Everything They’re Telling Us About Syria….is False?
By Russ Baker | WhoWhatWhy | July 8, 2012
Friday, we read in the New York Times and elsewhere about one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most important supporters and allies having defected. The impression one gets is that Assad’s government is in a state of collapse— and this gives credibility to those pushing for Assad to turn over power.
But what the media are not mentioning is that Brigadier General Manaf Tlass did not defect directly from the Assad inner circle. He had already fallen into disfavor early in the uprising and lost his command in May 2011—14 months ago. If you had that additional piece of information, you would interpret the news reports in a totally different way.
When a piece of evidence that contradicts the overall impression is absent from the reportage, the reportage itself is almost worthless.
As are reports of horrific events without adequate fact-checking and follow-up. Remember the Houla massacre? Who carried that out?
Houla Whoops
The media told us that more than 100 people, including women and children, were brutally slaughtered at close range in the village of Houla in late May. The bloodshed, reported around the world, was ascribed to a militia, the Shabiha, which is loyal to Assad. Here’s an example, from the BBC website:
Survivors of the massacre in Syria’s Houla region have told the BBC of their shock and fear as regime forces entered their homes and killed their families. […]
Most witnesses who spoke to the BBC said they believed that the army and shabiha militiamen were responsible.
“We were in the house, they went in, the shabiha and security, they went in with Kalashnikovs and automatic rifles,” said survivor Rasha Abdul Razaq.
Later, a dribble of accounts cast doubt on this, since the people killed were, by and large, themselves supporters of Assad. But few heard about these. The BBC report did not say who Rasha was, or provide any evidence that she actually was there, or that if she was, she had any basis for saying that the killers were identifiable as to their affiliation. BBC quoted one other source, who did not provide a name. Despite the thinness of this material, the BBC story was picked up all over the world, and became perhaps the definitive account.
Hence, you probably were unaware of an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine-Zeitung, a traditional and serious German newspaper for whom I’ve written in the past. It published a report a month ago from a correspondent who got eyewitness accounts from people who he says had visited the Houla area. The correspondent, Rainer Hermann, says that these eyewitnesses were Assad opponents, yet discovered that government backers were not responsible for the massacre.
Hermann’s sources described the events as follows: anti-Assad rebels attacked army roadblocks just outside Houla, which had been intended to protect villages, where the majority are members of Assad’s Alawi sect, from Sunni militias. The soldiers at the roadblocks, overwhelmed, called for backup, which led to a 90-minute battle, in which both sides sustained extensive fatalities.
It was in this time frame that the unidentified militias entered Houla.
As Hermann wrote June 7:
“According to eyewitness accounts…those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.
…”Their findings contradict allegations of the rebels, who had blamed the Shabiha militias which are close to the regime.”
Thus, Hermann seemingly was able to do something that most of the Western reporters have been unable to do: find opponents of Assad who nevertheless may be willing to provide accounts that do not serve their own interests.
Of course, we could do with more information on Hermann’s sources. How do we know they were really in Houla? How do we know they are really opponents of Assad, not just pretending to be? Their story of inter-communal strikes makes more sense than the one that went around the world and turned so many people who had not been paying attention into supporters of toppling Assad. But nevertheless, everyone needs to provide more detail so we can try to ascertain what is true.
Almost all of the accounts in major news organization stories are characterized as being from the opposition, almost all portray everything as caused solely by the regime, and almost all add the disclaimer that the information “could not be independently verified.”
Talking Turkey
Though conventional journalism likes to advertise that it is “objective” and doesn’t take sides, I don’t recall hearing much from the Syrian regime’s point of view, beyond general and unconvincing denials following reports of regime wrongdoing. One almost gets the impression that the Syrian government does not wish to be heard.
But that turns out not to be the case.
With Syria’s neighbor Turkey increasingly the leading edge for NATO on toppling Assad, it’s interesting that a Turkish newspaper was willing to hear what the Syrian leader had to say:
In an interview with the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, Bashar Assad went after Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with an extraordinarily interesting critique. A version translated into English by the Syrian news agency, SANA, shows Assad stressing his goodwill toward the Turkish people in the first part of the interview, then raising questions about the motives of the alliance seeking to overthrow him:
Assad: …. Today, Erdogan is shedding the tears of hypocrites for the Syrian people. Why hasn’t he cried for those killed in some Gulf countries, although they are innocent, peaceful and unarmed? Why isn’t he speaking about democracy in some Gulf countries?
Journalist: Which country?
Assad: Qatar, for instance. Why didn’t he do anything after the Marmara ship incident except shouting? Why did he challenge Israel, and then suddenly agreed to deploy the missile shield in Turkey? Did he deploy it in order to protect Turkey from the attack of a hostile country? Did America build these bases in order to protect itself against this region? Which country in the region has the capability to threaten America? No country. […]
You don’t have to be a fan of Assad (and who is?) to find it worthwhile to read his comments. Hearing, almost for the first time, from the other side in a conflict gives one a rush—reminds me of a rule we were taught in journalism school but which never seemed to come up again, except in the most superficial ways :To find out what is really going on, make a real effort to speak to both sides.
All Hillary, All the Time
While the Western media simply ignores statements from the Syrian establishment, it functions as the flip side of the Syrian government press agency, publishing a relentless stream of declarations from the establishment trying to bring Assad down. For example, again from The Times, Hillary Clinton’s well-covered remarks on Tlass:
Later at a news conference, Mrs. Clinton said that General Tlass’s reported defection and those of other senior military officials had sent a powerful message that Mr. Assad’s government was on its way out. She described General Tlass as “a very close and longtime ally” of Mr. Assad and his father.
So what you have is Hillary Clinton being willing to distort the Tlass development, and the media only too happy to go along.
There’s a growing body of evidence/ that we Americans are being lied to by our government, with nary a peep from the people’s representatives in the press. That’s one development, sadly, that really is not news.
Related articles
- Avaaz’s war on Syria: Soros sponsored sorrow pleads for foreign intervention (worldmathaba.net)
- Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story — Is Anyone Paying Attention? (lewrockwell.com)
July 9, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Alawi, Assad, Bashar al-Assad, Frankfurter Allgemeine-Zeitung, Syria | Leave a comment
Washington’s new tricks on the road to global dominance
RT | July 9, 2012
The latest round of the war against an independent Syria unfolded in Paris last week at the gathering of the “Friends of Syria”.
Russia and China very rightly did not attend this “amoral” – in the diplomatic language of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – meeting. At the meeting western champions of the war insisted on their interpretation of the one-week old Geneva agreements: “transition government based on mutual consent” means “Bashar al-Assad must go”, affirmed French President Hollande.
This recent round of pressure highlights two new tactics employed by Washington: word games and an end-run around the United Nations itself.
First, the new formula “transition government”. The authoritative Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “regime” as “government” and “change” as “transition.” Thus, for those who reject “regime change,” a euphemism was created that has much better chances to go through.
Interestingly enough, this term was promoted by an expert of Russian origin, Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. On June 28, 2012 Trenin published a suggestion in his piece “Syria: A Russian Perspective”: “Russia might be willing to cooperate with the U.S. and other countries if the goal moves towards “transition” rather than “regime change” – what has been dubbed the “Yemen model.”
So who is Mr. Trenin? This retired Soviet colonel was a Senior Research Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome just before he was recruited in 1993 to join the Carnegie Moscow Center, created the same year by none other than Michael McFaul, the current US Ambassador in Moscow. After nearly 20 years in the pay of the Americans Trenin was rewarded with his current post as director by his former boss, Rose Gottemoeller, who left Moscow in 2008 to join the State Department where she is now Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. Big shoes to fill for Mr.Trenin, but in Washington they know how to pick their cadre.
The board of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington features – this world is truly small – Kofi Annan himself. Among the Endowments “Funders and Supporters” are George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the US National Intelligence Council, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, the US Defense Department, and a collection of other private and public enthusiasts.
Of course the “transition government” and “Yemen model” are nothing other than “regime change.” Honestly: we, Russians, brought up on Tolstoy and Chekhov, should be able to miss Washington’s elementary-school semantic traps.
Secondly, unable to push anti-Syrian resolutions through the UN Security Council due to Russia and China’s staunch resistance, Washington is building up a group of more than a hundred nations more pliable to US pressure. Such “coalitions of the willing” have been put together before, but this time the number of countries makes it look like a parallel anti-UN construct acting as if it is replacing the UN General Assembly itself.
Such a gathering, despite total absence of legitimacy, is not just a talking platform. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told Le Parisien that the Paris meeting would push for a Chapter VII United Nations resolution to enforce the transition plan. A Chapter VII resolution can authorize the use of military force “to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
In the short term, the United States may attempt to institutionalize this ad hoc grouping into a mechanism to implement a “final solution” to President Al-Assad. In the long term, Washington may try to solidify such structure into an anti-U.N. body of sycophants, ready and willing to approve any U.S. initiative.
Now, from tactics to strategy. Looking at the type of leaders that are seizing power in the Arab world with American assistance, a normal person is perplexed: why does the United States, with assistance of their local satellites, keep on removing moderate secular governments and bringing to power, in one country after another, increasingly radical extremists – that same type of people who committed 9/11, the greatest tragedy in U.S. post-WWII history?
Indeed, this question is not solvable by listening to Washington’s official line of arguments. But take a look at the policies of the US and its European partners during the 1930s. Then, America and its ever so reasonable and civilized European allies provided the financial, industrial and political support encouraging the highly energized, violent extremist Nazi and fascist movements in Europe. With a purpose: to direct its violence against Russia. According to the plan, Germany and Russia were to exhaust themselves so that the US would emerge dominant.
Similarly, the earlier use of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and again today the encouragement of various Muslim extremists including elements of the Muslim Brotherhood are part of the plan to create a regional movement which could be thrown against Iran, Russia and China. Such a furnace of war and chaos in the Middle East, the Caucuses and Central Asia will permanently disable all three of America’s strategic rivals and allow Washington to rise to uncontested world domination.
We should be able to decipher not only US language, but also US strategy. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was at the front line of the fight against Fascism in Europe. Today, Russia owes it to its history and to the fallen in the anti-fascist struggle to recognize, and before it is too late, avert American designs.
We must prevent Russian and other people from being drawn into a bloodbath of mutual extermination in the voracious interest of Washington’s drive for global hegemony.
July 9, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Bashar al-Assad, Michael McFaul, Russia, Syria, United States | Leave a comment
No Accountability Yet for Toronto G20 Police Crimes
TheRealNews | July 5, 2012
“Paul Jay: Until police and their political masters are held responsible under the criminal code, it can all happen again.”
July 7, 2012 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment
On History and Intellectual Courage
Empire Strikes Black | July 6, 2012
I want to talk about something which is taboo yet cliche. It is widely accepted yet universally denied. Those who talk about this are ridiculed as conspiracy theorists and racists. On the other hand, many people freely admit this reality but dismiss it as inconsequential and ‘the way it is’.
