American Psychological Association Refuses to Charge Member Who Committed Torture at Guantánamo
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman | AllGov | January 25, 2014
An American psychologist who took part in the torture of a Guantánamo detainee has avoided disciplinary action by an association of his peers.
The American Psychological Association (APA) wrote in a letter that John Leso, a former U.S. Army reserve major and psychologist, would not be rebuked for participating in the harsh interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani in November 2002.
Qahtani was suspected of helping plot the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The APA said in the letter to Trudy Bond, an APA member who filed the complaint against Leso, that it had “determined that we cannot proceed with formal charges in this matter. Consequently the complaint against Dr Leso has been closed.”
The association did not deny that Leso took part in the brutal interrogation of Qahtani, whose treatment was categorized as torture by a U.S. military commission.
A classified record of the interrogation, which surfaced in 2005, showed Leso (identified as “MAJ L”) was present while Qahtani was forcibly given liquids, denied use of bathrooms, resulting in him urinating on himself, subjected to loud music, and repeatedly kept awake while being “told he can go to sleep when he tells the truth.”
Leso’s role in the use of torture at Guantánamo was bolstered by documents that surfaced during a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee torture inquiry which highlighted Leso’s involvement with a special team at the prison that crafted torture techniques. Leso’s name, rank and membership on the team were cited in minutes of a Guantánamo meeting that was published by the committee. That record quoted Leso, at the time, as pointing out that the detainees “are used to seeing much more barbaric treatment” and therefore the team’s use of “force” on them “may be ineffective.”
Leso also helped write a 2002 memorandum that detailed the use, at Guantánamo, of “stress positions,” sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, isolation and exposure to extreme cold. The memo made its way through the Pentagon bureaucracy, leading U.S. forces to apply those same abusive techniques to detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
The Senate’s torture report quoted Leso as telling them he had been uncomfortable with the memo he helped produce, preferring instead a “rapport-building approach” to interrogation. APA’s ethics office made note of this, and it has been speculated that it played a role in Leso’s exoneration by the group.
Bond and other APA members who wanted Leso punished were dismayed by the decision. They believe that APA gave more weight to the doubts that Leso expressed after the fact than to his actual participation in the torture program.
“With Leso, the evidence of his participation is so explicit and so incontrovertible, the APA had to go to great lengths to dismiss it,” Steven Reisner, a New York clinical psychologist who unsuccessfully ran for the APA presidency last year, told The Guardian. “The precedent is that APA is not going to hold any psychologist accountable in any circumstance.”
Bond said the organization had sent the message that “psychologists are free to violate our ethical code, perhaps, in certain situations.”
An APA spokesperson, Rhea Farberman, told The Guardian that its investigation could not meet the burden of finding “direct unethical conduct” by Leso, and said it was “utterly unfounded” to fear the organization has condoned professional impunity. Farberman added that the APA’s “standing policies will clearly demonstrate that APA will not tolerate psychologist participation in torture.”
To Learn More:
US Psychology Body Declines to Rebuke Member in Guantánamo Torture Case (by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian)
American Psychological Association Letter on Dr John Leso: ‘We Cannot Proceed with Formal Charges’ (The Guardian)
Shrinks, Lies and Torture (by Trudy Bond, Counterpunch)
Is It Finally Time to Punish Pro-Torture Judge and Doctors? (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
Psychologists Move against One of Their Own Who Helped Torture (by Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
NSA, Israel, GVEs, Hasbara, and Gun Massacres in the USA and Beyond
By Michael Gillespie | Dissident Voice | January 25, 2014
Why would US leaders, lawmakers, intelligence and law enforcement agency administrators allow foreign intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies unfettered, unexamined, long-term access to vast audiences of American children and young adults? And does not that question represent legitimate and vital concerns regarding privacy, public health, public safety, and national security?
It is a matter of public record that, through its intelligence agencies and their spin-offs and many front companies, Israel is actively and deeply involved with the NSA in collecting and organizing data on Americans. The information thus collected by the NSA is shared with Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as well as Israel, but Israel is the major threat to legitimate US interests. Israel’s equivalent of the NSA, Unit 8200, or Israel SIGINT National Unit (ISNU), is notorious for its spin-off companies that become private intelligence gathering and espionage operations under Israeli control, in much the same way that Mossad has long been known to use front companies for its operations. In 2010, the investigation of a Mossad assassination team that used fraudulently obtained and falsified European and Australian passports and funding provided via US-issued bank cards revealed that the corporation that arranged the funding of the kidon team, Payoneer, was itself funded by venture capital firms linked to Israeli intelligence organizations.
One of the firms, Greylock Partners, founded in 1965, “operates in a number of global centers of innovation, including Boston, China (Beijing), India (Bangalore), Israel (Herzliya) and Silicon Valley. … Current Greylock portfolio companies include Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar,” according to the firm’s website. Greylock’s investment activities in Israel were launched in 2002 by partner Moshe Mor, who “served six years in the Israeli Army as a Captain in the Military Intelligence branch.” Unlike the CIA, which has an unfortunate history of ineffective and failed business operation covers, Mossad- and Unit 8200-controlled business operations are known for lucrative success.
That record is not unblemished. According to numerous published reports, one of Mossad’s most important early software trap-door sales operatives, Robert Maxwell, a media magnate who owned several major Mossad-controlled media outlets, came to a rather spectacularly embarrassing bad end when a Mossad kidon team assassinated him on his yacht off the Canary Islands on October 31, 1991. More recently, one Israeli spy working on US soil, Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan, is reported to have run as many as “30 companies in 17 countries on behalf of Israel” at one point. That Milchan was actively involved in espionage and arms dealing appears to have been an open secret in Hollywood, according to his own public statements.
A 2007 NSA secret report published by the Guardian (UK) on September 11, 2013, noted NSA’s “only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner [Israel].” The same Guardian article reported on a 2007 NSA document quoting a senior NSA official: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended.”
If restrictions placed on the NSA negatively impact US counter-intelligence operations directed against foreign intelligence agencies, like Israel’s, those agencies will be quick to take advantage of any void created by those restrictions or by the withdrawal of US intelligence assets. Experienced observers and analysts have seen this happen before, and not so very long ago, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) became a front organization for Israel’s Mossad and began funneling confidential information about Americans to the Israeli government.
“After COINTELPRO, a still-controversial FBI operation to destabilize black nationalist and other groups in the ’60s and ’70s, the FBI, state and local law enforcement authorities were ordered out of the business of gathering information about legitimate political activity by American citizens. But in some major American cities, law enforcement files relating to legitimate and Constitutionally protected political activities that had been ordered destroyed instead found their way to the offices of the ADL, which quickly became a clearinghouse for such illegally obtained and illegally retained information.
“The absence of the FBI, state, and local police investigators in the field created a void the ADL rushed to fill, with remarkable success, by increasing its in-house ‘fact-finding’ assets and capabilities and developing enhanced working relationships with ‘official friends’—government officials, investigators, and intelligence officers. … The ADL favored many of its ‘official friends’ with expense-paid trips to Israel, where they met with and were entertained by friendly officers of Israel’s espionage and counter-intelligence organizations, Mossad and Shin Bet, thus creating a major conduit for the flow of sensitive and useful U.S. domestic political intelligence to Israel’s spymasters in Tel Aviv,” wrote this reporter in a Special Report published by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in December 1999.
Because broadcast media news outlets in the USA seldom if ever mention Israeli espionage in their news coverage or in their ever more rare investigative reports related to matters of public interest, most Americans are unaware of and unconcerned about Israel as an espionage threat. Nevertheless, Israel has long been at or near the top of the list of nations with active and robust intelligence and espionage programs aimed at the USA and is by far the single worst offender among nations with propaganda campaigns directed at American audiences. Israel calls its public diplomacy efforts hasbara, and it is well-nigh impossible to overstate the influence of Israeli propaganda on American audiences. Likewise, because Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives exercise truly extraordinary influence over them, the vast majority of US elected officials seldom if ever mention the Israeli espionage threat or criticize Israel in any way. Rather, currying favor with Israeli leaders, media operatives, and spies is seen by many as a fast lane to success in government service and longevity of tenure in Congress. The grilling of former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska by Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who filibustered his nomination in February 2013 is illustrative. Hagel, who “volunteered to join the United States Army during the Vietnam War, rejecting a draft board recommendation that he go to college instead,” received two Purple Hearts among other commendations during his service in Vietnam. The filibuster of a nominee for Secretary of Defense was unprecedented in American history. Hagel was eventually confirmed by a vote of 58 to 41. His nomination was controversial only because he was viewed by Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives in the USA, their lobby, as being insufficiently subservient to Israel and, on rare occasions, publicly unenthusiastic about pro-Israel US policy and legislation.
Few Americans recognize the breadth, depth, and scope of Israel’s hasbara or propaganda campaign directed at Americans through media corporations, their products, and media outlets. Newsweek‘s Jeff Stein reported in a December article titled, “Former NSA Boss Michael Hayden Can’t Stop Talking” on the close relationship between Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA (1999-2005) and former Director of the CIA (2006-2009), and former Mossad chief Maer Dagan, writing that, “They were so close when Hayden ran the CIA, a well-placed source says, that the Israelis were afforded the unique privilege of bringing cell phones and laptops into the spy agency’s headquarters. Nobody but nobody gets to do that.”
Today, reports Stein, Hayden is, “comfortable in his expansive corner office in downtown Washington, with big windows overlooking a busy intersection only a few blocks from the White House. Along with other big guns at the Chertoff Group, the consulting firm headed by another all-everything, Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary, he’s cashing in and having a ball.”
How should Americans evaluate their government’s counter-intelligence efforts against such an insidious, pervasive Israeli threat? Files released by whistle blower Edward Snowden have shed new light on a particularly troubling and under-explored aspect of that question. Among those files is an NSA document titled, “Exploiting Terrorists Use of Games and Virtual Environments” dated “20070108” but described by the Guardian (UK) as having been “written in 2008.” The document, published on December 9, 2013, limns a brave new world of espionage in the era of on-line video gaming. Taking the document at face value, it appears that seven years ago someone in or closely associated with the NSA became concerned that terrorists could exploit and were exploiting on-line video games and virtual environments (GVEs) that allow like-minded individuals to gather and communicate privately on-line. The unnamed author notes that video games offer “realistic weapons training (what weapon to use against what target, what ranges can be achieved, even aiming and firing), military operations and tactics, photorealistic land navigation and terrain familiarization, and leadership skills”; that GVE’s can “reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes while imparting a targeted message or a lesson,” and that, “one cannot discount the ‘fun factor’ involved – it is important to hold your target audience’s attention – and makes ingesting the message not even noticeable”.
