Nearly everyone loses by President Donald Trump’s decision on Tuesday to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) relating to Iran’s nuclear energy program and to reinstate the “highest level” of sanctions while also threatening secondary sanctions on any country that “helps” the Iranians. The whole world loses because nuclear proliferation is a disaster waiting to happen and Iran will now have a strong incentive to proceed with a weapons program to defend itself from Israel and the United States. If Iran does so, it will trigger a regional nuclear arms race with Saudi Arabia and Egypt undoubtedly seeking weapons of their own.
Iran and the Iranian people will lose because their suffering economy will not now benefit from the lifting of sanctions and other economic inducements that convinced it to sign the agreement in the first place. And yes, even the United States and Israel will lose because an agreement that would have pushed back by ten or fifteen years Iran’s timetable if it were to choose to develop a weapon will now be reduced to a year or less. And the United States will in particular lose because the entire world will understand that the word of an American president when entering into an international agreement cannot be trusted.
The only winners from the withdrawal are President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will enjoy the plaudits of their hardline supporters. But their victory will be illusory as the hard reality of what they have accomplished becomes clear.
Failure of JCPOA definitely means that war is the only likely outcome if Tel Aviv and Washington continue in their absurd insistence that the Iranians constitute a major threat both to the region and the world. A war that might possibly involve both the United States and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel would devastate the region and might easily have potential to escalate into something like a global conflict.
The decision to end the agreement is based on American domestic political considerations rather than any real analysis of what the intelligence community has been reporting. Deep-pocketed Iran-hating billionaires named Sheldon Adelson, Rebekah Mercer and Paul Singer are now prepared to throw tens of millions of dollars at Trump’s Republican Party to help it win in November’s midterm elections.
Those possessed of just a tad more foresight, to include the Pentagon and America’s European allies, have strongly urged that JCPOA be continued, particularly as the Iranians have been fully in compliance, but there is a new team in Washington. America’s just-confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not exactly endorse the ludicrous Israeli claim made by Benjamin Netanyahu two weeks ago that Iran has a secret weapons of mass destruction program currently in place, but he did come down hard against the JCPOA, echoing Trump in calling it a terrible agreement that will guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapon. The reality is quite different, with the pact basically eliminating a possible Iranian nuke for the foreseeable future through degradation of the country’s nuclear research, reduction of its existing nuclear stocks and repeated intrusive inspections.
The failure of the JCPOA is not about the agreement at all, which is both sound and workable. There is unfortunately an Israeli-White House construct which assumes that Iran is both out to destroy Israel, for which no evidence has been revealed, as well as being singularly untrustworthy, an odd assertion coming from either Washington or Tel Aviv. It also basically rejects any kind of agreement with the Iranian government on principle so there is nowhere to go to “fix” what has already transpired.
The United States has changed in the past seventeen years. The promotion of policies that were at least tenuously based on genuine national interests is no longer embraced by either political party. A fearful public has allowed a national security state to replace a constitutional republic with endless war as the inevitable result. Presidents once constitutionally constrained by legislative and judicial balance of power have successfully asserted executive privilege to become like third world dictators, able to make war without any restraint on their ability to do so. If America survives, historians will no doubt see the destruction of the JCPOA as the beginning of something new and horrible, where the government of these United States deliberately made a decision to abandon a beneficial foreign treaty to instead opt for a path that can only lead to war.
May 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, JCPOA, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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The Turning on Russia Series
In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same. The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests, was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand. At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation ; “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.” But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.
With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and Committee on the Present Danger would set about to make American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East, interchangeable.
The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.
Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour declaration of 1917. This long term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.
It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”
Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse “farm teams” including liberal Catholics… populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest… With the exception of Middle East strategy… there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons… the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”
Add to that the abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II – the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948 – and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.
Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”
The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.
Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.
Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right-wing. By the 1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stoner Saunder’s describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.”
But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable. In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream; the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.’”
The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.
As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism – it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists… The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”
Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”
In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”
Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
May 10, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | AIPAC, JINSA, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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The United States is so far doing virtually no trade with Iran anyway. In 2017 total US exports to Iran were just 138 million dollars, and total imports a mere 63 million dollars, figures entirely insignificant to the US economy. By contrast, for the EU as a whole imports and exports to Iran were each a very much more substantial 8 billion dollars in 2017 and projected to rise to over 10 billion dollars in 2018.
There is one very significant US deal in the pipeline, for sale of Boeing aircraft, worth $18 billion dollars. It will now be cancelled.
Which brings us to the crux of the argument. Can America make its will hold? Airbus also has orders from Iran of over US$20 billion, and it is assumed those orders will be stopped too, because Airbus planes contain parts and technology licensed from the US. It is possible, but unlikely, that the US could grant a waiver to Airbus – highly unlikely because Boeing would be furious.
Now even a $20 billion order is probably in itself not quite big enough for Airbus to redevelop aircraft to be built without the US parts or technology (which constitute about 8% of the cost of an airbus). But the loss of a $20 billion order on such capricious grounds is certainly big enough for Airbus to look to future long term R & D to develop aircraft not vulnerable to US content blocking. And if Iran were to dangle the Boeing order towards Airbus too, a $38 billion order is certainly big enough for Airbus to think about what adaptations may be possible on a timescale of years not decades.
Read across from aircraft to many other industries. In seeking to impose unilateral sanctions against the express wishes of its “old” European allies, the USA is betting that it has sufficient global economic power, in alliance with its “new” Israeli and Saudi allies, to force the Europeans to bend to its will. This is plainly a very rash act of global geopolitics. It is perhaps an even more rash economic gamble.
We are yet to see the detail, but by all precedent Trump’s Iran sanctions will also sanction third country companies which trade with Iran, at the least through attacking their transactions through US financial institutions and by sanctioning their US affiliates. But at a time when US share of the world economy and world trade is steadily shrinking, this encouragement to European and Asian companies to firewall and minimise contact with the US is most unlikely to be long term beneficial to the US. In particular, in a period where it is already obvious that the years of the US dollar’s undisputed dominance as the world currency of reference are drawing to a close, the incentive to employ non-US linked means of financial transaction will add to an already highly significant global trend.
