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The Missing Quote from the King Memorial

By Don DeBar | Black Agenda Report | January 17, 2012

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government… I cannot be silent.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

While the insiders in Washington parse the meaning of the paraphrased words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. regarding his own epitaph, his true legacy – the one that many believe led to his murder – has been whitewashed from the King Memorial entirely.

Speaking at the Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one year – to the day – before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Dr. King announced that he was expanding his focus on America’s national shame of segregation to include its international crime of war on the people of Vietnam:

“(I)n the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers, (a)s I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — ‘what about Vietnam?’ They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

The King Memorial lists a total of 15 direct quotes and a paraphrase (currently in controversy) from Dr. King’s words; yet, curiously, this particular quote – which ties together the struggle for social and economic justice at home with the actions of the government abroad in an elegant and profound way – did not make the list.

Here are the quotes that appear on the Inscription Wall of the Memorial:

“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” (16 August 1967, Atlanta, GA)

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” (1963, Strength to Love)

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” (10 December 1964, Oslo, Norway)

“Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” (18 April 1959, Washington, DC)

“I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.” (25 February 1967, Los Angeles, CA)

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.” (24 December 1967, Atlanta, GA)

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (16 April 1963, Birmingham, AL)

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” (10 December 1964, Oslo, Norway)

“It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.” (24 December 1967, Atlanta, GA)

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” (25 February 1967, Los Angeles, CA)

“Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.” (4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York, NY)

“We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs ‘down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'” (5 December 1955, Montgomery, AL)

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” (16 April 1963, Birmingham, AL)

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” (16 April 1963, Birmingham, AL)

Within the list, there is one quote which deals directly with the Vietnam war, two that deal directly with war, and others that deal, in one way or another, with issues of war and peace in general. One is lifted from the Riverside speech.

Inscribed on the Stone of Hope are two statements – one, a direct quote, the other, the paraphrase of his words that is at the center of the present controversy:

The first, from the “I Have a Dream” speech, is “Out of the Mountain of Despair, a Stone of Hope” – the quotation that serves as the basis for the monument’s design. The words on the other side of the stone read, “I Was a Drum Major for Justice, Peace, and Righteousness,” which is a paraphrased version of a longer quote by King: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” The memorial’s use of the paraphrased version of the quote has been criticized (Wikipedia).

Nowhere on the monument is there any mention of Dr. King’s clearly-stated indictment of American foreign policy as being intrinsically evil (above); nor is there any mention that America’s wars are the cause of economic hardship at home:

“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

At the dedication of the King Monument last October, President Barack Obama invoked the words of Dr. King – some of them – without even mentioning war:

“When met with hardship, when confronting disappointment, Dr. King refused to accept what he called the ‘is-ness’ of today. He kept pushing towards the ‘ought-ness’ of tomorrow.

“And so, as we think about all the work that we must do –- rebuilding an economy that can compete on a global stage, and fixing our schools so that every child — not just some, but every child — gets a world-class education, and making sure that our health care system is affordable and accessible to all, and that our economic system is one in which everybody gets a fair shake and everybody does their fair share, let us not be trapped by what is. We can’t be discouraged by what is. We’ve got to keep pushing for what ought to be, the America we ought to leave to our children, mindful that the hardships we face are nothing compared to those Dr. King and his fellow marchers faced 50 years ago, and that if we maintain our faith, in ourselves and in the possibilities of this nation, there is no challenge we cannot surmount.”

Obama even went so far as to impute to Dr. King words that, if the record is any indication, are mere sterile parodies of the words of this Nobel Peace Prize winning minister:

“If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain. He would want us to know we can argue fiercely about the proper size and role of government without questioning each other’s love for this country — with the knowledge that in this democracy, government is no distant object but is rather an expression of our common commitments to one another. He would call on us to assume the best in each other rather than the worst, and challenge one another in ways that ultimately heal rather than wound.”

Not a word about “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – this is particularly odd when one considers that the US is now currently involved in more war and destruction, in more places and involving more people, weaponry and expense, than at the time Dr. King uttered those words in 1967.

As to the shared status with the President as a fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, in contrast to the Commander-in-Chief’s actions over the past three years, Dr. King said:

“I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?”

Quite a different interpretation of the charge that comes with joining the company of other Nobel Peace Prize winners than that demonstrated by the man who sat silent during the siege of Gaza (“Only one President at a time”), expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into Pakistan, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and, soon, Iran. Could we imagine Dr. King conducting – or sanctioning – a six-month bombing campaign for “humanitarian reasons”? Or might he instead feel compelled to speak out:

“And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

“They must see Americans as strange liberators.”

“Strange liberators,” indeed…

Don DeBar is a journalist and political activist residing in Ossining, NY. He currently serves as senior producer for WBAIX.org, an internet news and public events outlet featuring progressive producers who were purged from Pacifica Radio.

January 19, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli nukes aimed at terrorizing world: Ralph Schoenman

Press TV interview with Ralph Schoenman | January 19, 2014

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, author of Hidden History of Zionism, from Berkeley, California, to discuss Israel’s use of nuclear bombs to terrorize and dominate populations with the help of the United States.

What follows is a rough transcript of the interview.

Press TV: First of all, with this report in, will there be any political or legal implications for those who assisted Israel in acquiring these nuclear weapons?

Schoenman: The question is really going to the relationship of imperialism to the Zionist [entity] from its inception, in specific terms now the issue of the use of nuclear weapons.

There is a book,The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, which details the joint development of nuclear weapons by including neutron bombs by Israel and South Africa, and their testing.

The well-known figure Mordechai Vanunu – who was kidnapped by the Israelis when he disclosed the evidence of the Israeli preparations for nuclear capacity and testing of weapons, indeed, with the full panoply of evidence pertaining to this – was kidnapped, taken to Israel and held in incommunicado for 18 years.

There is a very sorted and menacing history of the use of these weapons to menace peoples across the world. I want to give a specific example in illumination of this, namely ‘View of the Cameroon Disaster…’, which Dan Fisher wrote about in the Los Angeles Times on August 27, 1986.

Death occurred in which people were found frozen in place as if they have been killed by gas. This was an event in 1986 in Cameroon – it was immediately described as an event in which the Israelis were involved. The Israeli infantry troops were soon to be on the scene. In fact, Shimon Perez, who was the former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Israel, was quickly on the scene with a team.

Indeed, the evidence about this was documented by Dan Fisher in the Los Angeles Times, as I’ve mentioned, but also there was a detailed account by the Cameroonian journalists which specified the role of the Israelis and the evidence of a neutron weapon: ‘The Lake Nyos Disaster 20 Years After: Revisiting Israeli Connection’, by Dibussi Tande.

