Use of Government Property to Relocate NYC Mosque Raises Serious Legal Questions
Americans United | August 18, 2010
New York Gov. David Paterson’s proposal to offer public property to relocate the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” raises serious constitutional issues and could spark litigation, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“I understand that some people are not happy with the prospect of an Islamic center opening in Manhattan, but relocating it to public property raises significant legal issues,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Whether the governor is talking about a gift of public land or a sweetheart deal that gives one religious group a special right to purchase government property, it’s wrong.
“In America,” continued Lynn, “government does not subsidize religion or give religious groups preferential treatment.”
Controversy has flared recently over plans by a Muslim group to build an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Paterson proposed resolving the matter by offering public land elsewhere for construction of the Islamic facility.
But Paterson’s proposal is legally flawed, AU says.
Lynn pointed out that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that government may not subsidize religious facilities. Any attempt to use public resources to relocate the Islamic center would undoubtedly lead to a legal challenge.
In addition to the U.S. Constitution, Lynn noted that New York’s constitution contains strong language barring any diversion of public resources for religious purposes. Article XI, for example, bans public support of institutions “wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination….”
Lynn urged Paterson to drop the proposal. The solution, Lynn said, is to respect the Muslim group’s right to build its center on private property using private funds.
“Local authorities in Manhattan have cleared the way for construction of the Islamic center,” Lynn said. “It’s up to the Islamic group to decide whether they want to proceed. I’m sorry that this situation has become so politicized.”
Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.
Developer Won’t Budge On Mosque Location
By Grace Rauh | NY1 | August 17, 2010
Sharif El-Gamal is the developer behind the plan to erect an Islamic community center and mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center site.
Calls are mounting for him and the other backers to find a new home for their center, further away from the site of the September 11th terrorist attacks, but El-Gamal isn’t budging.
He is sticking with his plans to erect Park51, a 13-story center and prayer space in Lower Manhattan. He likens the project to a YMCA or Jewish Community Center, with programs open to all residents of all faiths.
“A landmark, an iconic building that will have people come and visit it from around the world,” said El-Gamal as to what he imagines. “This looks like it is going to be the most famous community center in the world.”
Some might argue that the center would be the most famous mosque in the world, but El-Gamal emphasized throughout the interview that he is building a community center, that is expected to house a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a restaurant and an auditorium.
The developer takes issue with the fact that so much has been made of the location of the project, saying it is “nowhere near the World Trade Center site.”
“Park51 is a community center. It is two blocks north of the World Trade Center site,” said El-Gamal. “In New York City, two blocks is a great distance. There are some buildings in New York that have their own zip codes. There is such a scarcity of space in New York, especially in Lower Manhattan. Keep in mind this is a small island, so we are nowhere near the World Trade Center site.”
I asked El-Gamal if he’s been surprised by the backlash against the project and the national attention it’s garnered. He chose his words carefully.
“I am surprised at the way that politics is being played in 2010. There are issues that are affecting our country, which are real issues: unemployment, poverty, the economy,” he said. “And it’s a really sad day for America when our politicians choose to look at a constitutional right and use that as basis for their elections.”
El-Gamal views the fight over the center currently raging on television and in newspapers in sweeping, historic terms.
“This is a defining moment for you and I and the First Amendment, and I see us passing this test as Americans,” he said.
Of course, the project got a boost from the White House last weekend when President Barack Obama spoke strongly in support of the developer’s right to build the center. El-Gamal says he heard the president’s remarks while he was on his way to East Hampton. He says he was blown away.
There was also word on Tuesday that Governor David Paterson is planning to meet with mosque developers to discuss moving the project. El-Gamal says that while there is no such meeting scheduled yet, he is open to talking to the governor.
He insists, however, that he is not open to moving the center.
“This is not a debate. This is not a debate. This is us as Muslim Americans giving back to our community,” said El-Gamal.
Playing the Never Again Card, Again
By Jeff Gates · August 18, 2010
The phony intelligence used to induce our March 2003 invasion of Iraq has been dusted off. This time it’s being deployed to take us into Iran.
Same scam. Same storyline. Same fraud—even featuring some of the same players.
Except that this time around their deception lacks the broader context required to gain traction for their phony content. That key difference makes today’s perpetrators far more transparent—for those willing to look.
Those foisting on us this latest fraud also face another challenge: Americans now realize it was Israel and its advocates who fixed that false intelligence around a Zionist agenda.
That realization adds combustibility to the facts now fueling Israel’s fast-fading legitimacy.
Each week brings new insights that undermine generally accepted truths about 911 and our response to that mass murder on U.S. soil. As the costs continue to rise in both blood and treasure, the credibility of those who sold us this “Clash” continues its steady decline.
One key player in this long-running fraud remains unfazed: mainstream media.
In March 2002, Israeli-American Jeffrey Goldberg published in The New Yorker a story alleging an alliance between the jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Iraq. Though an impossible premise, his account made it appear plausible.
His collaborator was James Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA and an avid Zionist. Woolsey assured us that Iraqi intelligence officials met in Prague with Al Qaeda.
Woolsey’s intelligence was “sexed up” to sound credible. Now we know it was false. All of it.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In the consistency and common source of this duplicity lies the perilous future of Israel and its fast-shrinking legitimacy as a nation state.
The fast-growing worldwide revulsion at all things Israeli suggests that this latest fraud may yet fail—though not for lack of trying.
The Liars Return
Goldberg is back with another round of “reporting” in the best Goebbels tradition. Woolsey helped hype his 2002 New Yorker essay, calling it a “blockbuster.” That it was.