Jews dominate Hollywood, the global news media, and the global financial system. By extension it is often argued that ‘Jews run the world’. Essentially, one group of people with a unifying ideology and vested interest, is controlling the institutions by which we receive news. In addition to this, the film industry and cinematic media is something which we develop a very profound emotional attachment to and identify with closely. In other words, we are talking about an instrument of brainwashing. Is this not something we should talk about? If, for example, Hollywood, the global news media, and our ‘fiat money’ financial institutions were dominated by Arab Muslims, would we perceive this as a problem?
Of course we would, and rightly so. But this is not the case currently – we are afraid of speaking out and tackling this. Why?
What other group would be capable of attacking the world’s most powerful superpower, killing thousands in a sophisticated terror attack, and get away with it, blaming it on someone else? 9/11 is but one example, the USS Liberty is another. Most Americans have not even heard about the Liberty – a false flag attack designed to draw the USA into nuclear war with Soviet Russia.
The truth of the matter is, Jews are largely exempted from criticism in the West, and this runs much much deeper than any of us care to admit. Most people reading this are subconsciously thinking: ‘He just hates Jews because he’s Muslim’, ‘He’s a conspiracy theorist and he’s got nothing better to do’. Well, no I don’t hate Jews. No I’m not Muslim. No I’m not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ either; I am merely trying to exercise intellectual courage. We are constantly singing the praises of freedom, liberalism and democracy, but we are nothing more than a servile herd of cattle when it comes to being intellectually courageous. Our claims of love for democracy and freedom are utterly hollow without this.
Even the more ‘enlightened’ activists and bloggers (no point talking about the bought-and-paid-for mainstreamers) are more obsessed with catering to their readers’ ignorance and stroking their own ego, than performing an honest appraisal of these issues. Let’s be honest – it’s nice to get lots of ‘likes’ and to be patted on the back by your nodding, agreeing peers. To paraphrase Mark Twain, if you find yourself on the side of the majority, then it’s time to check yourself.
It is clear – talking about this issue makes one severely unpopular. This fact alone is a startling clue as to the underlying truths. Those who discuss this topic are stigmatized and ostracized, and it would be silly to think that there is no reason for this.
On a not unrelated note, I want you to help me with something. The popular reading of history portrays Jewish people as perennial victims who are persecuted anywhere they go for no reason other than that they are Jews, and irrational ‘anti-Semites’ hate them. The ‘holocaust’ is a paradigmatic example of this, and this is another issue which cannot be discussed in an open forum (so much for democracy). What I would like help with is this: history is replete with massacres, murders, torture, wars, and a myriad of different crimes that have been perpetrated by everybody from the Romans to the Americans; can you name a single historical event wherein, in the popular reading of history, Jews are portrayed as the aggressors and criminals?
Perhaps Jews really are perennial victims and have never done anything wrong. Or perhaps our reading of history is manipulated, censored, and reconstructed to convey a certain narrative? We often repeat the adage: history is written by the victor. Is there some truth in the idea that history is written by the powerful? If so, are we not being subjected to what is essentially mind control, whereby we harbor a completely incorrect interpretation of history? And is it not time that we started to put all historical events, especially those which we are told not to question, under the microscope?
Related articles
- There are two kinds of people in this world (empirestrikesblack.com)
July 6, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Antisemitism, Hollywood, Jews, United States, USS Liberty | Leave a comment
PA Agrees to Exhume Body of Yasser Arafat After Evidence of Radiation Poisoning Alleged
IMEMC & Agencies | July 4, 2012
Following a report Tuesday by Al-Jazeera, and a request by President Yasser Arafat’s widow Suha, the Palestinian Authority announced its support Wednesday for an international investigation into the president’s death which would include the exhumation of his body.
After a nine month investigation by Al-Jazeera reported that the Institut de Radiophysique in Switzerland found abnormally high levels of a rare radioactive element called polonium-210 on Arafat’s personal belongings, his widow Suha called for the exhumation of his body.
There are conflicting reports about whether Arafat’s symptoms indicate polonium poisoning. Al-Jazeera stated that the president’s symptoms were consistent with polonium poisoning but Ha’aretz reports contradicted this.
While testing of the president’s bones could provide confirmation of radiation poisoning, it would not necessarily lead to who was behind the incident. However, polonium is a difficult element to produce and the signature found in the bones could provide evidence of who created it.
Questions have surrounded the circumstances of Arafat’s death since his sudden illness during the second intifada in 2004. PLO official Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian Authority is looking to form an international tribunal to investigate the case modeled after the one that looked into the death of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri. But the former head of Israeli domestic intelligence, Avi Dichter told Israel’s Army Radio that the Palestinians are responsible for the outcome. He asserted, “The body is in their hands. It is in Ramallah and really, all the keys are in their hands.”
July 4, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception | Arafat, Avi Dichter, Israel, Palestinian National Authority, Saeb Erekat, Yasser Arafat | Leave a comment
The FBI’s ‘Islamic Terrorism’ Fraud
By Sherwood Ross | Aletho News | July 2, 2012
Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation at the center of which is a government informant, The Nation magazine reports.
The publication cites the findings of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. The Center has tracked 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001.
As the informants work for money or a reduction of their own criminal charges, their testimony may well be tainted. What’s particularly distressing, writes Petra Bartosiewicz, a New York City journalist in the July 2nd issue of the magazine, is that the FBI informants “have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself.”
The reporter explains that “Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”
One judge hearing a “terrorism” case, Colleen McMahon, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling along the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”
Adds Amna Akbar, a supervising attorney at CLEAR, the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project of the City University of New York Law School: “The FBI approaches the vast majority of our clients as potential informants to partake in mass surveillance of Muslim communities, unconnected to any real criminal investigation.”
Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, Bartosiewicz writes, the FBI reassigned nearly half of its field office positions formerly devoted to the ‘War on Drugs’ to the new ‘War on Terror.” It also launched 3,000 new counterterrorism investigations. Today, of an $8.1 billion budget, the FBI allocates $4.9 billion to intelligence and counterterrorism, “approximately $1.7 billion more than all other federal crimes combined,” the journalist reports.
The author says the FBI is operating in a post-9/11 environment of relaxed guidelines that allow the FBI “to engage in lengthy and extensive surveillance of individuals and communities with little or no evidence of any wrongdoing afoot.”
If Americans are not shocked that real criminal prosecutions are being scrapped by FBI Director Robert Mueller in favor of “terrorism” probes which may be cooked up by the FBI to feed the nation’s Islamophobic paranoia, perhaps they should be.
A related article published in the same issue of the magazine quotes Andrew Shryock, a University of Michigan professor, having this to say about prosecutions using government informants: “It’s fabricated police work. And the disturbing thing is not that it produces arrests but that the public tolerates it.”
Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
July 1, 2012 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | Colleen McMahon, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fordham University School of Law, Informant, Robert Mueller | Leave a comment
The History of US-Israel Relations
How the “special relationship” was created
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | September 2011
While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don’t support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.
Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S.[1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision in the word “lobby.”
As this article will demonstrate, the Israel Lobby is considerably more powerful and pervasive than other lobbies. Components of it, both individuals and groups, have worked underground, secretly and even illegally throughout its history, as documented by scholars and participants.
And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique influence over public knowledge.
The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.
It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred-year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.
In addition, this movement has been profoundly damaging to the United States itself.
As we will see in this two-part examination of the pro-Israel movement, it has targeted virtually every significant sector of American society; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; increasingly determined which candidates could become serious contenders for the U.S. presidency; and promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture.
It has promoted policies that have exposed Americans to growing danger, and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause), fueling recent actions that dismember some of our nation’s most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.
All this for a population that is considerably smaller than New Jersey.[2]
The beginnings
The Israel Lobby is just the tip of an older and far larger iceberg known as “political Zionism,” an international movement that began in the late 1800s with the goal of creating a Jewish state somewhere in the world. In 1897 this movement, led by a European journalist named Theodore Herzl[3], coalesced in the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basle, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing approximately 120 groups the first year; 900 the next.[4]
While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, and Texas,[5] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 95 percent Muslims and Christians, who owned 99 percent of the land.[6] As numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show, Zionists planned to push out these non-Jews – financially, if possible; violently if necessary.[7]
Political Zionism in the U.S.
In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state began popping up around the United States.[8] Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade.[9] A precursor to the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[10]
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, which at that time controlled Palestine. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents recognized the importance of the Turkish embassy for Jewish Americans, “… especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government.”
Every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed this precedent for the next 30 years. “During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain,” writes Dalin.[11]
By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.[12] Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basle, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in American cities that had large Jewish populations.[13]
In 1897-98 numerous additional Zionist societies were founded in the East and the Midwest. In 1898 the first annual conference of American Zionists convened in New York on the 4th of July, where they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ).[14]
By 1910 the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Even in its infancy, when it was still considered relatively weak, Zionism was becoming a movement to which Congressmen listened, particularly in the eastern cities.[15]
The movement continued to expand, and by 1914 several additional Zionist groups had cropped up. The religious Mizrachi faction was formed in 1903, the Labor party in 1905 and Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, in 1912.[16]
By 1922 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S. and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million.[17]
From early on Zionists actively pushed their agenda in the media, one Zionist organizer proudly proclaimed in 1912 “the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies.”[18] The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 only one New York Yiddish newspaper failed to qualify as Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927.[19]
The State Department Objects
Unlike politicians, State Department officials not dependent on votes and campaign donations, and charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity – were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. In memo after memo, year after year, U.S. diplomatic and military experts pointed out that Zionism was counter to both U.S. interests and principles.[20]
Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, when the Zionist Literary Society approached the Taft administration for an endorsement, Knox turned them down flat, noting that “problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.”[21]
Despite that small setback in 1912, Zionists` garnered a far more significant victory in the same year; one that was to have enormous consequences both internationally and in the United States and that was part of a pattern of influence that continues through today.
Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the “Parushim”
In 1912 prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis, who was to go on to become a Supreme Court Justice, became a Zionist. Within two years he became head of the international Zionist Central Office, which had moved to America from Germany a little while before.[22]
While Brandeis is an unusually well known Supreme Court Justice, very few Americans are aware of the significant role he played in World War I and of his connection to Palestine.
Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work on the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Harvard author and former New York Times journalist Peter Grose, sympathetic to Zionism[23], writes:
“Brandeis created an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society. As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath ‘to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.’”[24]
At the secret initiation ceremony, the new member was told:
“You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation.”[25]
‘We must work silently, through education and infection’
An early recruiter explained: “An organization which has the aims we have must be anonymous, must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise.” He wrote that to work openly would be “suicidal” for their objective.
Grose writes: “The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause long before official government planners had come up with anything. For example, as early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.”[26]
Brandeis was a close personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this position to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.
In 1916 President Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Although Brandeis officially resigned from all his private clubs and affiliations, including his leadership of Zionism, behind the scenes he continued this Zionist work, receiving daily reports in his Supreme Court chambers and issuing orders to his loyal lieutenants.[27]
When the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) was reorganized in 1918, Brandeis was listed as its “honorary president.” However, he was more than just “honorary.”