My wife and I had a role in this expose because after the time we flew to the big island of Hawaii where leading volcanologist in the island of Hawaii was involved in the report on what occurred in Cameroon, he confirmed that the claims that this was the result of gases emerging from a lake with presumptive latent volcano that emitted gases in Lake Nyos, those gases then reached the atmosphere in causing thousands of people to die in their tracks frozen, while no damage to property occurred, was quickly exposed as a myth.

In fact, what we’re dealing with here is a neutron weapon. One of the people who’s most associated with the neutron bomb, Sam Cohen, who was working with the RAND Corporation in the United States, has detailed the neutron weapon.

There is no question whatsoever, given what Vanunu has exposed, given what evidence there is in Cameroon, that neutron weapons have been used and tested by the Israelis with the approval and collusion of the United States and the imperial powers notably France.

This is not a new development. The story is important. It is the culmination of a series of documentations, revelations over a period of 20, 30 and 40 years. These are crimes against humanity.

These are ongoing threats to the peoples of the world. They define the relationship of Israel and the Zionist [entity] to imperialism and the utilization of the nuclear capacity and of neutron bombs and weapons of this nature to terrorize the populations they seek to dominate, whose sovereignty they wish to destroy.

Related article

January 19, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

FBI Arrests Michael Grimm’s Girlfriend; Meanwhile Another Congress Member Implicated

photo durgrimm_zps72627271.jpg

Diana Durand (L) has been arrested in connection with illegal campaign contributions allegedly made to the 2010 campaign of New York Republican Congressman Michael Grimm (R)

By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | January 18, 2014

Diana Durand, a Texas woman who apparently has been romantically involved with Congressman Michael Grimm, has been arrested and charged with illegally funneling money into the New York congressman’s 2010 campaign.

She is also accused of steering “straw donations” into the campaign of yet another congress member, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL), according to the New York Daily News.

A straw donation is a donation to a political campaign made by one person, though under another person’s name. It is a way of getting around legal limits on the amount of money that can be contributed to political candidates.

Schock, like Grimm, is an avid supporter of Israel.

Durand is 47-years old and was arraigned in federal court in Houston on Wednesday. She has hired an attorney, Stuart Kaplan, who is a longtime associate of Grimm, both having served in the FBI.

Grimm left the FBI in 2006, was elected to Congress in 2010, and in 2012 the FBI opened an investigation into him over possible illegal campaign donations to his 2010 congressional campaign made by supporters of Israeli Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto.

Durand is free on $50,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on January 30. The following is from the New York Daily News account:

The single mother of one worked with Grimm before his election when he launched a trucking company near Houston. Records list her brother and sister-in-law as executives at the firm.

Sources said Durand and Grimm, 43, who is divorced, were involved romantically, and that she visited him in Washington after his election.

Durand was busted Friday, nearly five months after a Brooklyn judge first ordered her arrest. Feds spent the intervening months in an unsuccessful bid to win her cooperation in an ongoing probe into allegations that Grimm and supporters encouraged donors to make illegal contributions to his 2010 campaign, people with knowledge of the case said.

As I reported previously, campaign donations totaling more than $500,000 were reportedly solicited on Grimm’s behalf by a top Pinto aide, Ofer Biton, who was arrested in 2012 for immigration fraud and who pled guilty to that charge last August.

The FBI had sought to have Biton turn state’s evidence against Grimm, but he has refused, and apparently Durand intends doing likewise. Also as I repoted before, Grimm has friends in high places—Israel—where he reportedly maintains close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and according to reports, the Israeli police have done their best to sabotage the FBI’s investigation.

photo grimyahu_zps6f085320.jpg

Grimm with Benjamin Netanyahu

Schock would appear to be the second congress member implicated in what seems to be a widening investigation. According to the Chicago Tribune:

Schock, 32, is a prolific fundraiser serving his third term in Congress. He had more than $2.9 million in his war chest in September, when the most recent campaign-finance reports were filed.

The House Ethics Committee has been examining Schock’s fundraising after reports that in 2012, he solicited $25,000 for a super PAC, in excess of a $5,000 limit for lawmakers asking for money for that kind of independent-expenditure group.

The Tribune also reports on a statement issued by Schock’s office in which a spokesperson said, “This literally is the first our office has heard of this issue.”

In March of 2010, Schock and 326 other members of Congress signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirming their “commitment to the unbreakable bond that exists between our country and the State of Israel and to express to you our deep concern over recent tension.”

The “recent tension” referred to by the signatories of the letter is an incident I referred to in my first article on the Grimm investigation. On March 9, 2010 the Israeli government announced the construction of 1,600 new homes, for Jews only, to be built in East Jerusalem. The announcement coincided with a state visit to Israel by US Vice President Joe Biden, and was viewed by many as insulting to America. Clinton referred to it as “deeply negative” for US-Israeli relations.

And as I also noted:

Coincidentally, simultaneous to the slight against Biden, the parents of Rachel Corrie were in Israel for the start of their civil trial charging the Israeli military in the wrongful death of their daughter.

Biden’s response to the announcement of the 1,600 new homes was to issue a servile statement in which he declared that “there is no space between the United States and Israel,” whereupon he boarded a plane and jetted home to America without offering any words of support to the Corrie family.

Schock and the other signers of the letter went on to state:

Our valuable bilateral relationship with Israel needs and deserves constant reinforcement. As the Vice-President said during his recent visit to Israel: “Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the U.S. and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space.” Steadfast American backing has helped lead to Israeli peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. And American involvement continues to be critical to the effort to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

We recognize that, despite the extraordinary closeness between our country and Israel, there will be differences over issues both large and small. Our view is that such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence, as befits longstanding strategic allies. We hope and expect that, with mutual effort and good faith, the United States and Israel will move beyond this disruption quickly, to the lasting benefit of both nations.

Born of Morrocon Jews, Pinto is one of the richest rabbis in Israel and is viewed by some as a religious and financial “guru” and a “wonder rabbi.” His adherents in the past have included some of the wealthiest oligarchs in the world and also Israeli political leaders:

In Israel, the list of those seeking Rabbi Pinto’s advice reads like a high-society gossip column: Multi-millionaires Lev Leviev and Nochi Danker, opposition leader Tzipi Livni and former Industry Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, who the rabbi supposedly brought out of a coma earlier this year. It is even rumoured that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consults him.

Now, however, he seems to be in hotwater with Israeli police, who have charged him with attempting to bribe a police official—apparently in a bid to sabotage the FBI’s investigation of Grimm. The FBI is hoping to have Pinto testify against Grimm, and reportedly is in possession of a wiretap audio in which Israeli police can be heard threatening the rabbi.

And finally, as I reported yesterday, Grimm apparently isn’t the only Congress member who has accepted donations from Pinto’s wealthy followers. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is reported to have as well.

