Chilean football club sparks Israeli outrage with pro-Palestinian uniform
Al-Akhbar | January 9, 2014
A Chilean football club has sparked debate over its new jerseys, in which the number “1” is replaced by an outline of pre-1948 Palestine, angering Israel which demanded the uniform’s removal, local media reported.
Club Deportivo Palestino, a first division football club created in 1920 by Palestinian immigrants, revealed on Saturday its 2014 uniform, on which the geographical outline of Palestine can be seen.
Chilean newspaper La Nacion reported on Tuesday that the Israeli foreign ministry had contacted the Chilean embassy to express its discontent over the football club’s move.
According to a statement by the Israeli embassy in Chile, the Foreign Ministry’s Deputy Director General for Latin America Itzhak Shoham called the map a “provocation.”
The statement relayed Shoham’s “hope to avoid anti-Israeli provocations such as presenting a map in which the state of Israel appears as part of Palestinian territories, with the evident intention of denying the existence of Israel.”
Shoham added that “while Israel is determined to generate a positive step towards a two-state solution, it seems inappropriate to use sport for political ends.”
The former president of the Jewish Community of Chile (CJCh) Gabriel Zaliasnik reacted to the news on Twitter and accused CD Palestino of “importing” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, saying the uniform controversy was a sign of “hate and fanaticism.”
On Monday, CJCh Executive Director Marcelo Isaacson demanded a public apology from CD Palestino, removal of the jerseys and sanctions from the Chilean National Association of Professional Football (ANFP) and the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA).
Isaacson argued that the jerseys were an “act that affects the dignity of spectators at a sporting event and a use of the sport as a platform of political demands,” Chilean newspaper La Nacion reported.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Federation of Chile expressed its support of the football club in a statement released on Tuesday.
“We deplore the hypocrisy of those who express outrage at the presence of this map, as they talk about the occupied territories,” the statement read. “We deeply regret that Chilean Zionists seek to import the Middle East conflict to our country” by “tarnishing the history and the fundamental contribution that CD Palestino has made to the development of this sport in our country.”
The federation also expressed its thanks to Chilean nationals, “and especially the Jews of our country,” who have spoken out in solidarity with the football team.
Related article
BBC News Night on Dieudonné & The Quenelle
Gilad Atzmon:
If the quenelle is loosely defined as an anti establishment salute, one may wonder why Jews are offended by it and regard it as an ‘anti-Semitic’ gesture? Is it because many Jews actually identify with ‘the establishment’? And how do we explain the fact that the French government is happy to compromise the most elementary liberties just to appease the French Jewish Lobby (Crif)?
The truth is devastating – Palestine is here and the French people are the Palestinians Du Jour…
The French Palestinian Solidarity Deserves a Quenelle
Ariadna Theokopoulos | Bold Face News
France is the middle of a sweeping popular movement sparked by Dieudonné and symbolized by la Quennelle, a movement that has united young and old, white and black, men and women, the middle class and the unemployed, extreme Left, center and Right, many Muslims, Christians and even a couple of Jews.
It is an anti-establishment revolt but also one specifically directed at the Jewish power that rules the French establishment and has destroyed individual freedoms long cherished by the French, like freedom of speech. The French appear to have had enough of forced indoctrination into the worship of the Holocaust (a topic Dieudonné has dared to ridicule in his comedy sketches), of laws throwing historians in prison for daring to question the official Holocaust narrative, of the foreign policy of France being conducted according to the dictates of CRIF (the French equivalent of AIPAC).
It is a peaceful revolt, employing a gesture, not words, in a state muzzled by anti-free speech laws, one that mocks Power and says, “We are no longer afraid of you.” It is precisely that message that has sent the French Israeli Firsters into a hysterical panic: that “they” are no longer afraid and that a single spark was sufficient to unite all segments of society that JP had worked for so long to atomize and set against each other.
The measure of their panic is given by the preposterous, Orwellian ways in which they propose to silence and punish Dieudonné. The French Interior Minister, Mon. Valls (the same one who declared that through his wife he is eternally tied to Israel) has instructed (he prefers the word “advised”) the mayors of all French towns to forbid any performances of Dieudonné anywhere, in any venue. “You will never work in this country again!” Another contemplated measure is to form a joint commission of no less than three ministeries: Interior, Justice and Economy, to find modalities of punishing Dieudonné in all possible ways: depriving him of liberty, ruining him finnacially. He already owes close to 100,00 Euros in fines for offending speech.
Now in the middle of all this popular revolt, a progressive voice that despite its French accent sounds so very familiar, speaks out… against Dieudonné! It is Jean-Claude LeFort, President of the Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS):
“Pour quiconque suit objectivement les faits, les gestes et les propos de Dieudonné, la chose ne peut prêter à aucun doute possible : son antisémitisme est patent. Il n’est pas acceptable. Le racisme, redisons-le avec force, n’est pas une opinion mais un délit. Nous le condamnons par principe, absolu et non discutable, mais aussi par nécessité politique : il nuit terriblement à la cause du peuple palestinien dont Dieudonné fait mine de se réclamer.
Ses propos ont été condamnés par la justice à de nombreuses reprises. Et la loi doit s’appliquer sans la moindre mansuétude.”
French is a beautiful language but abject groveling sounds as foul as it does in English.
In free translation, with emphasis added:
“To those who follow events objectively, the gestures and statements of Dieudonné leave no doubt: they are patently anti-semitic. It is unacceptable. Racism, let is restate it strongly, is not an opinion but a felony. We condemn it by principle, absolute and undebatable, but also by political necessity: it harms terribly the cause of the Palestinian people which Dieudonné claims to support.”
His statements have been condemned by judicial authorities many times. And the law must be applied in full force.”
Not making the “fight against anti-semitism” a priority of the Palestinian solidarity, I am sure, would “harm terribly the cause” of AFPS’ funding. Who’s your daddy, Jean-Claude?
AFPS, like their English-speaking brethren, “give no quarter” to “anti-semites,” and they support punishing them “sans la moindre mansuétude!”
AFPS, this quennelle is for you:
Dieudonné répond à Yann Barthès
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Economist Devastates “War for Oil” Dogma
Aletho News
Professor Cyrus Bina relates the facts that the oil industry and markets have been globalized. The various theories that have been put forward from both the left and the right regarding war rationales that rely on demonisation of OPEC are essentially nothing more than outdated fear mongering. Cyrus Bina has been vindicated by more recent events.
Cyrus Bina:
The history of Middle Eastern oil, including its subsequent development into a modern industry, can be divided into three distinct stages: (1) the era of international cartels, 1901-1950; (2) the era of transition, 1950-1972; and (3) the era of globalization since the mid-1970s. A slightly different historical periodization can be provided for the U.S. domestic oil industry: (1) the era of classical cartelization and early oil trusts of 1870-1910; (2) the era of regulated neo-cartelization of 1911-1972; and (3) the era of globalization since the mid-1970s. A close examination of the entire 1870-1970 period would reveal that administrative pricing under the International Oil Cartel (known as Seven Sisters) were predominantly the rule in the oil business. The cartel, however, began to lose its grip during the 1950s and 1960s. Proliferating market forces, in con-junction with the development of capitalist social relations in the colonial and semi-colonial oil regions, had overcome the colonial concessions and worldwide administrative control of oil under the international oil cartel. The oil crisis of 1973-1974 was but the symptom of this transformation toward globalization. Moreover, the so-called “OPEC offensive”—which was misperceived by both the right and the left as the cause for re-control of oil market/prices —was but the catalyst of this de-cartelization and globalization of oil.
The war-for-oil scenario, as a popular myth, ignores the deeper understanding of the complex web of contradictions and regulating dynamics of today’s economy and polity. Yet, the very anachronism of this scenario is understandable in the view of the anachronistic U.S. behavior that is so dreadfully attempting to reverse the loss of American hegemony against the time and, more importantly, history. Therefore, parallel with the anachronistic reality of U.S. colonial conduct in Iraq, the anachronism of the “oil grab” becomes “reality” in the minds of those who chant “No Blood for Oil.” Yet, holding a parallel between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the control of oil is a far fetched proposition, if not an outright illusion. For, since the mid 1970s, the material bases and dynamics of post-cartelization and globalization of oil render the physical access, prearranged inter-company allocation, and indeed administrative control and pricing of oil redundant. This rather counter intuitive reality also renders any connection between the war and oil—other than given disbursement to finance matters such as the establishment of a puppet government—superfluous.