The great danger inherent in such technologies, of course, and the aspect of these technologies that makes them so valuable to intelligence/espionage organizations, is their usefulness as means of covert messaging and manipulation of the behavior of individuals and groups of individuals who can be tracked and targeted on-line over time for espionage purposes, including the creation and direction of unwitting or Manchurian Candidate operatives and assassins. Think operant conditioning on steroids or behavior modification perverted by intelligence/espionage agency psychological operations (psy-ops) teams and taken to the deepest, darkest corners of the human psyche. This is work for which spook shop psy-ops teams once relied on short-range, low power FM radio broadcasts in order to covertly transmit programming created to manipulate their mentally unstable targets, work in which first-person-shooter video games represent a major technological advancement.
The author of the 2007 NSA paper on GVEs wrote, “We know that terrorists use many feature-rich Internet communications media for operational purposes such as email, VoIP, chat, proxies, and web forums, and it is highly likely they will be making wide use of the many communications features offered by Games and Visual Environments (GVE) by 2010,” and warned that the “NSA can’t even recognize the traffic, and therefore it is impossible to even say what percentage of the environment is GVE; let alone how targets are using the communications features of GVEs. However, GVEs offer a SIGINT/HUMINT opportunity space and more research is needed to figure out effective exploitation.”
Readers conversant with the history of video game technology will know that the technologies in use in today’s first-person-shooter video games, games that many mass murderers have used as training aids, have been in development since the 1990s. “By the late 1990s most [real time strategy] RTS games had native Internet support, allowing players from all over the globe to play with each other.” This, of course, puts the NSA document’s revelations regarding the NSA’s posture and policies regarding GVEs in a rather embarrassing light that should raise some serious questions about Gen. Michael Hayden’s leadership at the NSA. Apparently, Gen. Hayden was not much interested and perhaps not even aware of a need to be interested in GVEs while he was the Director of NSA, the primary producer and manager of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for the US government. Given that in 2007, NSA could not recognize the traffic, determine what percentage of internet traffic was devoted to GVEs, or see how [NSA] targets – terrorists or other intelligence/espionage agencies or their front companies – were utilizing the communications features of GVEs, Hayden’s and his successor Gen. Keith Alexander’s apparent indifference and ignorance with regard to these technologies prior to 2007 would appear to be well-nigh incomprehensible.
One might also ask why, today, Hayden is so popular among major broadcast and print news organizations as explainer- and defender-in-chief of the NSA. The answer, of course, is that currying favor with Israeli leaders, media operatives, and spooks in the USA is a fast track to success in the defense and security industries and associated media outlets following a career in government service – for those who view public service as a casino and retirement as an opportunity to cash in their chips and have a ball.
It is noteworthy that the NSA did not block the Guardian’s release of the GVE document, which Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman’s subsequent comments suggest it might have done on national security grounds. With regard to their government’s relationship with Israel, there is much about which their elected representatives and the vast majority of honest bureaucrats are unable to speak to the American people directly and plainly for fear of reprisal by Israeli leaders and their political and media operatives, aka the pro-Israel lobby. Those US officials who have been thoroughly corrupted by the powerful and influential pro-Israel machine, and many of those who might be described as duped and co-opted, are, of course, committed to keeping their own secrets as well as Israel’s secrets by adhering to a public narrative that is distinctly Israel-friendly.
So uncharacteristic of former CIA and NSA chiefs is Hayden’s media act that in his December Newsweek article Stein characterized Hayden’s public post-government-service defense of the NSA as, “So very un-spook-like.” Obviously, Hayden feels he has “a lot of ‘splainin to do.” Is the former NSA and CIA director worried that, should the truth become known, he might come to be widely viewed as the most feckless spy chief in American history, a figure of fun and ridicule, the Pillsbury Doughboy of espionage?
More information about on-line video games came to Americans courtesy of National Public Radio (NPR) on October 29, 2013, in an All Tech Considered segment, “How Video Games are Getting Inside Your Head – and Your Wallet,” by Steve Henn.
While the author of the 2007 NSA secret report on GVEs was concerned about terrorists who exploit video game technologies, Henn, who won an Edward R. Murrow Award for national investigative reporting on his way to becoming NPR’s technology correspondent, focuses on the effects of today’s video game technology on American children and their parents.
Henn writes, “… being connected to the internet … means that kids … can play with people spread across the globe. It also means that gaming companies can analyze how gamers play — each and every decision they make.
So when kids sit down with a game, they are actually sitting across a screen from adults who are studying them — and, in some cases, trying to influence their behavior in powerful ways.
Researchers in game companies tweak games to get players to stay on longer, or to encourage them to spend money on digital goods. They study gamers’ reactions. It’s become a science. And parents … often feel out-gunned.
In millions of families, video games are a source of intense love and intense hate because they can be so incredibly compelling. You might not believe that if you don’t play them, but you can get lost in a great game. They make you feel good.
And it’s no accident, says Ramin Shokrizade, the game economist for Wargaming America.
“The technology for this has gotten quite sophisticated,” says Shokrizade, who began his career in neuroscience and behavioral economics. “At this point, every major gaming company worldwide either has in place a fully developed business intelligence unit, or they’re in the process of building one.”
Today’s game design is dominated by research, he says. As we play games, game developers are tracking every click, running tests and analyzing data.
They are trying to find out: What can they tweak to make us play just a bit longer? What would make the game more fun? What can get us to spend some money inside a game and buy something?
“So as millions of people play, designers introduce little changes and get answers to all of these questions in real time [covertly, without the gamer’s knowledge – emphasis supplied]. And games evolve,” wrote Henn.
This reporter, who does not allow his son to play violent video games for the same reasons he would not hand any child a loaded revolver with the suggestion that he play Russian roulette, is astonished that so many American parents are apparently willing to allow their children to play violent video games widely known to have been used by gun massacre murderers for training purposes. Does not the enormous popularity of first-person-shooter video games, in and of itself, serve as compelling evidence that the flood of violent media product sluicing through screens large and small, a raging river of murder and mayhem, has desensitized large numbers of Americans to violence? Moreover, is the frantic, paranoid zealotry that so often characterizes the reactions of many American gun enthusiasts to proposals for background checks and restrictions on the sale of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines not persuasive evidence of a dangerous gun mania abroad in the land, yet another of the many negative effects of the surfeit of violent media product?
Here, one might pause to speculate that the media corporations responsible for creating and mass marketing GVEs knew in 2007 and, still today, know far more about the capabilities of their products than does the NSA. It would seem to be in the public interest for Americans and their elected officials to look closely at those corporations, take note who owns them, and to examine where their owners’ and managers’ political loyalties lie. We are, after all, talking about the most significant and alarming technological developments in the field of covert behavior modification and behavior manipulation in human history, the most lucrative — video games now generate more profits than do motion pictures — and the most dangerous of such technological developments. Are many of these companies using technologies developed by Israel’s spook shops? Might many of these companies be spin-offs of Israel’s Unit 8200 or Mossad front companies? Among the hundreds of gun massacres carried out by apparently deranged adolescents and young adult men in recent decades, is it possible to differentiate between those in which an obsession with violent media product was incidentally causal and those in which intelligence/espionage organizations covertly tracked and targeted individual gamers and influenced their behavior using GVEs for political purposes, such as inciting fear and animosity across political, social, racial, and religious dividing lines? Or instilling and maintaining in a significant number of Americans a pervasive sense of anxiety, fear, and anger? Should not every politically-related shooting by a mentally-ill individual be thoroughly scrutinized with regard to the shooter’s on-line GVE use? Why would US leaders, legislators, intelligence and law enforcement agency administrators allow foreign intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies unfettered, unexamined, long-term access to vast audiences of American young people? And does not that question represent legitimate and vitally important concerns about privacy as well as public health, public safety, and national security?
Though few are asking publicly, these would seem to be important questions. To fail to ask and answer them would represent a grave counter-intelligence lapse, given that just one particular series of violent video games, Call of Duty, is reported by news organizations to have been used for training by at least three mass murders. Mohamed Merah, who shot dead seven people in France in March 2012; Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in August 2012; and Adam Lanza, who gunned down 20 first-graders and six educators at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT in December 2012, all trained for their killing sprees using Call of Duty series video games.
The casual observer might have assumed that Merah acted out of political, religious, or racial animus, given his background and his choice of targets, four of whom were Jews, including three children, but his wife told investigators that he was obsessed with violent video games rather than politics or religion.
“Miriam, who was married to Merah for 17 days before his death, said: ‘We had many religious conversations, but we spent our time playing PlayStation, including ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Need for Speed,’” reported Richard Hartley-Parkinson, in an article published by the Daily Mail Online (UK) on December 15, 2012.
Breivik testified in open court at his trial that his motives were political, and he told the court that he trained for his killing spree with first-person-shooter video games.
“Breivik said he spent up to 16 hours a day playing the game in preparation for the attack. He said he became a deadly marksman by honing his gun skills on the Modern Warfare part of the [Call of Duty] series. He even bought a special gun sight used on the game, attaching it to the hunting rifle he used for his deadly rampage…” wrote Hartley-Parkinson.
Lanza’s mental health issues have been documented and widely reported along with his obsessive use of violent video games. A March 17, 2013 New York Daily News article by Mike Lupica draws heavily on an officer’s comments about a presentation by Col. Danny Stebbins of the Connecticut State Police at an April 2013 conference of International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels in New Orleans.
Stebbins spoke for a long time about the morning of Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary. Those in the room were told of first responders in Newtown who have since quit their jobs, so shattered were they by what they found when they got to the school that morning, when they saw dead teachers with their arms wrapped around the children they had tried in vain to save.
“The man to whom I spoke, a tough career cop who did not wish to see his name in the newspaper, was in the room when the state cop from Connecticut spoke,” said the man was well into his presentation when he began to talk of the spreadsheets that had been found at “the shooter’s” home.