Woolsey, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle lobbied the Bush White House in May 2004 to retain Iraqi liar Ahmed Chalabi as the U.S.-favored leader for Iraq. Perle took two decades to develop Chalabi as an Israeli asset—at U.S. taxpayer expense.
New York Times “reporter” Judith Miller featured as facts Chalabi’s fabrications about Iraqi WMD. Meanwhile, Perle took over as chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board in 2001—on which Woolsey and Gingrich served. None dare call this treason—yet.
Goldberg is now making the Evil Doer case for Iran. Writing in the July 22, 2008 issue of The Atlantic, he argues the Israeli case for bombing Iran and urges that the U.S. again join the fray.
Woolsey, Gingrich and Perle are pushing the same agenda from the periphery. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, among Chalabi’s earliest Congressional supporters, are again vocal in their support of expanding the war.
If the U.S. had an honest media, Goldberg would be revealed as a fraud and his cohorts reviled as traitors. Instead he was interviewed on MSNBC by Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, and lionized by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer who served 17 years with The Jerusalem Post.
The probability of Goldberg conceding that he served in the Israeli army is as likely as Blitzer conceding that he wrote a sympathetic book on Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard.
Our Faithful Ally
The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate confirmed with high confidence that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. No credible evidence has been offered that Tehran intends to enrich uranium beyond what is required for fuel and medical applications.
In a step scheduled for August 21, Russia will assist Iran in shifting 64 tons of low-enriched uranium from a storage site to the reactor chamber as the first of three steps in the long-delayed start-up of Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr.
If all goes according to plan, Iran’s reactor will begin generating electricity in three to four months. As a condition of completing and fueling the plant, Russia insists that Iran return spent fuel so that the plutonium cannot be extracted for use in developing atomic weapons.
To date, the Iranians have produced only 5,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium. Moscow sees this next step as essential to bringing Tehran’s nuclear activities under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
What’s the Israeli strategy for IAEA compliance? Bomb Iran. What’s the U.S. strategy? Follow the lead of our faithful and reliable “ally”.
Tel Aviv portrays the Iranian reactor as an “existential threat” and a sure sign of a pending Holocaust. How Likud Party leaders divine that outcome remains obscure. But never mind that minor detail, mainstream American media can fill in the “never again” blanks.
It was during just such a development stage of an Iraqi nuclear facility that Israel attacked and destroyed a nuclear plant at Osirak as it neared completion in June 1981.
Thus the concern that Tel Aviv may attack the Bushehr facility before the reactor rods are lowered into the reactor core. Any attack after the chain reaction begins is certain to release radiation into the atmosphere.
The Perils of Pending Transparency
Other key factors are also driving Israel in this direction, including the need for a diversion.
Tel Aviv is now implicated in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The massive bomb blast left a crater 10 feet deep and 50 feet across. To date, Syria has been blamed for Hariri’s murder, along with Hezbollah.
The ensuing instability was cited by Israel as a rationale for its 2006 invasion of Lebanon with the U.S.—per usual—widely portrayed as guilty by association.
A UN tribunal is now turning the spotlight on Israel’s role. The tribunal will add fuel to the ongoing inquiry into the suspicious death of UK nuclear weapons inspector David Kelly who complained of the “sexed up” intelligence on WMD that induced the war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, ridicule is being heaped on the report of the 911 Commission for its glaring omissions, including its failure to identify U.S.-Israeli relations as a key motivation.
Fast-emerging developments on other fronts also spell trouble for Israel.
Even now, no one dares mention the mysterious collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 which was not hit by hijacked airliners. No one dares repeat the comment of leaseholder Leonard Silverstein on a PBS interview when he conceded the building was “pulled.”
Means, Motive & Opportunity
When waging Information Age warfare, false beliefs are routinely deployed as a form of weaponry to displace facts. That displacement process is much easier when the psy-ops includes an emotionally wrenching component.
Thus the necessity that those selling us an agenda wield influence in mainstream media.
With Israeli dominance also reaching deep into official decision-making, those in our military who question today’s Zionist narrative are routinely cashiered out of the service.
So who remains to counter the disinformation that passes for intelligence? In our tattered system of self-governance, who can deploy the facts required to displace the fictions foisted on us by Woolsey & Co.?
Answer: you and those with whom you share these facts and analyses.
The solution to this corruption requires people willing to tell the truth about what is being done to our country—and by whom. Make it personal—because it is. What you see chronicled in these accounts is how organized crime succeeds in plain sight.
In a system of governance dependent on facts for our informed consent, mainstream media was an early target of those perpetrating these ongoing psy-ops. Their success traces to domination of this key industry by supporters of this purported ally.
The facts are clear and the case is now compelling: Israel is not an ally but a reliable enemy.
Goldberg, Woolsey, Perle, Gingrich, McCain, Lieberman, Miller, Mitchell, Blitzer, Chalabi & Co. comprise an army of agents and assets enabled by an industry taken hostage by those destabilizing and delegitimizing the U.S.—from within.
Should the Zionist state again approach us for assistance—of any sort, the response must be clear and unequivocal: never again.
Deceptive Economic Statistics
While Economists Lied, the Economy Died
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | August 18, 2010
On August 17, Bloomberg reported a US government release that industrial production rose twice as much as forecast, climbing 1 percent. Bloomberg interpreted this to mean that “increased business investment is propelling the gains in manufacturing, which accounts for 11 percent of the world’s largest economy.”
The stock market rose.
Let’s look at this through the lens of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com.