As historian Donald Neff writes, “Through his lieutenants, he remained the power behind the throne.” One of these lieutenants was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another particularly well-regarded justice, and another whose Zionist activities have largely gone unnoted.[28]
Zionist membership expanded dramatically during World War I, despite the efforts of some Jewish anti-Zionists, who called the movement a “foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.”[29]
World War I & the Balfour Declaration
Unlike some wars, most analysts consider WWI a pointless conflict that resulted from diplomatic entanglements rather than some travesty of justice or aggression. Yet, it was catastrophic to a generation of Europeans, killing 14 million people.[30]
The United States joined this unnecessary war a few years into the hostilities, costing many American lives, even though the U.S. was not party to the alliances that had drawn other nations into the fray. This even though Americans had been strongly opposed to entering the war and President Woodrow Wilson had won with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”
Americans today are aware of these facts. What few know is that Zionists pushed for the U.S. to enter the war on Britain’s side as part of a deal to gain British support for their colonization of Palestine.
From the very beginning of their movement, Zionists realized that if they were to succeed in their goal of creating a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited by non-Jews, they needed backing from one of the “Great Powers.” They tried the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at the time, but were turned down (although they were told that Jews could settle throughout other parts of the Ottoman empire and become Turkish citizens).[31]
They then turned to Britain, which was also initially less than enthusiastic. Famous English Arabists such as Gertrude Bell pointed out that Palestine was Arab and that Jerusalem was sacred to all three major monotheistic faiths.
Future British Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon similarly stated that Palestine was already inhabited by half a million Arabs who would “not be content to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.”[32]
However, once the British were embroiled in World War I, and particularly during 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies,[33] Zionists were able to play a winning card. Zionist leaders promised the British government that Zionists in the U.S. would push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised to support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward.[34]
As a result, in 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued a letter to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. Known as the Balfour Declaration, this letter promised that Britain would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
The letter then qualified this somewhat by stating that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The “non-Jewish communities” were 90 percent of Palestine’s population at that time, vigorous Zionist immigration efforts having slightly expanded the percentage of Jews living in Palestine by then.[35]
The letter, while officially signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, was actually written by Leopold Amery, a British official who, it came out later, was a secret and fervent Zionist[36].
While this letter was a less than ringing endorsement of Zionism, Zionists considered it a major breakthrough as it cracked open a door that they would later force wider and wider open.
These Balfour-WWI negotiations are referred to in various documents. For example, Samuel Landman, secretary of the World Zionist Organization, described them in a 1935 article in World Jewry:
“After an understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and [Zionists] Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and for support in the USA for the Allied cause, so as to bring about a radical pro-Ally tendency in the United States.”[37]
British Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1923, reminded his colleagues: “The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world… and it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists… did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.”[38]
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to this deal, telling a British commission in 1935: “Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, writes that the Balfour declaration “…was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers [Britain’s enemies in World War I]”.[39]
In 1917 President Wilson, who had been voted into office by Americans who believed his promises that he would keep them out of the war, changed course and plunged the U.S. into a tragic and pointless European conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed and injured.[40] Over 1,200 American citizens who opposed the war were rounded up and imprisoned, some for years.[41]
The influence of Brandeis and other Zionists in the U.S. had enabled Zionists to form an alliance with Britain, one of the world’s great powers, a remarkable achievement for a non-state group and a measure of Zionists’ immense power. As historian Kolsky states, the Zionist movement was now “an important force in international politics.”[42]
Paris Peace Conference 1919: Zionists defeat Christian leaders’ calls for self-determination
After the war, the victors met in a peace conference and agreed to a set of Peace Accords that addressed, among many issues, the fate of Ottoman Empire’s Middle East territories. The Allies stripped the defeated Empire of its Middle Eastern holdings and divided them between Britain and France, which were to hold them under a “mandate” system until the populations were “ready” for self-government. Britain got the mandate over Palestine.
Zionists, including Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the World Zionist Organization, and an American delegation, went to the conference to lobby for a Jewish “home”[43] in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords.[44] The official U.S. delegation to the Peace Conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists.
Distinguished American Christians posted in the Middle East, who consistently supported self-determination, went to Paris to oppose Zionists. Numerous prominent Christian leaders in the U.S. – including two of the most celebrated pastors of their day, Harry Emerson Fosdick and Henry Sloane Coffin[45] – also opposed Zionism. However, as a pro-Israel author notes, they were “simply outgunned” by Zionists.[46]
The most prominent American in the Middle East at the time, Dr. Howard Bliss, President of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), traveled to Paris to urge forming a commission to determine what the people of the Middle East wanted for themselves, a suggestion that was embraced by the U.S. diplomatic staff in Paris.[47]
Princeton Professor Philip Brown, in Cairo for the YMCA, provided requested reports to the U.S. State Department on what Zionism’s impact would be on Palestine. He stated that it would be disastrous for both Arabs and Jews and went to Paris to lobby against it.[48]
William Westermann, director of the State Department’s Western Asia Division, which covered the region, similarly opposed the Zionist position. He wrote that “[it] impinges upon the rights and the desires of most of the Arab population of Palestine.” Westermann and other US diplomats felt that Arab claims were much more in line with Wilson’s principles of self-determination and circulated Arab material.[49]
President Wilson decided to send a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation in person. After spending six weeks in the area interviewing both Jews and Palestinians, the commission, known as the King-Crane commission, recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.[50]
The commissioners stated that the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine could be accomplished only with “the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” pointing out that to subject the Palestinians “to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination] and of the peoples’ rights…”[51]
They went on to point out that “the well-being and development” of the people in the region formed “a sacred trust,” that the people should become completely free, and that the national governments “should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.”[52]
The report stated that meetings with Jewish representatives made it clear that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” concluded that armed force would be required to accomplish this, and urged the Peace Conference to dismiss the Zionist proposals.[53] The commission recommended that “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.”[54]
Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation, however, and the report was suppressed until after the Peace Accords were enacted. As a pro-Israel historian noted, “with the burial of the King-Crane Report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.”[55] The US delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.[56]
Ultimately, the mandate over Palestine given to Britain, supported the Zionist project and included the Balfour language. According to the mandate, Britain would be “responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration … in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”[57]
Brandeis and Frankfurter vs. U.S. diplomat
The idea behind Zionism was to create a state where Jews worldwide could escape anti-Semitism.[58]
There are various documented cases in which fanatical Zionists exploited, exaggerated, invented, or even perpetrated “anti-Semitic” incidents both to procure support and to drive Jews to immigrate to the Zionist-designated homeland.[59] A few examples are discussed below.
One such case involved a young diplomat named Hugh Gibson, who in 1919 was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Poland. After he arrived in Poland, Gibson, who was highly regarded and considered particularly brilliant,[60] began to report that there were far fewer anti-Semitic incidents than Americans were led to believe. He wrote his mother: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.”[61]
His dispatches came to the attention of Brandeis and his protégé (and future supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who demanded a meeting with Gibson. Gibson later wrote of their accusations:
“I had [Brandeis and Frankfurter claimed] done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said… that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work…. They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”[62]
Frankfurter hinted that if Gibson continued these reports, Zionists would block his confirmation by the Senate.
Gibson was outraged and sent a 21-page letter to the State Department. In it he shared his suspicions that this was part of “a conscienceless and cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad that they must turn to Zionism for relief.”
In 1923 another American diplomat in Poland, Vice Consul Monroe Kline, echoed Gibson’s analysis: “It is common knowledge that Zionists are continually and constantly spreading propaganda, through their agencies over the entire world, of political and religious persecution.”[63]
Zionists and Nazis
Perhaps the most extreme case of Zionist exploitation of anti-Semitism to further their cause came during the rise of Adolf Hitler. Historians have documented that Zionists sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only be safe in a Jewish state.[64]
When FDR made efforts in 1938[65] and 1943[66] to provide havens for Nazi refugees, Zionists opposed these projects because they did not include Palestine.
Morris Ernst, FDR’s international envoy for refugees, wrote in his memoir that when he worked to help find refuge for those fleeing Hitler, “…active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the U.S.] in order to undermine political Zionism… Zionist friends of mine opposed it.”[68]
Ernst wrote that he found the same fanatical reaction among all the Jewish groups he approached, whose leaders, he found, were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”[69]
FDR finally gave up, telling Ernst: “We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.”[70]
Journalist Erskine B. Childers, son of a former Irish Prime Minister, wrote in the Spectator in 1960, “One of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept.”
He explained that “this was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP [displaced persons] camps.”
Childers, author of several books on conflict resolution and peace-keeping who later became Secretary General of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, commented: “It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.”[71]
Zionist fake “hate” attacks on Iraq Jews
Zionists wished for a massive “in-gathering of Jews” in one state, but most Iraqi Jews wanted nothing to do with it, according to Iraq’s then-Chief Rabbi, who stated: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism.”
“Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1,000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation,” the rabbi declared.[72]
Zionists worked to change that by covertly attacking Iraqi Jews so as to induce them to “flee” to Israel. Zionists planted bombs in synagogues and in an American building “in an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews,” according to Author and former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland.
“Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel,” writes Eveland, and “… most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had ‘rescued’ really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”[73]
Similarly, Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author who later lived in Israel and the U.S., describes this program from the inside: “I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it.”
Giladi states that “Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel.” In order “to force them to leave,” Giladi writes, “Jews killed Jews.” He goes on to say that in an effort “to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors.”[74]
The modern Israel Lobby is born
The immediate precursor to today’s pro-Israel lobby began in the early 1940s under the leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, originally from Lithuania. He created the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which by 1943 had acquired a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread.
In addition to this money, Zionists had become influential in creating the United Jewish Appeal in 1939[75], giving them access to the organization’s gargantuan financial resources: $14 million in 1941, $150 million by 1948. This was four times more than Americans contributed to the Red Cross.[76]
With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”[77][78]
AZEC instructed activists to “make direct contact with your local Congressman or Senator” and to go after union members, wives and parents of servicemen, and Jewish war veterans. AZEC provided activists with form letters to use and schedules of anti-Zionist lecture tours to oppose and disrupt.
A measure of its power came in 1945 when Silver disliked a British move in 1945 that would be harmful to Zionists. AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements – the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches.[79]
Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition.[80]
Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed Zionism in the 1940s and 50s, writes in his memoirs that there was a “ubiquitous propaganda campaign reaching just about every point of political leverage in the country.”[81]
The Zionist Organization of America bragged of the “immensity of our operations and their diversity” in its 48th Annual Report, stating, “We reach into every department of American life… ”[82]
Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding. Among other things, would-be dissenters were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured.[83]
Berger writes that when he and a colleague opposed a Zionist resolution in Congress, Emanuel Cellar, a New York Democrat who was to serve in Congress for almost 50 years, told them: “They ought to take you b……s out and shoot you.”