“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”
The man paused and said, “They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.” …
The fascination (Lanza) had with this subject matter, the complete and total concentration. There really was no other subject matter inside his head. Just this: Kill, kill, kill. It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games. That’s what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in (police) school, about how if you’re moving from room to room — the way he was in that school — you have to reload before you get to the next room. Maybe he has a 30-round magazine clip, and he’s only used half of it. But he’s willing to dump 15 rounds and have a new clip before he arrives in the next room.
The career law enforcement veteran paused again, and when he started speaking again his voice was shaking, like a wind had blown through it.
They believe he learned the principles of this — the tactical reload — from his game. Reload before you’re completely out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon (the AR-15), he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing [first-person-shooter video] kill games.
Despite the impressions of the Connecticut officers, the voluminous final, official report identified no particular motive for Lanza’s actions, according to a November 25, 2013 article in the New York Times, a publication that has long claimed to be the nation’s newspaper of record, but one which did not find it necessary to publish a news article about revelations that the NSA shares intelligence data on Americans with Israeli spy agencies. That news was not “surprising” enough to cover, in the opinion of the editors and publisher of the New York Times.
In a September 2013 interview, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing, which publishes and mass markets Call of Duty and other first-person-shooter video games, told Rob Crossley that he was pleased with a business strategy that the nation’s most accomplished consumer protection advocate, Ralph Nader, has accurately if bluntly described as electronic child molestation.
Yeah I don’t see that strategy changing, it’s been one we’ve had for a while and I think our slate has always been relatively small and narrower than most of our competitors. We’re getting good results with this strategy too, and I think that kind of focus is good for us creatively. It allows us to focus on the choices we make very carefully, and to ensure you’re working with the best development talent, and you’re making the right investments from a marketing standpoint in order to succeed.
I look at the continued momentum of Call of Duty, the explosive success of Skylanders, the potential of Destiny and I see this as the right strategy for us.
Asked by Crossley if his strategy lacked diversity and he was, perhaps, relying too heavily on first-person-shooter games, Hirshberg responded:
First-person-shooters have been stable for a number of generations now, and I don’t think that just because Destiny and Call of Duty are in the same genre that they are not diverse. I think they couldn’t be more different from one another. One is a deep, mythological sci-fi epic opera in space, the other is a gritty action movie that’s come to life. The games are very different from a pacing and design standpoint too, so I think there is diversity there, you just might not see it at face value.
Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, Hirshberg’s Activision hired a high-powered Washington, DC lobbying firm to counter a potential legislative response to its lucrative business strategy and socially-destabilizing, violence-inciting products.
There can be no doubt that gun massacres and other violence attendant upon the widespread availability and use of violent, first-person-shooter video games as entertainment represent, at the very least, a major public safety challenge, one that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and lawmakers have failed to identify for what it is and are apparently powerless to address effectively. Whether the larger entertainment industry and its subsidiary news organizations are complicit in the continuing epidemic of gun massacres across the USA is not a question – they are. The question is, What can be done to reduce the deluge of violent media product these industries pump into American popular culture with criminal abandon?
In two countries, Venezuela and Switzerland, governments have acted to ban completely the sale and distribution of violent video games on the basis of violent content posing an unacceptable threat to public health and safety. With regard to gun violence and crime, Venezuela and Switzerland are a study in contrasts. Venezuela experiences high rates of crime and gun violence, while Switzerland, despite the Swiss owning more assault rifles per capita than, for instance, Americans, and competitive marksmanship being the national sport, enjoys remarkably low rates of both crime and gun violence. Many other countries have banned some games, most for violent content but also for a variety to other causes including pornographic content. It is noteworthy that video game industry flaks and gamer site writers typically sneer at bans on violent content and blatantly misrepresent the nature of the problem that violent video games represent.
In the USA, those who attempt to start or encourage a substantive public discussion in television news venues about the horrific effects of violent media product find themselves silenced in short order. Less than 48 hours after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge raised the issue on NBC’s Sunday morning news program, Meet the Press. Ridge, a former Secretary of Homeland Security and a member of the panel that investigated the April 16, 2007 Virginia Tech gun massacre, the nation’s worst, which left 32 victims dead and 17 wounded, is eminently well-qualified to speak on these matters. That did not prevent well-heeled corporate media operatives David Gregory and David Brooks shutting Ridge down almost immediately and dismissing his concerns. Brooks, taking on the role of propagandist for the video game industry, in defiance of decades of social science research flatly contradicted Ridge’s observation that young and impressionable viewers are put at serious risk by exposure to “the corrosive influence of a violence-oriented world, TV, video games, shoot-to-kill video games,” causative factors in gun massacres.
Attempts to restrict the manufacture, sale, and distribution of violent video games that all too frequently incite children, typically boys, young men, and mentally unstable adults to devastating acts of gun violence have been unsuccessful. In 2011, a California law was nixed by the US Supreme Court on free speech grounds [43].
“Leland Yee, a California state senator who wrote the law, said in a statement that ‘the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children,’ adding: ‘It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children,’” reported Adam Liptak for the New York Times on June 27, 2011.
“The video game industry, with annual domestic sales of more than $10 billion, welcomed Monday’s ruling,” wrote Liptak.
In the months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the entertainment industry fought back against a small number of news stories apparently crafted to persuade Americans that some in Hollywood recognize a sense of responsibility for the violence their products all too frequently incite. To address the potentially problematic public awareness of the entertainment industry’s causative role in gun massacres, Variety, the entertainment industry’s major trade publication since its founding in 1905, published a special edition titled Special Report: Violence & Entertainment (Winter Edition, Vol. 429, No. 10). The visually-impressive, glossy, 79-page report attempts to put an industry-friendly spin on violent media product and to place it in a larger, violent, but seemingly disconnected social context so as to effectively absolve Hollywood’s media moguls of culpability in societal violence.
Perhaps the report’s single most interesting and unintentionally revealing article is one authored by Variety’s Israel correspondent, Debra Kamin.
“Israel, well versed in terror attacks, has never had a U.S.-style mass shooting,” writes Kamin.
Apparently Kamin does not consider American-born Israeli physician and mass murderer Baruch Goldstein’s February 25, 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron to be a “U.S.-style mass shooting.” Goldstein, who used his Israeli government-issued, IMI Galil assault rifle to commit the murders, was an admirer of Rabbi Meir Kahane and active in the Israeli far-right political party founded by Kahane, Kach, a group classified by the United States and Israeli governments as a terrorist organization.
Kamin quotes an Israeli-American writer, editor, and cultural commentator, David Hazony, at some length. Hazony, too, is at pains to differentiate American and Israeli attitudes about guns, gun violence, and media violence.
“Israelis,” declares Hazony, “draw a very sharp line between cartoonish, U.S.-made TV violence and reality.”
But just who is responsible for most if not all of that “cartoonish, U.S.-made TV violence”? There is no mention in Variety’s Special Report: Violence & Entertainment that, according to a widely-respected Jewish-American author who among his many other accomplishments served as “a sharpshooter with the Israeli Border Police Civil Guard,” the industries that create, produce, market, advertise, promote, and defend lucrative, socially-destabilizing, violent US media product are heavily influenced or largely controlled by Jews.
It is true that Jews are represented in the media in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the population. … they make up one-fourth or more of the writers, editors, and producers in America’s ‘elite media,’ including network news divisions, top news weeklies and the four leading daily newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal).
In the fast-moving world of media mega-corporations, Jews are even more numerous. In an October 1994 Vanity Fair [magazine] feature profiling the kingpins of the new media elite, titled ‘The New Establishment,’ just under half of the two dozen entrepreneurs profiled were Jews. In the view of the magazine’s editors, these are America’s true power elite, ‘men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries whose ambitions and influence have made America the one true superpower of the Information Age.’
“And in a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation,” wrote JJ Goldberg, in his book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996).
Variety is, after all, a propaganda organ for a much larger propaganda organ, an industry that year after year lavished its most prestigious awards and award nominations on 24, a long-running popular prime time American television series that ever so persistently attempted to “normalize torture in the public consciousness.” That particular effort by Hollywood producers to legitimize torture was so successful that, “in February 2007, the New Yorker magazine reported that U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan (dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point), accompanied by three of the most experienced military and FBI interrogators in the country, met with the producers of 24 to criticize the show for misrepresenting the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation technique, saying it encouraged soldiers to see torture as a useful and justified tactic in the War on Terror, and damaged the international image of the United States.”
Violent media product and its many various and well-documented pernicious effects on vast audiences, particularly young, naïve, and impressionable viewers, across human society represent an increasingly serious public health and public safety challenge. Research studies indicate that first-person-shooter video games are likely the worst offenders. There was gun violence in an American school every two weeks on average in 2013. And, on September 16, 2013, a shotgun-wielding video game addict entered the Washington Navy Yard, a restricted access military facility in the nation’s capital, where he gunned down 15 people, killing 12. This year has already seen three shootings in American schools. An eleven-year old boy firing a shotgun injured two fellow students on January 14 at Berrendo Middle School in Roswell, NM. Two students were wounded in a shooting on January 17 at Delaware Valley Charter High School in Philadelphia, PA. A teaching assistant was shot dead on January 21 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Also on January 21, a student was shot while sitting in a car near the Widener University athletic center in Chester, PA.
America’s continuing epidemic of gun violence and gun massacres, a result in part of a massive counter-intelligence failure, is but the tip of an iceberg of espionage-related-and-facilitated, socially-destabilizing gun violence, death, and destruction, violence that is attendant upon and to some extent caused by the U.S. entertainment industry’s lucrative obsession with violent media product. The entertainment industry’s deadly focus on violent media product, much of it freighted with political and social messaging crafted to further the social, economic, political, and military agendas of industry moguls and Israeli leaders, is in large part a function of Israel’s robust overt hasbara and covert psychological operations campaigns aimed directly at credulous US audiences.
Israel’s long history of espionage against the United States government on Unites States soil, Israel’s long history of spying on Americans and listening in on Americans’ private conversations – even the communications of FBI counter-intelligence units and the telephone conversations of president of the United States – is largely absent from the thus distorted but crucial public debate about the NSA’s overreaching surveillance programs only because Israel-friendly US politicians and media organizations typically cover up or down play those crimes.