Cantor’s ties to Pinto have also been commented upon by blogger Richard Silverstein, who has written extensively on the FBI’s investigation of Grimm:

The key question is whether the techniques and solicitors used in Grimm’s campaign match those used by Cantor. If so, then the FBI is very interested in Cantor. If Cantor was smarter than Grimm and didn’t use mafiosi to collect cash as Grimm did, then he may not get into trouble. But the very fact that Cantor dipped into Grimm’s cookie jar so heavily is mighty suspicious. Who knows where it will lead?

Grimm, by the way, is not Jewish but of Italian descent, which makes us wonder why the Israelis are apparently so keen to protect him—and after all, there are plenty of Israel supporters in Congress. But as Silverstein notes, it’s insurance:

To be clear, I don’t have a smoking gun that points to Netanyahu involvement in sabotaging the FBI investigation.  But I do have a series of strong circumstantial evidence that leads in that direction.  But why would Bibi or Sara care about this enough to take such risky actions as agitating the FBI?  Let’s return to that grand strategy of electing even more Israel-friendly GOP members of Congress.  If Michael Grimm was their model to see whether Pinto was a new source of campaign cash, they needed to protect him if he might be going down.  Rather than lose their investment and shut down this conduit for millions in new campaign funding, they’d go to the mat to help Grimm.

More background on Bibi’s strategy in dealing with the U.S. political process: he’s found that presidents may not like him because they are slightly more independent than members of Congress.  But Congress is in his back pocket due to that campaign largess I mentioned earlier.  Bibi is hated in the White House but loved (or feared) in Congress.  When he can’t get an invitation to the White House, he goes over the president’s head and gets to address a Joint Session of Congress.

This is the same strategy he and the Lobby are following regarding the Iran sanctions legislation.  The president doesn’t want new sanctions.  Most sane members of Congress don’t want them either.  But the Lobby and Israel do.  They want a war with Iran.  So they want to sabotage Obama’s strategy of negotiating his way out of the impasse.  How best to do this?  Don’t confront Obama head-on because he’s an immovable object on this matter.  But do an end-around.  Activate all those pro-Israel IOUs in Congress.

So the more Michael Grimms there are in Congress, the more Israel has its own interests guaranteed in the halls of Congress.

And of course, there’s no shortage of money. In fact, in a manner of speaking, there’s money to burn:

photo pinto_lev_zpsa6cdf727.jpg

Rabbi Pinto, center, surrounded by oligarchs, including Israeli diamond billionaire Lev Leviev, far right.

January 19, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

UK police watchdog apologetic about Duggan case

346256_Mark-Duggan

Press TV – January 18, 2014

Britain’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has offered an apology to the family of Mark Duggan for “wrongly” telling the media that the black man opened fire at police before he was fatally shot in 2011.

On Friday, deputy chairwoman of the IPCC Rachel Cerfontyne stated that the non-departmental public body is following “a number of significant lines of inquiry” surrounding the death of the 29-year-old.

An inquest jury ruled last week that Tottenham police in northern London lawfully gunned down Duggan on August 4, 2011.

Duggan’s death triggered the massive 2011 summer unrest across England. It was the worst social unrest Britain faced in a generation, unleashing street protests, fighting with the police and arson attacks.

“We know that the family’s confidence in us and our investigation was damaged by mistakes made in the early stages – both in relation to inaccurate information we provided to the media, and the initial management of the incident,” Cerfontyne said.

She added, “I would like again to record my sincere apology to them that on the evening that Mark was fatally shot by a police officer, a member of our staff wrongly led the media to believe that he had fired at police officers. I fully understand the damaging impact of this.”

Cerfontyne further noted that the IPCC is trying to interview key witnesses who have either declined to speak or have given conflicting accounts.

“Having assessed the evidence at inquest, there are initially a number of significant lines of inquiry which we are pursuing. These include following up concerns about the way the police responded to intelligence and seeking to interview some key witnesses who have so far declined to speak to or be interviewed by us or whose accounts are inconsistent with other evidence,” she said.

“We expect police officers to cooperate fully with us if required, including answering questions at interview, something they have so far refused to do,” the IPCC deputy chairwoman pointed out.

January 18, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Embarrassing NIST: They Left Out Critical Structural Features of WTC7

By Andrew Mills | RINF Alternative News | January 17, 2014

On December 12, 2013, well known attorney, Dr. William Pepper, sent a letter to the U. S. Department of Commerce Inspector General on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth. The letter concerned certain structural feature omissions found in early 2012 in the drawings on which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based their conclusions in their 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) on 9/11. (NIST is one of the agencies under the Department of Commerce.) Dr. Pepper’s letter asked that that the Inspector General investigate and have NIST correct the Report.

As most Americans know, a third building (WTC7) of the WorldTradeCenter complex of buildings collapsed on the same day as the twin towers.  WTC 7 was a 47-story skyscraper that housed offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, as well as the NYC Office of Emergency Management’s OperationsCenter. It collapsed at around 5 pm on 9/11. No airplane crashed into it and it experienced only minor fires before it collapsed. It fell straight down, right into its own footprint, and the speed of fall was very close to gravitational free fall.  Many people at the time remarked that its collapse closely resembled the collapse of buildings due to intentional demolition.

Of those Americans who know that Building 7 collapsed on 9/11, very few are aware that the government through NIST actually investigated the causes of the building’s collapse. The report by NIST was released to the public in August 2008, nearly seven years after the attacks. The drawings upon which the report was based were released only in 2011 in response to a FOIA request.   At the time of the release of the report, many professional engineers and architects had serious misgivings about the report as it basically contended that for the first time in history, the symmetrical, complete collapse of a large, fire protected, steel framed building was said to be fire induced.

As noted in Dr. Pepper’s letter, since the release of the drawings, structural engineers have spent considerable time comparing these drawings to the descriptions of the collapse model provided in the report. Their findings revealed that critical structural features in Building 7 were inexplicably missing from consideration in the Report. These critical features included stiffeners, that provided critical girder support, as well as lateral support beams which supported a beam which allegedly buckled. Only through the omission of any discussion about the stiffeners and the lateral support beams is NIST’s probable collapse sequence possible. It is the unanimous opinion of these structural engineers that with the inclusion of these critical features, NIST’s probable collapse sequence must be ruled out.

As Dr. Pepper’s letter notes, the group of architects and engineers unanimously believe that the NIST Report’s conclusion of collapse due to fire could not have been justified if the stiffeners and the lateral support beams were not omitted. The credibility of NIST and the Department of Commerce requires that they open an investigation into the potential negligence and/or misconduct by the lead investigators of NIST’s Building 7 investigation and that NIST be directed to produce a corrected analysis and report on the collapse of Building 7, this time, by fully taking into account the presence of the stiffeners and the lateral support beams.

After the discovery of these omissions, the group of architects and engineers who discovered them pressed NIST for over a year to get an answer to the question as to why these critical features were omitted from the Report’s discussion and analysis. But they were greeted with silence until October 25, 2013 when a NIST public relations official finally acknowledged that the stiffeners had been omitted, but incredibly, from an engineering standpoint, said they were not necessary to consider.

