The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) “released late last week a list of key issues relating to Bedouin citizens of Israel in the Negev/Naqab region and discrimination against non-Jewish citizens” to which Israel is obliged to respond.
According to Adalah, the Committee asked Israel to provide information on a variety of issues pertaining to institutionalised discrimination, including “steps taken to fully respect rights of the Arab-Bedouin people to their traditional and ancestral lands”.
The Committee is also concerned to find out what “assessments, if any, which Israel carried out on impact of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People on the non-Jewish population and on their enjoyment of the Covenant rights, particularly the right to self-determination, right to non-discrimination and cultural rights.”
The UN Committee is also demanding answers from Israeli authorities regarding “concerns raised regarding the Law that it may exacerbate the existing ethnic segregation and lead to policies and budget allocation that may further disadvantage the non-Jewish population.”
Adalah Attorney Myssana Morany stated: “We are happy to have convinced the Committee to focus on the forced displacement of the Bedouin community as one of the key concerns requiring further clarification from Israel.”
“Although the Prawer Plan for mass displacement of the Bedouin was frozen in 2013, Israel is now using other mechanisms to forcefully displace Bedouin communities. The past two years, for example, have seen a huge increase in Israeli demolitions of Bedouin homes”, she added.
“Israel has also just revealed a plan to forcefully displace 36,000 Bedouin citizens to make way for massive ‘development’ projects to be built on top of their homes and villages. All these practices are expected to receive backing from the Jewish Nation-State Law.”
“Turkey is a global “swing state.” It has a large and growing economy, a strategic location, a democratic government, and mixed views about prevailing international arrangements. Like the other three global swing states — Brazil, India, and Indonesia — Turkey’s choices will influence whether today’s international order evolves and endures or fragments and fails.”
The above passage is reproduced from a policy brief titled Turkey: A Global Swing State by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the American think tank. Indeed, from the US perspective, several fault lines in regional politics are affected by Turkish policies. At least half a dozen major templates can be readily identified: Syrian conflict, Kurdish autonomy, Palestinian problem and Israel’s security, US sanctions against Russia and Iran, Turkey’s entente with Russia, Qatar, Iran, etc., NATO presence in the Black Sea and Mediterranean and the alliance’s base in Incirlik and so on.
It is no big secret that the US and its European allies and Israel view Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s regional policies with growing disquiet. Erdogan’s independent foreign policies weaken western regional strategies and his support for Hamas (and his visceral dislike of Netanyahu) isolates Israel in the region.
On the other hand, the US’ containment strategies against Russia and Iran are undermined by Erdogan’s policies. The Turkish-Russian-Iranian troika created new facts on the ground in Syria and rendered untenable the US military presence in Syria. Turkey frontally challenges the US’ alliance with Syrian Kurds. The deepening Turkish-Russian partnership challenges the cohesion of NATO. The so-called Middle Eastern Entente between Turkey, Qatar and Iran creates much-needed strategic depth for Tehran.
Suffice to say, Erdogan has become a thorn in the flesh for the USand Israel. All this goes to explain the unusually high level of western interest in Turkey’s local elections, which concluded on Sunday. The big question is how far the election results affect Erdogan’s hold on power. Put differently, do the election results show any signs of this charismatic politician losing his grip?
The turnout of voters has been appreciably high — 84.67%. Overall, AK Party (Erdogan’s party) and its ultra-nationalist ally MHP (under the banner People’s Alliance) polled 51.62% votes as against the secular ‘Kemalist’ and liberal opposition (known as National Alliance) which secured 37.56% votes.
The AKP is leading the race securing 16 metropolitan municipalities (out of 30) and taken control of 24 cities, with the main opposition winning in 10 municipalities. But the opposition has wrested control of Ankara and may have scraped through in Istanbul, the country’s main centre of business and industry.
On the whole, there has been no significant shift in the established pattern of social and political polarisation — the southern (Mediterranean) and western (Aegean) provinces supporting the opposition parties with liberal, ‘westernist’, secular outlook, while the Islamist AK Party retains its vast power base in the deeply conservative Anatolian heartland.
Simply put, the AK Party emerges as the winner for the 15th consecutive election under Erdogan’s stewardship. Erdogan said in an address to the nation, “There will be no elections for four and a half years. What will we do? We will focus on national and international issues, and hopefully raise our country above the level of our contemporaries.” Erdogan prioritised the strengthening of the economy, development and job creation.
A pall of gloom would have descended on the western capitals as the realisation sinks in that Erdogan will be around as Turkey’s helmsman for the foreseeable future. Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections are due only in 2023.
It is a sign of the times that Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned Erdogan on Monday to congratulate him. Erdogan is due to travel to Russia next week to co-chair with Putin the eighth meeting of the High-Level Russian-Turkish Cooperation Council scheduled for April 8 in Moscow.
Erdogan’s meeting with Putin will be crucial as both sides are conscious that stormy days lie ahead in Turkish-American relations. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is due to travel to the US even as Washington is ratcheting up pressure on Ankara to pull out of the S-400 missile deal with Russia and to comply with the US sanctions on Iran.
Things may come to a head between the two NATO allies in the coming weeks since Russia is due to deliver to Turkey in July the first batch of the missile system. Turkey is buying four batteries of the S-400 air defence system for $2.5 billion.
On Thursday, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the US senate to block the transfer of F-35 stealth fighter jets to Turkey unless Ankara scrapped the S-400 deal. The US is also reportedly considering removing Ankara from the joint production program on F-35s. But the Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu reiterated on Friday that Ankara will go ahead with the missile deal with Russia. He scotched the rumours that Ankara might resell the missiles to a third country.
More importantly, last Tuesday, the US introduced sanctions on 25 individuals and firms on grounds of violation of sanctions on Iran, including firms and persons based in Turkey. On Wednesday, Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence in the US Treasury, called on Turkey to strictly observe the sanctions against Iran.