Nevertheless, in an interview, James Schlesinger remarked: “The United States [Bush, 41st] has gone to war now, and the American people presume this will lead to a secure oil supply. As a society we have made a choice to secure access to oil by military means. The alternative is to become independent to a large degree of that secure access.” It is indeed surprising that a market worshipping Chicago School economist fails to see the formation of (spot) oil prices within interconnected and unified markets since the post-cartelization of oil in the 1970s. Schlesinger, on the one hand, stresses the phrase “secure access” and, on the other hand, underscores the alternative of “independence,” as if one can insulate the U.S. oil industry from the rest of transnational oil. This thesis provides a convenient cover for two separate strategic projects: justifying the war without exposing its real cause, and creating panic by playing the familiar scarcity card to extend the exploration of oil in the pristine U.S. regions of wildlife such as ANWAR. In this context this was also what the Bush administration and Cheney’s “Task Force on Energy” probably had in mind when they were referring to “secure oil.”
In a nutshell, the above thesis ignores (1) the mutuality of oil producers and oil consumer, the need of both sides in selling and purchasing in the competitive global oil market, (2) the interdependence of oil regions in the present interdependent world, (3) the formation of global prices based on the cost of highest cost (U.S.) producer, not the cost of individual oil regions, and (4) the formation of differential oil rents, given the existing differential (regional) costs, through competition. Here, the dramatized “oil dependency” is but an empty phrase in the view of the trans nationalization of oil since the 1970s.
On the opposite side, hardly anyone on the left fully recognized the implication of uncritical acceptance of the above tautological thesis. Thus, the left-wing liberals and the radical left adopted this theory and dressed it up in leftist garb before applying it to either the question of war or the problem of environment. Michael Klare is one of the remarkable defenders of this thesis on the left. He declares: “Two key concerns underlie the Administration’s [Bush, 43rd] thinking: First,the United States is becoming dangerously dependent on imported petroleum to meet its daily energy requirements, and second, Iraq possesses the world’s largest reserves of untapped petroleum after Saudi Arabia.” Klare, however, takes this thesis one step further to an improvised level of neo-Malthusian scarcity:
“Global demand for many key materials is growing at an unsustainable rate. As the human population grows, societies require more of everything (food, water, energy, timber, minerals, fibers, and so on) to satisfy the basic material requirements of their individual members…. Because the production and utilization of these products entails [sic.] the consumption of vast amount of energy, minerals, and other materials, the global requirement for many basic commodities has consistently exceeded the rate of population growth.”
This worn-out neo-Malthusian message has again been reiterated in Blood and Oil. Yet, Klare, who is perplexed by the gravity of U.S. involvement in Iraq is “compelled … to conclude that petroleum is unique among the world’s resources that it has more potential than any of the others to provoke major crises and conflicts in the years ahead.” Again for Klare (and for many on the left) the specificity of the cause-and-effect seems to have no bearing on this historically unique epochal conflict and his fascination with oil is so intensive that he fails to realize a need for a specific and independent analytical proof.
I contend that, at best, the war-for-oil scenario is a text with out a context. On a logical level, the oil scenario is a remarkable example of a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, misplacing the real cause of U.S. military intervention. Moreover, by neglecting the depth of the last two decades of global transformation, the protagonists on the left and the right both have adopted a very voluntaristic-functionalist view of the U.S. global role. The left tends to capitalize on a voluntaristic interpretation of the concept of hegemony and the functionalist pivot of U.S. military might. For Klare, though, the global conflict “is entirely the product of geology.” The right, on the other hand, tends to rely on the notion of a “unipolar” world and wishful arguments of the “bound to lead” variety, without adequate attention to the emerging new polarities associated with the loss of American hegemony and the forces of globalization.
Others on the left, who are obsessively fond of the war-for-oil scenario, argue that this war may not have been for oil in the interest of U.S. capitalism as a whole, but rather in the interest of “U.S. oil corporations.” Hence, they propose that the cost of war amounts to a huge subsidy by the entire society given to the oil industry. This is a fictitious argument derived from the blind assumption of “direct access” and physical control of oil, and absolute denial of the reality of global transformation of the oil industry in the early 1970s. It is also crude and arbitrary, given the reduction of the material interests of the entire (U.S.) capitalist class to the alleged interests of its tiny fraction. And, appealing to casual observation, such as watching news from the Iraqi oil fields and the arrival of oil service contractors for “rebuilding” Iraq, is not sufficient to turn away from serious analysis. The truth is that this adventurous undertaking is in the interest of neither.
Finally, attaching significance to the switching of the currency, from dollar to euro, by OPEC oil producers is unjustified. As Paul Krugman pointed out in a short note, any possible shift from the dollar to the euro on the part of OPEC will result in a “small change,” for the U.S. economy, much smaller than the switching made already by the “Russian Mafia.” However, many on the left are not losing any opportunity to grasp this straw.
http://www.heterodoxnews.com/htnf/htn7/bina.pdf
Exposing the complex system of Israel’s domination over Palestinians and Palestine
By Georgina Reeves | January 8, 2014
Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction – Nadia Abu-Zahra Adah Kay, Pluto Press, 2013
The opening lines of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Bitaqat Hawiyyah (identity card) are a poignant reminder of reality for Palestinians throughout the world:
“Register me!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand”
And it is most fitting that Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay quote these powerful words within the first few pages of their book, Unfree in Palestine: Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction.
Over the past few years’ there’s been a general increase in awareness of what’s happening in Palestine and Israel. The daily challenges of living under illegal occupation–the roadblocks and checkpoints, the ‘separation’ barrier, the illegal colonies, and the constant threat of violence, detention, abuse and attack from both the Israeli army and settlers–are far more visible and understood than ever before.
Activists and solidarity groups regularly visit, witnessing and experiencing the effects of the occupation. They return home to share what they’ve seen with others, helping to raise consciousness and understanding. But there is a hidden oppression, one only experienced by Palestinians, one that is rarely discussed but which has the most profound impact on them and them alone.
Whether they live inside Israel, within the West Bank and Gaza, or for the many millions more living in the Diaspora, Palestinians are at the mercy of complex systems that underpin their control and dispossession, and have done so since the 1930s. Unfree in Palestine meticulously exposes these systems to the reader, providing a detailed chronology of development, and the impact of the various methods used to control and strip Palestinians of any rights whatsoever. That this is all done in contravention of international law and United Nations resolutions that should provide protection to the Palestinian people is a potent reminder of the international community’s ongoing complicity in these crimes.
Unfree in Palestine may only be 183 pages long, but it packs quite a punch with its in-depth analysis and the unraveling of the many complex tactics and strategies used by Israel to dominate, dispossess, control and denationalize Palestinians. The authors have gone to great lengths to ensure their narrative provides a detailed explanation of not only of how the tactics are used against Palestinians, but also the irrevocable impact these tactics have. Included in the book are some harrowing testimonies of Palestinians who are constantly subject to harassment, violence, humiliation and detention, purely because of the system that is used to control them.
Despite such a complex subject, with many strands and layers, the authors have categorized the different aspects and impacts with great care. The book, naturally, starts with registration and denationalization: a process which began in the 1930s under the British Mandate but was subsequently used with deliberant intent from 1948 following the establishment of Israel as a state for Jews and not for its indigenous Arab population.
The book then concentrates on blacklisting, coercion and collaboration–all of which are used to devastating effect in Palestine. The impact of such tactics which, as well as serving an intelligence purpose for Israel’s security forces, also encourages mistrust and suspicion within Palestinian communities, causes great harm to individuals, and successfully prevents the natural development and progression of society as a whole.
The next chapter looks at movement restrictions and induced transfer from the post-1948 period, the efforts to control Palestinians within Israel, and the efforts to keep displaced Palestinians out. Palestinians who’d remained in what had become Israel were subject to martial law (until 1966) and extreme measures, such as curfews and military-issued permits to travel between one village and the next, were used to restrict and impede everyday existence. This system provided the blueprint for what was to come when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, following the Six-Day War.