In short, if the US fails to prevent Europe and Asia’s burgeoning trade with Iran – and I think they will fail – this moment will be seen by historians as a key marker in US decline as a world power.
I have chosen not to focus on the more startling short term dangers of war in the Middle East, and the folly of encouraging Saudi Arabia and Israel in their promotion of sustained violence against Iranian interests throughout the region, as I have written very extensively on that subject. But the feeling of empowerment Trump will have given to his fellow sociopaths Netanyahu and Mohammed Bin Salman bodes very ill indeed for the world at present.
I shall be most surprised if we do not see increased US/Israeli/Saudi sponsored jihadist attacks in Syria, and in Lebanon following Hezbollah’s new national electoral victory. Hezbollah’s democratic advance has stunned and infuriated the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia but been reported very sparsely in the MSM, as it very much goes against the neo-con narrative. It does not alter the positions of President or Prime Minister, constitutionally allocated by religion, but it does increase Hezbollah’s power in the Lebanese state, and thus Iranian influence.
Iran is a difficult country to predict. I hope they will stick to the agreement and wait to see how Europe is able to adapt, before taking any rash decisions. They face, however, not only the provocation of Trump but the probability of a renewed wave of anti-Shia violence from Pakistan to Lebanon, designed to provoke Iran into reaction. These will be a tense few weeks. I do not think even Netanyahu is crazy enough to launch an early air strike on Iran itself, but I would not willingly bet my life on it.
The problem is, with Russia committed to holding a military balance in the Middle East, all of us are betting our lives on it.
May 9, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia, United States, Zionism |
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Against all common sense, moral considerations and international law, U.S. President Donald Trump tonight decided to place the United States outside the international so-called community and isolate itself, not Iran.
He withdrew the United States from what is one of the most important negotiated peace-oriented agreements that have ever been signed: the one that prevents Iran (if it has ever wanted to) from acquiring nuclear weapons: The Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, JCPOA, of July 2015 – all about this agreement and its text here).
Noteworthy is that the nuclear deal is incorporated into international law by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, even though the U.S. already at that point stated – as an exceptionalist state – that it did not consider the deal binding for it.
With the exception of Germany, the deal was negotiated – cynically, of course – by countries which have themselves thousands of nuclear weapons.
It never mentioned the only state in the region that possesses them, against international law in the form of UN resolutions and, additionally, has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That state is Israel whose nuclear weapons Western politicians and their loyal, politically correct media omit mention of – as systematically and uniformly as if orchestrated by an invisible hand from above.
Back in 2014-15, many of us stated that the alternative to a negotiated deal would be war. I am still of the belief that President Trump’s announcement tonight will turn out to be a declaration of war on Iran. A series of developments since then in the Middle East point dangerously in the same direction.
Towards the end, his speech was extremely bellicose and one long systematic violation of the UN Charter’s Article 2.4 that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
Without a doubt, both the decision itself, the way it was announced as well as the threats stated relating to the future was nothing but a series of indisputable violations of the UN Charter. For all practical purposes he seems also to question that Iran has the right to self-defence according to the UN Charter’s Article 51.
It cannot be deemed acceptable that the U.S. or Israel or any other country can deny Iran a right to have conventional missiles and other military equipment, at least not as long as other countries – including these two exceptionalist and nuclear-armed countries – have much more of such weapons themselves and there are no international agreements that prohibit such types of weapons.
Who has and who has not honoured the JCPOA?
It’s the United States that has never honoured its commitments according to the JCPOA: Old sanctions not lifted fully, new sanctions installed, and control by the US Treasury of all currency exchange that takes place via the dollar with the aim of punishing corporations and banks that trade and invest in Iran.
Towards the end, Trump declared his admiration for and non-conflict with the Iranian people.
But since 1979 his country has done everything in its power to cause troubles, economic in particular, to the Iranian people. He seems to now have a perverse joy in announcing new sanctions and – well, at the end of the long road kill people: Remember the 13 years of sanctions on Iraq that killed more innocent Iraqis than the military invasion and occupation did? Trump’s sanctions are open-ended.
In contrast to this, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and all other experts, Iran has fulfilled its side of the agreement in every detail.
CNN states on the page where the announcement was made: “Note: The Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense have all said in last two months they are complying with the deal.” (“They” being the Iranians, JO).
Trump’s reference to Israeli PM Netanyauhu’s stand-up comedian-like speech a few days ago only shows how incredibly little evidence his administration has as that speech has been debunked completely by a series of independent experts, including Gareth Porter here. In addition, it was 1992 when Mr. Netanyahu first began talking about Iran attempting to go nuclear.
No wonder the West talks about fighting fake because others use fake. No wonder it blames others for international law violations. It’s called psycho-political projection of one’s own dark sides. And nuclear weapons and threats and lies belong to the dark sides.
Why Iran is not a threat
Unfortunately for the US militarist foreign policy circles, Iran is not a threat to the US or its allies. It pure nonsense.
For more than 250 years Iran has not invaded anyone – not exactly a record the West and Israel can match. Iran is in Syria fighting the terrorism which the U.S. allegedly fights too since 9/11 2001 (with the marvelous result that 17 years later 80 times more people worldwide are being killed in political terror actions than back then).
Iran is in Syria upon invitation by the legitimate government of Syria and, thus, in compliance with international law. So is, by the way, Russia. Whereas every other state or group – NATO allies, friends like Saudi Arabia and Israel on Syrian land, sea and air territory or through money, weapons and terrorism-support are involved through gross violation of international law, including the UN Charter.
Is Iran a big military power?
To judge that, let’s see what the just published figures by SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, tell.
The military expenditures of Iran with 80+ million people and a huge territory is US$ 15 billion. In the event of an attack on Iran, it may – may… – be supported by Russia or China but that is unlikely.
Who must Iran perceive as the likely coalition to attack it? It depends of course on who starts it – if Israel should start it, it would hardly do so without a prior green light by the U.S. and its commitment to help out. Saudi-Arabia is now the third largest military power in military expenditure terms, i.e. larger than Russia.