Williams reports that “the primary driver of a 1.0% monthly gain in seasonally-adjusted July industrial production” was “warped seasonal factors” caused by “the irregular patterns in U.S. auto production in the last two years.” Industrial production “shrank by 1.0% before seasonal adjustments.”
If the government and Bloomberg had announced that industrial production fell by 1.0% in July, would the stock market have risen 104 points on August 17?
Notice that Bloomberg reports that manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of the US economy. I remember when manufacturing accounted for 18% of the US economy. The decline of 39% is due to jobs offshoring.
Think about that. Wall Street and shareholders and executives of transnational corporations have made billions by moving 39% of US manufacturing offshore to boost the GDP and employment of foreign countries, such as China, while impoverishing their former American work force. Congress and the economics profession have cheered this on as “the New Economy.”
Bought-and-paid-for-economists told us that “the new economy” would make us all rich, and so did the financial press. We were well rid, they claimed, of the “old” industries and manufactures, the departure of which destroyed the tax base of so many American cities and states and the livelihood of millions of Americans.
The bought-and-paid-for-economists got all the media forums for a decade. While they lied, the US economy died.
Now, back to statistical deception. On August 17 the census Bureau reported a small gain in July 2010 residential construction housing starts. More hope orchestrated. In fact, the “gain,” as John Williams reports, was due to a large downward revision” in June’s reporting. The reported July “gain” would “have been a contraction” without the downward revision in June’s “gain.”
So, the overestimate of June housing not only made June look good, but also the downward correction of the June number makes July look good, because starts rose above the corrected June number. The same manipulation is likely to happen again next month.
If the government will lie to you about Iraqi weapons of mass production, Iranian nukes, why won’t they lie to you about the economy?
We now have an all-time high of Americans on food stamps, 40.8 million people, about 14% of the population. By next year the government estimates that food stamp dependency will rise to 43 million Americans. So last week Congress cut food stamp benefits. Let them eat cake.
Wherever one looks–food stamps, home foreclosures, bankrupted states, mounting joblessness, the message to long-suffering Americans from “their government” is the same: go eat cake, while we fight wars for Israel that enrich the military/security complex and while we bail out banksters whose annual incomes are in the tens of millions of dollars and up.
It is impossible to get any truth out of the US government about anything. If private companies used US government accounting, the executives would be prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated.
“Our government” is committed to fighting wars to enrich the military/security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion at the expense of cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
All most members of Congress, especially Republicans, want to do is to pay for the pointless wars by cutting Social Security and Medicare.
When they worry about the deficit, it is usually Social Security and Medicare–so-called “entitlements” that are in the crosshairs.
You don’t have to be smart to see that Wall Street’s and the government’s response to the amazing US budget deficit is not to stop the senseless wars and bailouts of mega-millionaires, but to cut “entitlements.”
I will end this column on unemployment. “Our government” tells us that the unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, a figure that would have wrecked any post-Great Depression administration. But, again, “our government” is lying.
Compare this fact with the number you read from the financial press. Right now, if measured according to the methodology of 1980, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. Thus, the reported rate of unemployment hides more than half of the unemployed.
And Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner welcomed us in the August 2 NewYork Times to “the recovery.”
Utterly amazing.
###
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Israeli settlers expand campaign to manipulate entries on Wikipedia
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – August 18, 2010
The internet’s open-source, user-edited encyclopedia called ‘Wikipedia’ has been targeted by Israeli governmental and non-governmental partisans who, since its inception, have attempted to manipulate its contents to promote a Zionist agenda. This week, Israeli settlers launched a course for right-wing Israelis interested in helping to manipulate the contents of entries in the online encyclopedia.
The course, held in Jerusalem, was organized by the Yesha Council of settlements and Israel Sheli, two groups which have been at the forefront of constructing Israeli-only settlements on illegally-seized Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Around 50 right-wingers, including media professionals who live in Israeli settlements, are participating in the course, which aims to teach not only how to manipulate the open structure and style of Wikipedia to push their far-right political agenda, but also how to do so undetected, in order to get into the administration of the site.
This is not the first time that right-wing Israelis have been exposed trying to manipulate Wikipedia. In 2005, 5 high-level editors were removed from their positions when they were discovered to be working for the right-wing Israeli group CAMERA to “surreptitiously coordinate editing by ideologically like-minded individuals”, an objective which was found to be at odds with the open nature of Wikipedia.
Despite the attempts by editors to keep the site, and the internet in general, open to all, private groups with political objectives continue to try to manipulate content.
Naftali Bennett, the director of the Yesha Council, says that he believes the internet must be ‘managed’, telling reporters, “The Internet is not managed well enough, and Israel’s position there is appalling. Take for example the Turkish flotilla [to Gaza]. During the first hours we were nowhere to be found. In those first hours millions of people typed the words Gaza-bound flotilla and read what was written on Wikipedia.”
The group plans to award a prize for the “Best Zionist Editor”, who is able to incorporate the most Zionist changes into Wikipedia over the next four years. The winner will receive a free trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel.
Settlers beat 10-year-old Palestinian girl
Ma’an – 18/08/2010
HEBRON — Israeli settlers assaulted a 10-year-old Palestinian girl on Sunday evening and an Israeli military jeep struck an 8-year-old boy in Hebron, witnesses said.
Inas Mazen Qaaqour was beaten by residents of the illegal Tel Rumeida settlement and treated at the Hebron Government Hospital where medics said she was bruised all over her body. Sameh Natshe Jacob was taken to the same hospital, and medics described his condition as stable.