With the submittal of Dr. Pepper’s letter, which was accompanied by a detailed engineering analysis, NIST has never before been challenged this way, with their own data and information that they themselves have released. They appear to be caught between a rock and a hard place. At the very least they should be forced to release their WTC 7 collapse modeling data. They have not responded to the letter as of yet.

But this is court-room level evidence of impropriety involving the preparation of the WTC 7 report, and will clearly be an embarrassment to NIST. It shows that the demand for a new WTC 7 investigation by those skeptical of the Report’s conclusions was in order all along. Even if nothing else is re-investigated about 9/11, the collapse of Building 7 richly deserves a thorough investigation .

Here is a link to Dr. Pepper’s letter to the Department of Commerce Inspector General:

http://www.journalof911studies.com/resources/2014JanLetterPepper.pdf

Andrew Mills is a groundwater hydrologist employed in an engineering consulting company. He and his wife have six children and 18 grandchildren. He was active in the civil rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

January 18, 2014 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Theses on Zionism

A Response to Joseph Massad’s “Theses on Zionism”

By HARRY CLARK | CounterPunch | January 17, 2014

This is a response to Joseph Massad’s  “Theses on Zionism” in Electronic Intifada on December 9, 2013.

I.

In pre-modern times, Jews lived in separate communities, governed by their religious authorities, with corporate rights and obligations, determined by royal or aristocratic authority. The Enlightenment and emancipation ended the subjugation of west European Jews to Judaic authorities, and to gentile regulation. Jews were admitted, gradually but inevitably, to full citizenship in their states of residence, equal to their fellow citizens. The US was created on a modern, liberal basis, with no trace of pre-modern Jewish status. Anti-semitism existed but liberalism was the prevailing trend before World War I. In modern terms, Jews became a religious minority, or secular citizens. Jews embraced  modernity wholeheartedly. Western Jews became some of its leading proponents; east European Jews emigrated by the million from oppressed, traditional societies to the US.

II.

Zionism was a response not only to anti-Semitism but to liberal modernity. Zionism opposed the assimilation and integration of Jews, and held that anti-Semitism was irrevocable and natural. “The Jews comprise a distinctive element among the nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.” We “must give up contending against these hostile impulses [anti-Semitism].” Resistance is “a waste of time and energy.” “The civil and political emancipation of the Jews is not sufficient to raise them in the estimation of the peoples.” “The proper, the only solution, is in the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews; their return to the ranks of the nations by the acquisition of a Jewish homeland.” (Leon Pinsker, Auto-emancipation)

III.

Zionism adopted anti-Semitic ideas and tactics and cooperated with anti-Semites practically. Herzl frequented anti-Semitic salons in Paris, and sought Russian czarist support for Zionism with Ottoman Turkey in return for silencing Russian Jewish protest. After the October, 1917 Russian revolution Zionism presented itself to the western powers as Jewish anti-Bolshevism. In the Russian civil war Zionists allied with anti-Semitic White forces who committed pogroms when they lost to the Bolsheviks. In 1933 the Zionist movement broke the promising Jewish-led boycott of Nazi Germany with the Transfer Agreement, which sold German exports through Palestine. Zionism opposed relief for Jews on humanitarian grounds because it detracted from Zionist national aims in Palestine. Zionism was an elite project of national renewal, concerned with “the problems of Judaism, not the problems of Jewry,”  in Ahad Ha’am’s words.

IV.

The Zionist claims of a historical Jewish people,  attached to the “land of Israel,” and of modern “secular Jewish identity” are utterly untenable. Zionist racialism dates to the proto-Zionism of Moses Hess; the chauvinism of Heinrich Graetz contributed to German anti-Semitism; German Zionism was Jewish Romantic nationalism, embracing Jewish Blut und Boden. Theodor Herzl was steeped in the racism of European colonialism. Nazi and Zionist “race experts” consulted each other in the 1930s. Elmer Berger, an anti-Zionist rabbi, co-authored the 1977 UN resolution on Zionism as a form of racism.  “Jewish genetics” tries to build a biological basis for Zionism. Zionism’s fundamental opposition is not Jewish settler vs  Arab indigene in Palestine, but Jew vs gentile everywhere. Historian Noel Ignatiev called  Zionism Jewish race doctrine.

V.

There is no “progressive Zionism.” The leaders of “cultural Zionism” supported immigration and a Jewish majority. Zionist “culture” is founded on irreducible Jewish difference, separatism, alienation, and anti-gentilism, the counterpart of racialist anti-Semitism. The bi-nationalists wanted Jewish immigration leading to demographic parity and eventually majority, when Jews were a minority. The kibbutz was an instrument of exclusive Ashkenazi Jewish settlement in Palestine, and was inspired by 19th c. German  plans to counter a Polish “demographic threat” in the eastern Reich. Hitler might have conquered the Near East; the Judeocide happened because of Nazi Germany, not because there was no Jewish state. Israeli Hebrew ethnicity or nationality, secular and open to all, is the liberal replacement for Zionist Jewish nationality,

VI.

The classical left and liberal traditions descended from the Enlightenment and emancipation rejected Zionism categorically. American Reform Judaism once stated: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and, therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor… the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Marxism upheld the international solidarity of the working class, viewed nationalism as reactionary, and Zionism as a colonial movement and tool of imperialism. The Yiddish labor movements in the Russian Empire and their immigrant offshoots also opposed Zionism. The late Israel Shahak referred to the “modern, secular Jewish tradition,” which he traced from Spinoza, who began the remarkable Jewish contribution to  modernity. Shahak viewed Zionism as a reaction against emancipation, and a longing for the ghetto.

VII.

Zionism was a marginal cult among western Jews until World War I. The Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine raised interest but it subsided, reviving only with the advent of Nazism. US Jews supported overwhelmingly the establishment of Israel in 1948, but liberal attitudes prevailed into the early 1960s. The success of liberalism and assimilation led to a “continuity crisis,” an effort to maintain separatism that was fatally supercharged by the June, 1967 war. Organized Jewry became and remains fanatically chauvinist, insular and pro-Israel. “The Holocaust” became an institution and part of Jewish identity, including classic Zionist dogma about irrevocable, murderous anti-Semitism. The organized Jewish communities and the Jewish state have constituted the Zionist Jewish people. The Volk has replaced liberalism as the Jewish social principle; the modern period of Jewish history has ended.

VIII.