Without doubt, the Israeli lobby in Washington is pulling all stops to punish Erdogan. His support for Iran and Hamas infuriate Israel. Erdogan said last week that Turkey will never accept Israel’s illegal occupation of Golan Heights and intends to raise the issue in the UN. The US media which is heavily under Jewish influence has been harshly critical of Erdogan. Sunday’s election results are being displayed as ‘setback’ for Erdogan. Given the Jewish influence on Wall Street, the game plan would be to create difficulties for the Turkish economy so that mass discontent rises to threaten Erdogan’s popularity.
At such a sensitive juncture when an escalation of tension in ties between Ankara and Washington looks possible in the days ahead and Turkey is hard-pressed to strike a balance between the US and Moscow, the results of the local elections on Sunday would relieve the pressure on Erdogan. But the loss of control of Ankara and Istanbul creates new headaches.
The head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Devlet Bahçeli, ally and coalition partner of Erdogan, said on Monday that “external forces seeking to implement shady machinations over Turkey have failed” in the local elections. Bahceli said that the “economic hitmen, currency gangs, terrorist groups and intentions” lost hope thanks to the will of the nation and “got the answer they deserved.”
However, looking ahead, Bahceli added, “Elections are now past and Turkey has replenished its hope. It is of crucial importance to focus on worsening social and economic issues along with international challenges.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual summit in Washington. It claims that 18,000 supporters attended the event, which concluded with a day of lobbying Congress by the attendees. Numerous American politicians addressed the gathering and it is completely reasonable to observe that the meeting constituted the most powerful gathering of people dedicated to promoting the interests of a foreign nation ever witnessed in any country in the history of the world.
There are a number of things that one should understand about the Jewish state of Israel and its powerful American domestic lobby. First of all, the charge that the actions of The Lobby (referred to with capital letters because of its uniqueness and power) inevitably involves dual or even singular allegiance based on religion or tribe to a country where the lobbyist does not actually reside is completely correct by definition of what AIPAC is and why it exists. It claims to work to “ensure that the Jewish state is safe, strong and secure” through “foreign aid, government partnerships, [and] joint anti-terrorism efforts…,” all of which involve the U.S. as the donor and Israel as the recipient.
Being a citizen of a country is not just an accident of birth. It requires loyalty to the interests of that country and to one’s fellow citizens. No two countries have identical interests, something that is particularly true when one is considering Israel, an ethno-religious autocracy, and the United States, where The Lobby works assiduously to compel the American government at all levels to adopt positions that are beneficial to Israel and almost invariably harmful to U.S. interests. Asserting that the two nations have nearly identical interests is little more than a fraud.
Second, there is the claim that Israel benefits American security. That is also a lie. Washington’s relationship with Israel, which is now more subservient than it ever has been, is a major liability that is and always has been damaging to both American regional and global interests. The recent decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights were ill-conceived and have been condemned by the world community, including by nearly all of America’s genuine close allies.
The harm done by the Israeli connection to policy formulation in Washington and to U.S. troops based in the Middle East has been noted both by Admiral Thomas Moorer and General David Petraeus, with Moorer decrying how “If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don’t have any idea what goes on.” Petraeus complained to a Senate Committee that U.S. favoritism towards Israel puts American soldiers based in the Middle East at risk. He was quickly forced to recant, however.
Former CIA Deputy Director Admiral Bobby Inman has also rejected the claim that Israel is a security asset by observing that “Israeli spies have done more harm and have damaged the United States more than the intelligence agents of all other countries on earth combined… They are the gravest threat to our national security.” Inman was referring to American Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole for Israel an entire roomful of the most highly classified defense information. Israeli spies, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan, also participated in the systematic theft of weapons grade uranium and nuclear triggers in the 1960s so Israel could secretly create a nuclear weapons arsenal. The FBI, for its part, in its annual counterintelligence report, consistently identifies Israel as the “friendly” country that spies most persistently against the U.S. FBI Agents have testified that there are very few prosecutions of the swarms of Israeli spies due to “political pressure.”
Third, there is the myth that the United States and Israel have “shared values,” which is meant to imply that both are liberal democracies where freedom and human rights prevail, beacons of light offering enlightened leadership in a world where tyranny threatens at every turn. This was stressed in the opening remarks last weekend by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, who described Israel as “A nation always striving to be better, more just and true to the message of its founders, a nation dedicated to freedom of religion for people of all faiths. We do our work for all to see. What unites our pro-Israel movement is the passion for bringing American and Israel closer for the benefit of both and the benefit of all. We look like America because we are America.”
Kohr is, of course, preaching to an audience that wants desperately to believe what he says in spite of what they have been able to see with their own eyes in the media when it dares to publish a story criticizing Israel. Jewish hypocrisy about one standard for Israel and Jews plus another standard for everyone else operates pretty much out in the open if one knows where to look. Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein, who once tweeted regarding a “filthy Arab,” was interviewed by journalist Nathan Thrall and asked why he believed it was “utterly racist and despicable” to support a “white nationalist” ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do the same. He responded “Israel is a unique situation. This is really a Jewish state given to us by God. God did not create a state for white people or for black people.” Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, who calls himself the Senate’s “shomer” or guardian for American Jews, had a slightly different take on it: “Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace.”
But Kohr, Klein and Schumer all know as well as anyone that Israeli Jews, fortified by their conceit of being a “Chosen people,” are not interchangeable with contemporary Americans, or at least not “like” the Americans who still care about their country. There are hundreds of mostly Jewish pro-Israel organizations in America, having a combined endowment of $16 billion, that are actively propagandizing and promoting Israeli interests by ignoring or lying about the downside of the relationship. The University of Michigan affiliate of the Hillel International campus organization alone has a multistory headquarters supported by a budget of $2 million and a staff of 15. It hosts an emissary of the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli government supported promotional enterprise.
So, what is the meaning of the “American” in AIPAC? Requiring a religious-ethnic litmus test for full citizenship and rights is Israeli, not American. Having local government admissions committees that can bar Israeli-Palestinian citizens based on “social suitability” would not be acceptable to most Americans. Demanding a unique Israeli right to exist while denying it to Israel’s neighbors; demolishing homes while poisoning Palestinian livestock and destroying orchards; shooting children for throwing stones; and inflicting death, terror and deprivation upon the imprisoned people of Gaza are all everyday common practice for the Israeli government.
