violations at the NSA. Thomas Drake, your reaction to this latest revelation?

THOMAS DRAKE: My reaction? Where has the mainstream media been? This is routine. These are routine orders. This is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records of—from any company that exists in the United States.

I think what people are now realizing is that this isn’t just a terrorist issue. This is simply the ability of the government in secret, on a vast scale, to collect any and all phone call records, including domestic to domestic, local, as well as location information. We might—there’s no need now to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond. And this is only just Verizon. As large as Verizon is, with upwards of 100 million subscribers, what about all the other telecoms? What about all the other Internet service providers? It’s become institutionalized in this country, in the greatest of secrecy, for the government to classify, conceal not only the facts of the surveillance, but also the secret laws that are supporting surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Drake, what can they do with this information, what’s called metadata? I mean, they don’t have the content of the conversation, supposedly—or maybe we just don’t see that, that’s under another request, because, remember, we are just seeing this one, for people who are listening and watching right now, this one request that is specifically to—and I also want to ask you: It’s Verizon Business Services; does that have any significance? But what does it mean to have the length of time and not the names of, but where the call originates and where it is going, the phone numbers back and forth?

THOMAS DRAKE: You get incredible amounts of information about subscribers. It’s basically the ability to forward-profile, as well as look backwards, all activities associated with those phone numbers, and not only just the phone numbers and who you called and who called you, but also the community of interests beyond that, who they were calling. I mean, we’re talking about a phenomenal set of records that is continually being added to, aggregated, year after year and year, on what have now become routine orders. Now, you add the location information, that’s a tracking mechanism, monitoring tracking of all phone calls that are being made by individuals. I mean, this is an extraordinary breach. I’ve said this for years. Our representing attorney, Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project, we’ve been saying this for years and no—from the wilderness. We’ve had—you’ve been on—you know, you’ve had us on your show in the past, but it’s like, hey, everybody kind of went to sleep, you know, while the government is harvesting all these records on a routine basis.

You’ve got to remember, none of this is probable cause. This is simply the ability to collect. And as I was told shortly after 9/11, "You don’t understand, Mr. Drake. We just want the data." And so, the secret surveillance regime really has a hoarding complex, and they can’t get enough of it. And so, here we’re faced with the reality that a government in secret, in abject violation of the Fourth Amendment, under the cover of enabling act legislation for the past 12 years, is routinely analyzing what is supposed to be private information. But, hey, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because we can get to it. We have secret agreements with the telecoms and Internet service providers and beyond. And we can do with the data anything we want.

So, you know, I sit here—I sit here as an American, as I did shortly after 9/11, and it’s all déjà vu for me. And then I was targeted—it’s important to note, I—not just for massive fraud, waste and abuse; I was specifically targeted as the source for The New York Times article that came out in December of 2005. They actually thought that I was the secret source regarding the secret surveillance program. Ultimately, I was charged under the Espionage Act. So that should tell you something. Sends an extraordinarily chilling message. It is probably the deepest, darkest secret of both administrations, greatly expanded under the Obama administration. It’s now routine practice.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Shayana, I’d like to ask you, specifically that issue of the FISA court also authorizing domestic surveillance. I mean, is there—even with the little laws that we have left, is there any chance for that to be challenged, that the FISA court is now also authorizing domestic records being surveiled?

AMY GOODMAN: FISA being Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I mean, you know, two things about that. First, the statute says that there have to be reasonable grounds to think that this information is relevant to an investigation of either foreign terrorist activity or something to do with a foreign power. So, you know, obviously, this perhaps very compliant judge approved this order, but it doesn’t seem like this is what Congress intended these orders would look like. Seems like, on the statute, that Congress intended they would be somewhat narrower than this, right?