The organized Jewish community is the core of US support for Israel, the “Zionocracy,” after the 19th c. “Slaveocracy” that wielded immense power until the Civil War. The Zionocracy has exercised quasi-sovereign influence on US foreign policy since the 1940s, when it secured US support for partition of Palestine and the Jewish state, against overwhelming military and diplomatic opposition. Israel’s “strategic value” during the later Cold War is mostly Zionist public relations. In the 1960s the Zionocracy concealed Israel’s nuclear weapons program, secured arms sales, and US support for Israel in 1967, against warnings by many US officials. The October, 1973 war and resulting oil price increases were the biggest shock to the world economy since 1945. The Carter Administration sought  a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict but the Zionocracy limited Carter’s diplomacy to a separate Egypt-Israel peace. Israel and the Zionocracy then opposed Iraq and supported Iran during their war in 1980s.

IX.

Zionism has been the chief ideological driver of US militarism since the end of the Cold War. The congressional vote for the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq was the closest since the War of 1812,  and the Zionocracy may have tipped the scales. The “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq in the 1990s was by and for the Zionocracy, over substantial business opposition. The 9/11 attacks, which led to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the destruction of civil liberties, were directed mainly against US patronage of Israel. The Zionocracy is the main source of Islamophobia in the US. The Jewish neoconservatives were the prime movers in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. This greatly increased Iranian influence and escalated its antagonism with Saudi Arabia, and led to the present dissolution of Syria. The US has restarted diplomacy with Iran but the Zionocracy has passed overwhelmingly in the House and has majority sponsorship in the Senate for legislation that will destroy the opening and restore the war drive.

X.

Left and liberal Jewish opinion since 1967 has been as völkisch as the mainstream. Israel was not an issue for the Jewish members of the American New Left in the early 1960s, who sought to build a universalist movement. The New Left shattered in the late 1960s over internal differences, including attitudes toward Israel, after the June 1967 war.  A “Jewish left” arose, which purported to combine Jewish commitment with social justice, including some criticism of Israel. Today a loose school of  Jewish identity politics centered on Noam Chomsky imposes on the left terms of “anti-occupation”, “law and rights,” “solutions,” “progressive Zionism,” “Israel as US strategic asset,” and “anti-anti-Semitism”. This circumscribed critique conceals the US Zionocracy and Zionism itself, in contrast to the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment and emancipation, which rejected Zionism categorically. The modern period of Jewish history has ended on the left also.

XI.

A universalist critique would oppose Zionism, not “the occupation”; recognize Zionism as Jewish racialism, opposing Jew and gentile everywhere; acknowledge Zionism as the ideological driver of genocide and destruction in western Asia, and the source of Jewish chauvinism and separatism

in the US; reject the Zionist idea of “the Jewish people” in whose name the state of Israel and organized Jewry act; condemn the role of US organized Jewry and the Zionocracy as a quasi-sovereign, radicalizing force in US Middle East policy; and defend a secular realm in which we think and act together. It would do this in the name of the people of Jewish background who contributed so much to modernity, from Spinoza onward, whose legacy towers over Zionism. The failure to do this is catastrophic, comparable to the German Communist Party’s disastrous misreading of Hitler and Nazism, which  weakened the left and assisted their rise to power, and all that followed.

Harry Clark’s article “The End of Modern Jewish History,” which expands on these issues, will appear in Left Curve,  No. 38, forthcoming in April. He may be reached at his web site http://questionofpalestine.net

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January 17, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US to Expand Military, Intelligence Presence in Bahrain

us-military-bases-surround-iran

Al-Manar | January 17, 2014

The US military plans to establish an intelligence center in Bahrain in a bid to compensate for its dwindling presence in Afghanistan.

A senior US military official told a Senate hearing that the planned espionage center in the Arab state, home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, will be an “integral part” of the Pentagon’s post-2014 strategy in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The official, Erin Logan, who oversees the Pentagon’s “counter-narcotics efforts,” claimed during a US Senate hearing on narcotics on Wednesday that the plan is part of Washington’s efforts to “continue fighting” Afghanistan’s “booming drug industry.”

“The center,” she added, “will help fill the gap where space for personnel on the ground in Afghanistan is no longer available.”

The US move to expand its military and intelligence presence in Bahrain comes, however, despite the grave human rights record of the ruling Al Khalifa regime for its brutal crackdown on a popular uprising that has left scores shot and tortured to death and many more injured and prosecuted for taking part and even sympathizing with the continuing anti-regime protests in the country.

The United States has long been suspected by regional countries, particularly Iran and Russia, of promoting the growth of the narcotics trade in Afghanistan ever since American and NATO military forces invaded the country in 2001 under the pretext of fighting terror and bringing stability to Afghanistan.

There have been numerous press accounts over the past years pointing to the involvement of US troops and CIA operatives in Afghanistan’s expanding drug trade that largely finances the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban militants in the country.

The US military aims to establish an intelligence center in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain in a bid to compensate for its dwindling presence in the war-torn Afghanistan.

January 17, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

A New Year Just Like the Old Year

Jennifer Rubin Wants More War

By Philip Giraldi • The Unz Review • January 16, 2014

Israel’s friends frequently claim that critics hold Tel Aviv to a higher standard than they do other countries that have similar or worse records on human rights. Actually the truth is quite the reverse, with Israel frequently able to escape censure for actions that would normally result in the imposition of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council and condemnation by other international bodies. I am of course referring to the continued brutal Israeli occupation of much of what remains of Palestine and the ongoing colonization of land that is being appropriated illegally, activity that is only allowed to continue because of Washington’s willingness to protect Israel no matter what cost to other American interests.

Some of the gyrations that Israel’s supporters engage in would be describable as comic if the consequences of their obfuscation were not so serious. And there is no one better at throwing mud than Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s designated “Right Turn” blogger who is one of those folks who believe that being in love with Israel is a core conservative value. Rubin can hardly write about any current issue without somehow turning the discussion to poor little Israel, or, alternatively, to evil Iran.

On January 5th, Rubin produced what for her might be considered a ruminative piece entitled “What mattered in 2013.” She found “two developments… more significant” than anything else that happened in the past year, namely gay marriage and the continued perfidy of those danged Muslims. Leaving the gay marriage issue aside, Jennifer sees “Iran and its junior partner Syria in ascendancy” while Bashar Al-Assad of Syria “murdered more than 130,000” of his own people and crossed red lines with “near impunity,” a “monstrous event [that] Elliott Abrams tells us, has ramifications far beyond Syria.”

Abrams, a convicted felon and notorious liar but true blue for Israel, believes that inaction in Syria “has been noted in Jerusalem” and will send a signal and encourage Moscow and Beijing to challenge Washington.

Hezbollah meanwhile has “expanded its missile cache” and obtained “a strategic victory” together with Iran and will win in Syria while the US president “thinks up reasons not to act.”