The authors then bring us to the early 2000s, focusing on the direct social impacts of Israel’s mechanisms of control on healthcare and education in the occupied territories. These chapters in particular highlight the reality of day-to-day life under a military occupation. Health and education systems are on the verge of collapse, and access to services and centers delivery is severely obstructed. And there is the ever-present threat of personal danger in trying to access services. This has also created an environment in which there can be no effective development of the infrastructure or institutions to support health and education services serving Palestinians.
One of the most heartbreaking and distressing testimonies in the book concerns access to healthcare. Rula Ashtiya was in labor but soldiers refused her passage through Beit Furik checkpoint. She was forced to deliver in the dirt by the side of the road, with her husband helpless by her side, pleading with the soldiers in Hebrew: their baby died. This is not an isolated incident but the terrible reality that Palestinians have to face, alone.
The book is far from a cheery read, but the authors’ conclusions provide some hope for the future. Despite all the restrictions and control over their lives, Palestinians, inside and out, and with international support, continue to resist. They remind us that, while disempowered and denationalized, Palestinians are not immobilized. The fact that more people today than ever before know about the occupation of Palestine and are sympathetic to their plight tells us we must continue the struggle for justice and equality.
Through the belligerent and expansionist project of Zionism, which expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, a highly complex, bureaucratic and racist system has been established. It has one goal: to deny Palestinians any and all of their rights. There are those who say that much of what happened in 1948 (and subsequently) was not part of a determined Zionist intention to expel Palestinians, that in times of war or conflict bad things happen that are beyond anyone’s control. Unfree in Palestine exposes this for the myth that it is: if there was never a premeditated or orchestrated plan to dispossess Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants, then why was so much energy expended by the Zionists, even in the 1930s, to catalogue and record with meticulous precision personal details of the Arab population? And why was the subsequent population register used explicitly to force Palestinians from their homes and to prevent others from returning?
The aims of Zionism have always been to take as much land and expel as many Palestinians as possible to create a state based on ethnic and religious exclusivity. Of all the tools, tactics and efforts used by Israel to achieve this, the use of registration, documentation and the restriction of movement have proved to be the most effective. Almost six million Palestinians live as refugees in the Diaspora. In Israel there are more than 1.6 million, and almost 4.5 million live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All of them have more than a national identity in common: they have all been systematically stripped of their rights.
Unfree in Palestine is required reading for anyone who is genuinely interested in the struggle for Palestine and what it means to be Palestinian. It goes beyond the headlines, beyond the solidarity and beyond the activism. It shines an uncomfortable light onto the world in which Palestinians have been forced to exist: one in which they have no control, no rights and no redress.
It is perhaps hard for some of us–who through virtue of our place of birth have the right of access to a passport, a nationality and relative freedom–to realise what being Palestinian actually means. Personally I feel no particular national allegiance to the country in which I was born, but I do understand and appreciate the privilege I have that grants me freedom of movement and the protection of my rights. Palestinians are not so ‘lucky’. Once you’ve read this book you’ll better understand why you will never experience the occupation in the way a Palestinian does.
– Georgina Reeves splits her time between Bethlehem and London, and is a co-founding trustee of Ahdaf, a British organization working with Palestinian students to support youth empowerment and community development. Visit: http://georgie.ripserve.com.
All in the Family: David Cameron’s Jewish Roots and the Coreligionists Who Brought Him to Power
EmpireStrikesBlack | January 7, 2014
While speaking to a 500-strong group of Jewish lobbyists in London in 2007, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared,(1) “I am a Zionist.” He went on to add, “I’m not just a good friend of Israel but I am, as you put it, good for Jews.”
These comments can easily be explained merely as fawning attempts to placate and appease the Jewish lobby – a necessary step for any who wish to assume high office. One has to ask the question though: why does ‘Anglican’ David Cameron conceal his own Jewish identity?
David Cameron is not merely of Jewish descent; he hails from a bloodline that can fairly be described as Jewish royalty, yet he claims never to have known this. As he spoke to the Movement for Reform Judaism in 2010 he described his learning of his Jewish ancestry(2) as the “highlight” of his year.
While studying the Cameron family tree in 2009,(3) Dr Yaakov Wise – a University of Manchester historian who specialises in Jewish history – found that David Cameron is descended from a highly distinguished Jewish family line (emphases added):
And according to Dr Wise, who has been using archival material to examine the Cameron family tree, the Tory leader could also be a direct descendent of the greatest ever Hebrew prophet, Moses.
Cameron is a descendent of banker Emile Levita, who came to Britain as a German immigrant in the 1850s. Emile Levita was himself a descendent of Elijah Levita, who lived from 1469-1549.
During the last years of his life Elijah Levita produced, among other works, two major books: the 1541 Translator’s Book, the first dictionary of the Targums or Aramaic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.
His lexicon of 1542 explained much of the Mishnaic Hebrew language and was a supplement to two important earlier dictionaries.
Elijah Levita also wrote what is thought to be the first ever Yiddish novel – called the Bove-bukh (The Book of Bove) written in 1507 and printed in 1541.
The book is based on an Italian version of an Anglo-Norman tale about a queen who betrays her husband and causes his death.
Emile Levita, who was granted citizenship in 1871, is Cameron’s great great grandfather.
Cameron’s great-great grandfather, Emile Levita was a German Jewish financier who emigrated to Britain and obtained British citizenship in 1871. Levita was the director of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China which in 1969 became Standard Chartered Bank. Levita himself is descended from Elijah Levita, a Jewish scholar of out-and-out luminary status whose writings included not only a dictionary explaining much of the Talmudic Hebrew language (or ‘Mishnaic Hebrew’), but the first ever Yiddish novel (Yiddish, meaning literally “Jewish” is a language of German Ashkenazi Jews written in the Hebrew alphabet).
Considering the sheer historical eminence of his ancestors, it would take real gullibility to believe that David Cameron ‘found out’ about his roots one year before he assumed office. The question is not ‘why did Cameron have no knowledge of his Jewish roots’, but rather, why would he conceal his Jewish identity?
A 2006 report by the Jewish Chronicle(4) cited here by Stuart Littlewood(5) perhaps goes some way in explaining this. The report titled ‘Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers‘ is a laundry list of powerful members of the Jewish community who donated over £1 million to David Cameron, explaining his inexplicable rise to power after a relatively mundane and unremarkable political career.
The biggest Jewish donor to the party while Mr Cameron has been leader is gaming magnate Lord Steinberg, who has donated £530,000, plus a loan of £250,000. Hedge-fund owner Stanley Fink has donated £103,000, even though he was a declared supporter of Mr Cameron’s leadership rival, Liam Fox. A further £250,000 has been loaned by philanthropist Dame Vivien Duffield.
During Mr Cameron’s campaign to lead his party, Jewish figures gave his team (as opposed to the party) additional donations of more than £60,000. According to the JC’s inquiries, direct donations to “Team Cameron” in the leadership battle came from philanthropist Trevor Pears (around £20,000), Bicom chair Poju Zabludowicz (£15,000 plus £25,000 to the party), Next chief executive Simon Wolfson (£10,000 plus £50,000 to the party), former Carlton TV boss Michael Green (£10,000) and Tory deputy treasurer and key Cameron fundraiser Andrew Feldman (£10,000 through his family firm, Jayroma).
Aside from these donations from powerful Jewish figures, a ‘small but influential’ group of Jewish Conservative officials and politicians were also ‘key players’ in Cameron’s campaign for leadership, the Jewish Chronicle report goes on to mention.(4)
In the aforementioned piece,(5) Stuart Littlewood makes an observation about the extent to which Jews are over-represented in the British parliament (emphases added):
While nobody is suggesting, I hope, that Jews have no place in our law-making, it is not unreasonable to wish the number to reflect their presence in the population. Three years ago the Jewish Chronicle published a list of Jewish MPs in Britain’s Parliament, naming 24. The Jewish population in the UK at that time was – and probably still is – around 280,000 or just under 0.5 per cent. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so, on a proportional basis, Jews could expect three seats. But with 24 they were eight times over-represented. Which meant, of course, that other groups were under-represented.
The UK’s Muslim population is about 2.4 million or nearly 4 per cent. Similarly, their quota would be 25 seats but they had only eight – a serious shortfall. If Muslims were over-represented to the same extent as Jews (i.e. eight times) they’d have 200 seats. Imagine the hullabaloo.