An Israeli military spokesman did not respond to several requests for comment.
The presence of settlements in the center of Hebron means that Palestinians and Israelis live closer in the city than anywhere else in the West Bank, sometimes on the same street.
The Israeli military controls 20 percent of the city including the Old City and the market area and imposes severe restrictions on Palestinians’ movement.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem says settlers routinely abuse Palestinians in the city, sometimes using extreme violence. Filmed incidents include settlers shooting, stoning, and beating Palestinians with clubs. The organization has reiterated Palestinian complaints that Israeli soldiers often witness these attacks but rarely intervene, and perpetrators are seldom prosecuted.
Beware the ‘progressive agenda’
By Charles Davis | False Dichotomy | July 29, 2010
Since taking office nearly 18 months ago, Barack Obama has failed to deliver on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, has expanded the war in Afghanistan, has dropped cluster bombs on civilians in Yemen, has intensified a proxy war in Somalia and is currently seeking the authority to search every Americans e-mail and web history without so much as a warrant from a rubber-stamping intelligence court. In other words, he’s been successfully advancing the progressive agenda, or so liberal magazine The American Prospect tells me in a piece that notes the bulk of the professional bloggers and Democratic activists who attended the recent “Netroots Nation” conference in Las Vegas likewise believe our smooth-talking murderer-in-chief is a Pretty Swell Guy.
The Netroots Nation straw poll, conducted during the conference by Revolution Messaging, shows President Obama with an approval rating of 84 percent among the attending activists, journalists, and bloggers. Given the mostly somber mood of the conference, this is higher than I expected, but on reflection, I’m not too surprised. Among conference attendees, there didn’t seem to be much disagreement with the idea that Obama has been pretty successful in advancing a progressive agenda. While I’m sure there was plenty of disappointment over the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, for example, I don’t think anyone challenged the notion that passing health care is a defining achievement for the administration.
I particularly like the last line: while sure the president didn’t actually deliver on his promise to enact a public option, much less the single-payer system desired by much of the liberal left, passing something and calling it “health care reform” was certainly an achievement, and shouldn’t we all be proud of that? Absent from the piece, you’ll of course notice, is any mention of all those dead foreigners that liberal cosmopolitans purportedly care about, which I guess might just indicate that they never really cared about them. A civilian killed by a Democratic president in an unjust landwar in Asia just doesn’t inflame a liberal’s passions as much as when it’s a nasty ‘ol Republican dropping the bombs.
Beyond just the sickening partisan morality of these activists, the Netroots poll also shows that the liberal lore that the Democratic rank-and-file are more willing to stand up to their politicians than their mouth-breathing Republican counterparts — carbon-copies, I say — is just that: Lore. Fiction. Bullshit. The Netroots liberals are just as impressed by the pomp and prestige of the presidency, are just as worshipful of authority and liable to join a creepy cult of personality, as any conservative.
What, too much? A bit unfair? Yeah, well: 84 percent.
Reagan ambassador decimated Italy’s intelligence capabilities in the Arab world
By Wayne Madsen | Online Journal | August 18, 2010
The CIA translated and maintained in its voluminous files an article from the Milan newspaper Il Mondo that described the joint actions of the CIA and “the American Jewish Lobby” to purge Arabists from the Italian intelligence service (SISMI) and counter-terrorism service (SISDE) in the early 1980s.
The article, once stamped “For Official Use Only” and dated January 8, 1982, states that “a mass defection among the [intelligence] professionals” affected “the most delicate of the intelligence agencies.”
The article states that among the blows to SISMI and SISDE they “came with the recent influx of CIA personnel here, both before and after the arrival of the new U.S. ambassador to Rome, Maxwell Rabb (a member of the very powerful American Jewish lobby who has business connections in Israel).” The article continues by stating that “Italy’s capacity for foreign penetration (and ‘foreign’ for Italy in this delicate context means primarily the Middle East)” declined.
Rabb had served as an assistant to Navy Secretary James Forrestal in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Rabb also served as an assistant to Eisenhower adviser Sherman Adams dealing with Jewish issues and “anti-Semitism.” Before and during World War II, Rabb served as an assistant to two Massachusetts Republican senators, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Sinclair Weeks.
One of the SISMI casualties described in the article was Carabiniere Colonel Stefano Giovannone, “who led SISMI’s southeastern division and most importantly was the man who maintained close ties with the top spokesmen for the incandescent Arab world, including the Palestinian leadership.”
Along with the departure of Giovannone was, according the article, the demise of SISMI’s “building and strengthening good working relationships with the Arab nations around the Mediterranean” in order to “keep Italy out of the line of fire of the Palestinian guerrillas and other Arab irredentist groups” and continue Italian economic penetration of Middle East commercial markets.
The article states that the demise of Italy’s autonomous intelligence services in the Mediterranean region was also engineered by France’s SDECE and Israel’s Mossad. Particular targets of SDECE and Mossad included Italian industries that had contracts with Iraq. The article states that the French and Israelis leaked to the media fabricated reports concerning “alleged payoffs to the Italian parties in connection with trade agreements (such as the sale of Lupo-class frigates to Iraq and, quite probably, the ENI contract with Petromin.”)
The article suggests that Rabb and the government of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini were developing “parallel structures” for intelligence, which was viewed with alarm after what the paper described as the “P2 hurricane.” P2, or Propaganda Due, was a secretive Masonic lodge exposed in the late 1970s that had influential members within the Italian government, police, intelligence services, and even the Vatican.