As long as the Israeli political and media machine wields such wildly inordinate and inappropriate influence over US politicians, political institutions, and what passes for popular culture and a public discussion in America, it is very difficult to imagine that the NSA, CIA, FBI and other US law enforcement agencies will find the guidance and political support necessary to address effectively these increasingly problematic espionage-related-and-driven public health, public safety, and national security challenges.
The single greatest danger in restricting the ability of the National Security Administration (NSA) to collect information broadly is that no foreign intelligence agency will necessarily be similarly impacted by such restrictions. Foreign intelligence agencies, especially Israeli intelligence and espionage agencies and their front companies, may well find their ability to act against the USA and its interests, and to act with impunity, substantially enhanced by restrictions placed on US intelligence agencies.
~
Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.
Oil majors eager to enter Iran market: Zangeneh
Press TV – January 25, 2014
Iran’s oil minister says major world oil companies have voiced readiness to set up shop in the country.
Oil giants attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss city of Davos announced that they were interested to enter the Iranian market, said Bijan Namdar Zangeneh in Tehran after returning from Davos where he attended the conference.
“Iran’s presence at the Davos meeting was very positive and the reaction of prominent international corporations attests to that,” he said.
Zangeneh touched upon his meetings with high-ranking officials of oil companies at the WEF, and said, “These companies were interested in working in Iran and many of them arranged plans for talks.”
He also referred to the Oil Ministry’s plans to develop a new model for oil contracts, and noted that a committee was set up four months ago to examine the existing contracts and pinpoint the merits and demerits of the structure of buy-back deals.
“We are holding talks with oil companies to have their viewpoints as well,” Zangeneh pointed out.
The new model of contracts should fulfill the expectations of the government and, at the same time, attract oil firms, the Iranian minister said.
A draft of the model will be ready by next month and it will be discussed at a meeting of experts in Tehran, Zangeneh projected.
On the sidelines of the OPEC ministerial meeting in Vienna in early December 2013, Zangeneh said Tehran would like to see seven oil giants – namely Total, Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Statoil, Eni and British Petroleum, as well as the US Exxon and Conoco – make investment in the Islamic Republic’s energy sector once US-led sanctions are lifted.
On January 20, the Council of the European Union suspended part of the sanctions it had imposed against Iran following the Geneva nuclear deal between Tehran and the Sextet of powers – the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany.
The new measure incorporates suspension of a 2012 ban on insuring and transporting Iran’s crude oil and the sanctions on trade in gold, precious metals and petrochemical products.
Federal Probe Into Senator Menendez Widens To Include Help To Fugitive Bankers
By DSWright | FireDogLake | January 24, 2014
Already under investigation for trying to help a contributor who may have been defrauding Medicare, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is reportedly facing another federal criminal probe this time focusing on his relationship with two fugitive bankers from Ecuador.
William and Roberto Isaias were sentenced in abstentia for embezzling millions from Filanbanco, a bank they ran that collapsed in Ecuador. The United States has so far refused to hand them over to Ecuador despite an Interpol international arrest warrant and recommendations from officials within the State Department to return the convicted bankers back to Ecuador.
In 2005, U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador Kristie Kenney wrote a cable to the State Department saying the Isaias brothers absconded “with $100 million” and “used their ill-gotten wealth to buy safe passage from Ecuador.”…
“The fact that the Isaias brothers continue to live a life of luxury in the U.S. while their account holders are suffering in Ecuador has been a constant concern between the U.S. And Ecuador since their flight,” said Linda Jewell, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador.
Enter Senator Bob Menendez who has allegedly been advocating on the brothers’ behalf. Menendez is said to have used the power of his office to assist the Isaias brothers writing letters to the State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
While Senator Menendez was writing letters the Isaias family was giving money to his campaign and the Democratic Party.
Federal election records show relatives of the Isaias brothers who are residents donated more than $10,000 to the senator’s 2012 campaign. And records show that the family of Roberto Isaias also donated at least $100,000 to the Democratic party in 2012.
If a connection between the donations and the letters can be established Senator Menendez might once again have to face ethics charges if not criminal charges.
Menendez previously paid $58,000 to a campaign contributor as reimbursement for two round trips he took to the Dominican Republic on the contributor’s private jet. The contributor was Dr. Salomen Melgen whom Menendez had assisted in dealing with allegations of improperly billing Medicare. Melgen had contributed $33,000 to Senator Menendez and traveled with him throughout the Caribbean for “political fundraisiers.”
~~~
Backgound:
How Israel kills at will and in total impunity while the world asks the Palestinians for non-violent resistance
April 20, 2009
Frank Barat writes of the life and death of Bassem Abu Rahme, shot by an IOF soldier with “the rocket”, a new kind of weapon also used on critically injured US citizen Tristan Anderson some weeks ago.
On April the 17th, like any Friday afternoon for the last 4 years, the small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah, was preparing for the usual demonstration against Israel’s annexation wall … The village of Bil’in has, since the mid eighties, lost more than 60% of its land for the purpose of Israeli growing settlements and the construction of the wall. The inhabitants of the village used to live mainly from agriculture and olive trees plantations but more and more, the people of Bil’in have to rely on the women to survive. Embroidery has become one of the main resource of the place, located a few kilometres away from Tel Aviv (on a nice day, you can see the “inaccessible”–for the Palestinians– beach from the roof tops of Bil’in).
In January 2005, a village committee (led by Mohamed Khatib, Iyad Burnat and Abdullah Abu Rahme) was created and a month later non-violent demonstrations started, first taking part every day, then once a week, on Yum Al Juma’a (Friday, day of prayer).
The village won a huge battle in August 2008 (1) when the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the new route of the barrier in Bil’in was in violation of the Court ruling released on September 2007 (2) (which ruled that the Wall path was prejudicial to Bil’in and must be altered) and ordered the State to present within 45 days a new route, which will uphold the principles of the ruling.
On Friday the 17th of April 2009, the wall still had not moved one inch and while the inhabitants of the village were praying at the village mosque, many internationals (coming from all around the world) and the strong Israeli contingent (including people from the Alternative Information Centre (3) and Anarchists Against the Wall (4)) were looking for some shade (to hide from the baking sun) and chatting about the day’s event. As soon as prayer was over with, the demonstration started to move forward in direction of the wall, a few kilometres away.
You can be sure that Bassem (aka Phil) was right at the front of the march. He always was. I had met Bassem a few times while visiting Bil’in. He was a strong looking man, singing the loudest, joking all the time, jumping around and leading the way, accompanied by the rest of the village committee and the Israeli contingent.
As it usually happens, as soon as the march reached the corner where the Israeli soldiers can be seen, the tear gas started. A few brave ones, always continue anyway and reach the beginning of the wall, after a few minutes. Bassem, as usual, was one of those. The Israelis present at the front of the demonstration started talking with the nearby soldiers in Hebrew and Bassem too, screamed “We are in a non violent protest, there are kids and internationals…”. He was shot in the chest and never managed to finished his sentence. He fell on the floor, moved a little bit, fell again, and died. ( http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/testimonies/Basem-Abu-Rahme-killed-in-Bilin-weekly-protest , scroll down for stills and videos)
Bassem was shot by a new kind of Tear Gas, called “the rocket”. The soldier who shot was a mere 40 meters away. This is the same type of tear gas that critically injured US citizen Tristan Anderson a few weeks ago. Those tear gas canisters are as fast and lethal as live ammunition. Very hard to get away from. Normally, tear gas canisters fly in the air for a long time, then fall and bounce a few times. Those ones fly like a bullet and go straight, not up and down.
Once more, Israel using the West Bank as its testing ground, the Palestinians as guinea pigs.
The soldier who fired, knew what he was doing and who he was targeting. The shame is that he probably knew Bassem. Bassem was always at the front, and had been for a few years now. The soldiers often come back more than once in Bil’in and start to get to know the ones facing them. Bassem did not get a chance to say hi, or bye.
On April the 17th , Bil’in and Palestine lost one of their heroes.
What is going to happen next?
Israel has already said that it will investigate the incident (out of every single investigation into such crimes, only 6% of the soldiers were ever prosecuted, often let off with a few weeks suspension), but before it did, started the usual propaganda, saying that the protest had been really violent and that the soldiers had to react (the video of the demonstration clearly shows otherwise).
We might even hear in a few days that it was actually the Palestinians who fired the tear gas and killed their beloved friend.
The P.A, instead of issuing the strongest statement against this act, stopping once and for all the negotiations with the Israeli government and joining the demonstrators every Friday to be hand in hand with its people, said next to nothing, and is looking forward to the upcoming White House meeting between Mahmoud Abbas and Obama (this is being planned while I write).
The media hardly reported this. The Palestinians do not count. Even more shocking when a video of the event is available to all and could have been used to great effect.
The international community (for what it means) will not mention this “incident” (it is for them) and continue issuing calls for the Palestinians to renounce violence and resist peacefully while saying nothing about Israel’s killings (since the start of the second intifada, 87% of the dead have been Palestinians), violations of international law and oppression of the Palestinians.
It is therefore down to us, the citizens of this world, to act, join solidarity groups, write articles, make films and talk, constantly, about the plight of the Palestinian people. Palestine has to become the number one issue.
This is a must.
For Bassem, his family, Bil’in and Palestine.
Frank Barat is in the organizing committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and a member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK.
1. http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/testimonies/The-Supreme-Court-The-new-barrier-in-Bilin-violates-the-Court-ruling
2. http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/press-and-independent-media/Palestinians-celebrate-rare-victory-over-hated-barrier
3. http://www.alternativenews.org/
4. http://www.awalls.org/
Related article
British ministers answer for GCHQ mass surveillance in European court
RT | January 24, 2014
The court in Strasbourg has ordered British ministers to provide submissions on mass surveillance programs by the UK’s spy agency to find out whether GCHQ’s secret activities went against the European convention on human rights.
Four European civil rights groups filed a case against Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at the European Court of Human Rights over its surveillance methods in September, after being denied the chance to challenge its practices in an open court in the UK.