Israel’s military expenditures are US$ 16 billion – larger than Iran’s with a population about 1/10 of Iran. And, remember, Israel has nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia has been building up against Iran for a long time and built a coalition. Saudi military expenditures stand at US$ 69 billion. Oman’s are US$ 9 billion. Bahrain US$ 1 billion. So, a little dependent on one’s geo-political assumptions and hypotheses, we arrive at Iran US $ 15 billion against 16+69+9+1 = 95 or a 15:95 regional ratio.
It’s inconceivable that the U.S., France and the U.K. would not intervene. Indeed, the U.S. tonight declared war on Iran.
The military expenditures of the United States stand at US$ 610 billion, France at US$ 69 billion and the United Kingdom at US$ 47 billion.
So, is Iran a threat? Is Iran likely to start a war?
No matter what you might otherwise think of Iran, it is not a threat. It knows very well that it has 4 nuclear weapons states against it and a group of adversaries and Iran-hating leaderships whose combined military expenditures are, roughly speaking and according to the latest figures, a combined US$ 820 billion and way more technically sophisticated. And it knows that while its own military expenditures are US $ 16 billion – that the combined, thinkable international coalition that could get involved in a war in and around Iran is 55 times more resourceful in military terms.
So forget it. It’s exemplary fake foreign policy nonsense.
They are neither mentally ill nor suicidal in Tehran. In addition, in sharp contrast to almost all its potential military enemies, it is defensive in is military posture and foreign policy. Iran has gained strength in the region mostly because Western/NATO countries have produced one devastating, predictable war fiasco after the other.
Will the friends of the U.S. have the civil courage to speak up and take action now?
Will the NATO allies and EU friends – who have been woefully incapable of showing solidarity with Iran by standing up against the United States’ permanent non-commitment to and violation of the JCPOA – now be able to change course?
Why have they so submissively and leaderlessly avoided setting down their feet and saying to Washington: Dear friend, we will take action against you if you withdraw from the JCPOA because that step endangers all of us, could release a new round of violence, make the Second Cold War with Russia even colder and send millions of refugees our way. That will be our red line, a concept you surely understand!
Did NATO/EU really believe that President Macron’s and Chancellor Merkel’s pathetic appeasement attempts – such as talking in favour of a new agreement because the JCPOA “is not enough” – at the White House stage would charm and persuade Trump and his war-mongering, neo-con, militarist team with obsessed Iran-haters such as Trump, Bolton and Pompeo?
Of course: Neither NATO allies – or a country such as Sweden for that matter – will show the necessary civil courage to stand up against Donald Trump’s reckless de facto war declaration on Iran tonight. They will talk and express concern, in the best of cases.
For years, they have taken order from His Master’s Voice, their state-financed institutional researchers and military academy experts have had about the same freedom of creativity as their former colleagues had in the German Democratic Republic, at the time. Loud and clear criticism of U.S. foreign policy still a taboo?
For how long? With how much more pain brought down on innocent people in foreign lands?
And it is anyhow too late now. NATO/EU allies have not dared to speak truth to the Captain:
“The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”
-Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row” (1965)
The major ones likely to stand with Iran in this dark hour are Russia and China.
And Iran will need – and deserves – our sympathy. If there ever was a case for the need of standing with the Iranian people, this is it.
They have suffered more than enough over decades – yes due to the domestic corruption and economic mismanagement but in particular due to these suffocating sanctions. And it is the people – anywhere and therefore in Iran too – who will pay the highest price, as did – and still do – the Serbian people, the Afghan people, the Iraqi people, the Libyan people, the Syrian people and the Yemeni people, to mention a few.
Whether the – deceptively “soft” sanctions which over years turn into Weapons of Mass Destruction – or bombings, invasions, arms trade, splitting of sovereign states and other war crimes: the innocent citizens who never touched a gun are always and without exception those who suffer most.
Nobody believes a word of your statement about your respect and admiration of the Iranian people, Mr. Trump. With this step you obviously could not care less about their welfare and the peace of the region.
What should ideally be done now?
Just a few – non-violent – ideas that reflect what should be relevant to discuss objectively and in proportion to the violation of international law and ignorance of the common global good that the U.S. by its president’s statement is solely responsible for:
+ Allies and friends of the U.S. impose selected economic sanctions on the U.S. leadership to not only talk but show that they mean business.
+ Allies and friends of the U.S. summon the U.S. ambassadors to their countries for hard talk.
+ Allies and friends threaten to close U.S. military bases in their countries and demand withdrawal of U.S. troops (and secret forces) from them.
+ Everybody begin to practice civil disobedience against the U.S. by trading, investing and otherwise cooperating with Iran, its people and institutions. After all, the U.S. is now deliberately trying to bully everybody else in whose interest it is to cooperate in various ways with Iran. If enough countries, corporations and banks just ignore the U.S. threats, the U.S. legal system will not be able to handle all these cases.
+ More countries should now decide to trade oil in other currencies than the US dollar.
+ Citizens around the world go visiting Iran, see and hear for themselves what the well-educated, cultured, hospitable and discussion-happy Iranians are truly like – because the mainstream media and politicians have provided close to no information about the people, culture, history – and suffering – of the Iranian people but only conveyed negative perspectives and images conducive to confrontation and future warfare.
+ In addition: people-to-people exchanges below and above the state level is always peace-promoting and, secondly – it’s way more difficult to accept military activity against countries you know from your own experience and in which you have made friends. So, as much citizens diplomacy as possible! Now!
– All until the U.S. backs down from its new sanctions, stops violating international law also verbally in its dealings with Iran and, finally, accepts that other countries do what is in their interest vis-a-vis Iran without Washington’s intimidation, threats or other preventive actions. If you leave a deal because you think it is in your interest, you cannot also influence its outcome and legitimately prevent others from acting in their best interest. It’s as simple as that!
Was this a declaration of war?
I think: Yes. However, the U.S. doesn’t bother about declaring war, it just does them.