Israel and AIPAC have relentlessly pursued their agenda while also corrupting the Congress of the United States to support the Israeli government with money and political cover. Israel and friends like Kohr routinely make baseless charges of anti-Semitism against critics while also legislating against free-speech to eliminate any and all criticism. This drive to make Israel uniquely free from any critique has become the norm in the United States, but it is a norm driven by Israeli interests and Israel’s friends, most of whom are Jewish billionaires or Jewish organizations that meet regularly and discuss what they might do to benefit the Jewish state.
And the fourth big lie is that the American people support Israel on religious as well as cultural grounds, not because mostly Jewish money has corrupted our political system and media. Indeed, many Christian fundamentalists have various takes on what Israel means, but their influence is limited. The Israel-thing is Jewish in all ways that matter and its sanitized Exodus-version that has been sold to the public is essentially a complete fraud nurtured by the media, also Jewish controlled, by Hollywood, and by the Establishment.
“This weekend the New York Timesbreaks one of the biggest taboos, describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party’s slavish support for Israel. Nathan Thrall’s groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we’ve reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins, as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism– that’s the nut.” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to ex-President Barack Obama recounted in the article how “a more assertive policy toward Israel” never evolved “The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the [Jewish] donor class.”
And the support for Israel goes beyond money. The Times article included an October 2018
“Survey of 800 American voters who identify as Jewish, conducted by the Mellman Group on behalf of the Jewish Electoral Institute, 92 percent said that they are ‘generally pro-Israel.’ In the same poll — conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut humanitarian aid to Palestinians — roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump’s handling of relations with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a November 2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel. According to a 2013 Pew survey, 44 percent of Americans and 40 percent of American Jews believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, [a] fact that Jews believe they have rights in historic Palestine that non-Jews do not.”
And one only has to listen to the AIPAC speeches made by leading members of the U.S. government establishment to appreciate the essential hypocrisy over the U.S. wag-the-dog relationship with the Jewish state of Israel. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer led the parade of Democrats on the first evening of AIPAC, thundering “When someone accuses American supporters of Israel of dual loyalty, I say: Accuse me, I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel—an overwhelming majority of the United States Congress. I tell Israel’s accusers and detractors: Accuse me.”
Well, Steny there is a certain irony in your request and to be sure you should be accused over betrayal of your oath to uphold the constitution against all enemies “domestic and foreign.” Hoyer is a product of the heavily Jewish Maryland Democratic Party machine that has also produced Pelosi and Senator Ben Cardin. Pelosi told the AIPAC audience about her father in Baltimore, a so-called Shabbos goy who would perform services for Jews on the sabbath and who would also speak Yiddish while at home with his Italian family. Cardin meanwhile has been the sponsor of legislation to make criticism or boycotting of Israel illegal, up to and including heavy fines and prison time.
Hoyer, widely regarded as one of the most pro-Israel non-Jewish congressman, also boasted to AIPAC about the 15 official trips to Israel he’s made in forty years in Congress, accompanied by more than 150 fellow Democrats. “This August, I will travel with what I expect will be our largest delegation ever—probably more than 30 Democratic members of Congress, including many freshmen.”
Steny Hoyer will be on an AIPAC affiliate sponsored trip in which any contact with Palestinians will be both incidental and carefully managed. He also clearly has no problem in spending the taxpayer’s dime to go to Israel on additional “codels” to get further propagandized. He is flat out wrong about Israel in general, but don’t expect him to be convinced otherwise, which may be somehow related to the $317,525 in pro-Israel PAC contributions he has received.
There was much more at the AIPAC Summit. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced “the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, fresh from selling out U.S. interests on a visit to Israel, declared that “We live in dangerous times. We have to speak the truth. Anti-Semitism should and must be rejected by all decent people. Anti-Semitism – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and any nation that espouses anti-Zionism, like Iran, must be confronted. We must defend the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”
Vice President Mike Pence, like Pompeo an evangelical Christian, piled on in his Monday prime time speech, declaring that “Anyone who aspires to the highest office of the land should not be afraid to stand with the strongest supporters of Israel in America. It is wrong to boycott Israel. It is wrong to boycott AIPAC. Anti-Semitism has no place in the Congress of the United States of America. Anyone who slanders this historic alliance between the United States and Israel should never have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Clearly, there is considerable evidence to support the theory that one has to be completely ignorant to hold high office in the United States. Rejecting Zionism and/or questioning Israeli policies is not anti-Semitism and the Jewish state is in fact no actual ally of the United States. Nor is there any mandate to defend it in its questionable “rightful homeland.” Furthermore, dual-loyalty is what the relationship with Israel is all about and it is Jewish money and political power that makes the whole thing work to Israel’s benefit.
But the good news is that all the lying blather from the likes of Steny Hoyer and Howard Kohr reveals their desperation. They are running scared because “the times they are a changing.” Sure, Congressmen will continue to be bought and sold and Jewish money and the access to power that it buys will be able to prevail in the short term in a conspiratorial fashion. But, in the long run, everyone knows deep down that loyalty to Israel is not loyalty to the United States. And what Israel is doing is evil, as is becoming increasingly clear. It is trying to convince Washington to make war on Iran, a country that does not threaten the U.S., while the willingness of the American people to continue to look the other way as Benjamin Netanyahu uses army snipers to shoot down unarmed demonstrators who are starving will not continue indefinitely. It must not continue and we Americans should do whatever it takes to stop it.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Ghanaian authorities must open an investigation into the kidnapping and torturing Palestinian Mahran Baajour and bring those responsible to justice, Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR UK) said in a statement today.
Thirty-nine-year-old Baajour has been subjected to enforced disappearance and torture in Ghana by security agents, believed to be Mossad agents, since his arrest on 13 December 2018 until his release in March 2019.