The purging of SISMI’s Arab specialists did not end in 1982. On March 4, 2005, US forces guarding the road from Baghdad to Baghdad Airport opened fire on the car transporting the deputy head of the Italian intelligence service SISMI, Nicola Calipari, and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, freed by hostage takers, to an awaiting plane bound for Rome. Calipari was killed in what WMR previously reported was a targeted assassination. Calipari was a member of the Arabist wing of SISMI who survived the purges of the 1980s. But his negotiations with Iraqi insurgents who had taken Sgrena hostage also exposed his links to the Arabs in the Middle East, earning him a death sentence from the neocons in Washington.
WMR reported on multiple confirmations that Calipari was purposefully targeted by US forces who feared he was bringing out of Iraq evidence proving US war crimes in Iraq. It was reportedly part of a quid pro quo arranged with Sgrena’s Iraqi captors who released her to Calipari in return for informing the world about US war crimes in Fallujah.
The United States has refused to bring Calipari’s assassins to justice.
When Calipari was shot by the Americans, there happened to be another AIPAC-tied U.S. ambassador in Rome, Mel Sembler. A month before Calipari was assassinated, Sembler had an annex to the embassy named after himself, a move never before accomplished by an incumbent U.S. ambassador.
Massive anti-US rally held in Afghanistan
Press TV – August 18, 2010
In eastern Afghanistan, hundreds of people have taken to the streets to protest against the mounting civilian death toll in US-led raids in the war-torn country.
Some 600 demonstrators blocked the main highway linking the Capital, Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday. The protesters were chanting slogans against the growing foreign presence in the country and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
An Afghan father and his son were killed when their house in Nangahar Province was stormed overnight by NATO soldiers, triggering an outcry that led to the demonstrations.
The US-led forces in the country say they killed two militants in the operation, a claim local villagers have firmly rejected.
Earlier this week, a similar rally was held in the eastern province of Wardak.
A UN report published earlier this week said that 386 civilians were killed by NATO or Afghan forces in the first six months of 2010.
On Monday, at least five Afghan civilians, including a woman and her three children, were killed after a NATO supply vehicle hit their motorcycle in southern Afghanistan. According to Afghan officials, the accident took place on a road in Helmand province, a Press TV correspondent reported Sunday.
Civilians have been the main victims of violence in Afghanistan, particularly in the country’s troubled southern and eastern provinces. The issue of civilian casualties has caused friction between Washington and the Karzai government in Kabul.
Facebook scandal escalates as group posts new photos
Ma’an – 17/08/2010
BETHLEHEM — An Israeli human rights group has released pictures of Israeli soldiers and border guards alongside blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian detainees — some of them dead.
Breaking the Silence set up a group on Facebook entitled “the norm denied by Avi Benayahu,” an Israeli military spokesman who described the recent release of photographs by an ex-soldier next to detainees as exceptional.
“The new campaign came into being in the wake of the publication of Eden Abergil’s photos, in order to show the prevalence of this phenomenon among IDF ranks,” Breaking the Silence said in a statement to the Israeli news site Ynet.
“The photographs that had been published are merely the tip of the iceberg. Many people possess thousands of photos, but only a small part is being published … we turned Eden into a scapegoat, while the norm is what needs to be targeted.”
The original photos prompted a harsh reaction from the Palestinian Authority. “This shows the mentality of the occupier, to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. There is nothing in the world that can justify [this] humiliation that is part of the Israeli occupation practices on [a] daily basis,” the PA’s Government Media Center said in a statement.
“Occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting. It should end and Palestinian rights and dignity be respected. We call upon all human rights defenders to make all efforts to end the Israeli occupation and close this dark era for humanity,” the statement added.
Abergil posted the photos in her Facebook album “Army…best time of my life:)” in early August. The series of images, since removed from her page, displayed Abergil posing with blindfolded and handcuffed detainees who were apparently seized during a recent army raid in the occupied West Bank.
Why Condemning Israel and the Zionist Lobby is so Important
By James Petras | Atlantic Free Press | December 25, 2006
“It’s no great secret why the Jewish agencies continue to trumpet support for the discredited policies of this failed administration. They see defense of Israel as their number-one goal, trumping all other items on the agenda. That single-mindedness binds them ever closer to a White House that has made combating Islamic terrorism its signature campaign. The campaign’s effects on the world have been catastrophic. But that is no concern of the Jewish agencies.” – December 8, 2006 statement by JJ Goldberg, editor of Forward (the leading Jewish weekly in the United States)
Introduction
Many Jewish writers, including those who are somewhat critical of Israel, have raised pointed questions about our critique of the Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the United States and what they wrongly claim to be our singular harsh critique of the state of Israel. Some of these accusers claim to see signs of ‘latent anti-Semitism’, others, of a more ‘leftist’ coloration, deny the influential role of the ZPC arguing that US foreign policy is a product of ‘geo-politics’ or the interests of big oil. With the recent publication of several widely circulated texts, highly critical of the power of the Zionist ‘lobby’, several liberal pro-Israel publicists generously conceded that it is a topic that should be debated (and not automatically stigmatized and dismissed) and perhaps be ‘taken into account.’
ZPC Deniers: Phony Arguments for Fake Claims
The main claims of ZPC deniers take several tacks: Some claim that the ZPC is just ‘another lobby’ like the Chamber of Commerce, the Sierra Club or the Society for the Protection of Goldfish. Others claim that by focusing mainly on Israel and by inference the ‘Lobby’, the critics of Zionism ignore the equally violent abuses of rulers, regimes and states elsewhere. This ‘exclusive focus’ on Israel, the deniers of ZPC argue, reveals a latent or overt anti-Semitism. They propose that human rights advocates condemn all human rights abusers everywhere (at the same time and with the same emphasis?).