The UK’s Big Brother Watch, English PEN and Open Rights Group, as well as the German internet activism group, Constanze Kurz, accused GCHQ of violating the European Convention of Human Rights, insisting that alleged hacking of vast amounts of online data, emails and social media breached Article 8 of the Convention, which guarantees European citizens the right to a private family life. Their case refers to two surveillance programs by the domestic spying agency, Prism and Tempora. The campaigners, who teamed up under the umbrella title of Privacy Not Prism, claimed that GCHQ has “illegally intruded on the privacy of millions of British and European citizens.”
In line with the data revealed by former US National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, about the mass surveillance programs operated by the US and Britain, the group said that “GCHQ has the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes of data a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.” Meanwhile, under UK law, intelligence agencies are supposed to seek permission from the Secretary of State to read an individual’s text messages.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ordered the British government to provide their submissions by May, and the campaigners expect the court to make a ruling before the end of the year.
According to the lawyer for the groups, the ECHR has acted “remarkably quickly” communicating the case to the British government.
“It has also acted decisively by requiring the government to explain how the UK’s surveillance practices and oversight mechanisms comply with the right to privacy. This gives hope the ECHR will require reform if the government continues to insist that nothing is wrong,” Daniel Carey told the Guardian.
Both GCHQ and British ministers have insisted that none of their intelligence programs violated privacy laws and human rights.
According to GCHQ, all of its work is “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence Services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague has continuously dismissed allegations that GCHQ breached the law, saying law-biding citizens have no reason whatsover to be alarmed.
“If we could tell the whole world and the whole country how we do this business, I think people would be enormously reassured by it and they would see that the law-abiding citizen has nothing to worry about,” he said in June.
“If we did that, it would defeat the objective – this is secret work, it is secret intelligence, it is secret for a reason, and a reason that is to do with protecting all the people of this country,” Mr Hague explained.
Last week a joint investigation conducted by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and Channel 4 News, and based on the new documents leaked by Snowden, revealed that the NSA created a secret system called Dishfire to collect hundreds of millions of text messages a day. The documents showed that GCHQ had used the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications of people in the UK. According to the Guardian report, “The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.”
Related article
Top Three Media Lies About the Syrian Peace Talks
The Propaganda War Heats Up
By Shamus Cooke | RINF | January 24, 2014
The media spin machine is again kicking into high gear, perfectly timed to accompany the “Geneva II” Syria peace talks. The lies are necessary to give the Obama administration an upper hand in the peace negotiations, which are not being used to pursue peace, but instead, to accomplish the Obama administration peace talks.
1) The removal of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was an agreed upon “precondition” for the Geneva II peace talks.
This lie has been repeated over and over by government and media alike. It has zero basis. The Obama administration claims that this precondition was expressed in the “Geneva communiqué,” which was a road map agreement meant to guide the Geneva II peace talks, agreed upon by some of the major parties of the negotiations, including Russia.
The communiqué does indeed call for a negotiated political transition, but nowhere does it state that such a transition cannot include President Assad. Such a condition would have been outright rejected by Russia.
In fact, the Geneva communiqué includes this crucial statement:
“[a transition government] could include members of the present [Syrian] government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent.”
Nowhere does it specifically mention or imply President Assad.
The Los Angeles Times recently stepped out of line and exposed this lie:
“[John] Kerry regularly cites the “Geneva communiqué,” a kind of peace road map hammered out in June 2012 during a United Nations-organized summit. But the document does not explicitly call for Assad’s ouster.”
The Obama administration’s constant repeating of this lie only causes divisions in the peace process, undermining the chances that the peace process will succeed.
The Obama administration is especially adamant about this “Assad must go” pre-condition because it knows that, if free and fair elections were held tomorrow in Syria — as part of a UN-backed “transitional process”— President Assad would likely win. This is the result of the ethnic and religious minorities in Syria that have rallied behind President Assad, since they’ve witnessed the consistent religious sectarian atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed rebels (which the U.S. media loves to ignore or minimize).
Assad would probably win an election since there is also simply no one else on the government side or the opposition side with his name recognition or popularity. The U.S.-backed rebel war in Syria has vastly strengthened Assad’s political hand, but you wouldn’t know it from the Western, anti-Syrian media.
Demanding Assad’s ouster also does not reflect the situation on the ground. The U.S.-backed rebels have never controlled more than one Syrian city, namely Raqaa, which is dominated by al-Qaeda and is governed under a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law, which includes a strict ban on music. Thus, the rebels don’t have the ground power that would even enable them to make the demand that “Assad must go”.
2) The U.S.-backed rebel militias are “moderate” Islamic groups.
The fact that this lie can even be uttered publicly without encountering ridicule is a major success of Western media propaganda. The media narrative paints the U.S.-backed “good” rebels fighting both the Syrian government and the “bad” al-Qaeda linked rebels.
But the “good” rebels in the U.S.-backed Islamic Front share the same vision for Syria’s future as the al-Qaeda rebels: a fundamentalist version of Sharia law, where women live in virtual house arrest and where religious minorities are second class citizens (non-Sunni Muslims would simply be butchered, as they are on a regular basis in Syria, which is again minimized or ignored in the Western media.)
The “moderate rebel” lie was further exposed recently when a top leader in the most powerful militia, Ahrar al Sham, within the Islamic Front declared Ahrar al Sham to be the “real” representative of al-Qaeda in Syria, as opposed to the rival al-Qaeda faction that the Islamic Front had recently begun fighting.
Ahrar al Sham has long been known to be an al-Qaeda type Islamist extremist group; the Western media simply chose to ignore it. But when it was recently made official, the U.S. media chose to continue its ignoring stance, since actually reporting on it would destroy their “moderate rebel” lie. The Western media also continues to ignore the fact that the “moderate” U.S.-backed Islamic Front issued a joint statement that aligned itself to the extremist views of Ahrar al Sham, the “real” al-Qaeda.
3) New Evidence of Syrian government “industrial scale” torture.
The Western media recently blasted the “breaking news” of brand new evidence showing massive “NAZI-like” torture and murder by the Syrian government, released at the beginning of the Syrian peace talks. This may or may not be true, but the lie here is that the Western media promoted the “evidence” as being unquestionably true, when the story doesn’t reach first base when it comes to evidence-based journalism.
All we really know is that there are hundreds of pictures of dead people that a “trusted source” says were killed by the Syrian government. The trusted source was designated as such by pro-Western intellectuals, who have earned professional “credibility” by helping convict war criminals in the International Criminal Court [ICC]. But as author Diane Johnstone pointed out in her excellent book “Fools Crusade,” about the war against Yugoslavia — as well as in other articles — the ICC has long been used by western powers as a tool to create a pretext for war, or a tool to justify a war after the fact.
The evidence of the “NAZI-like” atrocities was written in a study paid for by the government of Qatar, which has long funneled cash, guns, and Jihadis to Syria in aid of the anti-government rebels.
Again, we don’t know if the story is true or not. But such an important investigation should be conducted by the UN or another more objective institution. The same biased dynamic occurred in relation to the infamous chemical weapons attack, where no real evidence was provided, though an unending string of “experts” were quoted in the Western media, testifying to the guilt of the Syrian Government. But when Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Seymour Hirsch reported that the Obama administration lied about the rebels not having the capacity to perform such an attack, the Western media simply ignored the legend of journalism. The wrench in the propaganda machine was simply dislodged.
How do these lies become such permanent fixtures in the Western media? An excellent article in the Guardian newspaper recently discussed in depth the principal sources the Western media has used to understand the Syrian conflict.
The article exposed the incredible bias of some of the most important Western media sources on Syria, which is why they were handpicked in the first place to be “expert” sources: they had political agendas that were aligned with the U.S. government’s foreign policy decisions. The other side of the conflict was completely ignored, except when it was targeted for ridicule. Thus, Americans and Europeans have a completely one-sided, if not fantasy-based perspective of what is happening in Syria. This has been systematic since the beginning of the conflict, as happened with the Yugoslav, Afghan, Iraq, and Libya wars.
The result of this media-led ignorance could result in yet more unnecessary deaths in a country that now has millions of refugees and over a 100,000 dead. Obama seems like he intends to exploit these peace talks with the intention of blaming the Syrian government for their failure. Having failed to defeat Assad on the battlefield in a proxy war, the Obama administration is trying to win the propaganda war. And once peace talks have failed, talk of war will resume, since “all other options have failed.”
Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com
Increase in homicides linked to “extermination groups” and ARENA campaign
CISPES | January 21, 2014
Since the beginning of the New Year and with the February 2nd presidential elections less than two weeks away, El Salvador has seen a dramatic increase in homicides. In the month of January, El Salvador has seen an average of 9.4 violent deaths per day, a shocking increase from months past, many of them carried out en masse and reminiscent of death squad-style murders.
The Foundation for the Study of the Application of Law (FESPAD), a Salvadoran legal aid clinic and research group, reports that the murders are being carried out by “extermination groups.” Nelson Flores of FESPAD notes that these types of murders often occur prior to electoral periods, and that the “extermination groups” are trying to generate terror in the population and make the government look like it cannot stop this phenomenon.
The type of group that FESPAD describes have been operating in El Salvador since during the armed conflict; many of the groups take their names from “historic figures tied to the worst state violence, including General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, Domingo Monterrosa, Roberto D´Aubuisson.” This is not the first time that FESPAD has publicized the continued operation of social cleansing groups in El Salvador (For more background, download a report in Spanish here).
Even before FESPAD’s recent announcement, many prominent voices in El Salvador had been questioning whether the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party was behind the recent rise in homicides.
President Mauricio Funes expressed concern about a possible link between the increased violence and ARENA’s electoral campaign, while FMLN spokesperson Roberto Lorenzana described ARENA, wracked by internal crises and an unpopular candidate, as being driven to desperate measures, including the use of confrontation and violence as part of a last ditch effort at a “black campaign.”
ARENA’s new campaign manager, the infamous right-wing Venezuelan campaign manager J.J. Rendón, is renowned for his use of “rumorology” and smear tactics. At the very least, ARENA is taking advantage of the increase in murders in their campaign, which has in recent weeks turned more vitriolic, with a focus on violence and insecurity. Some ads use slogans like “My money will no longer go to gangs” and “Children will play safely in the streets again” while others directly attack the Funes administration’s public security policies. In a recent presidential debate, ARENA candidate Norman Quijano, who was the only candidate to directly attack the administration, proposed militarizing public security as a solution to the insecurity problems, a measure that would directly violate El Salvador’s Constitution.