When it was unclear that President Harry Truman would support Zionism, Cellar and a committee of Zionists told him that they had persuaded Dewey to support the Zionist policy and demanded that Truman also take this stand. Cellar reportedly pounded on Truman’s table and said that if Truman did not do so, “We’ll run you out of town.[84]
Jacob Javits, another well-known Congressman, this one a Republican, told a Zionist women’s group: “We’ll fight to death and make a Jewish State in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.”[85]
Richard Stevens, author of American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947, reports that Zionists infiltrated the boards of several Jewish schools that they felt didn’t sufficiently promote the Zionist cause. When this didn’t work, Stevens writes, they would start their own pro-Zionist schools.[86]
Stevens writes that in 1943-44 the ZOA distributed over a million leaflets and pamphlets to public libraries, chaplains, community centers, educators, ministers, writers and “others who might further the Zionist cause.”[87]
Alfred Lilienthal, who had worked in the State Department, served in the U.S. Army in the Middle East from 1943-45, and became a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, reports that monthly sales of Zionist books totaled between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout 1944-45.
He reports that Zionists subsidized books by non-Jewish authors that supported the Zionist agenda. They would then promote these books jointly with commercial publishers. Several of them became best sellers.[88]
Zionists manufacture Christian support
Silver and other Zionists played a significant role in creating Christian support for Zionism, a project Brandeis encouraged.[89]
Secret Zionist funds, eventually reaching $150,000 in 1946, were used to revive an elitist Protestant group, the American Palestine Committee. This group had originally been founded in 1932 by Emanuel Neumann, a member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization. The objective was to organize a group of prominent (mainly non-Jewish) Americans in moral and political support of Zionism. Frankfurter was one of the main speakers at its launch.[90]
Silver’s headquarters issued a directive saying,“In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediate organized.”[91]
Author Peter Grose reports that the Christian committee’s operations “were hardly autonomous. Zionist headquarters thought nothing of placing newspaper advertisements on the clergymen’s behalf without bothering to consult them in advance, until one of the committee’s leaders meekly asked at least for prior notice before public statements were made in their name.”[92]
AZEC formed another group among clergymen, the Christian Council on Palestine. An internal AZEC memo stated that the aim of both groups was to “crystallize the sympathy of Christian America for our cause.”[93]
By the end of World War II the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee boasted a membership of 6,500 public figures, including senators, congressmen, cabinet members, governors, state officers, mayors, jurists, clergymen, educators, writers, publishing, and civic and industrial leaders.
Historian Richard Stevens explains that Christian support was largely gained by exploiting their wish to help people in need. Stevens writes that Zionists would proclaim “the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,” thus linking the refugee problem with Palestine as allegedly the only solution.[94]
Stevens writes that the reason for this strategy was clear: “… while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favor of the Zionist cause through the refugee problems.”[95]
Few if any of these Christian supporters had any idea that the creation of the Jewish state would entail a massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of the non-Jews who made up the large majority of Palestine’s population, creating a new and much longer lasting refugee problem.
Nor did they learn that during and after Israel’s founding 1947-49 war, Zionist forces attacked a number of Christian sites. Donald Neff, former Time Magazine Jerusalem bureau chief and author of five books on Israel-Palestine, reports in detail on Zionist attacks on Christian sites in May 1948, the month of Israel’s birth.
Neff tells us that a group of Christian leaders complained that month that Zionists had killed and wounded hundreds of people, including children, refugees and clergy, at Christian churches and humanitarian institutions.
For example, the group charged that “‘many children were killed or wounded’ by Jewish shells on the Convent of Orthodox Copts… ; eight refugees were killed and about 120 wounded at the Orthodox Armenian Convent… ; and that Father Pierre Somi, secretary to the Bishop, had been killed and two wounded at the Orthodox Syrian Church of St. Mark.”
“The group’s statement said Arab forces had abided by their promise to respect Christian institutions, but that the Jews had forcefully occupied Christian structures and been indiscriminate in shelling churches,” reports Neff. He quotes a Catholic priest: “‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ [The priest] added that Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, ‘but their deeds do not correspond to their words.’”
After Zionist soldiers invaded and looted a convent in Tiberias, the U.S. Consulate sent a bitter dispatch back to the State Department complaining of “the Jewish attitude in Jerusalem towards Christian institutions.’”[96]
Zionist Colonization Efforts in Palestine
As early Zionists in the U.S. and elsewhere pushed for the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists in Palestine simultaneously tried to clear the land of Muslim and Christian inhabitants and replace them with Jewish immigrants.
This was a tall order, as Muslims and Christians accounted for more than 95 percent of the population of Palestine. Zionists planned to try first to buy up the land until the previous inhabitants had emigrated; failing this, they would use violence to force them out. This dual strategy was discussed in various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians.
As this colonial project grew, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land.
When the buy-out effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.
By the eve of the creation of Israel, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6 percent.
This was in 1947, when the British at last announced that they would end their control of Palestine. Britain turned the territory’s fate over to the United Nations.
Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country.
Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine. (While they rarely announced this publicly, their stated plan was to later take the rest of Palestine.
U.S. Officials Oppose Zionism
The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and US interests.
For example, the director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs consistently recommended against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The director, named Loy Henderson, warned that the creation of such a state would go against locals’ wishes, imperil US interests and violate democratic principles.
Henderson emphasized that the US would lose moral standing in the world if it supported Zionism:
“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the [second world] war.”
When Zionists began pushing the partition plan in the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal, saying that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and was “not based on any principle.” He warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.… ”
Henderson elaborated further on how plans to partition Palestine would violate American and UN principles:
“…[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race… ”[97]
Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and threatening his family. They pressured the State Department to transfer him elsewhere; one analyst describes this as “the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests” were moved on.[98]
In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then officially under India). (In recent years, virtually every State Department country desk has been directed by a Zionist.)
But Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the [State] Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”[99]
He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.
In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[100]
Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on US national interests.
Grady argued that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.” He also described the decisive power of the lobby:
“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended….. I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty…. [I]n the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”[101]
Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the Soviets.”[102]
Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson’s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Mulhall, records Acheson’s warning of the danger for American interests:
“… to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”[103]
The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:
“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN’s own charter.”[104]
Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.
An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:
“… the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN.… In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”[105]
And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw one last outcome of the “partition” plan: that no Arab state would actually ever come to be in Palestine.[106]
Truman Accedes to Pro-Israel Lobby
President Harry Truman, however, ignored this advice and chose instead to support the Zionist partition plan. Truman’s political advisor, Clark Clifford, believed that the Jewish vote and contributions were essential to winning the upcoming presidential election, and that supporting the partition plan would garner that support. (Truman’s opponent, Dewey, took similar stands for similar reasons.)
Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious to see electoral considerations taking precedence over policies based on national interest. He condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would make “[t]he great dignity of the office of President seriously diminished.”[107]
Marshall wrote that the counsel offered by Clifford “was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President… ”[108]
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal also tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose the Zionists. He was outraged that Truman’s Mideast policy was based on what he called “squalid political purposes,” asserting that “United States policy should be based on United States national interests and not on domestic political considerations.”[109]
Forrestal represented the general Pentagon view when he said that “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”[110]
A report by the National Security Council warned that the Palestine turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the United States. A CIA report stressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and its oil resources.
Similarly, George F. Kennan, the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, issued a top-secret document on January 19, 1947 that outlined the enormous damage done to the US by the partition plan (“Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with Respect to Palestine”).[111]
Kennan cautioned that “important U.S. oil concessions and air base rights” could be lost through US support for partition and warned that the USSR stood to gain by the partition plan.
Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s nephew and a legendary intelligence agent, was another who was deeply disturbed by events, noting:
“The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests…. Only when the national interests of the United States, in their highest terms, take precedence over all other considerations, can a logical, farseeing foreign policy be evolved. No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes… ”[112]
He went on:
“The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict. It is to be hoped that American Zionists and non-Zionists alike will come to grips with the realities of the problem.”
Truman wrote in his memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.” There were now about a million dues-paying Zionists in the U.S.[113]
Then, as now, in addition to unending pressure there was financial compensation, Truman reportedly receiving a suitcase full of money from Zionists while on his train campaign around the country.[114]
Personal influences on Truman
One person key in such Zionist financial connections to Truman was Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy businessman who was later to play a similar role with Kennedy and Johnson.
While many Americans at the time and since have been aware of Truman’s come-from-behind win over Dewey, few people know about the critical role of Feinberg and the Zionist lobby in financing Truman’s victory. (When the CIA later discovered that Feinberg also helped to finance illegal gun-running to Zionist groups, the Truman administration looked the other way.[115] )
An individual inside the US government who worked to influence policy was David K. Niles, executive assistant first to FDR and then to Truman. Niles, according to author Alfred Lilienthal, was “a member of a select group of confidential advisers with an often-quoted passion for anonymity. Niles… though occasionally publicized as Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man, remained totally unknown to the public.”[116]
Behind the scenes Niles was regularly briefed by the head of the Washington Office of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
When it was discovered that top secret information was being passed on to the Israeli government, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar Bradley told Truman he would have to choose between Bradley and Niles. Not long after, Niles resigned and went on a visit to Israel.[117]
Another who helped influence Truman was his old Kansas City friend and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, active in B’nai B’rith and “a passionate believer in Jewish nationalism,” who was able to procure Zionist access to the President at key times.[118] Truman credited Jacobson with making a contribution of “decisive importance.”[119]
Still another was Sam Rosenman, a political advisor to Truman, who screened State Department memos sent to Truman. A longtime diplomat reports that one of the departments memoranda was returned, unopened, with a notation, “President Truman already knows your views and doesn’t need this.”[120]
Evan M Wilson, a career diplomat who had been U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, later wrote that Truman had been largely motivated by “domestic political considerations.”[121] At least one of Truman’s key policy speeches had been drafted primarily by the Washington representative of the Jewish Agency.[122]
Acting Secretary of State James E. Webb in a dispatch to Secretary of State Acheson noted the obvious: “Past record suggests Israel has had more influence with US than has US with Israel.”[123]
Pro-Israel Pressure on General Assembly Members
When it was clear that, despite US support, the partition recommendation did not have the two-thirds support of the UN General Assembly required to pass, Zionists pushed through a delay in the vote. They then used this period to pressure numerous nations into voting for the recommendation. A number of people later described this campaign.
Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the US government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency, wrote afterward, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any countries that did not vote the right way.[124]
Another Zionist proudly stated:
“Every clue was meticulously checked and pursued. Not the smallest or the remotest of nations, but was contacted and wooed. Nothing was left to chance.”
Financier and longtime presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia; rubber magnate Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia.[125]
Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.
Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Truman domestic advisor Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress).
Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land… ”[126]
The delegate went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”
Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the Philippine delegate voted in favor of partition.
The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. Affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.[127]
On Nov 29, 1947 the partition resolution, 181, passed. While this resolution is frequently cited, it was of limited (if any) legal impact. General Assembly resolutions, unlike Security Council resolutions, are not binding on member states. For this reason, the resolution requested that “[t]he Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation,”[128] which the Security Council never did. Legally, the General Assembly Resolution was a “recommendation” and did not create any states.