Others still argue that Israel is a democracy – at least outside of the Occupied Territories (OT) – and therefore is not as condemnable as other human rights violators and should be ‘credited’ for its civic virtues along with its human rights failings. Finally others still claim that, because of the Holocaust and ‘History-of-Two-Thousand-Years-of-Persecution’, criticism of Jewish-funded and led pro-Israel lobbies should be handled with great prudence, making it clear that one criticizes only specific abuses, investigates all charges – especially those from Arab/Palestinian/United Nations/European/Human Rights sources — and recognizes that Israeli public opinion, the press and even the Courts or sectors of them may also be critical of regime policies.
These objections to treating the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict and the activities of Zionist Lobbies as central to peace and war serve to dilute, dissipate and deflate criticism and organized political activity directed at the ZPC and its directors in Israel.
The response of the critics of Israel and the ZPC to these attacks has been weak at best and cowardly at worst. Some critics have responded that their criticism is only directed toward a specific policy or leader, or to Israeli policies in the OT and that they recognize Israel is a democracy, that it requires secure borders, and that it is in the interests of the Israeli ‘people’ to lower their security barriers. Others argue that their criticism is directed at securing Israeli interests, influencing the Zionist Lobby or to opening a debate. They claim that the views of ‘most’ Jews’ in the US are not represented by the 52 organizations that make up the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations of America, or the thousands of PACs, local federations, professional associations and weekly publications which speak with one voice as unconditional supporters of every twist and turn in the policy of the Zionist State.
There are numerous similar lines of criticism, which basically avoid the fundamental issues raised by the Israeli state and the ZPC, and which we are obliged to address. The reason that criticism and action directed against Israel and the ZPC is of central importance today in any discussion of US foreign policy, especially (but not exclusively) of Middle East policy and US domestic policy-making is that they play a decisive role and have a world-historic impact on the present and future of world peace and social justice. We turn now to examine the ‘big questions’ facing Americans as a result of the power of Israel in the United States.
The Big Questions Raised by the ZPC and Israeli Power in the USA:
War or Peace
Critical study of the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq, US involvement in providing arms to Israel (cluster bombs, two-ton bunker buster bombs and satellite surveillance intelligence) prior to, during and after Israel’s abortive invasion of Lebanon, Washington’s backing of the starvation blockade of the Palestinian people and the White House and Congress’ demands for sanctions and war against Iran are directly linked to Israeli state policy and its Zionist policy-makers in the Executive branch and US Congress. One needs to look no further than the documents, testimony and reports of AIPAC and the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations to observe their claims of success in authoring legislation, providing (falsified) intelligence, engaging in espionage (AIPAC) and turning documents over to Israeli intelligence (now dubbed ‘free speech’ by liberal Zionists).
If, as the overwhelming evidence indicates, the ZPC played a major role in the major wars of our time, wars capable of igniting new armed conflicts, then it ill behooves us to dilute the role of the Zionist/Jewish Lobby in promoting future US wars. Given Israel’s militarist-theocratic approach to territorial aggrandizement and its announced plans for future wars with Iran and Syria, and given the fact that the ZPC acts as an unquestioning and highly disciplined transmission belt for the Israeli state, then US citizens opposed to present and future US engagement in Middle East wars must confront the ZPC and its Israeli mentors. Moreover, given the extended links among the Islamic nations, the Israel/ZPC proposed ‘new wars’ with Iran will result in Global wars. Hence what is at stake in confronting the ZPC are questions which go beyond the Israeli-Palestine peace process, or even regional Middle East conflicts: it involves the big question of World Peace or War.
Democracy or Authoritarianism
Without the bluster and public hearings of former Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Jewish Lobby has systematically undermined the principal pillars of our fragile democracy. While the US Congress, media, academics, retired military and public figures are free to criticize the President, any criticism of Israel, much less the Jewish Lobby, is met with vicious attacks in all the op-ed pages of major newspapers by an army of pro-Israeli ‘expert’ propagandists, demands for firings, purges and expulsions of the critics from their positions or denial of promotions or new appointments. In the face of any prominent critic calling into question the Lobby’s role in shaping US policy to suit Israel’s interests, the entire apparatus (from local Jewish federations, AIPAC, the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations etc) go into action – smearing, insulting and stigmatizing the critics as ‘anti-Semites’. By denying free speech and public debate through campaigns of calumny and real and threatened repercussions the Jewish Lobby has denied Americans one of their more basic freedoms and constitutional rights.
The massive, sustained and well-financed hate campaigns directed at any congressional candidate critical of Israel effectively eliminates free speech among the political elite. The overwhelming influence of wealthy Jewish contributors to both parties – but especially the Democrats – results in the effective screening out of any candidate who might question any part of the Lobby’s Israel agenda. The takeover of Democratic campaign finance by two ultra-Zionist zealots, Senator Charles Schumer and Israeli-American Congressman Rahm Emanuel ensured that every candidate was totally subordinated to the Lobby’s unconditional support of Israel. The result is that there is no Congressional debate, let alone investigation, over the key role of prominent Zionists in the Pentagon involved in fabricating reports on Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and in designing and executing the war and the disastrous occupation policy. The Lobby’s ideologues posing as Middle East ‘experts’ dominate the op-ed and editorial pages of all the major newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post). In their pose as Middle East experts, they propagandize the Israeli line on the major television networks (CBS, NBC,ABC, Fox, and CNN) and their radio affiliates. The Lobby has played a prominent role in supporting and implementing highly repressive legislation like the Patriot Act and the Military Commission Act as well as modifying anti-corruption legislation to allow the Lobby to finance congressional ‘educational’ junkets to Israel. The head of Homeland Security with its over 150,000 functionaries and multi-billion dollar budget is none other than Zionist fanatic Michael Chertoff, head persecutor of Islamic charity organizations, Palestinian relief organizations and other ethnic Middle Eastern or Moslem constituencies in the US, which potentially might challenge the Lobby’s pro-Israel agenda.