Baajour arrived in Ghana on 13 December 2018 on a business trip. He was arrested after leaving the airport of Ghanaian capital Accra, without justification. He was arrested along with two other Ghanaian nationals who were at the airport to receive him; they were taken to an unknown location. The two Ghanaian men were later released and they informed Baajour’s family of his arrest.
“He was detained at the airport and when the family asked about his whereabouts, the reply was that he wasn’t in their custody,” his brother Jehad Baajour told reporters.
One of Mahran’s brothers who lives in Denmark subsequently flew to Ghana in a bid to locate him, but Ghanaian intelligence services again denied he was in the country.
AOHR UK confirmed that Baajour was “subjected to physical torture, beating all over his body, psychological torture, insult and verbal abuse by white-skinned officers speaking little Arabic”.
“Some officers’ clothes had Hebrew writings on it.”
In his statement to the organization, Baajour said:
“As soon as I left the airport in Accra, four cars surrounded the car I was in.
They arrested us without showing a legal warrant, without disclosing the agency they belong to and took us to another place, where they exchanged cars. They took me to an unknown place, I still do not know, and I was handcuffed the whole time.
White-skinned men, who knew little Arabic, started investigating me. They were 14 men from different nationalities as they told me. I noticed on a coat, which belongs to one of them, Hebrew badges, Hebrew written papers, and some of them used Hebrew words like ‘Shekel’.
I was interrogated about the situation of the refugees in Lebanon, the Lebanese and Palestinian political forces, some terrorist activities and operations that were not related to me and I told them so. They tortured me in various ways for 35 days.
They detained me in a narrow room, 1×1 meters, deprived me of sleep for up to three consecutive days, poured cold water on me and beat me on the head strongly, in addition to handcuffing my hands and feet all the time. They threatened me with kidnapping my 12-year-old daughter and killing her, while verbally abusing me.”
If Zionism was the political movement to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in the Middle East, then surely it achieved its goal and the term ceased to have meaning in terms of defining the objectives of a political movement.
Alternatively, if Zionism then morphed into support for the continued existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East, then the only point of view what would not be Zionist would be the one that calls the Jewish state illegitimate and calls for it to be dismantled. Yet there are few political voices that call for such an approach, and governments that have referred to the Jewish state as illegitimate have been demonized for doing so. Clearly, such a view is regarded as a fringe one.
So, what is Zionism today? Is everybody who does not declare Israel to be an illegitimate state that should be dismantled and the land given back to its dispossessed people a Zionist? Would that not make nearly everyone a Zionist? And, if so, does that not deprive the term of any meaning whatsoever?
This is not just semantics. Clearly, considerable effort goes on, particularly within movements like BDS and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to imprint the mantra into people’s minds that it is “Zionism not Judaism” that is responsible for the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people; and that, more importantly, we should not ask any questions about the role of Judaic teaching or ideology in attempting to understand what motivated and continues to motivate the supporters of what is now a genocidal apartheid state that openly defines itself as a “Jewish state” in the Middle East. If it is Zionism and not Judaism that is the problem, then clearly we need to understand what Zionism is (and, relatedly, whether it is rooted in Jewish religious teaching). And if Zionism turns out to be an empty concept, then we should be asking ask what are the ideological underpinnings of Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians (and the lack of action on the part of the international community in that context) for more than 70 years.
Personally, I reject the “Zionism is not Judaism” approach and see that we are being fobbed off with nonsense. It seems clear that this wonderfully popular term “Zionism” is now devoid of content. Either no one is now a Zionist (because the goal of Zionism was achieved via the Catastrophe of 1948) or almost everyone is a Zionist (because there are very few people who would declare that the Jewish state should be dismantled and returned to its dispossessed owners). And,as Israel Shahak argued eloquently in his important and insightful work Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, I would suggest that we cannot begin to understand Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians without examining the roots of Judaic thinking and Jewish identity in the ethnically and religiously discriminatory doctrines of Judaic religion, which has shaped the Jewish mindset for most of its history. It seems, however, that Shahak’s writing continues to reap far less attention than it merits.
Yesterday, I attended a social evening organized by BDS Granada. Towards the end of the evening, I spoke to a couple of members, who seemed very nice people, but they instantly became uncomfortable when I made this point, namely, that we cannot understand Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians without looking at its ideological roots and justification in the Jewish religion. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘that is dangerously close to anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism,’ etc. Then their Jewish friend popped up and, well, let’s just say things went downhill from there.
Clearly, the topic continues to be both policed and silenced within many circles. It is thus no surprise that the activities of the many nice people within the BDS movement and various PSC collectives have failed to gain any real traction over the last decades, when discussion of issues highly relevant for understanding the problem continue to be policed and rendered taboo out of fear of offending Jewish feelings. And while I agree that there is always a need to respect the feelings of others in all forms of discourse, this needs to be balanced against many other needs, including the right to free speech – especially when the matter involves attempts to resolve ongoing crimes against humanity being committed against a specific collectivity, in this case the Palestinian people. To say that we cannot understand the roots of Israel’s ongoing genocide without examining the doctrines of Judaic teaching over the centuries is not to call for violence or discrimination against people who identify as Jews (and there are various different mechanisms of identification involved here, which merit considerable academic analysis in themselves). Nor is it an attempt to say that all people who identify as Jewish are involved in or support the illegal, oppressive and discriminatory actions of the Jewish state. Attempts to suggest otherwise violate our right to and need for free and open discourse on matters of great importance. Furthermore, discourse about justifications of violence in religious texts have taken place without problem in the context of other religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (and also, “Hinduism”, though this term is something of a misnomer for the various traditions that are usually grouped together under this name).