David Cameron appointed the UK’s first Jewish ambassador(6) to the Zionist regime, Matthew Gould.
Succeeded by David Cameron, the previous leader of the Conservative party, Michael Howard, is also Jewish,(7) as is the current leader of the UK Labour party, Ed Miliband.(8) Not bad going for a group that constitutes less than 0.5% of Britain’s population.
If the British public were to consider Cameron’s very real pursuance of Zionist policies in the context of his rise to power on the back of Jewish money, there would be a public awakening (which would no-doubt be labelled as ‘anti-Semitism’). In light of this, the decision to conceal his Jewish identity can easily be understood.
It is not democratic for a holder of high office to be put in place by the money of powerful political pressure groups. Nor is it democratic for one ethno-religious group to be grossly over-represented within the corridors of power.
If the interests of the Zionist regime and the powerful Jewish community were to conflict with those of the United Kingdom, who would David ‘I’m a Zionist‘ Cameron really represent? If the recent wars on Libya and Syria are anything to go by, this question need not be asked.
Notes
(1) ‘Cameron declares himself a Zionist’ – The Jerusalem Post, 13 June 2007.
(2) ‘David Cameron Speaks to the Movement for Reform Judaism’ – Written by Movement for Reform Judaism, 12 April 2010.
(3) ‘Illustrious Jewish roots of Tory leader revealed’ – The University of Manchester, 10 July 2009.
(4) ‘Special report: Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers’ – Bernard Josephs and Leon Symons – The Jewish Chronicle, 12 October 2006.
(5) ‘David Cameron’s “Torah” government: Britain’s unbearable shame’, by Stuart Littlewood.
(6) ‘Interview: The UK’s new Jewish ambassador to Israel’ – The Jewish Chronicle, 10 December 2009.
(7) ‘Britain’s Conservative Party To Elect First Jewish Leader’ – The Jewish Federations of North America, 6 November 2010.
(8) ‘The Jewishness of Ed Miliband: Labour’s first Jewish leader bravely faces up to the Left’s anti-Semitic streak’ – The Telegraph, 25 May 2012
Related article
The GAO’s Office In The NSA Is Collecting Dust Because Congress Hasn’t Asked For A Report In Years
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | January 8, 2014
The NSA’s defenders go to great lengths to convince everyone (the public and many angered legislators) that it operates under a tremendous amount of oversight — so much though that even THINKING about abusing its capabilities is out of the question. The leaks have repeatedly proven this assertion false as members of the supposedly stringent oversight continue to state their shock and dismay over what’s been uncovered.
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News points out there’s another layer of oversight that’s gone unutilized for years as well.
Years ago, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, conducted routine audits and investigations of the National Security Agency, such that the two agencies were in “nearly continuous contact” with one another. In the post-Snowden era, GAO could perform that oversight function once again.
“NSA advises that the GAO maintains a team permanently in residence at NSA, resulting in nearly continuous contact between the two organizations,” according to a 1994 CIA memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence.
Why haven’t we read any damning reports from the GAO about the NSA’s abuses over the past several years? Well, apparently it’s because no one wants to know.
At a 2008 Senate hearing, Sen. Daniel Akaka asked the GAO about its relationship with NSA. “I understand that GAO even had an office at the NSA,” Sen. Akaka noted.
“We still actually do have space at the NSA,” replied David M. Walker, then-Comptroller General, the head of the GAO. “We just don’t use it. And the reason we don’t use it is we are not getting any requests [from Congress]. So I do not want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs.”
There’s that oversight at work again. Idle for “years” by 2008 and no signs that anything has occurred since then. The GAO maintains an office (currently unstaffed) within the NSA but because if no one’s asking any questions, it’s not providing any answers.
If there’s something the GAO does well, it’s track down internal issues and problematic behavior. Unfortunately, it’s limited to recommending courses of action rather than mandating any serious changes, meaning its follow-up reports are generally filled with descriptions of how these audited entities failed to pursue the recommendations and (often) performed considerably worse during the interim.
On the other hand, the GAO’s reports do at least make it clear to the American public exactly what’s wrong with nearly everything the government spends its money on. It’s very limited accountability that does nothing to change the underlying agency ethos, but at least it prevents them from pretending these problems don’t exist.
Being in-house should naturally raise concerns about the GAO’s objectivity. Unfortunately, considering the nature of the agency’s intelligence work, there’s probably no way around that. But the first step in renewing this layer of oversight is to remind Congress of its existence. It has the power to order a GAO investigation, but until it does, the office will continue to gather dust and the NSA’s internal problems will worsen — or at least go unnoticed by Congress.
Aftergood points out that James Clapper has ordered the agency to be responsive to GAO inquiries, apparently in the eventuality that it ever gets back to the business of asking questions.
In Intelligence Community Directive 114, issued in 2011 following years of stagnation in GAO oversight of intelligence, DNI James Clapper instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to be responsive to GAO, at least within certain boundaries.
“It is IC policy to cooperate with the Comptroller General, through the GAO, to the fullest extent possible, and to provide timely responses to requests for information,” the DNI wrote.
Of course, Clapper’s definition of “responsive” probably differs greatly from the normally-accepted usage of the word. Having Clapper condone cooperation with an agency that exists to find flaws and misconduct is a bit underwhelming. The NSA’s top men have been less than cooperative in the many hearings since the Snowden leaks began, most often recycling old talking points and insisting on discussing it in the context of one program (Section 215) when everyone else is clearly focused on another area.
Still, whatever the GAO finds (that somehow doesn’t get blotted out with black ink) will provide more useful information for its Congressional overseers. This certainly shouldn’t be used in place of more independent oversight committees, but it should prove to be a valuable addition. The real question Congress needs to answer is why it has ignored this option for so many years.
7 Things You Missed If You Didn’t Read Wired’s Big Story On How The NSA Is Killing The Internet
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | January 7, 2014
Steven Levy, who specializes in massive articles looking into aspects of the tech industry, has a new one for Wired, called How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet. It basically looks at how the NSA legally coerced the tech companies into having to comply with certain court orders to hand over information, and how the tech companies have been gagged from explaining what’s going on. And then… he gets the NSA’s side of the story. Much of what’s in there is stuff that you probably already know (especially if you read Techdirt regularly), but I wanted to call out a few tidbits that I hadn’t seen or heard anywhere else before:
- Google doesn’t charge the government for requests for information:
FISA requires the government to reimburse companies for the cost of retrieving information. Google says it doesn’t bother to charge the government. But one company says it uses that clause, hoping to limit the extent of the requests. “At first, we thought we shouldn’t charge for it,” says an executive of that company. “Then we realized, it’s good—it forces them to stop and think.”
This is kind of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” situation. I know plenty of folks in the civil liberties community go back and forth on it. When companies do charge, then you see articles about how companies are “making a profit” off of violating our privacy. If they don’t charge, then you see arguments about how they’re making it too easy for the government to get info. Either way, the standard has been to charge basic costs, so it’s interesting to see that Google doesn’t charge at all, probably betting on the fact that if they did, it would be misrepresented. Of course, the fact that they don’t might be misrepresented as well.
- The NSA has no response to fear of future abuse of programs beyond “we’d never do that.” Seriously.
Critics charge that while there is not yet any evidence of massive abuse of the NSA’s collected data, there is also no guarantee that a future regime won’t ignore these touted protections. These officials discounted that possibility, saying that the majority of NSA employees wouldn’t stand for such a policy. “If that happened, there would be lines at the Inspector General’s office here, and at Congress as well—longer than a Disneyland line,” Ledgett says. (The fates of several NSA employees-turned-whistleblowers indicate that anyone in that hypothetical queue would be in for a ride far wilder than anything in Anaheim.)
Sure, except there’s a very long history of the NSA and the FBI doing exactly the opposite (the claim of no evidence of massive abuse is not actually true). And, as Levy notes in that final parenthetical, the way whistleblowers are treated these days would probably shorten that line quite a bit.
- Keith Alexander admits that companies were compelled to comply and admits that we should stand up for the companies not to be harmed by all of this:
“This isn’t the companies’ fault. They were compelled to do it. As a nation, we have a responsibility to stand up for the companies, both domestically and internationally. That is our nation’s best interest. We don’t want our companies to lose their economic capability and advantage. It’s for the future of our country.”