Blasphemy in Secular France
The Shoah as State Religion?
By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | January 24, 2014
Paris – The campaign by the French government, mass media and influential organizations to silence the Franco-Cameroonese humorist Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala continues to expose a radical split in perception within the French population. The official “mobilization” against the standup comedian, first called for by Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a ruling Socialist Party gathering last summer, portrays the entertainer as a dangerous anti-Semitic rabble rouser, whose “quenelle”* gesture is interpreted as a “Nazi salute in reverse”.
For his fans and supporters, those accusations are false and absurd.
The most significant result of the Dieudonné uproar so far is probably the dawning realization, among more and more people, that the “Shoah”, or Holocaust, functions as the semi-official State Religion of France.
On RTL television last January 10, the well-known nonconformist commentator Eric Zemmour (who happens to be Jewish) observed that it was “grotesque and ridiculous” to associate Dieudonné with the Third Reich. Zemmour described Dieudonné as a product of the French left’s multiculturalism. “It’s the left that has taught us since May ’68 that it is prohibited to prohibit, that we must shock the bourgeois. It is the left that has turned the Shoah into the supreme religion of the Republic…”
Zemmour suggested that Dieudonné was provoking “the respectable left-wing bourgeoisie” and that he “reproaches Jews for wanting to conserve the monopoly of suffering and steal primacy in suffering from descendants of slavery”.
There is more than that at stake. Reminders of the Shoah serve indirectly to justify France’s increasingly pro-Israel foreign policy in the Middle East. Dieudonné opposed the war against Libya enough to go there to show his solidarity with the country being bombed by NATO.
Dieudonné began his career as a militant anti-racist. Instead of apologizing for his 2003 sketch mocking an “extreme Zionist settler”, Dieudonné retorted by gradually extending his sphere of humor to cover the Shoah. The campaign against him can be seen as an effort to restore the sacred character of the Shoah by enforcing repression of a contemporary form of blasphemy.
To confirm this impression, on January 9 an “historic” agreement was reached between the Paris Prosecutor’s Office and the French Shoah Memorial that any teenager found guilty of anti-Semitism may be sentenced to undergo a course of “sensitivity to the extermination of the Jews”. Studying genocide is supposed to teach them “republican values of tolerance and respect for others”.
This is perhaps exactly what they don’t need. The Prosecutor’s Office may be unaware of all the young people who are saying that they have had too much, rather than not enough, Shoah education.
An atypical article in Le Monde of January 8 cited opinions anyone can easily hear from French youth, but which are usually ignored. After interviewing ten left-leaning, middle class spectators who denied any anti-Semitism, Soren Seelow quoted Nico, a 22-year-old left-voting law student at the Sorbonne, who adores Dieudonné for “liberating” laughter in what he considers a stuffy conformist society of “good thoughts”. As for the Shoah, Nico complained that “they’ve been telling us about it since elementary school. When I was 12, I saw a film with bulldozers pushing bodies into ditches. We are subjected to a guilt-inducing morality from the earliest age.”
In addition to history courses, teachers organize commemorations of the Shoah and trips to Auschwitz. Media reminders of the Shoah are almost daily. Unique in French history, the so-called Gayssot law provides that any statement denying or minimizing the Shoah can be prosecuted and even lead to prison.
Scores of messages received from French citizens in response to my earlier article as well as private conversations make it clear to me that reminders of the Shoah are widely experienced by people born decades after the defeat of Nazism as invitations to feel guilty or at least uncomfortable for crimes they did not commit. Like many demands for solemnity, the Shoah can be felt as a subject that imposes uneasy silence. Laughter is then felt as liberation.
But for others, such laughter can only be an abomination.
Dieudonné has been fined 8,000 euros for his song “Shoananas”, and further such condemnations are in the offing. Such lawsuits, brought primarily by LICRA (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme), also aim to wipe him out financially.
“Hatred”
One line in the chorus against Dieudonné is that he is “no longer a comedian” but has turned his shows into “anti-Semitic political meetings” which spread “hatred”. Even the distant New Yorker magazine has accused the humorist of making a career out of peddling “hatred”. This raises images of terrible things happening that are totally remote from a Dieudonné show or its consequences.
There was no atmosphere of hatred among the thousands of fans left holding their tickets when Dieudonné’s January 9 show in Nantes was banned at the last minute by France’s highest administrative authority, the Conseil d’Etat. Nobody was complaining of being deprived of a “Nazi rally”. Nobody thought of causing harm to anyone. All said they had come to enjoy the show. They represented a normal cross-section of French youth, largely well-educated middle class. The show was banned on the grounds of “immaterial disturbance of public order”. The disappointed crowd dispersed peacefully. Dieudonné’s shows have never led to any public disorder.
But there is no mistaking the virulent hatred against Dieudonné.
Philippe Tesson, a prominent editor, announced during a recent radio interview that he would “profoundly rejoice” at seeing Dieudonné executed by a firing squad. “He is a filthy beast, so get rid of him!” he exclaimed.
The internet Rabbi Rav Haim Dynovisz, in the course of a theology lesson, acknowledged that Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he rejects, had been proved by Dieudonné to apply to “certain” people, who must have descended from gorillas.
Two 17-year-olds have been permanently expelled from their high school for having made the quenelle gesture, on grounds of “crimes against humanity”. The Franco-Israeli web magazine JSSNews is busily investigating the identities of persons making the quenelle sign in order to try to get them fired from their jobs, boasting that it will “add to unemployment in France”.
The owners of the small Paris theater, “La Main d’Or”, rented by Dieudonné on a lease running until 2019, recently rushed back from Israel expressing their intention to use a technicality to end his lease and throw him out.
The worst thing Dieudonné has ever said during his performances, so far as I am aware, was a personal insult against the radio announcer Patrick Cohen. Cohen has insistently urged that persons he calls “sick brains” such as Dieudonné or Tariq Ramadan be banned from television appearances. In late December, French television (which otherwise has kept Dieudonné off the airwaves) recorded Dieudonné saying that “when I hear Patrick Cohen talking, I think to myself, you know, the gas chambers… Too bad…”
With the anti-Dieudonné campaign already well underway, this offensive comment was seized upon as if it were typical of Dieudonné’s shows. It was an excessively crude reaction by Dieudonné to virulent personal attacks against himself.
Irreverence is a staple for standup comics, like it or not. And Dieudonné’s references to the Holocaust, or Shoah, all fall into the category of irreverence.
On matters other than the Shoah, there is no shortage of irreverence in France.
Traditional religions, as well as prominent individuals, are regularly caricatured in a manner so scatological as to make the quenelle look prudish. In October, 2011, Paris police intervened against traditional Catholics who sought to interrupt a play which included (the apparent) pouring of excrement over the face of Jesus. The political-media establishment vigorously defended the play, unconcerned that it was perceived by some people as “offensive”.
Recently, France gave a big welcome to the Ukrainian group calling itself “Femen”, young women who seem to have studied Gene Sharp’s doctrines of provocation, and use their bare breasts as (ambiguous) statements. These women were rapidly granted residence papers (so hard to get for many immigrant workers) and allowed to set up shop in the midst of the main Muslim neighborhood in Paris, where they immediately attempted to try (unsuccessfully) to provoke the incredulous residents. The blonde Femen leader was even chosen to portray the symbol of the Republic, Marianne, on the current French postage stamp, although she does not speak French.
Last December 20, these “new feminists” invaded the Church of the Madeleine near the Elysée Palace in Paris, acted out “the abortion of Jesus” and then pissed on the high altar. There were no cries of indignation from the French government. The Catholic Church is complaining, but such complaints have a feeble echo in France today.
Why the Shoah Must Be Sacred
When Dieudonné sings lightly of the Shoah, he is believed by some to be denying the Holocaust and calling for its repetition (a contradictory proposition, upon reflection). The sacred nature of the Shoah is defended by the argument that keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust is essential to prevent it from “happening again”. By suggesting the possibility of repetition, it keeps fear alive.
This argument is generally accepted as a sort of law of nature. We must keep commemorating genocide to prevent it from happening again. But is there really any evidence to support this argument?
Nothing proves that repeated reminders of an immense historic event that happened in the past prevent it from happening again. History doesn’t work that way. As for the Shoah, gas chambers and all, it is quite preposterous to imagine that it could happen again considering all the factors that made it happen in the first place. Hitler had a project to confirm the role of Germans as the master “Aryan” race in Europe, and hated the Jews as a dangerous rival elite. Who now has such a project? Certainly not a Franco-African humorist! Hitler is not coming back, nor is Napoleon Bonaparte, nor is Attila the Hun.
Constantly recalling the Shoah, in articles, movies, news items, as well as at school, far from preventing anything, can create a morbid fascination with “identities”. It fosters “victim rivalries”. This fascination can lead to unanticipated results. Some 330 schools in Paris bear plaques commemorating the Jewish children who were deported to Nazi concentration camps. How do little Jewish children today react to that? Do they find it reassuring?
This may be useful to the State of Israel, which is currently undertaking a three-year program to encourage more of France’s 600,000 Jews to leave France and go to Israel. In 2013, the number of Aliyah from France rose to more than 3,000, a trend attributed by the European Jewish Press to the “French Jewish community’s increasingly Zionistic mentality, particularly among young French Jews, and a manifestation of efforts by the Jewish Agency, the Israel government, and other non-profits to cultivate Jewish identity in France.”
“If this year we have seen Aliyah from France go from under 2,000 to more than 3,000, I look forward to seeing that number grow to 6,000 and beyond in the near future, as we connect ever more young people to Jewish life and to Israel,” declared Natan Sharansky, Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Surely, one way to encourage Aliyah is to scare Jews with the threat of anti-Semitism, and claiming that Dieudonné’s numerous fans are Nazis in disguise is a good way to do this.
But as for Jews who want to live in France, is it really healthy to keep reminding Jewish children that, if they are not wary, their fellow citizens might one day want to herd them onto freight trains and ship them all to Auschwitz? I have heard people saying privately that this permanent reminder is close to child abuse.