Like Professor E Michael Jones, who has also sought to open up discourse surrounding Jewish thinking so that we might understand what is going on in our world, I have never advocated violence against any specific collectivity. And, like Gilad Atzmon, too, I reject racially or biologically based generalizations to examine questions related to the political and social influence of Jewish power and ideology in our world. I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to explain that to talk about discriminatory and supremacist teachings at the core of Judaic teaching does not mean that all individuals who identify as Jewish are as equally influenced by such doctrines. Jewish thought runs the gamut from the belief that all human beings (including non-Jews) should have the same rights and be valued and treated equally to the view that non-Jews have Satanic souls, that only Jews have a Higher Soul that comes from God, and that the non-Jew exists only to serve the Jew like a clever beast of burden, with a vast range of shades in between representing various attempts to reconcile (or not) the notion of being a “chosen people” with a private covenant with their own god (hence the commandment that ‘thou shalt not have other gods before me’) and own set of laws, on the one hand, with the Enlightenment ideals of universalizable morals and the equality of all human beings, on the other. Certainly, there are many people who identify as Jews today who would seek to distance themselves from views espoused by groups such as that of the powerful ultra-Orthodox sect Chabad that it is only Jews that have a Higher Soul, or that expressed by the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community that Gentiles exist only to serve Jews. On the other hand, in noting that, we must also recognize that such an egalitarian strand within Jewish thinking is a relatively recent phenomenon, stretching back only to the post-Enlightenment period, when many Jews sought to break free of the strict mental and social control of the rabbis that had sought to keep them segregated from the rest of humanity in ghettos for so long. And the deep traces of the ancient religious teachings can still be found, and thus merit serious examination, even within today’s secular Jews. As the joke has it, and not without some merit, many secular Jews say they don’t believe in God that but still seem to think He granted them their “promised land”.
Leaving all that aside for now, though, the fact that there exist individuals who identify as Jewish but who reject (consciously or otherwise) the discriminatory ideology of Judaic teaching does not mean that we cannot or should not be allowed to talk meaningfully about the role of supremacist and genocidal teachings within Jewish thought as a Jewish phenomenon as a whole, just as the fact that there are many Americans who have opposed US exceptionalism throughout history does not mean that we cannot or should not be allowed to talk meaningfully about American exceptionalism. This should be fairly obvious. Even in the recent farcical allegations of Russian collusion made against the Trump campaign, no one suggested that all Russians were colluding with Trump, or that Trump’s team was colluding with all Russians. It’s quite simple really. The fact that there are people who see themselves as Jewish who reject (to greater or lesser degree) Jewish supremacist ideology and activity does not mean that we cannot and should not be allowed to talk about supremacist and genocidal thinking within Jewish ideology and religious teaching, nor to examine how far such thought influences events in the social and political sphere. And the fact that so much effort goes into attempting to prevent us from doing so should set off red warning lamps in the minds of any true defender of freedom of speech and academic enquiry.
I thus repeat my claim from a day or two ago, that we need (but of course will not get for what should be by now obvious reasons) full academic recognition of a critical discourse on questions related to Jewish identity, Jewish thinking and Jewish power. We might perhaps call such discourse Critical Jewish Studies. And it should be understood by any legitimate scholar of integrity that Critical Jewish Studies is not anti-Semitism, and that any attempt to silence such studies or discourse on such grounds would represent a violation of principles of free enquiry that any true academic should seek to defend, as well as of the natural law right to freedom of speech.
A senior official in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has called on Arab nations to change their decades-long strategy of having no diplomatic relations with Israel, which he brands as a mistake.
Anwar Gargash, the tiny Persian Gulf regime’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said that the Arab world needed a “strategic shift” in its ties with the regime in Tel Aviv.
“Many, many years ago, when there was an Arab decision not to have contact with Israel, that was a very, very wrong decision, looking back,” he told the UAE-based news website The National.
“The strategic shift needs actually for us to progress on the peace front,” said Gargash, who also believed that the boycott of Israel has made finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more complicated.
“From the perspective of the UAE, we do need to resolve it, because this issue has this tendency of jumping out of the background when it’s quiet to suddenly becoming headline news.”
Among the Arab countries, the governments of Egypt and Jordan are the only ones having formal diplomatic ties with Israel.
The call for open ties with Israel comes after US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Syria’s occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territories.
Israel occupied the area during the Six-Day War with Arab armies in 1967 and went on to annex the East Jerusalem al-Quds. The international community has condemned both moves and repeatedly called on Israel to give back the territories.
Trump, however, recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as the Israeli “capital” in December 2017 and moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to the ancient city in May last year, sparking global condemnations.
Israel lays claim to the whole city, but the Palestinians view it as the capital of their future sovereign state. The city has been designated as “occupied” under international law since it fell to Israel.
The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, are known to have secretly developed expansive ties with Tel Aviv over the past years.
Israeli media reported in late January that UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the country’s national security adviser had paid a not-so-secret visit to Israel with a direct flight from Abu Dhabi to Tel Aviv.
The trip came a few days after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a tour of regional countries in a bid to unite Arab countries and the Israeli regime against Iran.
In an interview with Fox News on January 4, Pompeo was asked about an unofficial anti-Iran alliance between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan.
“Undoubtedly. We have set the conditions in the Middle East where these countries are now working together across multiple fronts,” Pompeo said.
The outgoing chief of staff of the Israeli military, Gadi Eisenkot, reportedly made two secret visits in November to the United Arab Emirates, where he met with senior officials.
In June, the New Yorker magazine reported that Israel had maintained a secret but extremely close relationship with the UAE for more than two decades, with a special focus on intelligence sharing and military cooperation, including potential weapons deals
The U.S. State Department is offering to pay up to a million dollars each for two projects “that counter the rise of anti-Semitism” in Europe and Central Asia. The State Department uses a new definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticisms of Israel.
The projects will be funded through two State Department offices: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism envoy position was created through 2004 legislation over the objection of the State Department. All four such envoys have been Israel partisans.
The objective of the new projects, according to the announcement of the program, is to address anti-Semitism abroad that is manifested in several ways, including “the use of hateful or inflammatory speech in public discourse, traditional media and online.” The announcement does not specify what language will be considered “hateful or inflammatory speech.” (In the U.S., the First Amendment prohibits the censorship of free speech.)
Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Hannah Rosenthal adopted the new Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism in 2009. The formulation had been created by Israeli minister Natan Sharansky.