Those words could have come from a policy spokesperson for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Or one of the legislators criticizing the NSA’s tactics. Or even a civil liberties group opposing the NSA. But the source is US Army general Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. Still, even as he acknowledges that tech companies have been forced into a tough position, he insists that his programs are legal, necessary, and respectful of privacy.
This is just bizarre. If he doesn’t want the companies to lose their economic capability and advantage, maybe he shouldn’t have undermined a large portion of it.
- Companies were given about 90 minutes to respond to the (misleading) claims in the original PRISM article that they had given the NSA direct access to their servers.
“We had 90 minutes to respond,” says Facebook’s head of security, Joe Sullivan. No one at the company had ever heard of a program called Prism. And the most damning implication—that Facebook and the other companies granted the NSA direct access to their servers in order to suck up vast quantities of information—seemed outright wrong. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taken aback by the charge and asked his executives whether it was true. Their answer: no.
Similar panicked conversations were taking place at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. “We asked around: Are there any surreptitious ways of getting information?” says Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “No.”
This remains one of the most unfortunate bits about the Snowden leaks. While I think that Barton Gellman, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have done an incredible job with most of their reporting, the original PRISM stories that appeared in the Washington Post and Guardian both came out rushed and were misleading, which is still impacting how people are reporting on these things today. The PRISM program and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act have serious issues that need exploring, but it’s all been distorted by the misleading initial claims, which implied things that just weren’t true.
- The NSA claims it uses the very same encryption that it tries to push everyone else to use. Yes, the same encryption that Snowden docs have revealed was compromised by the NSA.
And the NSA insists that, despite the implications of those Snowden-leaked documents, it does not engage in weakening encryption standards. “The same standards we recommend are the standards we use,” Ledgett says. “We would not use standards we thought were vulnerable. That would be insane.”
Sorry, but no one believes that one at all. The clear takeover by the NSA of NIST standards shows that’s clearly not true.
- The NSA still doesn’t realize how serious all of this is. They still think it’s just been blown out of proportion.
They understand that journalism conferences routinely host sessions on protecting information from government snoops, as if we were living in some Soviet society. And they are aware that multiple security specialists in the nation’s top tech corporations now consider the US government their prime adversary.
But they do not see any of those points as a reason to stop gathering data. They chalk all of that negativity up to monumental misunderstandings triggered by a lone leaker and a hostile press.
- Patent troll Nathan Myhrvold is also completely clueless about national security:
Former Microsoft research head Nathan Myhrvold recently wrote a hair-raising treatise arguing that, considering the threat of terrorists with biology degrees who could wipe out a good portion of humanity, tough surveillance measures might not be so bad. Myhrvold calls out the tech companies for hypocrisy. They argue that the NSA should stop exploiting information in the name of national security, he says, but they are more than happy to do the same thing in pursuit of their bottom lines. “The cost is going to be lower efficiency in finding terrorist plots—and that cost means blood,” he says.
This is stupid on so many levels. First, the old argument that it’s somehow equivalent of tech companies and the NSA to make use of information — a claim that Levy ridiculously repeats multiple times in his article — is a line that has been debunked so many times it’s really beneath Levy to give it any life at all, let alone refuse to point out how stupid it is. Companies provide a direct service to users, and they make a decision: If I give this information, I get this service in return. It’s a decision made by the consumer, and a trade-off where they decide if it’s worth it. We can argue that people should have more information about the costs and benefits, but it’s still a trade-off where the final decision is their own. The NSA, on the other hand, is not providing a choice or a trade-off. They’re just taking everything in exchange for nothing. And, oh yeah, they have guns and can put you in jail — something no company can do.
Second, Myhrvold incorrectly buys completely the line that all this data collection has been helpful in stopping terrorists. There’s just one problem: there is no evidence to support that. Besides, based on his idiotic reasoning, we might as well just do away with pretty much all our rights. For example, I’m pretty sure that we could all have protected Myhrvold more completely if there were video cameras streaming video of everything he did within the privacy of his own home, cars, office or just walking around, right? We could certainly make sure that no one was attacking him or, better yet, that he wasn’t about to attack anyone. The cost of not spying on every moment of Nathan Myhrvold might mean “blood.” So, based on his own logic, we should violate his privacy, right?
All in all there’s a lot in the article that’s worth reading, but those were a few key points that really stood out.
Official 9/11 story crumbling, Washington blames Saudis
By Michael Rivero | What Really Happened | January 7, 2014
The official story of 9-11 is collapsing almost as fast as the Obamacare website. Most Americans are now well aware of the strange collapse of WTC Building 7, the video that captures the sound of the actual explosion that initiates the collapse of WTC7, the very strange behavior of the Secret Service as President Bush read about goats at Booker Elementary School. We have all seen the photographs that confirm the remains of demolition “cutter charges” in the remains of the towers. And we all know how the BBC reported that Building 7 collapsed 26 minutes before it actually happened. indicating a script was being followed (but alas, not carefully enough).
With the official story in free fall, Americans are wondering just who did this heinous deed. With the US Government itself the prime suspect, many are asking if the US Government had help from an outside nation, one with a long track record of world-changing dirty tricks.
There is a great deal of evidence that implicates the nation of Israel as a co-conspirator with the Bush administration. First, there was the massive Israeli spy ring uncovered in the United States just before 9-11, and how some of the “Dancing Israelis” arrested after being seen cheering and dancing as the World Trade Towers collapsed turned out to be Mossad spies! Then there was the strange case of Odigo, an Israeli-owned company whose New York offices received a warning about the attacks before the planes used in the attacks had even left the ground! All four of the hijacked planes departed from airport gates whose security was provided by the same Israeli security company. Israel has a long track record of playing dirty tricks against the United States and other countries, including the Lavon affair (framed on Egypt), Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty (initially framed on Egypt), and Israel’s smuggling a radio transmitter into Libya that was used to send fake messages that tricked President Reagan into bombing Libya.
As people start to seriously examine the plethora of evidence regarding Israel’s numerous perfidies it comes as no surprise that recently we have seen Israel’s “useful idiots” launch a propaganda campaign to claim that Saudi Arabia was behind the 9-11 attacks, based on a lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by the families of the victims. But anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone for anything. That does not mean the lawsuit allegations are true. Nonsense lawsuits are a reality of the modern US court system, as are lawsuits staged primarily as political and propaganda stunts, which is what this appears to be. At the very least this propaganda is intended to deflect interest away from Israel. At worst, it is the start of the campaign to justify military invasion of that country, just as Saddam’s nuclear weapons were the excuse to invade Iraq, and the more recently (and thankfully failed) attempt to justify invasion of Syria by claiming Syria’s government was gassing their own people.
As I have mentioned before, the best way to tell if you are being lied to is to look for what should be there but isn’t. In the case of the claim that Saudi Arabia was behind 9-11, what should be there and isn’t is a motive for Saudi Arabia to do something like that.
George Bush had a motive to do 9-11. He needed that “new Pearl Harbor” to enrage Americans into the century of war called for by the Project For The New American Century. Israel certainly had a motive to do 9-11 and frame Muslims for it, to trick Americans into siding with Israel’s continued land grabs and wars against Israel’s enemies, with Israel’s agenda being (as it was with the Lavon affair, the USS Liberty, and the Libyan radio hoax) that Americans fight those wars for them!
Saudi Arabia does not have a history of dirty tricks, nor a demonstrated ability to carry out such deceptions. More to the point, Saudi Arabia has no motive to attack the United States. The Saudi princes have grown very rich indeed through the Petrodollar arrangement. Saudi Arabia buys many American products and weapons ($61 billion in 2011), and unlike Israel, the American taxpayer does not have to give them the money first with which to buy those weapons. Whereas Israel constantly takes money out of the US, the Saudis pour it in! Private Saudi investment in the US economy is over $400 billion. Saudi Arabia is a major creditor to the US Government. Exact figures are hard to find but Saudi Arabia has loaned the US Government hundreds of billions of dollars.
Saudi Arabia is not going to risk an attack on the US because all that wealth would vanish. The Saudi wealth inside the US would be frozen or seized, and the outstanding loans to the US would never be repaid. The “useful idiots” trying to save Israel by blaming 9-11 on Saudi Arabia have yet to come up with a motive for the Saudis to do something like 9-11 that risks losing all that cash.