What it did do, however, was increase the fighting in Palestine. Within months (and before Israel dates the beginning of its founding war) the Zionists had forced out 413,794 people. Zionist military units had stealthily been preparing for war before the UN vote and had acquired massive weaponry, some of it through a widespread network of illicit gunrunning operations in the US under a number of front groups. (see below)
The UN eventually managed to create a temporary and very partial ceasefire. A Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had previously rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis was dispatched to negotiate an end to the violence. Israeli assassins killed him and Israel continued what it was to call its “war of independence.”[129]
At the end of this war, through a larger military force than that of its adversaries and the ruthless implementation of plans to push out as many non-Jews as possible, Israel came into existence on 78 percent of Palestine.
But let us take a closer look at the violence that followed the UN recommendation.
Massacres and the Conquest of Palestine
The passing of the partition resolution in November 1947 triggered the violence that State Department and Pentagon analysts had predicted and for which Zionists had been preparing. There were at least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages, half of them before a single Arab army joined the conflict.[130] Zionist forces were better equipped and had more men under arms than their opponents[131] and by the end of Israel’s “War of Independence” over 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were ruthlessly expelled.[132] Zionists had succeeded in the first half of their goal: Israel, the self-described Jewish State, had come into existence.
The massacres were carried out by Zionist forces, including Zionist militias that had engaged in terrorist attacks in the area for years preceding the partition resolution.[133]
Descriptions of the massacres, by both Palestinians and Israelis, are nightmarish. An Israeli eyewitness reported that at the village of al-Dawayima:
“The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead… One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.”[134]
One Palestinian woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife.[135]
One of the better-documented massacres occurred in a small, neutral Palestinian village called Deir Yassin in April 1948 – before a single Arab army had joined the conflict. A Swiss Red Cross representative was one of the first to arrive on the scene, where he found 254 dead, including 145 women, 35 of them pregnant.[136]
Witnesses reported that the attackers lined up families – men, women, grandparents and children, even infants – and shot them.[137]
An eyewitness and future colonel in the Israeli military later wrote of the militia members: “They didn’t know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good.”[138]
The Red Cross representative who found the bodies at Deir Yassin arrived in time to see some of the killing in action. He wrote in his diary that Zionist militia members were still entering houses with guns and knives when he arrived. He saw one young Jewish woman carrying a blood-covered dagger and saw another stab an old couple in their doorway. The representative wrote that the scene reminded him of S.S. troops he had seen in Athens.
Richard Catling, British assistant inspector general for the criminal division, reported on “sexual atrocities” committed by Zionist forces. “Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered,” he reported. “Old women were also molested.”[139]
The Deir Yassin attack was perpetrated by two Zionist militias and coordinated with the main Zionist forces, whose elite unit participated in part of the operation.[140] The heads of the two militias, Menachem Begin and Yitzakh Shamir, later became Prime Ministers of Israel.
Begin sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:
“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”[141]
Approximately six months later, Begin (who had also publicly taken credit for a number of other terrorist acts, including blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people) came on a tour of America. The tour’s sponsors included famous playwright Ben Hecht, a fervent Zionist who applauded Irgun violence,[142] and eventually included 11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressmen, 17 Justices, and numerous other public officials.
The State Department, fully aware of his violent activities in Palestine, tried to reject Begin’s visa but was overruled by Truman.[143]
Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?” Begin proclaimed, “In the Middle East? In all the world!”
Terrorists set up U.S. front groups Hillel Kook and “The Bergson Boys”
The Irgun had been operating in the U.S. since the 1930s. As one of their leaders later wrote, “It was in Europe of those days that the idea of transferring the focal point of our activity to the United States was born, and it was from there that we left on a mission that lasted far longer than originally planned… ”[144]
The “we” referred to a small group known as the Irgun Delegation that operated in the U.S. from the late 1930s until 1948 and that formed a half dozen front organizations for what they themselves called “a military operation.”[145]
Two of the leaders were Yitshaq Ben-Ami (father of Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of today’s J-Street) and “Peter Bergson,” the pseudonym of the senior Irgun officer working outside Palestine, Hillel Kook. The group is often called the Bergson Group.[146]
Among their numerous activities they lobbied Congress and the White House, organized a march on Washington, D.C. of 500 Rabbis, placed full-page ads in newspapers around the U.S., and produced a pageant “We Will Never Die!” celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Moss Hart, featuring music by Kurt Weil, and starring Edward G. Robinson.
Forty thousand attended the extravaganza’s New York performances. It then went on to play in most of America’s largest cities.[147]
While the various organizations created by the Irgun Delegation frequently pushed for rescuing European Jews, one of the major demands was for the creation of a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” This was a goal that Revisionist Zionists had sought even before the Nazi holocaust had begun and is believed to have had a mixed agenda.
Author William Rubinstein writes, “It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, than with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.”[148]
Critics point out that the delegation did not manage to rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust.[149]
Bergson-Kook’s uncle was Rabbi Avraham Ytzhak Kook, often known as “Rabbi Kook the Elder.” Rabbi Kook was originally from Eastern Europe, had worked toward the Balfour Declaration in Britain, and eventually became the “Chief Rabbi of Palestine.”
Perhaps his most significant accomplishment was to devise an ideology that merged a kabalistic version of religious Judaism with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues today.[150]
The Kabala teaches that non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan, and that the world was created solely for the sake of Jews.[151] Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews… is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”[152]
In addition to spanning the Jewish religious-secular continuum, the Irgun Delegation spanned the political spectrum from left to right. Its historian Judith Baumel writes that it “evinced many of the unique characteristics of Eastern European protofascism” while also forming partnerships with communists and Jews who belonged to left-wing American groups.
All of this was hidden from view, however, as the “Bergson Boys” aimed for the American man in the street, using tantalizing slogans, illustrated advertisements, and “seductive curiosity-whetting gimmicks.” As Baumel notes, the Irgun Delegation’s primary triumph was to understand “the power of Madison Avenue.”[153]
Rabbi Korff and the “Political Action Committee for Palestine”
Another terrorist front group, the Political Action Committee for Palestine, was formed by Rabbi Baruch Korff[154], who indirectly admitted that the financing of terrorism was among its activities.[155]
In actuality, Korff did more than just finance terrorism.
In 1946 British intelligence uncovered plots by Jewish terrorists to assassinate the British foreign minister. Details were heavily censored from the public for many years, but eventually it came out that Korff was part of this.[156]
In 1947 Rabbi Korff and his group planned to drop explosive bombs on the British foreign office, accompanied by 10,000 Stern Gang leaflets. The plot was foiled by a young American aviator they had tried to recruit, Reginald Gilbert, promising him “lucrative jobs” after the mission was completed.[157]
Gilbert, who had flown 136 combat missions over Europe, shooting down three German planes and damaging seven, informed the American Embassy, and then worked with Scotland Yard and the Paris police to have the would-be assassins arrested. French police, who said they “feared for the flier’s life if the Stern gang ever caught up with him,” flew him to London until he could return to the U.S.[158]
Although almost no one remembers this plot, it was headline news at the time in newspapers across the United States,[159] though many sanitized versions mentioned only the leaflets.
In a first-hand account of the plot published by the New York Herald Tribune, Gilbert writes that the group planned much more than a leaflet drop. The first idea was to drop bombs on Parliament, but the target was subsequently changed to the Foreign Ministry, “because Korff held a grudge against that office for refusing him a visa to Palestine.”
When Gilbert (who, at the direction of the Paris police, was pretending to go along with the plot) mentioned that fog might prevent them from locating the exact target, Korff told him in that case they would just drop the bombs anywhere on London. When Gilbert protested that innocent people might be killed, Rabbi Korff replied, “They are British, so they are our enemy.’”[160]
Korff then came up with various stories. At one point he claimed that Gilbert had been the guilty party. Next, he and Peter Bergson claimed that the plot was a British “frameup” and that Gilbert was a British agent.[161]
According to the London Times, Rabbi Korff later said that “millions of dollars had been subscribed by private American sources’ to fund the purchase of the aircraft.”[162]
In 1948 Korff published a large advertisement in the New York Post calling a State Department policy against enforcing partition “pure and simple anti-Semitism… plain everyday anti-Semitism, incorporated in the hearts and minds of those who govern free America.”[163]
Later, Rabbi Korff became a close friend and strong supporter of President Richard Nixon, who called him “my rabbi.”[164] Korff is reported to have influenced Nixon’s strong support for Israel and efforts to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.[165]
Korff served as a chaplain for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health for 21 years.[166] He later acted as a consultant to Brown University in conjunction with the school’s acquisition of his archives.[167] According to the London Independent, Korff had many supporters in high places in Israel, including Ytzahak Rabin and Golda Meir.[168]
The “Sonneborn Institute”
Another American front group for illegal Zionist activities was known as the “Sonneborn Institute,” named after its founder, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family from Baltimore.[169]
Sonneborn had first met Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1919 when Sonneborn, at the behest of family friend, Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, had traveled to the Versailles peace conference as secretary of a Zionist delegation and afterward gone on a tour of Palestine.[170]
In 1945 Sonneborn and Ben Gurion hosted a meeting of 17 well-connected guests at Sonneborn’s Manhattan penthouse. They came from Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Newark, New Haven and New York. One was a rabbi, five were lawyers, and the others were highly successful businessmen.
The purpose, Ben Gurion explained, was to create a secret underground organization that would be the American arm of the Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, the Haganah. The organization was to have a representative in at least 35-40 industry groups, and in one month alone there were meetings in Memphis, Ohio, New Jersey, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Washington DC, and 40 more were scheduled.[171]
Their objective was to raise money and support “for purposes which could not be publicized or even fully disclosed.” A variety of front groups were created for military arms and equipment smuggling of everything from machine guns to B-17s.[172]
Zionist youth groups were organized, the members sometimes helping load guns onto boats headed for Palestine.
US authorities tried to stop what were not only illegal but also extremely damaging activities.
In 1948 the Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, filed a top-secret report with the Secretary of Defense about the Zionist arms trafficking. He warned, “U.S. National security is unfavorably affected by these developments and it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the ‘implements of war.’”[173]
Author Grant Smith reports that under Truman “the role of Feinberg and Haganah operative groups active in arms trafficking within the US, like the terrorist charges, would only be lightly investigated and seldom prosecuted.”[174]
Infiltrating displaced person’s camps in Europe to funnel people to Palestine
A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated Europe’s displaced person’s camps to orchestrate a clandestine operation to funnel people to Palestine.
When it turned out that only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a Zionist report by Rabbi Klaussner concluded that “the people must be forced to go to Palestine.”
Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that numerous means were employed, including confiscation of food rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights; in one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.”[175]
The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well-organized and well-funded operation behind this (including $25 million from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) was hidden from view.
A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy credited with the buildup for the Normandy invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, publicly noted that many of the refugees were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their travels.
Morgan commented:
“The Jews seem to have an organized plan for becoming a world force, a weak force numerically, but one which will have a generating power for getting what they want.”
He was attacked viciously by the press and others; comedian Eddie Cantor took out a New York Times ad saying, “I thought Hitler was dead.”
The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgans allegation of ‘ secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine’ is… fanatically untrue.”