The biggest threat to democracy in its fullest sense of the word – the right to debate, to elect, to legislate free of coercion – is found in the organized efforts of the Zionist lobby, to repress public debate, control candidate selection and campaigning, direct repressive legislation and security agencies against electoral constituencies opposing the Lobby’s agenda for Israel. No other lobby or political action group has as much sustained and direct influence over the political process – including the media, congressional debate and voting, candidate selection and financing of congressional allocation of foreign aid and Middle East agendas as the organized Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) and its indirect spokespeople heading key Congressional positions. A first step toward reversing the erosion of our democratic freedoms is recognizing and publicly exposing the ZPC’s nefarious organizational and financial activities and moving forward toward neutralizing their efforts.
Their Foreign Policy or Ours?
Intimately and directly related to the loss of democratic freedoms and a direct consequence of the Jewish lobby’s influence over the political process is the making of US Middle East policy and who benefits from it. The entire political effort of the Lobby (its spending, ethnic baiting, censorship and travel junkets) is directed toward controlling US foreign policy and, through US power, to influence the policy of US allies, clients and adversaries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The Lobby’s systematic curtailment of our democratic freedoms is intimately related to our own inability to influence our nation’s foreign policy. Our majoritarian position against the Iraq War, the repudiation of the main executioner of the War (the White House) and our horror in the face of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and destruction of Gaza are totally neutralized by Zionist influence over Congressional and White House policymakers. The recently victorious Congressional Democrats repudiate their electorate and follow the advice and dictates of the pro-Zionist leadership (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Rahm Emmanuel, Stephan Israel and others) by backing an escalation of troops and an increase in military spending for the war in Iraq. Bush follows the war policy against Iran proposed by the zealous Zionist fanatics in the American Enterprise Institute, repudiating the diplomatic proposals of the bi-partisan Baker Commission. Congress quadruples US arms stored in Israel (supposedly for dual use) in the aftermath of Israel’s bombing of Southern Lebanon with one million anti-personnel bomblets from cluster bombs in direct defiance of US electoral opinion. While hundreds of millions of undernourished women and children suffer and die in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the Lobby ensures that over half of US foreign aid goes to Israeli Jews with per capita incomes of over $22,000 USD.
No other organized political action group or public relations firm acting on behalf of the Cuban and Venezuelan exiles or Arab, African, Chinese or European Union states comes remotely near the influence of the Zionist lobby in shaping US policy to serve the interest of Israel.
While the Lobby speaks for less than 2% of the US electorate, its influence on foreign policy far exceeds the great majority who have neither comparable organizational nor financial muscle to impose their views.
Never in the history of the US republic or empire has a powerful but tiny minority been able to wield so much influence in using our nation’s military and economic power and diplomatic arm-twisting in the service of a foreign government. Neither the Francophiles during the American Revolution, the Anglophiles in the Civil War and the German Bund in the run-up to World War Two, nor the (anti-China) Nationalist Taiwan Lobby possessed the organizational power and sustained political influence that the ZPC has on US foreign and domestic policy at the service of the State of Israel.
Confronting the Lobby Matters
The question of the power of the Lobby over US policies of war or peace, authoritarianism or democracy and over who defines the interests served by US foreign policy obviously go far beyond the politics of the Middle East, the Israeli-colonial land grabs in Palestine and even the savage occupation of Iraq. The playing out of Zionist influence over the greatest military power in the world, with the most far-reaching set of client states, military bases, deadly weapons and decisive voice in international bodies (IMF/World Bank/United Nations Security Council) means that the Lobby has a means to leverage its reach in most regions of the world. This leverage power extends over a range of issues, from defending the fortunes of murderous Russian-Jewish gangster oligarchs, to bludgeoning European allies of the US to complicity with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The ZPC represents a basic threat to our existence as a sovereign state and our ability to influence whom we elect and what agendas and interests our representatives will pursue. Even worse, by serving Israeli interests, we are becoming complicit with a State whose Supreme Court legalizes political assassinations across national boundaries, torture, systematic violations of international law and a regime which repudiates United Nations resolutions and unilaterally invades and bombs its neighbors and practices military colonist expansionism. In a word Israel resonates and feeds into the most retrograde tendencies and brutal practices of contemporary American politics. In this sense the Lobby through its media, Congressional influence and think tanks is creating an Israeli look-alike. Like Israel, the US has established its own Pentagon assassination teams; like Israel, it invades and colonizes Iraq; like Israel, it violates and rejects any constitutional or international legal restraints and systematically tortures accused but untried prisoners.
Because of these fundamental considerations, we cannot oblige our Jewish ‘progressive’ colleagues and compatriots and refrain from confronting the Zionist Lobby with force and urgency. Too many of our freedoms are at stake; too little time is left before they succeed in securing a greater military escalation; too little of our sovereignty remains in the face of the concerted effort by the Lobby and its Middle Eastern ‘expert-ideologues’ to push and shove us into a new and more devastating war with Iran at the behest of Israel’s pursuit of Middle East dominance.