Someone who thinks that way is Jonathan Moadab, a 25-year-old independent journalist who was interviewed by Soren Seelow. Moadab is both anti-Zionist and a practicing Jew. As a child he was taken to tour Auschwitz. He told Seelow that that living with that “victim indoctrination” had engendered a sort of “pre-traumatic stress syndrome”.
“Dieudonné’s jokes about the Shoah, like his song Shoananas, are not aimed at the Shoah itself,” he says, “but at the exploitation of the Holocaust described by the American political writer Norman Finkelstein.”
On January 22, on his web site Agence Info Libre, Jonathan Moadab openly called for “separating the State from the Holocaust religion”. Moadab cites professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz as the first to point out the many ways in which the Holocaust has become the new Jewish religion. If that is so, everyone has the right to practice the religion of the Shoah. But should it be the official religion of France?
French politicians never cease celebrating the “laicité”, the secularism, of the French Republic. Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who proclaims his own devotion to Israel, because his wife is Jewish, recently called the Shoah the “sanctuary that cannot be profaned”. Moadab concludes that if the Shoah is a sanctuary, then the Holocaust is a religion, and the Republic is not secular.
Changes are taking place in the attitude of young people in France. This change is not due to Dieudonné. It is due to the passage of time. The Holocaust became the religion of the West at a time when the generation after World War II was in the mood to blame their parents. Now we are with the grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, of those who lived through that period, and they want to look ahead. No law can stop this.
*As described in my earlier article, the “quenelle” is a vulgar gesture roughly meaning “up yours”, with one hand placed at the top of the other arm stretched down to signify “how far up” this is to be. Using the name of a French dumpling, Dieudonné started using this gesture in a wholly different context years ago, as an expression of defiance, incredulity or indifference.
Diana Johnstone can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
Dieudonné interviewé par Sky News – Complet-
January 23, 2014
Related article
Israeli gunfire blocks sowing of Palestinian farmland in Gaza
Resistenza Quotidiana | January 22, 2014
Gaza, Occupied Palestine – Since the Zionist occupation forces’ bulldozers had destroyed part of Khaled Qudaih’s field in Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, he and his family went out to sow it again. The military responded with about half an hour of gunfire, threatening to strike Qudaih directly if he had not moved away.
Qudaih had sown wheat a little less than a month ago. It was growing, it was green and in May would be ripe. On 19th January, he went to his lands with his family to spray fertilizer. Samiha, his twelve year old daughter, wanted to get closer to the separation barrier, but she knew that it was forbidden: mamnua in Arabic.
She came as close as she could, until she reached foreign activists with yellow jackets. She approached and, with the voice of a twelve-year-old child, with the slightly clumsy behavior of those approaching foreigners for the first time, explained that the land is forbidden to her.
“I am forbidden to approach the barrier more than this,” she said. “Over there, there are the Israelis and they shoot. That land is prohibited (mamnua). It is my family’s land and is prohibited. Sometimes the Israelis shoot even when we are away from the barrier, but today it is quiet. Will you come back when we will harvest? For the harvesting, the whole family will come. There will also be my grandfather, uncles … a few days ago the bulldozers came and destroyed this plot of land that we had sown. Now it is destroyed.”
It gives a certain feeling to hear that horrible word mamnua from a young girl referring to her family’s land, “prohibited.”
In any case, on the 19th, fertilizer was sprayed fertilizer and there was no Zionist aggression.
Qudaih, however, was not entirely satisfied.
There was the land he had planted at the edge of the field, beside the barrier, which had been destroyed by occupation bulldozers. Even that was his land. The Zionists had no right to prevent him from cultivating it, to prevent him from reaping its benefits. He would be back the next day to reclaim it. That land could not be mamnua, “forbidden,” because it was his land, because he had also sown there, because the grain was used to make bread for his family, because the stems and bran are used to feed the sheep in his backyard , and they produce milk to drink and wool for warmth. No, not even the extreme limit of his land, 50 meters from the barrier, could be mamnua land.
So Qudaih promised that the next day he would return. He would come back with hoes to clear the ground , and with the donkey and plow for after sowing. If it was not under Zionist threat he would do it all with the tractor. But not here. This area is too close to the separation barrier. The Zionists would not let him use a tractor.
Qudaih’s case is not an isolated one. Indeed, one can almost say that he is lucky, because usually, it is impossible to approach the less than 300 meters from the separation barrier. This is not only to attack the freedom of movement of Palestinians in their own land, but also their right to work, and , even worse, their food self-sufficiency. The Gaza Strip’s population density is among the highest in the world and, with its demographic explosion in progress, the enclave is becoming increasingly dependent on external aid, unable to meet its own needs.
Qudaih reaches his land with his wife, his wife’s sister, and three of his sons. Wael, no older than ten years, is also among them. Some foreign activists accompany them. A donkey cart carries the seeds, hoes and plow; Qudaih leaves the cart at the edge of the field, farthest from the barrier, and carries everything by hand. The Zionists cannot claim they could not see what was on the cart, and nothing, neither the donkey nor the material it brought could pose a threat to Israel’s security or the safety of the soldiers of the occupation forces.
Qudaih and his sons aggressively work the ground with hoes. After about ten minutes a Jeep arrives. A few seconds after it stops, the Zionists shoot a few rounds of gunfire, without any warning, without any provocation toward them. Qudaih and his sons, including Wael, are not intimidated and continue to work. Their land cannot be mamnua just because a racist and unjust occupation force has decided so. Who is stronger, the occupation forces with all their weapons and armor, or these farmers armed with hoes? The older children continue to pave the way. Khaled holds the plow in the right position while Wael drives the donkey. It takes a long time to plow the land with the donkey, because it cannot pull a heavy plow, only a small plow, which must go back and forth several times.
While the farmers continue to work, several Jeeps pass on the other side of the barrier. They continue to shoot every now and then, just to remind that they are not gone, and that the land is mamnua. But Qudaih and his family do not move away until a soldier exits a Jeep. He remains a few minutes hidden behind a mound of earth, created to hide the occupation forces, and then comes out shouting, in Arabic with a strong Hebrew accent, that they have to leave otherwise he will shoot to hit them.
While it is nice to think that the presence of internationals helped ensure the soldier got the first shot in the air, and that it has discouraged them from directly targeting Qudaih, on the other hand, it is frustrating to realize that if this happens it is only because the world is fundamentally racist, and a witness from the West is more inconvenient than a Palestinian witness.
Meanwhile, the soldier continues to shoot. Not only single shots, but also bursts of gunfire. At first Qudaih continues to plow the land. Then he must desist: He has a family, he can not afford to get hurt, he needs be able to continue working. Then, half an hour after the first rounds of gunfire, all of us return to where the donkey had been left, with the cart, in safer territory. A few grains of wheat remain on a spot that Qudaih has not been able to plow, in a Palestinian land where a violent occupying force said mamnua.
Related articles
The Strange but ‘Stable’ Alliance: US Senate Await Israeli Instructions
By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | January 23, 2014
Israel is often viewed by Washington politicians as the most ‘stable’ ally in the Middle East. But stability from the American perspective can mean many things. Lead amongst them is that the ‘ally’ must be unconditionally loyal to the diktats of the US administration. This rule has proven to be true since the United States claimed a position of ascendency, if not complete hegemony over many regions of the world since World War II. Israel, however, remained an exception.
The rules by which US-Israeli relations are governed are perhaps the most bewildering of all foreign policies of any two countries.
An illustration of this would be to consider these comments by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon quoted in the Israeli news portal Ynetnews. “The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said, referring to efforts underway since July by American Secretary of State John Kerry, “who turned up here determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor.” Kerry “cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians,” said Ya’alon.
So far, Kerry has made ten trips to the Middle East with the intention of hammering out an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Based on media reports, it seems that the potential agreement is composed in such a way that it mostly accommodates Israel’s ‘security’ whims and obsessions, including a proposal to keep eastern West Bank regions and the Jordan Valley under Israeli military control. In fact, there is growing interest in the idea of ‘land swaps” which was floated by Israel’s notorious Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman ten years ago.
“When Mr. Lieberman first proposed moving Arab-populated Israeli towns near the present border into Palestine in exchange for Jewish settlement blocs in the Palestinians’ West Bank being incorporated into Israel, he was branded a racist firebrand,” wrote the Economist on Jan. 18. “Liberals accused him of promoting the forcible ‘transfer’ plan, akin to ethnic cleansing, proclaimed by a rabbi, Meir Kahane, who vilified Arabs while calling for a pure Jewish state.”
Those days are long gone, as Israeli society drifted rightward. “Even some dovish Israeli left-wingers find such ideas reasonable.” Back then, the Americans themselves were irked, even if just publically, whenever such ideas of ‘population transfers’ and ethnic cleansing were presented by Israel’s ultra-right politicians. Now, the Americans find them malleable and a departure point for discussion. And it’s Kerry himself who is leading the American efforts to accommodate Israel’s endless list of demands – of security and racial exclusiveness even if at the expense of Palestinians. So why is Ya’alon unhappy?
The Defense Minister, who sat immediately next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during talks with Kerry, was unapologetic about his reasoning: “Only our continued presence in Judea and Samaria and the River Jordan will endure.” It means unrelenting Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu is hardly an innocent bystander in all of this, although for diplomatic reasons he often entrusts his government minions to deliver such messages. The Prime Minister is busy issuing more orders to populate the occupied West Bank with Jewish settlements, and berating every government that rejects such insidious behavior as being anti-Israel, ‘pro-Palestinian’ or worse, anti-Semitic. This was the case again in recent days following another announcement of settlement expansion.
On Jan. 17, Netanyahu called on Europe to stop its “hypocrisy”. On the same day, Israel’s foreign ministry summoned the ambassadors of Britain, France, Italy and Spain, “accusing their countries of pro-Palestinian bias,” reported the BBC online. According to the ministry, the “perpetual one-sided stance” of these countries is unacceptable.
Yet, considering that Europe has supported Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories for decades, economically sustained the ‘Jewish state’ and its over 100 illegal Jewish settlements, and continue with its often unconditional military support of Israel, the accusations may appear strange and equally bewildering to that of Ya’alon against John Kerry.