Morgan was forced to apologize, despite the fact that, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan’s analysis of the situation was quite correct.”[176]
The Sieff group: Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration
Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.
The Sieff group was, as historian Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis’s Parushim.”
While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel through official Washington during the last years of FDR’s presidency and the critical first years of Truman’s.
Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan, in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman. Grose reports:
“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.”[177]
When State Department and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, were about to issue a “reverse Balfour” declaration on July 27, 1943 calling on these activities to cease, the Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David Niles, Bernard Baruch, et al took emergency, and successful, action to block it.[178]
Palestinian refugees
By 1949 as a result of Israel’s “War of Independence” and its campaign to cleanse the land of as many non-Jews as possible,[179] there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:
“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster. …. Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.”[180]
The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million. U.S. Diplomats in Cairo and Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of Arab countries inundated by desperate, starving Palestinian refugees were stretched practically to the breaking point.
The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated $11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.”[181]
During this time, the report noted, “… the total direct relief offered… by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.”[182]
Meanwhile, Israel had acquired properties worth at least $480 million in 1947 dollars; one estimate put the figure at $35 billion in 1990 dollars.[183]
Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:
“In the process of ‘Judaizing’ Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion.
“The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.”[184]
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes. His main representative working on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.
Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:
“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife… ”[185]
The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters George C. McGhee delivered the message to the Israeli ambassador and later described his response:
“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it… Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President wished to dissociated himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan.”[186]
Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-66, was the subject of an oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. He stated when this was completed:
“The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature–one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.”[187]
Zionist influence in the media
As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success.[188]
From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position. Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news’.” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:
“The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.”[189]
At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State Marshall wrote:
“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.”[190]
Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the amount of information on this from reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.”[191]
As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:
“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.”[192]
When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.
The magazine was inundated with vitriolic mail, subscriptions cancelled, and advertising withdrawn. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.”[193]
This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, they used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:
“If ‘voluntary’ compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.”[194]
Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.
“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective. The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.”[195]
Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all.[196]
When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”
In fact, Professor Burrows’ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven.[197]
In his book Burrows wrote, “A terrible wrong has been done to the native people of [Palestine.] The blame for what has happened must be distributed among all concerned, including ourselves. Our own interests, both as Americans and as Christians, are endangered. The interests of the Jewish people also have suffered. And we can still do something about it.”[198]
Burrows emphasized: “This is a question of the most immediate and vital concern to many hundreds of thousands of living people. It is an issue on which one concerned with right and wrong must take a position and try to [do] something.”[199]
Burrows wrote that imposing a Jewish state on Palestine violated the principle of self-determination, and noted that the “right of a majority of the people of a country to choose their own government would hardly be questioned in any other instance.”[200]
Burrows criticized what he termed “pro-Zionist reporting,” and pointed out that a “quite different view of the situation would emerge if the word ‘resistance’ were used” when describing Palestinian and Arab fighting in 1948.[201] He wrote that the “plan for Palestine advocated by the Arabs was a democracy with freedom of religion and complete separation of religion and the State, as in this country.”[202]
In his conclusion, Burrows stated: “All the Arab refugees who want to return to their homes must be allowed and helped to do so, and must be restored to their own villages, houses, and farms or places of business, with adequate compensation from the Government of Israel for destruction and damage.”[203]
He also stated: “Homes must be found in this country or elsewhere for Jews desiring to become citizens of other countries that Israel, and their religious, civic, social, and economic rights must be guaranteed.[204]
In their onslaught against him, Zionists accused Burrows of “careless writing, disjointed reporting and extremely biased observation.”[205]
Another author who described the misery of Palestinian refugees (as well as the suffering of Jewish suffering in Israel), Willie Snow Ethridge, was similarly attacked by pro-Israel reviewers. When she was invited to address the Maryland Teachers Association and chose to speak on her book, Journey to Jerusalem, she was told she must speak on a different subject. The secretary of the association explained that so much pressure had been brought on him that he would lose his job if she didn’t changed to another topic.[206]
Still another was the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian. When she wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was begun against her as a Christian “anti-Semite.”[207]
Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East. She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail. In her memoir, she attributed such failures to “the Zionist control of the media of communication.”[208]
Dorothy Thompson, played by Katharine Hepburn & Lauren Bacall
America’s most famous female journalist of the time also attempted valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to tell Americans about Palestinian refugees.
According to the Britannica encyclopedia, Dorothy Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.”[209]
Her column was in newspapers all over the country, her radio program listened to by tens of millions of Americans, she had been married to one of America’s most famous novelists, graced the cover of Time magazine, been profiled by America’s top magazines and was so well-known that “Woman of the Year,” a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on Thompson.[210]
She had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then after the war had visited the region in person. She began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight[211], and condemned Jewish terrorism.
Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.” She wrote of this organized attack:
“… when letter after letter is couched in almost identical phraseology I do not think the authors have been gifted with telepathy.”[212]
She was dropped by the New York Post, whose editor Ted Thackry, and his wife, Dorothy Schiff, were said by other Post editors to be close to the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Begin, the Irgunists, the Stern Gang and other Zionists organizations had what was termed “inordinate access” to the Post’s editorial board.[213]
(Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff and owner of the Post, later divorced Thackry and married Rudolf Sonneborn.[214])
Thompson’s mail was filled with ferocious accusations that she was “anti-Semitic.” One such correspondent told her that her “filthy incitements to pogroms” would not be tolerated by New York’s Jews.[215]
Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.
In the coming decades other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, lives and careers destroyed; history distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.
Very few people know this history. The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, even those who focus on the Middle East. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.
George Orwell once wrote: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”[216]
Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and save the future.
Works Cited
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July 1, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | American Jews, David G. Dalin, Grover Cleveland, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, World Zionist Organization, Zionism | Leave a comment
Israeli Attorney General Refuses to Prosecute Jilani’s Police Killers
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | June 30, 2012
Yesterday, Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein announced his refusal to prosecute Border Police officers Maxim Vinogradov and Khir Al-Din Shadi, who executed East Jerusalem Palestinian Ziad Jilani in 2010, after a minor traffic accident on the city’s crowded streets. A lower court had earlier found insufficient evidence to prosecute Jilani. His widow, Moira, appealed to the Attorney General and his response today further confirms the impunity of Israeli security forces when it comes to the murder of Palestinian civilians.
Ziad Jilani’s surviving family: justice perverted and denied
Jilani was the father of three young daughters (see accompanying picture). He’d met and married Moira, a woman from Texas, and was making a life for himself in Palestine. One Friday afternoon after prayers, he was making his way home to take his family for an evening out, when he accidentally side-swiped a police vehicle. Thinking they might be under a terror attack, officers pursued Jilani, wounded him and, when he was immobile on the ground, fired shots into his brain at point-blank range.
Reading what the attorney general has to say about all this is instructive. One point that stands out is that despite a graphic description in the brief of the execution, the document talks of Jilani’s “death” rather than “murder.” They don’t even use the term “killing.”
The memorandum says there is insufficient evidence to bring the accused to justice. The officers took action in pursuing Jilani because they saw their comrades injured and believed they had witnessed a hit and run accident, though the actual injuries of the policemen were minor. Therefore in the initial part of this action the policemen acted according to their training and initially opening fire on Jilani followed proper procedure.
Do you know many other jurisdictions where policemen are allowed to open fire on a hit and run driver? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Pursuit, sure. But immediately opening fire? Never.
The State Prosecutor, Hila Gorani argues in her brief, that it could not prosecute Vinogradov because it could not be certain that he had sufficient intent to commit murder, since it could not with certainty determine his frame of mind when he fired the kill shots into Jilani. He could not determine whether he fired in the heat of the moment, amidst panic and fear the “deceased” would further endanger him. All of this must also be seen in the context of what the accused thought was a hit and run accident.
The brief says that the case against Vinogradov isn’t being closed because he’s found to have acted according to law. But because there is insufficient evidence to determine a criminal act. In other words, we’re not saying our boy Vinogradov was a Boy Scout. But a murderer? No way. Or at least we can’t (or don’t want to) prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
In an act of counting how many dead Palestinians can dance on the head of a pin, Gorani somehow finds it probative to refute eyewitness testimony that Jilani was murdered by shots fired mere centimeters from his head. Instead, she counters that the pathologist hired by the murdered man’s family found he died from shots fired from “over a meter [three feet] away.” Big fucking deal. That’s all I can say and all this deserves.
Another element of the policemen’s argument that makes no sense is that they argue that they believed Jilani, who lightly injured them in the course of the accident, was a terrorist. They continued to believe this after they shot and wounded him from a distance of about 10 feet, even though he was no longer in his van and they could see he was unarmed. They somehow believed when they shot him, that even though he was no longer capable of harming anyone, he was on his way to commit some unforeseen act of terror or that he might fire on them. They feared, if you believe this sack of lies, that he constituted a danger to others. This from a bunch who, in firing at Jilani, actually injured a bystander.
The policemen testified (only in their second interrogation, during the first they didn’t even mention this… hmmm) that after being wounded, Jilani “moved his hand” which they viewed as “suspicious.” Who knows, they surmised, maybe he had a knife, gun or explosive device. They derive this intelligence from a man who was wounded and lying immobile (except for that fluttering hand) on his stomach on the ground. They continued to believe it when they shot him twice in the head from a distance of a few inches. A terrorist? Really?
All of this constitutes an Israeli version of Stand Your Ground. Under this doctrine any police officer may kill anyone he believes (or claims he believes) is about to commit an act of terror. The threshold is quite low. You don’t have to do anything any normal person would find suspicious. You merely have to lose control of your van and sidesweep a police car and leave the scene of the crime. That’s enough to seal your death warrant in the Only Democracy in the Middle East. Let’s call this Driving While Palestinian. In the U.S. Driving While Black will land you in jail, perhaps. In Israel it will land you in the morgue.
The State prosecutor further supports her decision not to prosecute based on the supporting testimony of “numerous” police officers (no mention of the contradicting testimony of Palestinian eyewitnesses since they don’t amount to shit), who of course may be presumed always to tell the truth without favor.
Apparently, Weinstein also wasn’t sufficiently troubled by the fact that during the first interrogation, the commanding officer claimed he fired the kill shots and in the second, only after the family performed an autopsy which could determine with specificity who murdered him, did Vinogradov confess that he was the killer.
Nor did Vinogradov’s homicidal comments posted to his Facebook account shortly before the murder, in which he said the equivalent of, “Gonna go out and kill me some Ay-rabs,” rise to a sufficient level of concern that justified prosecution. Though of course the statements weren’t very nice.
Gorani attempts to argue that Jilani was murdered because he drove erratically. To support this, she even notes that the authorities performed tests of his vehicle and found it to be in good working order. Doing so, presumably would argue that Jilani’s mental state and indecipherable motives were the cause of his own execution.
The prosecutor concedes that there is sufficient grounds for disbelieving the testimony of the policemen that they fired the kill shots because they still felt Jilani might be a danger to them. But not enough to justify prosecuting them on criminal charges. Our boys may be liars, she appears to be saying, but we can’t (or don’t want to) prove it.