From now on the U.S. will invent reasons for confronting Iran, accusing Iran, threatening Iran. It will feel more free to do so being outside the deal. The only countries that are happy about the announced policy are those already ganging up against Iran.
The rest of the world will distance themselves or condemn this step – but it is not likely that the U.S. will listen. It’s constitutionally unable to, seeing itself as the Exceptionalist, Chosen Country, the global ruler. # 1 in a system tends to teach and not learn…
It doesn’t necessarily mean war on Iran tomorrow. I hope by all my heart that I’m wrong and it will never happen.
But given Trump’s decision and all the other events and trends and coalition-building against Iran since 2015, it is much much more difficult from today to ignore the risk of a US-led attack or war on Iran.
We must remember that the US conflict with Iran is not only about nuclear weapons but also about a long and very conflictual relationship since the CIA-led coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 (who had the cheek to believe that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranians). It’s about today’s Syria, Israel, Saudi-Arabia and, since yesterday, Iran-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And – perhaps less easy to grasp but perhaps most importantly – it’s about the decline of US Empire worldwide and, therefore, an ever-increasing reliance on that last power dimension where the U.S. is still second to none: the MIMAC, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex.
The hammer will be used if it is the only tool in the toolbox no matter the problem to be fixed.
As a postscript, here is an interview with me on Iran’s international PressTV made nine hours before President Trump’s announcement. Another will follow that was made right after it and as a comment also on Iranian President Rouhani’s very balanced, moderate reaction to it.
May 9, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Israel, JCPOA, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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The other day I learned that the British Zionist pressure group Campaign Against Antisemitsm, an organisation that cares about bigotry against one people only, has launched a new short course. They teach their supporters “how to build bridges with natural allies” so they can fight antisemitsm together. Someone should explain to these ultra Zionist campaigners that ‘natural allies’ do not need bridges to be built. Bridges are only required when is a need to span noticeable obstacles.
CAA’s unusual interpretation of the notion of ‘bridge building’ will help us to grasp today’s topic: Zionism and Africa or more precisely Jews and Blacks.
Jews often brag about their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. According to some Jewish historians, a large amount of the funds for the NAACP came from Jewish sources – some experts estimate as much as 80%. Dr. King himself is regarded by many Zionists as their historic ally. Jewish sources often quote this defence of Zionism attributed to Dr. King. “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”
Howard Sachar begins his article Jews in the Civil Rights movement, by claiming that “nowhere did Jews identify themselves more forthrightly with the liberal avant-garde than in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. At the height of the anti-integration effort, in 1957, Rabbi Ira Sanders of Little Rock testified before the Arkansas Senate against pending segregationist bills.”
This would seem a positive moment in Jewish history until we remember that Judaism has sustained ‘segregation bills’ for two millennia. What are kosher dietary rules if not ‘segregation bills?’ I guess that we have all heard the Judaic and the Zionist attitude toward mixed marriage. Even within the Palestinian solidarity movement, many Jews choose to march within segregated racially oriented political cells (JVP, IJAN etc.)
I guess that CAA’s references to ‘bridge building with natural allies’ may help us to grasp the Jewish attitude to the Civil Rights Movement and solidarity movements. From a Jewish perspective the Blacks of the south were, to a certain extent, a ‘natural ally.’
Seemingly, some of the greatest voices of the Civil Rights Movement were Jews. Sachar writes “Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement far transcended institutional associations. One black leader in Mississippi estimated that, in the 1960s, the critical decade of the voter-registration drives, ‘as many as 90 percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish.’… They worked around the clock analysing welfare standards, the bail system, arrest procedures, justice-of-the-peace rulings.”
Probably among the most famous Civil Rights heroes were the three young voter registration workers, Jewish New Yorkers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman co worker, and James Chaney a Black man from Mississippi. The three were abducted and murdered by Klansmen and local law enforcement officers. This tragic event increased the nation’s awareness of the human crisis in the South.
But I am afraid that this is where the good story ends. Historically the Jewish attitude towards Blacks has been nothing short of a disaster. It is difficult to decide how to enter this colossal minefield.
In Jewish culture the word shvartze (Black, Yiddish) is an offensive term referring to a low being, specifically a Black person (“She’s dating a shvartze. Her grandmother is probably rolling over in her grave”). The reference to shvartze chaya is a direct reference to ‘black beast,’ meaning the lowest of the low. Shvartze chaya is also how Ashkenazi Jews often refer to Arab and Sephardi Jews. I guess that at least culturally some Ashkenazi Jews find it hard to deal with the colour black, especially when it comes on people. It is therefore slightly peculiar to witness white Ashkenazi Jews complain about white supremacy. If they are genuinely interested in combating white exceptionalism, maybe they should first uproot those vile symptoms from their own culture. I guess that kicking the racist ball into the goyim’s court is much easier.
We witness an anomaly — the same people who played a fundamental role in the civil rights movement, are themselves instrumental in an historic racist segregation project. The same people who supported the rights of Black Americans are implicated in deep cultural racism.
In order to grasp the Jewish institutional attitude toward Blacks we will review the ADL’s attitude to the Nation of Islam (NOI) in general and Louis Farrakhan in particular. The ADL claims that Farakhan is one of “America’s Leading Anti-Semite.(s)”
NOI according to the ADL, has “maintained a consistent record of anti-Semitism and racism since its founding in the 1930s.” The ADL’s site states that “under Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused and promoted anti-Semitism and racism throughout his 30-year tenure as NOI leader, the organization has used its programs, institutions, and media to disseminate its message of hate.”
“He (Farakhan) has repeatedly alleged that the Jewish people were responsible for the slave trade as well as the 9/11 attacks, and that they continue to conspire to control the government, the media, Hollywood, and various Black individuals and organizations.”
The question we want to ask at this stage is whether Farakhan’s criticism targets ‘The Jews’ as a people, race or ethnicity or does he actually target elements and sectors within the Jewish universe? A quick study of Farakhan’s cherry picked quotes provided by the ADL reveals that Farakhan doesn’t really refer to ‘the Jews’ as people. In most cases he refers to segments within the Jewish elite that are indeed politically dominant (AIPAC) and culturally corrosive or at least problematic.