How could a country the size of Israel have so much sway over the world’s greatest powers, where it gets what it wants and more, hurls regular insults against its sustainers, and still asks for more?
European countries found themselves in Israel’s firing line because a day earlier, the four EU countries took the rare step of summoning Israeli ambassadors to object to the Netanyahu government’s latest announcement of illegal settlement expansion (that of an additional 1,400 new homes). EU foreign policy Chief Catherine Ashton even went to the extent of calling the settlements “an obstacle to peace”, although hardly an advanced position considering that Israel’s colonial project in Palestine has been in motion for 46 years.
But even that is too much from the Israeli point of view. “The EU calls our ambassadors in because of the construction of a few houses?” Netanyahu asked as if baffled by a seemingly foreboding act, in a Jan 16 press conference. He even had the audacity to say this: “This imbalance and this bias against Israel doesn’t advance peace,” and also this, “I think it pushes peace further away because it tells the Palestinians: ‘Basically you can do anything you want, say anything you want and you won’t be held accountable.”
There is no sense in arguing with Netanyahu’s strange logic, but the question regarding Israel’s stronghold over the US and EU remains more pressing than ever, especially when one considers the ruckus in US Congress. No, the congress is not revolting because of the unmitigated power of the Zionist lobby, but for something far more interesting.
There seems to be a level of confusion in US Congress because members of the Senate are yet to feel serious pressure by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over a bill that proposes more sanctions on Iran.
“The powerful pro-Israel lobby has not engaged in a shoe-leather lobbying campaign to woo wayward senators and push Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to schedule a vote on the bill. While the group supports the bill — authored by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) — it is not yet putting its political muscle behind a push for an immediate vote,” reported Politico, citing key senators and their aides.
To say the least, it is disturbing that the US Senate is completely bewildered that AIPAC, which lobbies for the interest of a foreign power, is yet to provide its guidelines regarding the behavior of America’s supposedly most respected political representatives.
“I don’t know where AIPAC is. I haven’t talked to anybody,” said Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “I don’t know what they’re doing,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
This alone should shed some light on the seemingly bewildering question of the ‘strong bond’ and ‘stable’ alliance of Israel and the US – and to a lesser degree EU countries. This is not to suggest that Israel has complete dominance over US foreign policy in the Middle East, but to ignore Israel’s indispensable role in shaping the outlook of US foreign policy is dishonest and inconsistent with the facts, to put it mildly.
– Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).
Outside Forces Seeking Palestinian-Hezbollah Conflict
By Franklin Lamb | Al-Manar | January 23, 2014
Ain el Helweh camp, Lebanon – It isn’t just the Zionist regime still occupying Palestine six decades after the Nakba; one can sense the carnivorous drooling from Tel Aviv to Amman, from Riyadh and the Gulf Kingdoms all the way to Washington DC and beyond—drooling and salivation over their project to promote tensions between the Palestinian Resistance and what is in some respects its historic offspring—Hezbollah.
The hostile forces gathered against the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah-Palestine Resistance alliance are reportedly hard at work on yet another scheme to weaken, and possibly destroy, all four. It won’t be easy, but it is a key game plan among those still seeking regime change in Syria.
Even as some of these governments deceptively play down their central goal of regime change in public, they appear to be fantasizing that by building up the Lebanese army—with a pledged $3 billion from Riyadh—that Lebanese troops can be induced to confront Hezbollah and its allies, this in what seems to be a “beat em or bleed em” strategy.
Patrick Cockburn, writing recently in the UK Independent and Counterpunch, gave a digest of anti-Shia hate propaganda being spread by Sunni religious figures, clerics financially backed by, and in some cases based in, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies. Cockburn noted accurately that what is being painstaking laid is the groundwork for a sectarian civil war engulfing the entire Muslim world.
Efforts to egg on a confrontation between Palestinians and Hezbollah have increased over the past three months in Lebanon’s camps, stemming principally from some of the local Sunni and Christian power centers. Support is being seen for various “militia of the month” groups, those terrorizing the population of the Syrian Arab Republic.
Moreover, the Takfiri Al-Nusra Front leader Abou Mohammed al-Joulani insists his organization is active on Lebanese soil in order to help the Sunnis, including Palestinians, face the “injustice” of Shiite Hezbollah. “Lebanon’s Sunni are requesting that the mujahideen intervene to lift up the injustice they are suffering from at the hands of Hezbollah and similar militias,” he said recently in an interview on Al-Jazeera.
Shiite-populated areas across Lebanon have been the target of terror attacks even before Hezbollah entered the fighting on the side of the Syrian government in May 2013, but those terror attacks have intensified recently. Four car bombings have targeted southern Beirut in recent months, while a number of IED attacks have occurred in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley.
The head of the Islamic Jihadist Movement in Ain al-Hilweh camp voiced fears on January 8 of a possible armed sectarian confrontation between Hezbollah and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon if the party did not revise its policies at home and in Syria. Sheikh Jamal Khattab told the Daily Star that should fighting erupt between Palestinians and Hezbollah the conflict could be even worse than the “war of the camps” (read: massacres) of the 1980s, when that conflict was not considered particularly sectarian. Today, says Sheikh Khattab, it would be different. Today it would be a Sunni vs. Shia war, with regional and international consequences, given the poisonous sea-change in sectarian relations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In Ain al-Hilweh and other camps, posters of local men killed while fighting alongside Takfiri groups in Syria, or against U.S. troops in Iraq, are tacked up throughout the camp. Lebanese security sources claim that Palestinian Islamist groups in Ain al-Hilweh have all finalized preparations to for a possible conflict with the Hezbollah’s organized and trained “Resistance Brigades.” These organizations include Usbat al-Ansar, Jund al-Sham, Fatah al-Islam, and other Salafist groups, and supporters of the controversial fugitive Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, and rumors abound that some of these elements are being financed by certain of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states as well as some Lebanese pro-Western March 14 parties. Apparently the consideration among such groups and their sponsors is that conditions in Lebanon are ripe for an expanded war against “Shia infidels,” and reportedly plans are now in place to bring it here, with several groups that are now fighting in Syria pledging to widen the Sunni-Shia war into Lebanon.
For their part, some pro-Hezbollah groups and many Lebanese citizens are suspicious of possible Palestinian involvement in recent terror attacks in Dahiyeh and the recent bombing of the Iranian Embassy. In point of fact, one of the two suicide bombers who attacked the Iranian Embassy on November 17 was Mouin Abu Dahr, a known pro-Palestinian whose mother is a Shiite and his father a Sunni. Ain al-Hilweh of course has also been in the spotlight with the arrest of Majed al-Majed, the leader of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades. Majed is believed to have lived in the camp since 2012.
Clearly Israel and its new—as well as its longtime—allies seek a Sunni-Shia war, and the sooner the better. Also favored is a continuation of the Syria crisis for the reason that they consider Hezbollah to be squandering some of its best fighters and commanders and well as its weapons stores. Western Diplomats have spoken about US-Israeli hopes that Syria will be Hezbollah’s Achilles heel and Iran’s Vietnam, and Israeli media have commented on views by some officials that Hezbollah has shifted its attention toward Syria and away from the southern front with occupied Palestine.
Time will tell.
Hezbollah maintains it is using only five percent of its capacity to confront Israel, and according to one source close to the Resistance: Hezbollah has self-sufficiency when it comes to the missiles, strategic and non-strategic weapons. All these weapons are quite abundant. Any additional equipment will constitute a negative factor because there is no need for them. All the weapons that are manufactured by Iran or owned by Syria are also available for Hezbollah. The land forces and the Special Forces fighting in Syria have acquired a lot of practical and intelligence related experience and a force of maneuvering on the land. This experience will be used when the war with Israel begins again.
The Sunni and the Shia, just as with the Palestinians and Hezbollah, need each other for many reasons, including confronting growing Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate propaganda, and the deepening and broadening apartheid occupation of Palestine.
All must work to tamp down their differences publicly and privately while endeavoring to neutralize sectarian provocateurs, Sunni as well as Shia—domestic and regional as well as international—provocateurs that today are seeking internecine and sectarian violence in order to weaken both sects, and even all of Islam.
Related article
Featured Video
Iran’s Mass Protests /Patrick Henningsen & Lt Col Daniel Davis
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
loongtip on Eilat port faces worst crisis… loongtip on British minister dreams of kid… loongtip on Kiev awards major mining proje… loongtip on UK believes it can seize any t… loongtip on Pirates of the Caribbean loongtip on Australian festival boycotted… loongtip on Kiev seeks to ban Russian musi… seversonebcfb985d9 on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… John Edward Kendrick on Kidnapped By the Washington… aletho on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… John Edward Kendrick on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… aletho on Donald Trump, and Most America…
Aletho News- Knesset advances bill mandating death by hanging for Palestinian prisoners
- Eilat port faces worst crisis as Red Sea shipping collapses
- Iran protest-riots can only achieve US-Israeli intervention, ‘shadow CIA’ concludes
- The Coming War on Iran: What Has Really Been Happening?
- US Cargo Planes Have Flooded the Persian Gulf Since the First of December
- Deep-state forces from abroad instigated violence in Nepal – former foreign minister
- Rare Earths—or Arctic Control? Greenland’s Riches May Just Be Excuse
- Kiev awards major mining project to Trump-linked investors
- US makes money from weapons, not from Ukrainian minerals
- Drone hits Kazakh tanker en route to Russian port
- If Americans Knew
- The New Neoconservatives
- As more Gaza children freeze to death, Trump eyes Gaza as starting point for world domination – Not a ceasefire Day 95
- More death: in Gaza, West Bank, Israeli prison – Not a ceasefire Day 94
- The Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran
- Avoidable tragedy: another infant dies from cold – Not a ceasefire Day 93
- Israel is quietly erasing Palestinian refugee camps from existence in the West Bank
- The “Zionist tint” to the Maduro abduction, if not operational, then normative
- Press association condemns Israel’s continued ban on media access to Gaza
- Israeli Indifference to Palestinian Suffering Is Fertile Ground for the Growth of Sadism
- Surge in premature births, congenital defects, cancer deaths in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 92
- No Tricks Zone
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
- New Study: Human CO2 Emissions Responsible For 1.57% Of Global Temperature Change Since 1750
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
Aletho News 