In rejecting the appeal of Jilani’s family, the State feared it couldn’t prove guilt. But is that any surprise in a legal system gamed against Palestinian victims? Is it a valid argument for a prosecutor in a country that disregards the rule of law regularly to say he can’t prosecute because his legal system would never find any policeman who murdered a Palestinian guilty? That’s essentially the argument here.
But you can be assured, Gorani tells us, that she didn’t arrive at this decision easily or cavalierly, but only after heavy consideration of the evidence. We looked at all the evidence, as did the police investigation and the State attorney’s investigation, she says. So you can rest assured that all that investigating covered all of our asses and arrived at the only and proper conclusion. The premise here seems to be that if you have a case in which an Israeli security officer behaves badly the more investigations you have the better. Not that the investigations will arrive at the truth or justice. They can and should all arrive at the same conclusion: permitting and justifying impunity. But merely having such a process, as kangaroo-like as it may be, serves a useful purpose that will presumably anesthetize the victims and indemnify the perpetrators. The underlying message is that the fix is in, but we’ll do our best to prove otherwise.
That “proper conclusion” I mentioned above is that while our boys didn’t behave terribly well, they did their job as best they could and a poor Palestinian suffered as a result. But in the greater scheme of things it’s far more important that we protect the boys who protect us, than that we protect the lives of innocent Palestinians. That’s the shameful sentiment in a nutshell. Impunity reigns triumphant. And the rule of law is prostituted.
June 30, 2012 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
Egyptian President to expose FBI in 1993 WTC bombing?
m911t | June 30, 2012
Egypt’s new President Mohammed Morsi doesn’t believe the official story of 9/11.
And he apparently also doubts the official story of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
According to ABC News, President Morsi recently said:
“I see banners for Omar Abdel Rahman’s family, and for prisoners arrested according to martial rulings and detainees from the beginning of the revolution…It is my duty to make every effort, and I will beginning tomorrow, to secure their release, among them Omar Abdel Rahman.”
Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “blind Sheikh,” was the patsy-in-chief set up to take the blame for the mobbed-up New York FBI office’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. (The FBI also orchestrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, according to convicted bomber Terry Nichols.)
Even the New York Times, which led the cover-up of both World Trade Center bombings, cited tapes proving that FBI informant Emad Salem, who created and led the 1993 bombing plot, repeatedly discussed with his FBI handlers the fact that the FBI was responsible for the bombing:
“Do you deny,” Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, “your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?” Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. – NY Times
Many if not all of the Muslims who were falsely convicted of the FBI’s act of terrorism were obviously innocent. Would Mohammed Salameh really have tried to get his $400 deposit back on the van used in the bombing if he had known about the plot? “Mohammed A. Salameh had returned three times to a Ryder Truck Rental dealer in Jersey City requesting a refund of the $400 cash deposit he had placed on a yellow Ford Econoline van.” – Who Bombed the U.S. World Trade Center? — 1993 Growing Evidence Points to Role of FBI Operative By Ralph Schoenman (published in Prevailing Winds Magazine, Number 3, 1993)
Lynn Stewart, the lawyer for the innocent Muslims framed for the FBI’s act of terrorism, was herself convicted on trumped-up charges in retaliation for her efforts to expose the FBI’s terrorism and frame-up of her clients.
June 30, 2012 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Egypt, Emad Salem, Mohammed Salameh, Morsi, New York Times, Omar Abdel Rahman, World Trade Center | Leave a comment
Framing Hezbollah: STL Moves to Washington
By Legal Affairs Editor | Al Akhbar | June 29, 2012
Fearing that defense lawyers may succeed in undermining the Special Tribunal for Lebanon at the Hague, Washington is cooking up its own case against Hezbollah involving drug trafficking and money laundering.
“The Joumaa network is a sophisticated multinational money-laundering ring, which launders the proceeds of drug trafficking for the benefit of criminals and the terrorist group Hezbollah,” thus declared David Cohen, under-secretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence in the US, two days ago.
“We and our partners will continue to aggressively map, expose, and disable this network, as we are doing with today’s sanctions,” he warned.
These new threats to Hezbollah coincide with the faltering of the process set up by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) charged with prosecuting the assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri.
The team defending the four defendants from Hezbollah, who had been accused by [STL Prosecutor] Daniel Bellemare of involvement in the crime, recently launched three campaigns targeting the legitimacy of the establishment of the court and the legality of the indictment.
These campaigns caused a stir at the Hague and has made Washington worried. This led the US administration to renew its attempts to create an alternative international legal process targeting Hezbollah.
On Wednesday, the US Treasury released a statement titled “Treasury Targets Major Money Laundering Network Linked to Drug Trafficker Ayman Joumaa and a Key Hezbollah Supporter in South America.”
It pointed to 12 Lebanese citizens working in three groups, each made up of a commercial and a financial company accused of being involved in a multi-million US dollar drug trade to support Hezbollah.
The statement charged Ali M. S. with supporting the party and accused Ayman S. J. of moving more than a million US dollars in 2010 into the account of Abbas H., a Lebanese holding a Venezuelan passport living in Colombia.
It also claimed that a Lebanese bank branch manager was involved in the process and evoked the “February 2011 action against Lebanese Canadian Bank.” The statement focused on a “money laundering enterprise that has reach throughout the Americas and the Middle East with links to Hezbollah.”
Before going into the content of the memo, we should recall the statement released by the US Embassy in Beirut during the visit of US treasury official Daniel Glaser to Lebanon in November 2011. It had stressed his call “for Lebanon to meet all of its international obligations, including cooperating with and funding the STL.”
Documents published by WikiLeaks had indicated a high level of cooperation and information sharing between the US Embassy in Beirut, on one side, and the International Independent Investigation Commission and Bellemare’s office, on the other.
The indictment issued by Bellemare, following pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen’s approval, on 10 June 2011 had adopted the point of view of the US administration by describing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (Item 59).
Hezbollah’s branding as terrorist in the US Department of State was developed in three stages. The first was in 23 January 1995, categorizing it as a “Specially Designated Terrorist.” Then, the party was included in the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
The final classification was announced on 31 October 2001 through an Executive Order of the State Department (#13224), calling Hezbollah a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”
The latest US Treasury statement targets Ali M. S. as “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” due to his role in “acting for or on behalf of and providing financial, material, or technological support to Hezbollah” and directing and coordinating Hezbollah activity in Colombia.
The memo maintained that “he is a former Hezbollah fighter with knowledge of Hezbollah operations plans.”
“As of July 2010, Saleh was a contact of Hezbollah’s Foreign Relations Department and has maintained communication with suspected Hezbollah operatives in Venezuela, Germany, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia,” it said.
The Illegality of the STL
The renewed US legal offensive against Hezbollah coincides with the blowing apart of the legality of establishing the STL by the four legal teams defending Salim Ayyash, Mustafa Badreddine, Hussein Oneissi, and Assad Sabra.
In this respect, the lawyers initiated three consecutive campaigns. First it challenged the legality of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1757 on 30 May 2007, which established the court, considering that the 14 February 2005 crime did not pose a threat to international peace and security.
This meant that the Security Council had overstepped its authority provided by late Judge Antonio Cassese during his presidency of the international court for the former Yugoslavia (the Tadich case).
The evidence was provided by defense lawyers Antoine Korkmaz, Eugene O’Sullivan, Emile Aoun, Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, Dr. Guenael Mettraux, and David Young to the judges of the Trial Chamber in the Hague on the 13th and 14th of this month.
The decision of judges Robert Roth, Micheline Braidi, David Re, Walid Akoum, and Janet Nosworthy is expected in the next few weeks.
The second campaign was initiated by Korkmaz, who was later joined by the other seven lawyers. It refers to the illegality of the indictment which was issued by Bellemare in 2011.
The argument stressed that Bellemare’s appointment as international prosecutor was for one year, ending on 13 November 2010. Therefore, he did not have the legal authority to issue the indictment.
STL officials told Al-Akhbar that the challenge to the legality of the indictment caused a stir in the hallways of the court’s headquarters at the Hague. It hit the prosecutor’s office bureaucracy where it hurt.
The third – and not necessarily the final – campaign was initiated by Oneissi’s defense lawyers Courcelle-Labrousse and Yasser Hassan and Assad Sabra’s lawyers Mettraux and Young. It challenged some of the formal aspects of the indictment which violate the legal standards that can safeguard justice.
The challenges focused on the following points.
1- The four suspects were not informed of the details of the indictment nor did they choose their defense lawyers. This infringes on international judicial standards that can guarantee justice, violating several articles.
The first is Article 6 of the European Convention on Human rights which says that “Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights: (a) to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him; (b) to have adequate time and the facilities for the preparation of his defence; (c) to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing” (Paragraph 3).
The second violated Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “In the determination of any criminal charge against him, everyone shall be entitled to the following minimum guarantees, in full equality: (a) To be informed promptly and in detail in a language which he understands of the nature and cause of the charge against him; (b) To have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence and to communicate with counsel of his own choosing; (c) To be tried without undue delay” (Paragraph 3).
The third violation was of Article 131 of the Lebanese Law of Criminal Procedure that states that the indictment should contain “a clear and detailed account of the facts of the case” and “an itemized list of the evidence,” both of which were absent from Bellemare’s decision.
2- An indictment based on circumstantial evidence requires a high level of accuracy, but this also does not apply to Bellemare’s decision.
The third article of the indictment declares that it was “built in large part on circumstantial evidence.” But the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia had defined circumstantial evidence “as being evidence of circumstances surrounding an event or an offence from which a fact at issue may be reasonably inferred” (Decision of the Appeals Chamber on 20 February 2001).
It also defines it as “evidence of a number of different circumstances which, taken in combination, point to the existence of a particular fact upon which the guilt of the accused person depends because they would usually exist in combination only because a particular fact did exist” (Decision of the Trial Chamber on 15 March 2002 in the Krnojelac case).
But the defense maintains that they were not informed clearly and accurately of the evidence on which the indictment was based, an infringement of legal standards.
The defense insists on the need to be informed of all the details of the accusation due to the absence of the suspects and their inability to communicate with their defense lawyers.
This is in addition to the acute shortage of sources for the defense and the narrow margin of cooperation, which is limited to the Lebanese authorities without any cooperation of other states.
3- Some phrases used in the indictment, such as “during this period” (Item 32c.), “a number of days prior to the attack” (Item 33), “surveillance occurred on at least 15 days” (Item 34), and “on at least 20 days between 11 November 2004 and 14 February 2005,” are unacceptable by legal standards.
They are enigmatic and lack an accurate identification of circumstances that Bellemare claims are true.
In addition, there were more than 60 challenges to the indictment on formalities. Here are a few examples:
Item 5 states that “the four Accused participated in a conspiracy with others aimed at committing a terrorist act.” The word “others” is not defined, in violation to accepted standards in drafting indictments.
Item 30 states that “Oneissi used at least one phone,” but the decision does not mention the use of any other phone by Oneissi.