But the question goes further. If the Jews do empathise with Blacks and their suffering why can’t they take a bit of criticism from the likes of Farakhan? If Jews care for the Other, as we are asked to believe, how come all this caring disappears once Farakhan appears on the scene? Unfortunately, the Jewish supporters of Palestine can operate like the ADL in this regard, occasionally acting as a thought police suppressing any reference to Jewishness as the driving force in Jewish history and Israeli criminality in particular.
Maybe the CAA’s peculiar understanding of the notion of bridge building is an accurate description of the Jewish political apparatus. What we see is a search for ‘natural allies’ that serve the Jewish cause rather than a humane empathic course towards peace, harmony and a better world. Jewish New Yorker Philip Weiss expressed this sentiment brilliantly in an interview with me. “I believe all people act out of self-interest. And Jews who define themselves at some level as Jews — like myself for instance — are concerned with a Jewish self-interest. Which in my case is: an end to Zionism.” Weiss supports Palestine because he believes it is good for the Jews. For him the Palestinians are natural allies. Similarly, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who as a young German Zionist rabbi sought a potential collaboration with Nazi Germany, ended up as a leading Civil Rights figure marching alongside Dr. King supporting human rights. For the late Rabbi Prinz, Dr. King and the civil rights movement were natural allies, they were good for the Jews.
As you surely noticed, I have not mentioned the role of Jews in slavery. This horrendous chapter in human history is not within my field of study.* But I do see, like the rest of you, how the Jewish State treats Black refugees. I do see how Israel locks up Blacks for being Black. I grew up in a country that looked down at people with dark skin. When I left Israel in the 1990s, Ethiopian Jews couldn’t donate blood. Jews are probably split on their attitude to Blacks and this is good. But Jewish culture and politics have a lot of ground to cover before they can be considered ethical, universal or even empathetic.
* Those who seek answers to questions regarding the salve trade should consider reading Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism or tune themselves to the scholarship of Tony Martin and his writings on the Jews and their role in the salve trade.
May 9, 2018
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, United States, Zionism |
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The Turning on Russia Series
“Stanley Fischer, the 73–year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is familiar with the decline of the world’s rich. He spent his childhood and youth in the British protectorate of Rhodesia… before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies. There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire… Now an American citizen, Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage… the United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently… The U.S. political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction…”
A Shrinking Giant, Spiegel Online, 9/11/2017
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world’s first and only Unipower as well as its intention to crush any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order foreseen just a few short years ago becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington. As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America’s claim to leadership, by the time Stanley Fischer’s interview appeared in the online version of the conservative German magazine Der Spiegel, he had already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve; eight months ahead of schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the “globalist” and former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of the British Empire as a young student in London, he actually assisted in the wholesale dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.
As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims, that makes Stanley Fischer not just empire’s Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.
Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, Anatoly Chubais and Jeffry Sachs, (the Harvard Project) Fischer helped to throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight – privatizing, or as some would say piratizing – the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the robbery from beginning to end. As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book Shadow Elite, “Presented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them, this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial, even among communists… the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but in the particular privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament.”
Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false narrative, she continues “The outcome rendered privatization ‘a de facto fraud,’ as one economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to ‘offer fertile ground for criminal activity’ was proven right.”
If Stanley Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire Americans to ask what role Stanley Fischer played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Unknown to Americans is the blunt force trauma Stanley Fischer and the “prestigious” Harvard Project delivered to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative’s James Carden “As the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted back in 2011… ‘the IMF’s intervention in Russia during Fischer’s tenure led to one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.’ Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF’s intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack.”
Neither do most Americans know that it was President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that boomeranged back to terrorize Europe and America in the 21st century. Zbigniew Brzezinski spent much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the President’s top intelligence officer was that he couldn’t find Nicaragua on a map. If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following the Soviet Union’s collapse it was Zbigniew Brzezinski and if anyone could be said to represent the debt driven financial system that fueled America’s post-Vietnam Imperialism, it’s Stanley Fischer. His departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative’s spine. Their dream of a New World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.
Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. After emerging from their Marxist/Leninist cocoon after World War II their movement helped to establish the Cold War. And from the chaos created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists but directed by the Anglo/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives’ goal was to deconstruct the nation-state through cultural cooptation and financial subversion and in that they have been overwhelmingly successful. From the end of World War II through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any and all opposition to their global dominion.
Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA’s founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987’s Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, described how “Pentagon Capitalism” had made the Vietnam War possible by selling the Pentagon’s debt to the rest of the world. “In effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky’s couriers, and the European central banks arranged the ‘loan-back’” Naylor writes. “When the mechanism was explained to the late [neoconservative] Herman Kahn – lifeguard of the era’s chief ‘think tank’ and a man who popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration – he reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, ‘We’ve pulled off the biggest ripoff in history! We’ve run rings around the British Empire.’” In addition to their core of ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Zbigniew Brzezinski himself.
From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was known that their emergence could spell the end of democracy in America and yet Washington’s more moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight. Peter Steinfels’ 1979 classic The Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America’s politics begins with these fateful words. “THE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First, that a distinct and powerful political outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy.”
But long before Steinfels’ 1979 account, the neoconservative’s agenda of inserting their own interests ahead of America’s was well underway attenuating American democracy, undermining détente and angering America’s NATO partners that supported it. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, détente had been under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces (led by Senator “Scoop” Jackson) from its inception. But America’s ownership of that policy underwent a shift following America’s intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations Détente and Confrontation, “To the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces in Europe was too much.”
In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, “The United States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of alliance unity.”
In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of détente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by Israel’s “politically significant supporters” in the U.S. to begin opposing any cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all. Garthoff writes, “The United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez… Thus they [Israel’s politically significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem.”
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
May 9, 2018
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Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Middle East, Russia, UK, United States, Zionism |
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In its latest bid to impound Palestinian tax money, the Israeli government is going after funds Palestinians use to pay people who are killed, injured or imprisoned by Israeli forces.