Iran is behind all the instability, benefiting from “advanced centrifuges” and “international acquiescence” it is “on the cusp of obtaining a nuclear arms capability” even as it “pursues terrorism.” Rubin notes that “Sanctions have not dislodged the regime nor caused it to rethink its nuclear arms ambitions” but then goes on to recommend that “Congress can pass sanctions over White House objections and thereby force Iran to capitulate” because “If Congress finds a nuclear-armed Iran horrifying and wants to avoid a Middle East war it will need to pass a final sanctions bill, the last chance to peacefully disarm that mullahs.”

In another blog item posted on the following day, Jennifer is at it again, describing “Middle East bedlam.” She excoriates Secretary of State John Kerry for his eminently sensible suggestion “that Iran might join Syrian peace talks in Geneva” which she describes as “rewarding bad behavior” before stating that Washington has “no will to check Iranian hegemonic ambitions in the region.”

Three hours later, Rubin was at it again explaining how “Iran sanctions opponents [are] desperate,” noting that as of that time 49 senators had signed on to the new Iran bill, which would put an end to talks intended to resolve outstanding issues relating to the Iranian nuclear program. Interestingly, she observes that four “traditionally pro-Israel democrats” had yet to sign, suggesting that she appreciates very well that all the rationalizations about how Iran is a threat to the US are bogus and that it is all about Israel, just as it always is for her.

Rubin observes that the “anti-sanctions crowd remains a gaggle made up of far-left activists, State Department sycophants and reluctant Democratic chairmen dragooned into opposing the measure by the White House.” The lefties, apparently, have been suborned into opposing the measure by a “hit squad and consistently anti-Israel gang” in the progressive media while the “small cadre of ex-State Department and intelligence community hacks” fill out the roster of those who hate American National Security, apparently a subset of American Exceptionalism. Thank God true American heroes like Senators Schumer, Gillibrand, Cardin and Menendez are “showing fortitude on sanctions” and doing what it takes to “dismantle [Iran’s] illegal nuclear weapons program.”

Three days later Rubin again describes how “Obama Iran gambit is unraveling.” She describes the negotiations in Geneva as “a giant stall by Iran to allow it to progress with its nuclear weapons program while getting sanctions relief.” How does she know that? She quotes no less an authority than Mark Dubowitz, a Canadian who claims to be an expert on the Middle East because he lived there but it turns out that he only resided in Israel. He is currently president of the neocon Foundation for Defense of Democracies and heads a staff of 32 dedicated to finding more punishing ways to sanction Iran. Dubowitz claims that “Iran is building an industrial-size nuclear infrastructure that will give it multiple overt and covert pathways to a bomb.” Rubin adds that “either president Obama was snookered or he is snookering us” before quoting Josh Block, a former AIPAC communications director currently heading The Israel Project, who claims that “the ‘interim deal’ is actually just another stalling tactic by Iran… [but] Congress is not fooled. The American people are not fooled. Iran is playing us for the fool.” Block, for what it’s worth, is an Israel Firster who believes that anyone who uses the expression Israel Firster is a “borderline anti-Semite.”

Rubin concludes by warning that “… Congress needs to step forward and exercise leadership. If not, Iran will have gotten the bomb, relief from sanctions, encouragement for its hegemonic ambitions and a nuclear blackmail card. In fact, it’s most of the way there.”

First of all, it is perhaps not surprising that everywhere one turns with Jennifer Rubin Israel comes up, but she lacks the integrity required to appreciate that most of the criticisms she levels against the feckless Arabs and Iranians would apply equally or even more to Israel’s behavior. I sometimes think that it would be a wake-up call for her and her associates if one were able to arrange for all 100 Senators to vote anonymously, without fear of being exposed, on whether or not they really think that Iran threatens the United States. I would bet that an overwhelming number would indicate “no.” But, unfortunately, congress does not vote secretly. A veto proof majority of Senators now appear to be willing to vote for new Iran sanctions, the result of “a massive phone campaign by Concerned Women for America (CWA), a 500,000-member Christian and Zionist conservative group” and by the Emergency Committee for Israel. The White House is correctly warning that voting for new sanctions equates to voting for war.

So the question becomes “Why is the United States inching away from a possible agreement with Iran, a country that has been unfairly designated enemy number one since 1978?” I would suggest that Jennifer Rubin and the hacks (her term) that she assembles to say what she wants to hear have been a major element in pressuring congress and the rest of the media to line up squarely behind Israel, no matter what the issue and no matter what the genuine US interests might be. Rubin proudly reports that former Senator Scott Brown recently e-mailed her “One of the things I miss most [since leaving the Senate] is not being able to fight for Israel.” One has to wonder why any American Senator should be saying anything like that, but the irony apparently eludes Rubin.

And Jennifer is not above repeating over and over again her basic themes: that Iran wants to destroy Israel, that it has a nuclear weapons program, and that its intentions are both aggressive and hegemonic. Unfortunately all of her power points are either flat out false or not demonstrated by available evidence. According to the US intelligence community, Iran abandoned plans for a nuclear weapon in 2003 and does not currently have a program to develop one. Even Israeli intelligence agrees that is so. And Iran has never actually threatened to attack Israel. In fact, it hasn’t attacked anyone since the seventeenth century.

When Rubin launches her diatribes, she assumes that the reader agrees that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that it is a somehow a threat to the rest of the Middle East as well as to Europe and the United States. She piles surmise upon innuendo while making no real effort to explain how Iran with its miniscule military budget and surrounded by enemies is actually a threat, possibly because it is an impossible case to make. And as for poor beleaguered Israel, with its more than 200 secret nukes and delivery systems, she certainly must know that Iran could be destroyed in a matter of hours if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should choose to give the order. Given the fact that the breathtakingly belligerent Netanyahu is far nuttier than anyone running around loose in Iran, he is the real threat to peace that comes out of the Middle East, but it is a tale that Jennifer Rubin is unlikely to tell.

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January 16, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Americans Lied to Us”

The German government and its intelligence services no longer believe the United States will stop spying on German citizens. Resentment is running deep.

By Hans Leyendecker and Georg Mascolo | Süddeutsche Zeitung | January 13, 2014
Translated by Ron Argentati, edited by Gillian Palmer | Watching America

The planned “no spy” agreement with Germany seems doomed. While negotiations are still officially underway, Germany has little hope that a bilateral agreement acceptable to the United States is likely. The Americans will not even make a commitment to refrain from snooping on German government and political officials in the future.

There is a great deal of disappointment in German intelligence circles where the Bundesnachrichtendienst [the German intelligence agency] is charged with carrying on the negotiations. One BND expert told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “We’re not getting anything in return.”

BND President Gerhard Schindler is said to have told his staff that he would prefer to do without a no-spy agreement under such circumstances. Resentment among German negotiators is considerable. One high-level negotiator feels the Americans lied to them.

The U.S., for example, refuses to tell Germany the time frame in which Angela Merkel’s telephone was being monitored and whether America eavesdropped on other high-level German government officials’ telephone conversations as well.