But there’s a larger question, which is that, for years, the Supreme Court, since 1979, has said, "We don’t have the same level of protection over, you know, the calling records—the numbers that we dial and how long those calls are and when they happen—as we do over the contents of a phone call, where the government needs a warrant." So everyone assumes the government needs a warrant to get at your phone records and maybe at your emails, but it’s not true. They just basically need a subpoena under existing doctrine. And so, the government uses these kind of subpoenas to get your email records, your web surfing records, you know, cloud—documents in cloud storage, banking records, credit records. For all these things, they can get these extraordinarily broad subpoenas that don’t even need to go through a court.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, talk about the significance of President Obama nominating James Comey to be the head of the FBI—

SHAYANA KADIDAL: One of the—

AMY GOODMAN: —and who he was.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. One of the grand ironies is that Obama has nominated a Republican who served in the Bush administration for a long time, a guy with a reputation as being kind of personally incorruptable. I think, in part, he nominated him to be the head of the FBI, the person who would, you know, be responsible for seeking and renewing these kind of orders in the future, for the next 10 years—he named Comey, a Republican, because he wanted to, I think, distract from the phone record scandal, the fact that Holder’s Justice Department has gone after the phone records of the Associated Press and of Fox News reporter James Rosen, right?

And you asked, what can you tell from these numbers? Well, if you see the reporter called, you know, five or six of his favorite sources and then wrote a particular report that divulged some embarrassing government secret, that’s—you know, that’s just as good as hearing what the reporter was saying over the phone line. And so, we had this huge, you know, scandal over the fact that the government went after the phone records of AP, when now we know they’re going after everyone’s phone records, you know. And I think one of the grand ironies is that, you know, he named Comey because he had this reputation as being kind of a stand-up guy, who stood up to Bush in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004 and famously said, "We have to cut back on what the NSA is doing." But what the NSA was doing was probably much broader than what The New York Times finally divulged in that story in December ’05.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, will Glenn Greenwald now be investigated, of The Guardian, who got the copy of this, so that they can find his leak, not to mention possibly prosecute him?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Oh, I think absolutely there will be some sort of effort to go after him punitively. The government rarely tries to prosecute people who are recognized as journalists. And so, Julian Assange maybe is someone they try to portray as not a journalist. Glenn Greenwald, I think, would be harder to do. But there are ways of going after them punitively that don’t involve prosecution, like going after their phone records so their sources dry up.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw an astounding comment by Pete Williams, who used to be the Pentagon spokesperson, who’s now with NBC, this morning, talking—he had talked with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had said, when he goes after the reporters—you know, the AP reporters, the Fox reporter—they’re not so much going after them; not to worry, they’re going after the whistleblowers. They’re trying to get, through them, the people. What about that, that separation of these two?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I’ll give you an example from the AP. They had a reporter named, I believe, John Solomon. In 2000, he reported a story about the botched investigation into Robert Torricelli. The FBI didn’t like the fact that they had written this—he had written this story about how they dropped the ball on that, so they went after his phone records. And three years later, he talked to some of his sources who had not talked to him since then, and they said, "We’re not going to talk to you, because we know they’re getting your phone records."

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. William Binney and Thomas Drake both worked for the National Security Agency for years, and both ultimately resigned. Thomas Drake was prosecuted. They were trying to get him under the Espionage Act. All of those charges were dropped. William Binney held at gunpoint by the FBI in his shower, never prosecuted. Both had expressed deep concern about the surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for our hours of interviews with them, as well." - Democracy Now!

But where does it stop? As I asked before, is Syria now completely justified in attacking Israel? Is it justified to attack the United States since the US is transferring weapons to a state that constantly attacks Syria?

All of these scenarios and actions are and would be justifiable in a state of declared war. Perhaps your position is that Israel is in effect in a state of constant war with its neighbors, in which case all attacks against Israel are fair and any response is also justified (although even the just war doctrine doesn't allow for asymmetrical responses). However, that hawkish position definitely impedes any peaceful settlement.

A war ends when one side wins or one side decides it is not worth fighting anymore. Nobody is going to "win" this conflict. Instead, I would rather like to see Israel, the stronger side militarily and economically, be that harbinger of peace and accept the inherent security risks of its position by deciding it doesn't want this fight. It is because of that stance that I am always so deeply disappointed by acts like this and feel the need to push back against those who claim that Israel is justified in whatever it does (even if you are not exactly that person).

Yeah Chomsky rips that crap apart, but as of now for the last say 38 years or so Israel and the US have been obstructing the two state solution and supporting Israels brutal occupations. So whatever leg Israel may have HAD to stand on, they don't anymore.

Go challenge your views instead of just reading statist doctrine.