The Knesset approved yesterday the first reading of a bill to deduct the amount of money the Palestinian Authority pays to victims of the Israeli occupation from the Palestinian tax money collected by Tel Aviv in order to compensate “terror victims” in Israel.
The bill, which passed with 55 votes for and 14 against, seeks to give the Security Cabinet the authority to order a freeze of the transfer of money to the Palestinians as well as to outline clear instructions on what to do with the funds deducted, Ynet news reported.
While presenting the bill Deputy Defence Minister Eli Ben-Dahan said: “Today, the State of Israel says ‘no more’. We will fight terrorists not just by catching them and bringing them to justice, but even after they have been jailed. We will continue fighting them and their families and those who fund them and show zero tolerance to terrorism.”
The report went on to explain that the deducted money would be put in a special fund to pay compensation to terror victims; and to carry out projects as part the fight against terrorism and the funding of terrorism.
This is the latest Israeli attempt to penalise Palestinians using tax money which the Palestinians are entitled to. Previously they sought to punish the Palestinian leadership by freezing tax and customs payments when the PA successful won its bid at the UN in late 2012 to achieve non-member observer state status. Tel Aviv also withheld tax revenues in retaliation against the PA’s decision to join the International Criminal Court.
The tax collection regime in the occupied territory, which grants Israel the right to collect tax on behalf of the Palestinians, is one of the many oddities of the Oslo process. Critics say it has weakened Palestinians politically and economically.
While Israel has used the tax money it is not entitled to as a political stick against the PA, this time it is going after the families and victims of the occupation regime whose livelihood is dependent on the funds. In fact the fund has been a major source of contention in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Last March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed during a speech at the Israeli lobby group AIPAC that Mahmoud Abbas was paying $350 million a year to “terrorists and their families”. He went on to say that Palestinians were being encouraged to “murder Jews and get rich”.
Not only is the figure of $350 million far-fetched, the accusation that the “martyrs’ fund” goes to terrorists and their families is denied by Palestinians. Money not only goes to people who were killed or injured by Israeli forces, it also goes to Palestinian prisoners who are detained in their thousands by an occupation regime that designates, children and stone throwers terrorists.
May 8, 2018
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Tuesday U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
Speaking briefly after Trump announced the administration will reinstate the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Netanyahu hailed the move as a “courageous” and “right” decision.
Netanyahu accused Iran of preparing to attack ‘Israel’. “For the past months, Iran has been transferring weapons to its forces in Syria,” he claimed in a televised statement.
“We will react with force” to any attack, he said. “The army is prepared, the army is strong, and whoever will try us will feel well the strength of our arm,” he warned.
The prime minister called on the ‘international community’ to join the United States and revoke the landmark deal. He also called other countries to act against “the Iranian aggression.”
Netanyahu alleged that the deal would have enabled Iran to enrich uranium “in quantities sufficient to produce a whole arsenal of nuclear bombs.”
Iran denounced Trump’s move, saying his decision was unlawful and undermines international agreements.
May 8, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Israel, United States, Zionism |
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As Donald Trump announces his decision at 2 pm Tuesday on staying in the Iran nuclear deal, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity urge him in this memo exclusive to Consortium News not to base his decision on fabricated evidence.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Being “Played” By Bogus Evidence on Iran
NOTE: The evidence presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 alleging a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program shows blatant signs of fabrication. That evidence is linked to documents presented by the Bush Administration more a decade earlier as proof of a covert Iran nuclear weapons program. Those documents were clearly fabricated as well.
We sent President Bush a similar warning about bogus intelligence — much of it fabricated by Israel —six weeks before the U.S./UK attack on Iraq, but Bush paid us no heed. This time, we hope you will take note before things spin even further out of control in the Middle East. In short, Israel’s “new” damaging documents on Iran were fabricated by the Israelis themselves.
Executive Summary
The Bush administration account of how the documents on Iran got into the hands of the CIA is not true. We can prove that the actual documents originally came not from Iran but from Israel. And the documents were never authenticated by the CIA or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Two former Directors-General of the IAEA, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, have publicly expressed suspicion that the documents were fabricated. And forensic examination of the documents yielded multiple signs that they are fraudulent.
We urge you to insist on an independent inquiry into the actual origins of these documents. We believe that the renewed attention being given to claims that Iran is secretly working to develop nuclear weapons betokens a transparent attempt to stoke hostility toward Iran, with an eye toward helping “justify” pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
* * *
Mr. President,
We write you in the hope that you will be informed of our views before you decide whether to continue to adhere to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran. We fear that upcoming decisions may be based, in part, on unreliable documents alleging secret nuclear weapons activity in Iran.
On April 30, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu displayed some of those documents in his slide show on what he called the Iranian “atomic archive.” But those are precisely the same fraudulent documents that were acquired by the CIA in 2004.
The official accounts offered by the senior officials of the CIA about the provenance of these documents turned out be complete fabrication. Journalists were told variously that the documents (1) were taken from the laptop computer of an Iranian working in a secret research program; (2) were provided by a German spy; or (3) simply came from a “longtime contact in Iran.”
However, Karsten Voigt, the former German Foreign Office official in charge of German-North American cooperation, revealed in an on the record interview with historian/journalist Gareth Porter in 2013 that senior officials of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, told Voigt in November 2004 that the documents had been passed to the CIA by a BND source. That source, the senior BND official said, was not considered trustworthy, because he belonged to the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK), the armed Iranian opposition group that was known to have served as a conduit for information that Israeli intelligence (Mossad) wanted to provide to the IAEA without having it attributed to Israel. (In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton removed MEK from the list of terrorist organizations.)
Voigt recalled that the senior BND officials told him of their worry that the Bush administration was going to repeat the error of using fraudulent intelligence, as was the case with the notorious “Curveball”, the Iraqi living in Germany, whom the BND had identified as unreliable. Nonetheless, Curveball’s fictions about mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq —with “artists renderings” by the CIA of those phantom labs — had been used by Colin Powell in his error-ridden presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, leading to war on Iraq.