Remember that Saudi Arabia was being framed for 9-11 right from the start. One of the accused hijackers, a Saudi Pilot named Saeed Al-Ghamdi, was still alive after 9-11 and sued the US Government for defaming him.
And finally, here is some common sense that totally undermines the attempt to frame Saudi Arabia for 9-11. If Saudi Arabia really wanted to hurt the United States, they don’t need to fly airplanes into skyscrapers to do it. All they have to do is ask for their money back, all at once. The resulting damage to the US financial system would make 9-11 look like a minor inconvenience in comparison.
And it would be perfectly legal for Saudi Arabia to ask for their money back.
Which is why we know that the claim that Saudi Arabia was behind 9-11 has no more basis in fact than the claim that Saddam had nuclear weapons or that Assad gassed his own people right in front of the UN chemical weapons inspectors.
As the media tries to blame Saudi Arabia for 9-11, it is worth recalling that the Bush administration initially claimed that Iraq was behind 9-11 to sell the 2003 invasion, then later admitted Iraq had actually been innocent. So there is a pattern of the US simply using 9-11 as a “one size fits all” excuse to invade yet another oil rich nation.
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Dutch pension fund divests from Israeli banks over illegal settlements
Al-Akhbar | January 8, 2014
Dutch pension asset manager PGGM, one of the largest in the country, said on Wednesday it was divesting from five Israeli banks because they finance illegal settlements.
The announcement comes a month after a major Dutch water supplier ended a partnership with an Israeli water company which supplies Israeli towns and settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“PGGM recently decided to no longer invest in five Israeli banks,” said the company, which manages about 153 billion euros in funds.
“The reason for this was their involvement in financing Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories,” PGGM said in a statement.
PGGM said there was “a concern, as the settlements in the Palestinian territories are considered illegal under humanitarian law,” and regarded by international observers as an “important obstacle to a peaceful (two-state) solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
It said it would no longer do business with the Hapoalim and Leumi banks, the First National Bank of Israel, the Israel Discount Bank and the Mizrahi Tefahot Bank.
PGGM added it based its decision on a 2004 UN International Court of Justice ruling that the Jewish settlements were in breach of the Geneva Convention relating to occupying powers transferring their own citizens into occupied territories.
The group said it had been discussing the issue with the Israeli banks “for several years” but that the banks “have limited to no possibilities to end their involvement in the financing of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
“Therefore, it was concluded that engagement as a tool to bring about change will not be effective in this case,” PGGM said.
All investment in the banks ended on January 1 “as concerns remain and changes are not expected in the foreseeable future,” it added.
PGGM’s investments in Israeli banks amount to a few tens of millions of euros, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
“But its decision is liable to damage the banks’ image, and could lead other business concerns in Europe to follow suit,” the paper said.
Palestinians welcomed the PGGM’s decision to divest from the banks, Wafa news agency reported.
Palestinian Authority Parliament Member Qais Abdul Karim, said in a statement that he hoped such action would inspire other members of the European Union to follow suit and force Israel to abide by international law.
“Israel should understand that it will pay a heavy price if it continues to occupy Palestinian land and ignore international resolutions,” Wafa quoted him as saying.
In September, Dutch engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV withdrew from the construction of a sewage treatment plant in East Jerusalem, citing the Israeli’s project’s violation of international law.
Last month, Dutch water supplier Vitens ended a partnership with Israeli water company Mekorot due to the “political context.”
The decision came days after a visit to the Mekorot offices in Israel by Dutch trade minister Lilianne Ploumen was abruptly cancelled.
The visit was part of a larger tour of Israel by Prime Minister Mark Rutte that was marred by a dispute over a Dutch-made security scanner intended to check goods leaving Gaza for the West Bank.
Rutte was to have inaugurated the scanner on the isolated territory’s border with Occupied Palestine, but the ceremony was broken off after Israel said it did not want Gazan goods going to the West Bank.
Israel’s defense ministry wants to isolate the two Palestinian regions, while Dutch officials had hoped the scanner might boost commerce between them.
Israeli deputy Foreign minister Zeev Elkin last month said he was “blindsided” by Vitens’ pullout “and a few more European companies have made similar decisions in the past months, which have blindsided us exactly in parallel with the peace process.”
Zeev, speaking to Israeli military radio, said that peace initiatives should mean “that people don’t breathe down our neck”, but “unfortunately this doesn’t work.”
Since peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials began in July, Israel has announced the construction of thousands of settler homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, sparking tensions in already difficult negotiations.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
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ln Israel, Greenwald reveals whose agenda he is serving
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | January 7, 2014
When waging unconventional warfare, timing is everything.
In some pro-Israel circles, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are now being hysterically compared to Neville Chamberlain for their alleged “betrayal” of the self-defined “Jewish state” to yet another imminent Holocaust as a result of Obama’s historic, albeit so far limited, rapprochement with today’s supposed equivalent of a genocidal Nazi regime in Tehran and Kerry’s sustained diplomatic effort to get Israel to return to its so-called “Auschwitz borders” prior to its premeditated 1967 Land Grab. In light of this dual “existential threat” posed by the Obama administration to a Greater Israel, the interview given to Israeli TV by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of U.S. spying worldwide, is as close to a “game theory warfare” smoking gun as you’re going to get.
Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 — whose biggest shareholder, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, is President of the World Jewish Congress — Greenwald criticized “the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard,” who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. (Incidentally, Channel 10 owner Lauder is also a supporter of clemency for Pollard.) As reported today by Haaretz, here’s what Greenwald told his Israeli audience about the spy, who, in the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history”:
Greenwald agreed that the Snowden revelations are relevant to Pollard’s case. “When the U.S. government goes around the world criticizing other countries for spying on allies and prosecuting them,” he said, “are they going to maintain that with a straight face when they’re doing exactly that?”
It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.
While some may be willing to concede that Greenwald’s charge of U.S. government hypocrisy is perfectly valid, the acclaimed “independent” journalist’s remarks that American national security does not require surveillance of its so-called “ally” in Tel Aviv is at best naïve, at worst disingenuous:
Asked about the U.S. government’s claim that the purpose of the eavesdropping is to fight terrorism, he responded by citing the documents’ revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli officials, asking, Does the U.S. government think Angela Merkel is a terrorist? Or that democratically elected Israeli officials are involved in terror?
Although many Greeks and other Europeans may justifiably view Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures as a form of economic terrorism, could Greenwald seriously be oblivious to Israel’s long track record of terrorism, not only its state terrorism against the indigenous Palestinians and their neighbours but its less widely-known, albeit acknowledged, false flag terror attacks on its American benefactor and imperial proxy?
Given the account of the “Five Dancing Shlomos” caught celebrating in Liberty Park, New Jersey as the twin towers burned on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as much other well-documented evidence pointing toward Israeli complicity in the 9/11 attacks — seized on with great alacrity by Israel loyalists such as Joe Lieberman as a pretext to strip Americans of much of their constitutional rights while others such as Michael Chertoff profited from the hyped “need” for greater “security” in the post-9/11 “Homeland” — what kind of journalist genuinely concerned about civil liberties would deny that monitoring the conversations of a “spook, terrorist or criminal” such as Netanyahu, a harsh critic of NSA spying who infamously admitted that 9/11 as “very good” for Israel, is an essential requirement of any genuine fight against terrorism?
Like that other much-adored Jewish “critic of Israel” Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald would appear to be just the latest branded anti-imperial “hero” serving to provide cover for a less transparent Israeli agenda.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.
Will US Senate crown Netanyahu emperor?
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | January 7, 2014
The United States of America is supposed to be a democratic republic. Under its Constitution, the Congress decides whether to go to war, and the President serves as commander-in-chief.
Today, with nearly 1,000 military bases around the world, the USA looks more like an empire than a republic. But who is the emperor? Is the USA ruled by an “imperial presidency”? Or is the real emperor of America enthroned in Tel Aviv?
A bill introduced in the US Senate by Chuck Schumer (D-NY), entitled the “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013,” formally turns over American war powers to the State of Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. According to a leading American Iran expert, Columbia University professor Gary Sick, “the bill outsources any decision about resort to military action to the government of Israel, by committing the United States in advance to support any military action by Israel.”
That effectively gives Netanyahu the war powers of both the US Congress and the US president. In effect, it makes Netanyahu emperor of the USA, empowered to lead America into any war he wants at the time and place of his choosing.