Prior to eavesdropping on the German chancellor, the U.S. had guaranteed in writing that American intelligence would avoid doing anything counter to German interests. Requests by German constitutional lawyers for access to a suspected U.S. listening station on the top floor of their embassy on Berlin’s Pariser Platz were rejected by U.S. officials.

The German government had previously informed the U.S. government it would consider such a listening station to be a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The German attorney general’s office will determine whether a formal investigation should be conducted.

The U.S. refusal to sign an enforceable agreement came as a surprise to Berlin. As late as this summer, National Security Agency Chief General Keith Alexander told his German counterparts, among them BND President Schindler, that the U.S. was preparing a far-reaching no-spy agreement. But he always provided the caveat that such an agreement would have to be approved by the White House, saying his office had no authority to do so independently.

The Americans’ apparent engagement led the German government to expect a quick and positive conclusion. The word in August was that oral agreements with the Americans were already in place stipulating “no mutual espionage, no industrial spying and no infringements of national laws.” These supposed agreements have now vanished into thin air.

A spokesperson for the German government refused to comment on the Süddeutsche Zeitung report because negotiations were still underway. The chancellor’s office stated it had hopes of a conclusion sometime within the next three months.

Germany – Süddeutsche Zeitung – Original Article (German)

January 16, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

MIT study of Ghouta chemical attack challenges US intelligence

RT | January 16, 2014

A new MIT report is challenging the US claim that Assad forces used chemical weapons in an attack last August, highlighting that the range of the improvised rocket was way too short to have been launched from government controlled areas.

In the report titled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former UN weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined the delivery rocket’s design and calculated possible trajectories based on the payload of the cargo.

The authors concluded that sarin gas “could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’, or from the Eastern edge, of the Syrian government controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013.”

Based on mathematical calculations, Lloyd and Postol estimate the rocket with such aerodynamics could not travel more than 2 kilometers. To illustrate their conclusion, the authors included the original White House map that depicted areas under Assad control and those held by the opposition. Based on the firing range and troop locations on August 21, the authors conclude that all possible launching points within the 2 km radius were in rebel-held areas.


“This mistaken intelligence could have led to an unjustified US military action based on false intelligence. A proper vetting of the fact that the munition was of such short range would have led to a completely different assessment of the situation from the gathered data,” the report states.

The authors emphasize that the UN independent assessment of the range of the chemical munition is in “exact agreement” with their findings.

The report goes on to challenge the US Secretary of State’s key assessments of the chemical attack that he presented to the American people on August 30th and to the Foreign Relations Committee on September 3rd in an effort to muster a military attack on Syria.

“My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack. But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct,” Postol told McClatchy news.


“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.”

It also remains a mystery why the particular type of rocket that was used in the attack was not declared by the Syrian government as part of its chemical weapons arsenal when it agreed to destroy its chemical weapons and their delivery methods. OPCW inspectors charged with implementing the agreement also did not discover such a rocket in possession of government forces.

Syria agreed to the destruction of its chemical weapons through a deal brokered by Russia and the US after a sarin gas attack on August 21. Western nations blamed the deadly attack on President Bashar Assad’s forces, while Damascus accused the rebels for the incident. The UN fact-finding mission had no mandate to find out who carried out the attack.

Under the UN-backed plan, all of the country’s declared 1,290 tons of toxic agents should be destroyed by June 30. Initially, the first batch of the most dangerous materials was to be moved out of Syria on December 31.

However, the deadline was missed because of the ongoing war in Syria and technical issues. It was only on January 7 that “priority chemical materials” left the Syrian port of Latakia on a Danish ship for international waters.

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January 16, 2014 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Zionists covered up Sharon’s horrific words, deeds

By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | January 15, 2014

Ariel Sharon embodied the pure, unmitigated evil of Zionism. He was a war criminal, a terrorist, a mass murderer, a torturer, a rapist. The French term “genocidaire” also applies.

But Sharon did have one redeeming quality: He occasionally told the awful truth about himself and his country.

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Sharon vented his real feelings in public. In a Hebrew-language interview with Israeli writer Amos Oz, Sharon said:

“Even today I volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug out from underneath the feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us crying. Even if it means blowing up a few synagogues, I don’t care. And I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal… What your kind doesn’t understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it.”

The interview was published in Hebrew in the Israeli newspaper Davar on December 17th, 1982, later reprinted in a book. The Sharon quotes were attributed to “Z,” a high-level, heavy-set, 50-year-old Israeli officer “with a certain history” who was also a prosperous farmer. Israeli readers knew that “Z” was obviously Ariel Sharon, who perfectly fit the description, and whose real feelings about the subjects discussed in the interview were not exactly a state secret.

At the time, Sharon had just been fired as Defense Minister due to the international outcry over the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This was obviously the “certain history” referred to. No Israeli reader or journalist at the time had the slightest doubt that “Z” was Sharon.

Why did Sharon risk venting his real feelings under such a transparent veil?

Because he thought he had nothing to lose. At the time, everyone assumed Sharon’s political and military career was finished. He had, after all, just orchestrated and supervised one of the ugliest and most brutal massacres in human history – and been caught red-handed and disgraced. It seemed likely that he would either be executed, imprisoned for life, or at least live out the rest of his life hiding from Interpol.

In the Oz interview, Sharon lashed out at the liberal Zionists who were throwing him to the dogs. He felt these liberal Zionists were hypocrites who were just as guilty of genocide as he was, but too cowardly to admit it. In this he was right.

Sharon actually bragged about being evil:

“Tell me, do the evil men of this world have a bad time? They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear us instead of feeling sorry. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear our madness instead of admiring our nobility. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a savage country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go wild, that we might start World War Three just like that, or that we might one day go crazy and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East. Personally, I don’t want to be any better than Harry Truman who snuffed out half a million Japanese with two fine bombs.”

Paradoxically, Sharon’s interview with Oz may have helped save his political career. Many Israelis identified with Sharon’s sentiments and admired his bluntness. As Israel turned to the right, Sharon and his ideas became increasingly mainstream.

By the 1990s, Sharon had returned to center-stage in the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Though his brutal words in the Oz interview had helped pave the way for his comeback – and were a net asset in domestic politics, given the genocidal sentiments of the average Israeli – they were a huge liability for someone who wanted to be Prime Minister and appear on the international stage.

Pressure was applied to Amos Oz. When an American journalist named Holger Jensen accurately reproduced the Sharon “Z” quotes in an article published in 2002, the Zionist Liars Lobby went into action. Suddenly, Oz (a dedicated Zionist himself) quite absurdly denied that “Z” was – as everyone in Israel knew and still knows – the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Ariel Sharon.

That didn’t prevent the truth-teller from being punished. Holger Jensen was subjected to the Zionist equivalent of a journalistic lynching. To save his skin, he was forced to half-sincerely recant his attribution of the quote to Sharon, even though he obviously doubts the veracity of Oz’s disingenuous denial.