As for the purported Iranian documents, the CIA never ruled out the possibility that they were fabricated, and the IAEA made no effort to verify their authenticity. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei recalled in his memoirs that he had believed the documents were not really from the Iranian government and that, as he put it, “it made more sense that this information originated in another country.” ElBaradei stated publicly from 2005 through 2009 that the documents had not been authenticated, and he refused to use them as “evidence” of a covert Iranian weapons research program. And ElBaradei’s predecessor as Director-General, Hans Blix, has said he is “somewhat more worried” about the intelligence on the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program than about the dubious intelligence he saw on Iraq, because “there is as much disinformation as there is information.”
Each of the documents mentioned by both Netanyahu and the IAEA reports bears tell-tale signs of fraud. The most widely reported document in the collection is a set of schematic drawings showing efforts to redesign the re-entry vehicle of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon. But the slide that Netanyahu displayed on the screen in his slide show provides visual confirmation of fraud. The drawing shows clearly the “dunce cap” design of the Shahab-3 reentry vehicle. But Iran’s Defense Ministry had already discarded that “dunce cap” reentry vehicle when it began to develop a new improved missile. That redesign began in 2000, according to the Congressional testimony in September 2000 of CIA national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs Robert D. Walpole. But the earliest dates of any of the alleged Iranian nuclear weapon program documents on the project for redesign of the reentry vehicle in the May 2008 IAEA report on the entire collection are from summer 2002 after the “dunce cap” was replaced. The “baby-bottle” shaped reentry vehicle on the redesigned missile was not known to the outside world until the first test of the new missile in mid-2004. So those drawings could not have been done by someone who was actually involved in the redesign of the original Shahab-3 reentry vehicle; it was clearly the work of a foreign intelligence agency seeking to incriminate Iran, but slipping up on one important detail and thus betraying its fraudulent character.
The second document from that same collection turned over to the IAEA that has been widely reported is the so-called “green salt project” — a plan for a bench-scale system of uranium conversion for enrichment given the code name “Project 5.13” and part of a larger “Project 5”. Other documents that had been provided by the MEK showed that “Project 5” also included a sub-project involving ore processing at a mine designated “Project 5.15,” according to a briefing by IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen in February 2008.
But when Iran turned over detailed documents to the IAEA in response to its questions about Project 5.15 in 2008, the IAEA learned the truth: there had been a real ore processing project called Project 5.15, but it was a civilian project of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran – not part of a covert nuclear weapons program—and the decision to create Project 5.15 had been made on August 25, 1999—more than two years before the initial date of the project found in the collection of supposedly secret nuclear weapons research documents. That fact gives away the ruse surrounding the numbering system of “Project 5″ adopted by intelligence specialists who had fabricated the document.
A third document that purportedly shows Iranian nuclear weapons research is about what Netanyahu called “Multi-Point Initiation in hemispheric geometry” and the IAEA called “experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device.” Significantly, that document was not part of the original collection that the CIA had passed to the IAEA, but had been given to the IAEA years later, and officials from the IAEA, Europe and the United States refused to reveal which member country had provided the document. Former Director-General ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs, however, that Israel had passed a series of documents to the IAEA in 2008-09, in an effort to make the case that Iran had continued its nuclear weapons experiments until “at least 2007.”
The summary picture we offer above includes unusually clear evidence of the fraudulent nature of the documents that are advertised as hard evidence of Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons. One remaining question is cui bono? — who stands to benefit from this kind of “evidence.” The state that had the most to gain from the fabrication of such documents was obviously Israel.
Completely absent from the usual discussion of this general problem is the reality that Israel already has a secret nuclear arsenal of more than a hundred nuclear weapons. To the extent Israel’s formidable deterrent is more widely understood, arguments that Israel genuinely fears an Iranian nuclear threat any time soon lose much of their power. Only an extreme few suggest that Iran’s leaders are bent on risking national suicide. What the Israelis are after is regime change in Tehran. And they have powerful allies with similar aims.
We therefore urge you, Mr. President, not to go along with these plans or to decide to pull the U.S. out of the six-nation nuclear deal with Iran based on fraudulent evidence.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Kathleen Christison, Senior Analyst on Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain,Wing Commander, RAAF (ret.); Intelligence Officer & ex-Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou,former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Edward Loomis,NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern,former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray,former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce,MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Gareth Porter, author/journalist (associate VIPS)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ., USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (ret.); also Foreign Service Officer who resigned in opposition to the US war on Iraq
This Memorandum was drafted by VIPS Associate Gareth Porter, author of “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” 2014
May 8, 2018
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Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Sanctions against Iran, United States, Zionism |
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Michael Makovsky (l), CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), at a September 2013 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. (WWW.JINSA.ORG).
THE 20TH CENTURY was rife with partitions, many of them involving European powers carving up colonial possessions in Africa and the Middle East with what often appears to have been little or no concern for local realities. Perhaps the most famous of these free-hand attempts at state creation is the Sykes-Picot Line, whose legacy is very much still with us (and not for the better). But Sykes-Picot is far from the only example of European colonial borders that are still causing problems decades after they were drawn.
But who cares about all of that? It doesn’t seem to be an issue for at least some of America’s anti-Iran hawks. In response to Iran’s rising profile in the Middle East, fueled mostly by a war those neocons ardently championed and the striking ineptitude of the hawks’ new favorite Persian Gulf monarchy, the intellectual heirs to the men who drew those ill-fated borders are proposing, long after it might have done any good, to re-draw them.
Writing for Fox News on Dec. 25, Michael Makovsky — who is no fringe figure, being CEO of the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) — suggests just such a strategy for countering Iranian influence in the Middle East:
Maintaining Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen in their existing forms is unnatural and serves Iran’s interests. There is nothing sacred about these countries’ borders, which seem to have been drawn by a drunk and blindfolded mapmaker. Indeed, in totally disregarding these borders, ISIS and Iran both have already demonstrated the anachronism and irrelevance of the borders.