The new projects will “include training law enforcement to adequately and holistically respond to hate crimes from a legal, social, and community perspective; and to better equip police and prosecutors to engage effectively with local Jewish populations.”
The grants will be available to both nonprofit organizations and for-profit, commercial businesses. Organizations winning the grants may be allowed to keep aspects of their identity secret.
The current Anti-Semitism Envoy is Elan Carr, who ran for Congress in 2014 with the promise that he would be “a reliable vote for Israel.” Carr, who was backed by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said he visits Israel every year.
Hardly a week goes by and the United States falls deeper into global disrepute. This week was a bonanza of own goals for the self-declared “leader of the free world”.
The debacle over the ridiculous “Russiagate” scandal finally imploding was spectacular.
Then there were more horrific reports of US air strikes killing civilians simultaneously in four countries – Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
That was followed by Washington’s ludicrous lecturing to Russia about the US-imposed humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.
And then, to top all those own goals, we saw President Donald Trump declaring that Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights is not, in the warped US view, illegal after all. Can you possibly keep score of the mind-boggling inanities and insanities?
Switching metaphors for a moment – because you can hardly just use one when it comes to grappling with American asinine policy – Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova got it right when she likened the US to a “cowboy shooting up the Louvre museum” in its free-wheeling, double-dealing foreign conduct.
Where to begin in dissecting the US and its descent into madness and mafia-style foreign policy? It truly is a brain-wrecking, train-wrecking challenge. Is there a wicked genius to its Mephistophelean madness? Perhaps it is simply down to Washington becoming an absurd circus of incompetence, accelerated under the administration of a former real-estate magnate and reality TV star, President Donald J (for Joker) Trump.
On the Golan issue, Trump’s proclamation this week of recognizing the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as under Israeli sovereignty is a flagrant subversion of international law and the United Nations Charter. Israel has been forcibly occupying Syrian southern territory since the 1967 Six Day War. It formally annexed the strategic plateau in 1981, which was ruled as illegal by the UN Security Council – including a vote from the US at that time.
Trump’s declaration is thus a brazen repudiation of international law and a glaring green light to aggression. Can anything this president says or does be taken seriously? What’s that about Venezuela, or Ukraine?
His declaration this week undermines gravely the foundation of international law in a shocking, reckless affront. It completely demolishes any pretense the US claims to have as a world leader and upholder of international law.
Washington has been slamming Russia for the past five years over alleged “annexation” of Crimea – and then Trump this week turns around and endorses Israeli theft of Syrian territory.
At a UN Security Council meeting called this week by Syria in protest to Trump’s proclamation, the US was seen as a pariah state. All 14 other members of the council (including non-permanent members) slammed the US policy on Golan. They included US allies Britain and France.
Outside the UNSC, other US allies also condemned Washington’s declaration of complicity in Israeli annexation of Golan.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, among others, all slammed the US for daring to legalize the theft of Syrian territory by Israel.
Russia’s deputy envoy to the UN, Vladimir Safronkov, put it aptly. He said that the US move was not only an audacious violation of international and the UN Charter. “This only exacerbates the situation in Syria and complicates the establishment of a political process, but it also creates serious obstacles to normalizing the relations between Israel and the Arab states.”
We will come back to that profound point in a moment. But first, let’s throw out a few other motives for Trump’s outrageous violation of international law regarding Golan and Israel’s annexation.
Trump is no doubt giving his family friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a timely electoral boost ahead of Israeli state elections scheduled for April 9.
There is also the issue of American oil interests being pursued by designating the Golan as Israeli territory. The mountainous region overlooking the Jordan Valley is reputed to hold untapped reserves on par with those of Saudi Arabia, which US-based Genie oil company has been exploring for years.
But still a more strategic motive is the objective of keeping the Middle East and Syria in particular in perpetual turmoil. By annexing Syrian territory, the US-Israeli move furthers the objective of controlling the wider Arab region.
Syria’s envoy to the UN, Bashar al Jaafari, made that very point at the UN Security Council meeting this week. He said the US-backed annexation of Golan was a part of the US-sponsored covert war against his country. The move is a way to keep Syria and the region in turmoil, said al Jaafari.
This gets back to what the Russian envoy, Vladimir Safronkov, said. The whole point is for Washington to prevent any political settlement to the eight-year war in Syria and to impede any normalization of relations in the region. The US and its client Israeli regime only stand to benefit from perpetual chaos and conflict in the region.
So far so good, as Washington may calculate – albeit fiendishly. But in the final analysis, the US is ending up looking like a complete rogue state without any respect, even among its supposed allies.
The presumed global leader, Washington, is losing foes and allies alike through its disgraceful duplicity and disregard for any pretense of probity. The Golan Heights is another nail in the coffin for Washington’s over-rated self-regard.
In a week of other American absurdities and own-goals, the Golan debacle may turn out to be the moment when Washington is finally seen in the eyes of the world as the utter laughing stock that it surely has become. It’s a laughing stock, but in the creepiest, macabre sense.
Excerpt from a speech by former Republican Congressman Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey, Jr. on “Israel, the Anti Defamation League and Free Speech.”
McCloskey has had a long history of service to the United States: as a U.S. Marine, an environmentalist, and an opponent to unnecessary wars.
McCloskey was born and raised in California, graduating from Stanford University.
During Korean War service with the Marine Corps, he earned the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
From 1967 to 1983 he served as a U.S. congressman. He was co-chairman of the First Earth Day, 1970.
He was an early opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the first Republican in Congress to call for the impeachment of President Nixon. In 1972 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican party presidential nomination.
A documentary about McCloskey, narrated by Paul Newman, can be seen at: https://iakn.us/2FkMqTQ
The video above is from a speech he gave in 2000 at a conference for the Institute of Historical Review.
By the 1980s the ADL’s main purpose was no longer to try to stop anti-Semitism and bigotry, but instead to discredit any voice that was hostile to the policies of Israel – and not only to discredit people who spoke out against Israel, but to deny them a forum.
McCloskey describes the ADL’s work in spying on Americans.