Item 35 states that Oneissi “falsely” called himself “Mohammed” without mentioning where and when he did that, or any evidence of its use. The same item mentions that Bellemare does not designate the time of Oneissi’s presence in the mosque (in Tariq al-Jdideh).
Article 59 says that “all four Accused are supporters of Hezbollah” without mentioning the type of support or its relationship to their alleged involvement in the crime.
Accusations Built on a Void
Former prosecutor Daniel Bellemare presented the preliminary judge Daniel Fransen with the first draft of the indictment on 17 January 2011. The judge found that it does not fulfill legal standards and asked for its amendment.
On 21 January 2011, Fransen directed several questions related to the interpretation of the Lebanese laws used in the appeals chamber. The court allowed itself to expound on some articles of the Lebanese code without going back to the Lebanese parliament, the main authority charged with the law.
It announced its understanding of the law on 16 February 2011. Bellemare published the amended draft of the indictment on 11 March 2011. Based on these explanations, he added the accusations against Oneissi and Sabra to those of Ayyash from the first draft, and requested the issuing of warrants against the three suspects accordingly.
But he later incorporated several other changes from the second draft in May 2011, adding the accusation against Badreddine. He also asked to remove the supporting documents from the first draft, in order to prevent the defense team from using them.
On 9 June 2011, Judge Fransen requested some formal amendments to the indictment before approving it tentatively on June 28 and issuing warrants against the four suspects.
June 29, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception | al-Akhbar, Colombia, Daniel Bellemare, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Money laundering, United Nations Security Council | Leave a comment
Does Israel really fear Jihad terrorism from a post-Assad Syria?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | June 29, 2012
According to an article yesterday in Ynet, the Israeli military fears that “global Jihad terrorists will launch attacks from Syria” if President Bashar Assad’s regime falls. The Israeli newspaper reported:
Army officials are not ruling [sic] a situation whereby terrorists will take advantage of the chaos that may follow a regime change in Damascus to seize control of the border region, as was the case in the Sinai Peninsula after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown.
Over the past few months the 36th Armored Division (Ga’ash), which is in charge of security along the border, has been gearing for a number of possible scenarios, including a cross-border attack by global jihad, which is operating in Syria against Assad’s regime.
The IDF fears the Horan region, near the border with Israel, will become a “no man’s land” and a hotbed of terrorism. Military officials are not ruling out the possibility of rocket fire from Syria and attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.
But if Israel is so concerned about global Jihad terrorists getting a foothold in Syria, then why is its American lobby leading the push for regime change in Damascus? Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to websites such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Foreign Policy Initiative or Foundation for Defense of Democracies over the past year and a half knows how fervently pro-Israelis have been urging Washington to topple Assad.
To cite but one example, in November last year Foreign Policy Initiative and Foundation for Defense of Democracies jointly issued a discussion paper that outlined “policy options for the United States and like-minded nations to further assist the anti-regime Syrian opposition.” Entitled “Towards a Post-Assad Syria,” the paper advocated imposing “crippling sanctions” on the regime and providing assistance to opposition groups, including no-fly/no-go zones.
Foreign Policy Initiative co-founder Bill Kristol also heads the Emergency Committee for Israel, which specializes in producing videos attacking any politician, including President Obama, it deems to be insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. Unless Kristol et al. are pursuing an agenda on Syria opposed by Tel Aviv — which is most unlikely — then why have they been promoting a policy that the IDF says will lead to global Jihad terrorists launching attacks on Israel? Could they be that stupid? Or could it be that Israeli strategists welcome the chaos that its army officials supposedly fear?
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June 29, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception | Israel, Syria, Washington Institute for Near East Policy | Leave a comment
Rumsfeld’s Papers: The Perennial Anti-Syrian
Yitzhak Shamir (R) meets with Ronald Reagan (L) in the oval office at the White House. (Photo: Al-Akhbar)
By Sabah Ayoub | Al Akhbar | June 28, 2012
In the second installment of “Rumsfeld’s Lebanon Papers,” Al-Akhbar publishes the minutes of his meetings with the Israeli prime minister and defense minister at the end of 1983.
Rumsfeld does not request anything from the Israelis, nor does he interrogate them like he does with Lebanese and Arab counterparts. His meetings with the Israelis are closer to deliberations concerning common interests.
In the published documents going back to the period between 2001 and 2006, the most noteworthy seems to be a memo written following the 11 September 2001 attacks.
In the memo, Rumsfeld explains his “war on terror” strategy and its main objectives to former US President George W. Bush.
It spells out five main steps in the war, including “Syria out of Lebanon.” This came true four years later following the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005.
Rumsfeld Engineers a Lebanese Propaganda Campaign Against Syria
Following a shuttle diplomacy tour of the Middle East, Rumsfeld presented the results of his visit to five Democratic and Republican congressmen, in a breakfast meeting on 24 January 1984.
Rumsfeld spoke about “state-sponsored terrorism,” “those who don’t share our values,” and “the radical wing” (terms that would be later heard in the Bush era).
The US envoy warned about “the radical wing” gaining ground in the Arab world, which is made up of Syria, Iran, Libya, and South Yemen.
He tried to convince the participants of the necessity of keeping US forces in Lebanon. “If we decide as a country […] that we can thus use only diplomatic and economic means to pursue mid- to long-range US goals, we will have effectively yielded the field to those who don’t share our values,” he said.
He was asked about the reason why US troops should remain in Lebanon although it is not geographically strategic and in circumstances that makes them easy targets for the Soviets and their proxies.
Rumsfeld replied that a pullout from Lebanon “would almost surely bring down the constitutional government.”
In addition, “Jordan is convinced that they are next on the
Syrian list” at a time when King Hussein is being considered as a “linchpin of a rejuvenated peace process with Israel.”
“Syria, virtually the only Soviet card in the Middle East, will have proved that standing up to the US pays dividends,” he maintained. Although he said it was “clear that Assad desires to maintain a line of contact with the West.”
“The IDF remains only 23 kilometers from Damascus,” said Rumsfeld.
On the other hand, a memo dated 3 February 1984, shows Rumsfeld preparing a secret propaganda campaign to support the implementation of the US’s new plans regarding Lebanon’s security.
Rumsfeld said that “Syria and Syrian factions in Lebanon have been winning the public relations battle.” He insisted that the Amin Gemayel government must “unambiguously demonstrate to the world” that they are seeking reconciliation.
Rumsfeld suggested that “this might include publicized requests” by Gemayel for PSP leader Walid Jumblatt and Amal leader Nabih Berri to come to the Presidential Palace and meet with him.
He proposed that Gemayel gives “a public speech well in advance of any possible military step” to say the government has made an offer for national reconciliation but that “Syria and factional leaders” are the ones blocking it.
“In short there needs to be a concentrated public effort to demonstrate that it is Syria that is blocking the political reconciliation process [and] the formation of the GNU [Government of National Unity] […], that is conducting the infiltration into the city of Beirut, [and] that is maintaining artillery within the range of Beirut for political intimidation,” Rumsfeld explained.
He proposed that the idea of Lebanon’s inability to confront Syria on its own, therefore it will need US and/or Israeli support, and the only solution remaining is military.
Yitzhak Shamir: The Lebanese Are Too Soft
“Something must be done to ‘liberate’ Beirut,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told US envoy Donald Rumsfeld in a meeting held on 16 January 1983. By “liberate” Shamir meant getting rid of what he called the terrorists. But how?
Shamir said that they “must support Gemayel” politically. On the ground, they must get rid of terrorist targets in Beirut and its suburbs, in a manner similar to the attack on what he called an Iranian Revolutionary Guard training camp in Bekaa that led to 30 persons being killed.
He stressed that Beirut must be cleaned up and that US-Israeli allies must be protected because they are in constant danger.
Shamir warned that Hafez al-Assad will prepare for the “grand war” on Israel after taking control of the PLO. “Syria must also accept the principle that Lebanese territory could not be used by the PLO or the Iranians for terrorist purposes,” he maintained.
Rumsfeld also relayed to Shamir that Gemayel was unhappy with Israeli involvement in attempts to create a Druze “mini-state” in the Chouf region. The Israeli PM replied by saying that the Lebanese side must cooperate better.
He held that “[US] Ambassador [and special envoy to the Middle East Philip] Habib had previously stressed the importance of intelligence cooperation but there had been no results.”
“Gemayel had to realize [that the Druze] wanted to have their piece of the political cake and they had a considerable fighting force to back up their position,” Rumsfeld added.
The both agreed on saying that the Lebanese are “too soft” and “have become accustomed to depending on the support of others.”
On 17 November 1983, Rumsfeld met with the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens to discuss the Lebanese and Syrian conflicts.
Strategically, they agreed on the “necessity for both the US and Israel to bolster [Amin] Gemayel’s position in every possible way” to realize the “shared US-Israeli goals for Lebanon.”
Arens believed that “if the US withdraws its Marines [from Beirut], then Gemayel would be finished” and warned of a prolonged war with Hafez al-Assad in Lebanon.
“If the worst case eventuates, you will take Amin Gemayel out of Beirut and we will end up having to stay in South Lebanon,” Arens continued.
The Israeli Defense Minister indicated that the Lebanese forces will not “fall apart. Their morale is indeed poor and they are upset about what they see as President Gemayel’s mistakes in his not being sufficiently pro-Christian, pro-Israeli, and strong enough in standing up to the Muslims in general and Syrians in particular.”
“Gemayel wants it both ways. He wants to attack us publicly while telling us privately that he needs our help. He wants to tell the Syrians that he detests the Israelis but has to keep the agreement in order to get rid of us, while telling us privately to back him up,” Arens maintained.
Syria Out of Lebanon
On 30 September 2001, just 19 days after the attacks on New York and Washington DC, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to President George W. Bush elaborating his “strategic thoughts” on the “war on terrorism,” which should be implemented without haste.
He begins by defining the general framework of the war plans, arguing that “the US strategic theme should be aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves from regimes that support terrorism.”
Practically, “US Special Operations Forces and intelligence personnel should make allies of Afghanis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Sudanese, and others who would use US equipment, training, financial, military, and humanitarian support to root out and attack the common enemies.”
The second practical suggestion was to conduct “some air strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets” in Afghanistan soon.
“We should avoid as much as possible creating images of Americans killing Muslims until we have set the political stage that the people we are going after are the enemies of the Muslims themselves,” he stressed.
One of the main goals of the war “would be to persuade or compel States to stop supporting terrorism. The regimes of such States should see that it will be fatal to host terrorists who attack the US as was done on September 11.”
“If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the US will not achieve its aim,” he maintained.
He concluded that the US government “should envision a goal along these lines:
– New regime in Afghanistan and another key State (or two) that supports terrorism,
– Syria out of Lebanon.
– Dismantlement or destruction of WMD capabilities [in two countries whose names have been removed].
– End of [name removed] support to terrorism.
– End of many other countries’ support or tolerance of terrorism.”
Related articles
- Israelis Grapple with an Unfinished War (ipsnews.net)
June 28, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | al-Akhbar, Donald Rumsfeld, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria | Leave a comment
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