Yesterday, in an exclusive interview with Truth Jihad Radio, Gary Sick called for action against Schumer’s bill, “A very convincing case has to be made in Washington, and in the Congress, that this is a very bad idea. … Normally, I’m an analyst. I sit back and I look at issues. In this case, I think it is so important that I have been willing to get out in front and say ‘we need to do something.’”
How could the US Senate seriously be considering a bill that would give Israel the right to take America to war?!
The United States, especially in its higher echelons of power, has been thoroughly penetrated by agents of the state of Israel. In his landmark book October Surprise, Gary Sick (the top Iran expert on the National Security Council under three US presidents) discusses the vast power the Israeli spy service Mossad wields through its use of an army of “sayanim,” Jewish volunteers, throughout the world, “The availability of the sayanim, together with the ultra-professionalism and high motivation of the handful of experienced Mossad agents, meant that the Mossad, with relatively few people and a limited budget, could often match or surpass the performance of intelligence services may times its size. In many cases, money could not buy the kind of operational flexibility and cover that the Mossad enjoyed through the services of its unacknowledged brigades of willing volunteers.” (October Surprise, p. 65).
Is Senator Chuck Schumer, the descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, a sayanim?
That depends how you define “getting paid.”
Sen. Schumer and most of his congressional colleagues take massive Israeli bribes euphemistically described as “campaign contributions.” So they are not really sayanim (unpaid volunteers for Israel). Schumer and most of the US Congress are, in effect, on the Israeli payroll.
Sayanim are people who do it for love. Schumer and the other traitors in Congress are doing it for money.
Schumer and his colleagues take payoffs from the likes of Las Vegas godfather Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest donor and the leading fundraiser for pro-Israel political action committees. Speaking at Yeshiva University in New York a little over two months ago, Adelson said the United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran – not to defend American interests, but in service to Israel.
Where does Israel (including its dual citizens, sayanim, and loyalists living abroad) get the money to buy the American political system? Adelson’s billions come from gambling – historically a key segment of organized crime, which has often, at its highest echelons, been dominated by Zionists. As the British newspaper The Guardian has confirmed, “of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia’s economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin.” These Russian criminal oligarchs, like so many in other countries, have strong links to Israel, the world’s leader per capita in human trafficking, human organ theft, and other rackets. Global organized crime is one of the key, often-unrecognized sources of Zionist money and power.
An even more important source of Zionist money-power is the international banking system. John Perkins the “economic hit man” has revealed that the biggest international banking organizations, including the World Bank, the IMF, and their constituent banks, run private intelligence services that regularly seize power over entire nations through usury, murder uncooperative heads of state in plane crashes, and strive to create the world’s first-ever truly global empire – which some have called the New World Order.
The key players in the New World Order international banking racket are disproportionately Zionist. This important fact, which nobody is allowed to notice upon pain of being called an anti-Semite, was underlined by Obama’s recent nomination of the rabid Zionist dual citizen Stanley Fischer as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In his article “AIPAC’s Fed Candidate Stanley Fischer on a Warpath against Iran,” Grant Smith writes, “While the doors of federal government have long swung open for Israel-lobby appointees focusing most – if not all – their energies on advancing the interests of a foreign state, any who were actually Israeli dual citizens have traditionally kept that a closely-guarded secret. Fischer’s long-term boosters, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), likely want to accustom Americans to openly dual citizens circulating between top roles in the US and Israeli governments.”
According to the US State Department website, “dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country.” Why do Americans let people with declared loyalty to a foreign country overrun top positions in the US government?
The answer is that the USA today is neither a democratic republic nor a sovereign nation. As John Perkins explains, a new, global empire is arising, built by and for the international plutocrats. And that power structure has increasingly been dominated by hard-line Zionists like Stanley Fischer.
In the wake of 9/11, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon boasted to his cabinet, “We Jews control America!” Sharon, like Netanyahu today, fancied himself a sort of international emperor, and believed that the Israeli lobby completely controlled the USA.
Was Sharon right?
If the US Senate passes Schumer’s “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran” bill, Ariel Sharon should come out of his coma for a few seconds to whisper “I told you so” – and then shuffle off this mortal coil to face judgment for the countless horrors he unleashed on the world.
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What will it take for the US to cut military aid to Egypt?
By Dr Sarah Marusek | MEMO | January 6, 2014
Ever since the 3 July military coup that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected government, the world has stood back to witness the Egyptian authorities’ brazen attempt to cleanse an entire community from Egypt’s population.
As an American citizen I have to ask: how many Egyptians need to be killed, injured, arrested and tortured, and how many families torn apart and destroyed, before the US will take decisive action against Egypt’s post-coup military regime?
And I am not the only American asking this question.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times newspaper published an editorial under the headline “Stop coddling Egypt’s military”. The editors argue that: “It’s increasingly evident that the military rulers of Egypt are determined to intimidate and silence their political opponents, whether they are members of the Muslim Brotherhood or secular Egyptians who believe the generals are betraying the spirit of the ‘Arab Spring’. Yet the Obama administration continues to entertain the pious hope that Egypt is on the road to an inclusive democracy.”
The editors criticise the US response to the continued crackdown as being “polite to the point of pusillanimity”, and conclude that, “Clearly the current policy of trying not to offend [Egypt’s military] isn’t working.”
One week earlier, the Washington Post newspaper published a similar editorial, in which the editors denounce the Egyptian authorities’ criminalisation of the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement was designated a terrorist organisation on 25 December.
The Post’s editors lament how “Egypt has abandoned the path to democracy,” calling this a “tragedy” and asserting that: “The time has come for stronger US protests and action. To remain timid in the face of repression will invite only more.”
So why is the Obama administration not acting? After all, the US is supposedly a global superpower, and we have spent billions of dollars buying Egypt’s friendship.
Well, if we take a closer look at the two countries relations, we see that Egypt has never really been a client state of the US, and in fact the relationship is quite the reverse.
Military aid and “peace”
In February 2012, when Egypt’s military-led government under SCAF indicted 16 Americans working for non-governmental organisations in Egypt on charges of receiving foreign funds to foment unrest, US officials were quick to decry the move, and threatened a halt to American military aid to Egypt. In fact, 40 senators sent a strongly worded letter of warning directly to the former head of Egypt’s military, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. Senator Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee, warned the Egyptian military that, “the days of blank checks are over.”
And yet the following week, the rhetoric coming out of Washington was remarkably softened. According to the Atlantic magazine, officials had initially been so caught up in their outrage over the charges against Americans, including the son of the US Secretary of Transportation, that they did not think about how cutting Egypt’s military aid would have implications for their best friend in the Middle East, Israel.
Egypt is currently the fifth largest recipient of US aid in the world, and cumulatively second only to Israel. Foreign aid to Egypt was negligible until the mid-1970s and only ballooned after Egypt signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978. Since the mid-1980s, Egypt has received annually about $1.3 billion in military aid, while Israel received $1.8 billion until the year 2000, after which military aid to Israel fluctuated between $2 to $3.1 billion.
According to the Washington Institute, military aid to Egypt was initially tied to US aid levels to Israel, which is why the figures remained proportional up until 2000, when the launch of the second Palestinian intifada altered the equation. Two other factors also contributed to the shift. The first is that by the turn of the millennium, Egypt was no longer isolated in the region as a result of its neighbourly relations with Israel. The second is that by then, the US had phased out its economic aid to Israel, allocating part of it instead for military use.
Is it aid or blackmail?
Still, continued US aid to Egypt remains an unwritten condition of the Camp David Accords, and since the January 2011 revolution in Egypt, the Israel Lobby has repeatedly voiced its concern that if the aid were to dry up, then the peace treaty would be in jeopardy.
So it is not surprising that despite being subject to the harshly worded threats, Egypt continued to prosecute the American NGO workers, a political slap in Washington’s face, all the while receiving US military aid. All 16 Americans, along with 27 of their Egyptian peers, were eventually convicted and sentenced in absentia in June 2013.
This case is interesting for two reasons. One is that it highlights how US aid to Egypt is meant first and foremost to please and protect Israel. The second is that the Egyptian military regime knows this, and thus acts with impunity. The case against the 16 American NGO workers illustrates that. But so does the history of US economic aid to Egypt.