For more about McCloskey’s contentious relationship with the pro-Israel lobby, see former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley’s book, “They Dare to Speak Out.” (A documentary about Findley is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBsrV… )
An Israeli official revealed a plan to triple the number of Jewish settlers in the Golan Heights in the coming years in order to create a Jewish majority in the occupied Syrian territory.
The Mayor of Katzrin settlement in the occupied Golan, Dmitry Apartzev, said the plateau’s total population will increase to 150,000 people which means the number of Jews will reach 100,000 people while the number of Druze will be 50,000.
Apartzev expected the population of Katzrin settlement alone to increase from 8,500 to 50,000.
According to the Israeli official, the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan will open new horizons for foreign investment in the area, hoping that the recognition would also contribute to counter the international boycott campaigns urging investors not to invest in the occupied territories.
Apartzev claimed that the Golan economy is growing despite the campaigns.
Today, some 40,000 people live in the occupied Golan, 50 per cent of them are Arab Druze who consider themselves Syrian citizens.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive resolution recognising Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, internationally recognised as Syrian territory occupied in 1967.
Lebanese Judge Ahmad Mezher has given orders that a survey be conducted of Lebanese occupied territories in the Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba, Huneen, Ideise and Bleeda. These villages are bordering Hasbaiya, Rashaya al-Fukhar and Kiyam and have been under Israeli occupation since 1981, as Syria’s Golan Heights have been since 1967. This step coincides with the illegal “gift” of the Syrian Golan Heights offered by US President Donald Trump to his closest ally Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Although Trump’s move was verbally condemned by the international community, no other state or international body seems likely to openly oppose Trump’s move at the moment.
However, Lebanon has decided to confront this move on the ground, showing its readiness to defend its territory if US “gifts” were ever seen to include Lebanese occupied territories. The Lebanese presidency, the Parliament and the government agreed that it is the right of Lebanon to regain its occupied territory and that the equation “the army, the people, the resistance” is united under one umbrella. Thus, the possibility of confrontation between the Resistance – i.e. Hezbollah in this case – and Israel is now on the table.
The level of tension and chances of confrontation increased during Lebanese President Michel Aoun’s visit to Moscow. During meetings with his homologue Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Christian President Aoun rejected US pressure on his country. The US establishment, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his envoys to Lebanon, wants to prevent the over one and a half million Syrian refugees in Lebanon from returning home. President Aoun also rejected Trump’s gift to Netanyahu, stating clearly that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel, and not the property of the US to dispose of as it will.
It remains unclear whether the Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba and neighbouring villages are part of Trump’s gift to Israel. This is why Lebanese authorities have requested the judiciary authority officially survey the southern Lebanese territories occupied by Israel. If, in response to the survey, any attempt is made to assert that these areas are part of Israel, then the Lebanese triad (the army, the people and the resistance) will be bound to recover its occupied territory. The timing of the decision is important because it shows the readiness of the Lebanese government to raise the subject and to confront Israel in the wake of the US decision on the Golan Heights, a territory closely linked to the Lebanese farms and villages. As recently as 2009 some of these lands were contested between Syria and Lebanon, but now that Lebanon is in a better position than Syria to vindicate its claims against Israel, the Syrian government will be happy for it to do so.
President Aoun raised these issues with President Putin in the context of Trump’s previous gift of Jerusalem, by virtue of his recognition of an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Lebanon fully supports the right of return of Palestinians to their land, particularly since there are over 800,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Just as the US would prefer these Palestinians to remain in Lebanon, the US now seems to want Lebanon to accept an ongoing presence of Syrian refugees on Lebanese soil. The US policy of keeping Syrian refugees in Lebanon has several goals.
The first is to shift the religious balance of power in Lebanon. Most Syrian refugees are Sunni (mainly hostile to Assad and to his allies) and the US would like to see a Sunni plurality in Lebanon to confront Shia Hezbollah and the society behind it. All Israeli wars have failed to curb Hezbollah and could not reduce its strength. On the contrary, Hezbollah military power is increased to an unprecedented level domestically and regionally. Moreover, in the last Lebanese Parliamentary polls, Hezbollah won more votes than any religious party, surprising everyone. Support for Hezbollah goes beyond any one religious confession; it has proved itself as a force defending Christians and Shia against Wahhabi takfiri extremists. Confronting Hezbollah face to face would lead to certain failure, hence the US need to strategically build another society to stand against it.
President Aoun insists on the return of Syrian refugees to Syria, notwithstanding the financial incentives being offered by the US and Europe to keep them in Lebanon. The presence of the refugees upsets the religious equilibrium in Lebanon, and accelerates the process by which Christians are becoming a minority on Lebanese soil. The religious terrorism that hit the Middle East over the last decade targeted regional minorities, notably the Christians. The same NATO leaders whose governments sponsored takfiri terrorism against Christians in the Levant proposed to Lebanese Christian leaders that they leave the land of their ancestors and settle in the west. Christians who were raped, murdered and terrorized by ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria would have suffered the same fate in Lebanon had Hezbollah decided to entrench themselves in the south of Lebanon, in the Beirut suburbs, or in selected villages of the Bekaa Valley.
Moreover, the Lebanese President considers the Syrian refugees a security and a financial burden that is placing a heavy burden on the fragile and chaotic Lebanese infrastructure. These refugees currently represent a third of the total Lebanese population.
Another objective of US refugee policy in Lebanon is to recover from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad what it failed to achieve by arming militants to overthrow his government over the last 8 years. The US establishment would like to keep over 5 million Syrian refugees outside Syria, mainly in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe. This, in US thinking, could impede forthcoming presidential elections in Syria, and prevent both the rebuilding of the Syrian Army and the reconstruction of the country. Syrians are skilful craftsmen; keeping them away from home impedes rebuilding. All these US objectives do not help Lebanon in any way. On the contrary, they weaken Lebanon, which needs a healthy relationship with neighbouring Syria for its security and commercial development.