No other country, abuser or not of human rights, with or without electoral systems, has the influence over our domestic and foreign policy as does the state of Israel. No other Lobby has the kind of financial power and organizational reach as the Jewish Lobby in eroding our domestic political freedoms or our war-making powers. For those reasons alone, it stands to reason, that we Americans have a necessity to put our fight against Israel and its Lobby at the very top of our political agenda. It is not because Israel has the worst human rights agenda in the world – other states have even worst democratic credentials – but because of its role in promoting its US supporters to degrade our democratic principles, robbing us of our freedom to debate and our sovereignty to decide our own interests. The Lobby puts the military and budgetary resources of the Empire at the service of Greater Israel – and that results in the worst human rights in the world.
Democratic, just and peaceful responses to the Big Questions that face Americans, Europeans, Muslims, Jews and other peoples of the world passes through the defeat and dismantlement of the Israeli-directed Zionist Power Configuration in America. Nothing less will allow us to engage in an open debate on the alternatives to repression at home and imperialism abroad.
Israel should not keep its history behind lock and key
By Jonathan Cook | The National | August 17, 2010
History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.
That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.
The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.
The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents “are not fit for public viewing” and raise doubts about Israel’s “adherence to international law”, while the government warns that greater transparency will “damage foreign relations”.
Quite what such phrases mean was illustrated by the findings of a recent investigation by an Israeli newspaper. Haaretz revisited the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel seized not only the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also a significant corner of Syria known as the Golan Heights, which Israel still refuses to relinquish.
The consensus in Israel is that the country’s right to hold on to the Golan is even stronger than its right to the West Bank. According to polls, an overwhelming majority of Israelis refuse to concede their little bit of annexed Syria, even if doing so would secure peace with Damascus.
This intransigence is not surprising. For decades, Israelis have been taught a grand narrative in which, having repelled an attack by Syrian forces, Israel then magnanimously allowed the civilian population of the Golan to live under its rule. That, say Israelis, is why the inhabitants of four Druze villages are still present there. The rest chose to leave on the instructions of Damascus.
One influential journalist writing at the time even insinuated anti-Semitism on the part of the civilians who departed: “Everyone fled, to the last man, before the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] arrived, out of fear of the ‘savage conqueror’ … Fools, why did they have to flee?”
However, a very different picture emerges from Haaretz’s interviews with the participants. These insiders say that all but 6,000 of the Golan’s 130,000 civilians were either terrorised or physically forced out, some of them long after the fighting finished. An army document reveals a plan to clear the area of the Syrian population, with only the exception of the Golan Druze, so as not to upset relations with the loyal Druze community inside Israel.
The army’s post-war tasks included flushing out thousands of farmers hiding in caves and woods to send them over the new border. Homes were looted before the army set about destroying all traces of 200 villages so that there would be nowhere left for the former inhabitants to return to. The first Jewish settlers sent to till the fields recalled seeing the dispossessed owners watching from afar.
The Haaretz investigation offers an account of methodical and wholesale ethnic cleansing that sits uncomfortably not only with the traditional Israeli story of 1967 but with the Israeli public’s idea that their army is the “most moral in the world”. That may explain why several prominent, though unnamed, Israeli historians admitted to Haaretz that they had learnt of this “alternative narrative” but did nothing to investigate or publicise it.
What is so intriguing about the newspaper’s version of the Golan’s capture is the degree to which it echoes the revised accounts of the 1948 war that have been written by later generations of Israeli historians. Three decades ago – in a more complacent era – Israel made available less sensitive documents from that period.
The new material was explosive enough. It undermined Israel’s traditional narrative of 1948, in which the Palestinians were said to have left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab leaders and in the expectation that the combined Arab armies would snuff out the fledging Jewish state in a bloodbath.
Instead, the documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine.
One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army’s intention to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 per cent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees never returned.
Ethnic cleansing is the common theme of both these Israeli conquests. A deeper probe of the archives will almost certainly reveal in greater detail how and why these “cleansing” campaigns were carried out – which is precisely why Mr Netanyahu and others want the archives to remain locked.
But full disclosure of these myth-shattering documents may be the precondition for peace. Certainly, more of these revelations offer the best hope of shocking Israeli public opinion out of its self-righteous opposition to meaningful concessions, either to Syria or the Palestinians.
It is also a necessary first step in challenging Israel’s continuing attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, as has occurred in the last few weeks against the Bedouin in both the Jordan Valley and the Negev, where villages are being razed and families forced to leave again.
Genuine peacemakers should be demanding that the doors to the archives be thrown open immediately. The motives of those who wish to keep them locked should be clear to all.
Jonathan Cook is The National’s correspondent in Nazareth. His latest book is Disappearing Palestine
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Who Rules America?
The Power Elite in the Time of Trump
By James Petras | Axis of Logic | September 6, 2017
Introduction
In the last few months, several competing political, economic and military sectors – linked to distinct ideological and ethnic groups – have clearly emerged at the centers of power.
We can identify some of the key competing and interlocking directorates of the power elite:
- Free marketers, with the ubiquitous presence of the ‘Israel First’ crowd.
- National capitalists, linked to rightwing ideologues.
- Generals, linked to the national security and the Pentagon apparatus, as well as defense industry.
- Business elites, linked to global capital.
This essay attempts to define the power wielders and evaluate their range of power and its impact. … continue
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