The US has always employed its foreign aid as a political tool, and its economic assistance is handled by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Both during the Cold War and in the neoliberal era, USAID projects have come with conditions strongly favouring free markets and privatisation. But interestingly, in the case of Egypt, scholar Bessma Momani argues that: “the Egyptian government perceived the aid programme as an entitlement for signing the Camp David Accord, where equality of treatment between Egypt and Israel was supposedly guaranteed. In consequence, USAID found that the aid at its disposal did not give the organisation any real influence to induce Egypt to alter its economic policies.”
Writing in 1997, scholar Duncan Clarke also noted that Egypt views the American funds as its entitlement for making peace with Israel, thus despite the massive amounts of US aid to Egypt, “The remarkable absence of vigorous, reliable Egyptian advocates of the US is particularly striking.” In 1991, the US and its allies even agreed to forgive half the $20.2 billion debt that Egypt owed to them, in thanks for Egypt’s support during the Persian Gulf War. Nevertheless, Momani suggests that during this time, the Egyptian government was still not willing to alter its economic policy enough for Washington’s liking.
Continually frustrated by Egypt’s unwillingness to “reform” its state driven economy, in 1993 the US decided to privatise its economic aid to Egypt. Momani describes how Cairo and Washington set up a “Presidents’ Council” consisting of 15 American and 15 Egyptian corporate representatives to manage private American investment in Egypt as an alternative to official US government aid. Oil executives along with major US multinationals comprised the American team, while companies that had well-established connections with the Egyptian elite and were close to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made up the Egyptian team, which was headed by Mubarak’s son Gamal.
In this way Egypt’s rulers successfully transformed the US’s ideologically driven neoliberal policy into a crony trade relationship that directly profited the Mubarak regime.
How US aid to Egypt works
There are other aspects of the bilateral relationship that also limit Washington’s options.
All US military aid to foreign countries is deposited into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as part of the Foreign Military Financing programme, which is run by a division of the Pentagon called the Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). Nearly all countries have to spend the funds the US allocates each year, but Egypt is allowed to place orders on credit, which means that Egypt usually has a backlog of orders before the annual aid is even dispersed. The only other country granted this privilege is Israel.
The Washington Institute cites estimates that Egypt currently has about “$4 billion in outstanding contractual commitments to be paid by cash-flow financing”. In other words, Egypt has run up a $4 billion debt to satisfy its rapacious appetite for American-made weapons and military equipment, and all at the expense of US taxpayers, whose money is being funnelled into the pockets of American weapons manufacturers.
That’s why throughout the recent crackdown, the contracts never stopped coming in. According to the Politico web site, the day of the coup the US Army asked for information from contractors interested in building and upgrading F-16 bases in Egypt. And less than one week after the Egyptian security forces massacred and wounded thousands of anti-coup protesters in Rabaa Al-Adawiya and Al-Nahda Squares, “the US Air Force awarded a contract to General Electric to upgrade the Egyptian air force’s fighter jets. The deal, worth nearly $14 million, is to extend the lives of 18 engines used on F-16s and other fighters.”
The argument goes that cutting military aid to Egypt would mean that US companies would not get paid for the orders they are processing and this would negatively impact the US economy, resulting in job losses. However, maintaining the aid while stopping the delivery of the American-made weapons and military equipment is a possibility.
A report published by Businessweek magazine last August noted that, “Once the work is completed and the contractor is paid, it’s up to the DSCA to deliver the equipment to Egypt.” And according to the report, as of August the agency was not delivering anything.
This included helicopters, fighter aircraft and tank kits.
The magazine pointed out that: “This wouldn’t be the first time the US withheld military equipment it’s sold to a foreign country. In 1972, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi paid $70 million for eight C-130 Hercules aircraft. After political tensions arose and relations between the US and Libya became strained, Washington simply decided not to deliver the planes. To this day the aircraft are still sitting outside Lockheed’s plant in Marietta, Ga.”
However, according to Al-Jazeera America, after the Obama administration announced in early October that it would suspend some military assistance to Egypt, “nearly 2,000 tons of critical US military equipment continued to flow to Egyptian ports.” Although there was a delay in the shipment of some fighter jets, other equipment, including several kinds of vehicles used for crowd control, missile systems and spare parts for tanks, helicopters and fighter jets, among other items, continued to depart from eastern US ports to Egypt.
And then there is “war on terror”
So if the aid was supposedly halted, what is the catch?
One problem is that the Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to continue its provision of weapons and military equipment to help the Egyptian authorities fight “terrorism” in the Sinai, which shares a border with Israel.
Another is that the shipments mainly contain spare parts. As Al-Jazeera America points out, during the 1980s and 1990s, US military aid “led Egypt to phase out its Soviet-made arsenal, replacing most of its military equipment with higher-end US products.” Since then, Egypt has amassed an arsenal of American-made weapons and equipment, including thousands of tanks and the fourth-largest fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft in the world.
“There’s no conceivable scenario in which they’d need all those tanks short of an alien invasion,” Shana Marshall of the Institute of Middle East Studies at George Washington University joked to American National Public Radio.
So while Egypt is not in need of more weapons, the existing equipment does get worn out and continues to require a constant supply of spare parts, which the US freely provides. And Marshall also told Al-Jazeera America that: “there’s a lot of pressure on Congress [from the defence industry] to maintain those production lines in their own districts.”
This helps to explain why so many members of Congress, including Eliot Engel of New York, the most senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed “concern” when the Obama administration announced that it was withholding selected aid in October.
That said, some members of Congress did actively lobby to end military aid to Egypt while the country was under the leadership of President Mohammed Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood, after all, always did entertain the possibility of rethinking the Camp David Accords. Of course, these officials failed to realise that during Egypt’s short-lived democracy, US military aid went directly to Egypt’s military, and not to the civilian government.
In any case, there is public support for an aid freeze. A Pew Research survey in August found that “51 per cent of Americans believe the US should cut off military aid to Egypt to pressure the government there to end the violence against anti-government protesters.” And this number would likely be higher if Americans knew that the dispersal of military aid to Egypt could continue while the deliveries of the weapons are halted, weapons which could then even be sold to other parties for a profit, thus ensuring that American jobs are not lost.
So what is the prognosis for US military aid to Egypt? Is it even possible for the US to follow the European Union’s moral lead and suspend the export of all equipment that could be used by the Egyptian military regime in its ongoing campaign of repression?
Although in October President Obama suspended the delivery of some military equipment to Egypt pending the election of a civilian government, Washington still refuses to call the events surrounding 3 July a “coup”, a determination that would automatically halt all US military aid to Egypt in accordance with US law. And significantly, right after President Obama announced the suspension, Egypt hired a new Washington lobby firm.
Thus it should be no surprise to hear that before going on winter recess, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a bill on 18 December “that would allow the US to resume its full $1.6 billion aid relationship with Egypt by granting President Obama the power to waive [the federal law on the coup restriction] based on national security,” as reported by the Associated Press. Only a few days before the Senate committee passed this bill, three right wing House Republicans travelled to Cairo to visit General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi: Louie Gohmert of Texas, Steve King of Iowa and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
Considering that for Washington, US national security is mainly defined by two key concerns, Israel and the global war on “terror”, and that the three House Republicans have a particular obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, it is no wonder that Egypt’s interim authorities subsequently declared the movement a terrorist organisation.
And yet the new US law also aims to ensure that: “Egypt continues to implement the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, is fighting terrorism, is allowing the US Army to transit the territory of Egypt, is supporting a transition to an inclusive civilian government, is respecting and protecting the political and economic freedoms of all Egyptians, is respecting freedom of expression and due process of law, and finally, is abiding by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” according to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly.
While none of these conditions are anything particularly new, Hussein Haridy, a former assistant to the Egyptian foreign minister, has declared the bill “a blatant interference in the domestic affairs of Egypt” that must be firmly rejected by the interim authorities.
So despite Egypt’s continued human rights abuses and the calls from the American media for Washington to take action, US military aid to Egypt will probably continue to flow. Indeed, considering that in November Egypt negotiated a multi-billion dollar weapons deal with Russia, financed by the petrol dollars of the monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the historical imbalance of power between the US and Egypt in the latter’s favour, it seems more likely that if the aid were ever to be cancelled, then it would be the Egyptian authorities making that decision, not Washington.
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