Trump has made the Middle East less secure. He has offered Israel an illegal and unnecessary gift. Israel was already controlling the Syrian Golan Heights; Syria posed no threat to it. Syria had not fired a bullet against Israeli occupation of the Golan for 30 years and will be busy for the next ten years rebuilding its destroyed infrastructure. Moreover, the late President Hafez Assad had engaged with Israel, through US mediation, to negotiate a peace deal in exchange for the Golan Heights. It was Israel who rejected the deal at the last minute. Assad then said he would leave liberation of the territory to the generation to come.
The US establishment is undermining Lebanon’s security and peace by imposing one and a half million refugees on the country, destabilizing the local society, and threatening to impose sanctions if Lebanon does not submit to US bullying.
Trump gave Jerusalem to Israel and can no longer be considered a partner in any peace process. This realization has given new urgency to the Palestinian cause. He is not willing to give a state to the Palestinians, but he is disposing of their rights.
US forces are unwelcome in Syria, occupying a third of the country and a bordering passage, while ISIS no longer controls any Syrian territory in the north-east. At the same time the US is keeping tens of thousands of Syrian refugees at the al-Rukban camps from returning home.
In Iraq, the parliament is divided between those willing to see the last US soldier depart and those who want to maintain some training and intelligence collaboration. Iraqi politicians are afraid of asking the US to stay or to leave permanently for fear of seeing ISIS return with US support in either case (if US forces stay there is fear of seeing the US support for ISIS, an eventuality Iraqis also fear if the US were to leave).
Finally, the US is now seen as a superpower ruled by a thug sucking wealth from the oil-rich Arab countries, forcing them to buy US weapons so that Middle Easterners can continue killing each other at their own expense. Arab countries, once very rich, are imposing local taxes they have never imposed before on their own nationals and are going through a financial crisis unheard of for decades. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon are on the floor financially and even Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain are not in their best financial shape. Iran’s nuclear deal was revoked and since Trump took power the country is facing the harshest sanctions ever.
It is unclear when the next war may erupt to challenge US hegemony in this part of the world. It is clear that Russia and China are already present in the Middle East, ready to take the place of a US establishment which is no longer regarded as a friendly nation by any state but Israel.
Elijah J. Magnier is a veteran war correspondent Senior Political Risk Analyst with over 35 years’ experience covering Europe, Africa & the Middle East.
In a fair world, the contemporary leadership of India and Israel would understand the mistakes of the past and try to rectify the occupation of Kashmir and the occupation of Palestine. But back in the real world, both India and Israel thrive on perpetuating a cycle of violence against the occupied while spinning a narrative to the outside world that the victims are the aggressors and that somehow those armed with sticks and stones are a “threat” to states with nuclear arms and a modern air force.
These unfortunate characteristics have come to the fore in ever more prominent ways in recent years. This is largely due to the fact that far from just carrying on old traditions of war and occupation, Indian Premier Narendra Modi and Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu have become grossly hyperbolic representatives of the most militant, extremist and sectarianism tendencies within their own political cultures. Whilst Modi and Netanyahu did not invent Hindutva extremism nor Zionist extremism, respectively, they have both come to be the most effective representatives of the most extreme tendencies of both ideologies.
This year was not the first time that Modi and Netanyahu have used military violence against an occupied people in order to secure the ultra-jingoistic vote during an election season. That being said, this year has seen both Netanyahu and Modi become ever more brazen in their violent electoral tactics. India’s full scale mobilisation against occupied Kashmir in the aftermath of the Pulwama incident saw ever more soldiers and heavy artillery enter the most militarised zone in the world. It was this same aggressive attitude which saw Israel conduct large scale airstrikes against occupied Gaza over the last 12 hours.
Furthermore, whilst Netanyahu scapegoats all of Israel’s internal problems on the existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Modi does the same in respect of the existence of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Modi’s “surgical tree strike 2.0” against Pakistan was little different than Netanyahu’s frequent air raids against alleged Iranian personnel in neighbouring Syria.
But the similarities do not end there. For Netanyahu and his supporters, occupied Palestinians are not humans but terrorists. When one realises that women, children, the elderly and the limbless are also scoffed at as “terrorists” by Netanyahu’s ultra-Zionist base, one can begin to understand how for Modi’s ultra-Hindutva base, the same applies to the civilians of Indian occupied Kashmir.
When it comes to Indian Muslims and so-called “Arab Israelis”, things are not much better. Modi’s government has continued to either turn a blind eye or even encourage violent and sexual assaults against Indian Muslims whilst working to culturally cleanse India’s rich Muslim heritage from the streets and monuments of the country. Recent legislation has even made it clear that while undocumented Hindu migrants can become Indian citizens, the same does not apply to Muslims in the same position. This is the case in spite of India’s technically secular constitution.
As if taking cues from Modi, in 2018, Netanyahu passed the Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People law which defines Israel not just as a “Jewish State” but as a state of and for Jewish people. This has effectively ended the long held myth that the minority of Arab citizens of Israel have a truly equal footing in society.
But it is not just Arab Muslims and Indian Muslims who are discriminated against in their respective countries. The ever growing Hindtuva movement is also suppressible of the right of Sikhs to hold a peaceful referendum for self-determination in Indian Punjab. Meanwhile, in Israel, the many black African Jewish migrants to Israel are in many ways treated even worse than indigenous Arabs.
Of course in both instances, due to the large global powers seeking strategic partnerships with both India and Israel, little is said and virtually nothing is done about these worrying trends.
But there is one important difference. Whilst recent years have seen western celebrities join the BDS movement to oppose Israeli occupation and discrimination against Palestinians, India’s black propaganda continues to convince many self-described “peace activists” of the wider world and in western states in particular, that occupied Kashmiris and Pakistan are to blame for regional strife. While Netanyahu’s mask has slipped among influential artist-activists like Roger Waters, Kashmir and Pakistan have yet to receive support from those who dare to speak out against India’s culture of extremist Hindutva violence.
Thus, while Israel’s Hasbara propaganda is beginning to show its limitations, India is far ahead of the game when it comes down to portraying itself as a victim abroad whilst the international community gives it a blank cheque in respect of aggression against occupied Kashmir and even against its own Muslim citizens.
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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