Here is another revealing quote attributed to Sharon :

“I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child that will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child are more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on…”

This quote, from an interview by Ouze Merham, has been disputed by the Zionists… which speaks for its likely authenticity! In any case, it accurately describes Sharon’s policies and actions. Under Sharon, the Israeli Defense Forces had a de facto official policy of “enticing Palestinian children like mice into a trap to murder them for sport,” as journalist Chris Hedges described it in his 2001 article “Gaza Diary.” The sport-shootings of children that Hedges witnessed are official Israeli policy; a British Medical Journal study a few years later confirmed more than 600 sniper murders of Palestinian children by the Israeli military.

The Zionist propaganda machine, which dominates Western media, works overtime to “scrub” such facts from public consciousness, just as it works to scrub the public record clean of Ariel Sharon’s too-revealing words. An apparent Mossad spin-off called CAMERA does much of the dirty work.

CAMERA has published outrageous lies about Sharon’s “Z” interview with Amos Oz. Now it is offering an even more ridiculous lie about Sharon’s notorious post-9/11 “We Jews control America” outburst.

In early October of 2001, three weeks after 9/11, Shimon Peres had been pressuring Ariel Sharon to respect American calls for a ceasefire, lest the Americans turn against Israel. According to a BBC News report, a furious Sharon turned toward Peres, saying: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”

The report was picked up by the BBC from Israeli media. I heard it myself on BBC radio news. Yet CAMERA absurdly claims: “These quotes originated with the pro-Hamas American group Islamic Association for Palestine…” Unfortunately, the largely Zionist-owned-and-operated Western media often accepts the ludicrous propaganda of CAMERA, MEMRI, the ADL, and other Zionist-extremist propaganda outlets without critical examination.

Today, the professional liars are trying to rehabilitate the image of the brutal Zionist butcher Ariel Sharon – by papering over the historical record of his vicious words and deeds. We must not allow them to get away with it.

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January 15, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sharon took “Brave Decisions” for Peace, says Agent Cameron

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By Stuart Littlewood | Intifada-Palestine | January 14, 2014

In a statement marking the death of Ariel Sharon, British prime minister David Cameron said he was “one of the most significant figures in Israeli history and as Prime Minister he took brave and controversial decisions in pursuit of peace, before he was so tragically incapacitated.”

This sickening tribute will not go down well outside Israel. Sharon, real name Scheinermann, was the child of immigrants fleeing Russia to the British mandate of Palestine in the 1920s. At the tender age of 10 the boy joined the Zionist youth movement Hassadeh. At 14 he was a member of a paramilitary youth battalion and later joined the terrorist group Haganah.

Sharon made a name for himself in 1953 when his secret death squad, Unit 101, dynamited homes and massacred 69 Palestinian civilians – half of them women and children – at Qibya in the West Bank. His troops later destroyed 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 12,000 people and deporting hundreds of young Palestinians to Jordan and Lebanon.

He was regarded as the patron of the settlers’ movement. He used his position as housing minister to encourage the establishment of a network of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to prevent the possibility of ethnically-cleansed Palestinians returning. Explaining his policy, Sharon said: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Judean) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

Chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, Rafael Eitan, remarked, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Sharon doubled the number of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the end of 2005 the total was 177.

In 1982 he masterminded Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in a huge death toll of Palestinians and Lebanese, a large proportion being children. An Israeli tribunal found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and he was forced to resign as Defence minister, but that didn’t stop him being appointed to other senior government posts.

In 2000, just before his election as prime minister, Sharon and an escort of over 1,000 Israeli armed police visited the Temple Mount, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, and declared that the complex would remain under perpetual Israeli control. It was a deliberately provocative move which triggered the second Intifada, although there are indications that the Palestinians had already planned an uprising and Sharon’s reckless move simply pushed the button.

He was also responsible for war crimes at Jenin in 2002 when, after the second intifada was declared, the Israeli army turned a variety of strategic weapons on the town. Accusations of a massacre were denied but many civilians living in the town and its refugee camp were killed in the street fighting and helicopter gunship attacks, and in sections of the town that were flattened by armoured bulldozers.

Israel prevented UN investigators gaining access but a Human Rights Watch report concluded:

Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes. Human Rights Watch found no evidence to sustain claims of massacres or large-scale extrajudicial executions by the IDF in Jenin refugee camp. However, many of the civilian deaths documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF. Many others could have been avoided if the IDF had taken proper precautions to protect civilian life during its military operation, as required by international humanitarian law… Some of the cases documented by Human Rights Watch amounted to summary executions, a clear war crime… Throughout the incursion, IDF soldiers used Palestinian civilians to protect them from danger, deploying them as ‘human shields’ and forcing them to perform dangerous work … the IDF prevented humanitarian organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, from gaining access to the camp and its civilian inhabitants, despite the great humanitarian need.

Sharon was the driving force behind the evil Separation or ‘Apartheid’ Wall which deviates wildly from the Demarcation/Green Line and effectively annexes 10 percent of the Palestinian West Bank’s choicest land and water resources, and cuts off villagers from their crops and livelihoods.

And there have been reports that Israeli death squads are authorised to enter “friendly” countries and kill those suspected of being a threat to the Jewish state wherever they are hiding. Targeted killings were pretty much restricted to Occupied Palestine but the appointment of a new Mossad director, Meir Dagan, in 2002 changed all that.

Sharon was said to have given his old buddy Dagan a mandate to revive the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad, even at the risk to Israel’s bilateral relations. It is quite possible that Mossad hoodlums are at this moment prowling the streets of London, Bradford, Glasgow and Manchester – as well as major cities in Europe and the US – snuffing out plotters against their rotten racist regime.

The president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Vivian Wineman, paying tribute to Sharon, says: “He was among Israel’s greatest military strategists and a master of tank warfare, an art learnt at staff college in Britain… His final major act demonstrated his vision and political boldness in unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza in pursuit of the peace process with the Palestinians.”

The truth is that Israel continued to control Gaza’s airspace, air-waves, coastal waters and border crossings, and still does, creating, in effect, an open air prison camp. The idea that Sharon’s withdrawal was a peace overture is nonsense.

Former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, called him “a warrior who became a man of peace”. A poll by the Israeli news website Ynet voted Sharon the eighth greatest Israeli of all time.

One of Sharon’s must famous (or should that be infamous?) sayings was at an Israeli Cabinet meeting when he (allegedly) told Peres: “We the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” Americans from now on should make damn’ sure they unshackle themselves from such people.

Sharon escaped earthly justice and belongs to the mega-criminal class that Cameron’s government changed our law of Universal Jurisdiction to protect. It is hoped others, however, will live to feel the teeth of justice chewing their sorry ass.

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January 14, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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