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen are not nation-states as Americans understand them, but rather post-World War I artificial constructs, mostly created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in a colossally failed experiment by Western leaders.
With their deep ethno-sectarian fissures, these four countries have either been held together by a strong authoritarian hand or suffered sectarian carnage.
It is astonishing to read neoconservatives, who have done little else since the 1970s but lobby for exerting American hegemony in the Middle East, decry the results of the exertion of European hegemony in the Middle East. It reads like an artificial intelligence that just briefly verges on full self-awareness before pivoting and falling back to safer ground. It’s particularly rich for Makovsky, whose JINSA predecessors promoted the ouster of two of those “strong authoritarian hands” in former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to bemoan one result of their ouster.
But let’s focus on the proposal Makovsky makes: redrawing borders in the Middle East, creating what he calls “loose confederations or new countries with more borders that more naturally conform along sectarian lines,” in order to counter Iran. The proposal strongly resembles recommendations found in “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 publication of the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies that was prepared in collaboration with several other neoconservative think tanks — including JINSA.
“A Clean Break,” the conclusion of a task force that included such Likudnik geniuses as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, argued in part that Israel should work with friendly governments in Turkey and Jordan to contain regional threats, particularly coming from Syria. It concluded, among other things, that Israeli leaders should pursue “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” “Syria” in this context serves as a stand-in for “Iran.” Long-term, the report envisioned the formation of a “natural axis” of Israel, Turkey, Jordan and a “Hashemite” Iraq serving as “the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East, which could threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.”
Even a cursory glance at the state of the Middle East since the end of the Iraq war shows that ousting Saddam Hussein achieved the opposite of the report’s stated goals. The idea of a Hashemite restoration in Shi’i-majority Iraq was ridiculously far-fetched, and Iraq’s democratically elected government has — justifiably — greatly improved the Baghdad-Tehran relationship. Makovsky, who wants to reverse this trend, argues that the United States should “declare our support and strong military aid for an eventual Iraqi Kurdish state, once its warring factions unify and improve governance. We could support a federation for the rest of Iraq.”
In Makovsky’s imagination, the new Kurd-less Iraqi federation would presumably wish Erbil well and send it on its way. In reality, another serious Kurdish move toward independence would probably lead to a civil war, as it nearly did in October over the status of Kirkuk. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s first foreign trip after his dramatic capture of Kirkuk was… to Iran. If the United States were to come out in full support of an independent Kurdistan, it would almost certainly push the rest of Iraq more firmly into Iran’s orbit. Speaking of Kirkuk, does Makovsky imagine that independent Kurdistan would be given the city and its surrounding oil fields? If yes, then that only increases the chances of a war with Baghdad. If no, then there are serious questions about whether that hypothetical Kurdish state would be economically viable.
REDRAWING THE MAP OF SYRIA?
For Syria, Makovsky says that “we could seek a more ethnically coherent loose confederation or separate states that might balance each other—the Iranian-dominated Alawites along the coast, the Kurds in the northeast, and the Sunni Arabs in the heartland.” He might want to check a recent map of Syria, because while “heartland” is obviously a subjective term, by almost any definition Syria’s “heartland” now belongs to President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. This includes the country’s five largest (pre-war) cities: Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Latakia and Hama. How does Makovsky propose any of that territory be taken from Assad so as to be turned over to “Sunni Arabs,” even in a confederate sense? If the answer is “war,” then his Fox News thinkpiece is burying the lede, to say the least.
Makovsky then recommends that the U.S. strengthen relations with Shi’i-majority Azerbaijan, in order to “demonstrate we are not anti-Shi’i Muslim.” Yes, that should do the trick. Of course, that’s not the only reason:
An added potential benefit of this approach could be a fomenting of tensions within Iran, which has sizable Kurdish and Azeri populations, thereby weakening the radical regime in Tehran.
You might even say that it could threaten Iran’s territorial integrity. Make a Clean Break, if you will.
The dangers of the United States trying to redraw Middle Eastern borders — Makovsky graciously allows that America “cannot dictate the outcomes” but should instead “influence” them—should be obvious. For one thing, there’s the immediate likelihood that attempting to draw new borders would intensify regional instability. For another, there’s little reason to expect that the United States would get the new borders any more “right” than Britain and France did a century ago, particularly not when the process is being managed by the same people who brought us the invasion of Iraq. For still another, the most recent example of such Western “influenced” partitioning isn’t exactly a positive one.
But we can’t leave Makovsky’s piece without mentioning its most jaw-dropping paragraph:
Artificial states have been divided or loosened before with some success, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, which are all post-WWI formations. Bosnia and Herzegovina have also managed as a confederation.
Czechoslovakia divided peacefully of its own accord. The Soviet Union more or less did likewise, though that dissolution hasn’t been quite so peaceful in recent years. As for Yugoslavia — well, maybe Dr. Makovsky’s definition of “success” is a bit different from most other people’s. To be fair, though, if the breakup of Yugoslavia is his template for the future of the Middle East, this piece makes a lot more sense.
But if Makovsky believes in federalizing existing Middle Eastern states along “ethno-sectarian” lines, why not start with Israel and the occupied territories, a notion that would seem logical to any 21st century mapmaker? After all, occupation of one people by another via a “strong authoritarian hand” — in this case the IDF — would seem to be a prescription for a “colossally failed experiment,” no? Perhaps Makovsky’s experience as a former West Bank settler may make it difficult for him to see the relevance.
Derek Davison is a Washington-based researcher and writer on international affairs and American politics. He previously worked in the Persian Gulf for The RAND Corporation. Jim Lobe served as the Washington, DC correspondent and chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) from 1980 to 1985. Copyright © 2017 LobeLog. All rights reserved.
May 8, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, JINSA, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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Time to question the loyalty of some legislators and judges
I have a number of times discussed how the U.S. and other governments have legislated and otherwise promoted Jewish and Israeli interests in ways that most people would find unacceptable if they were aware of what exactly has been going on. Here in the United States, special Medicare coverage and immigration status have been granted, often concealed in other legislation, to benefit holocaust survivors and Russian Jews seeking to emigrate. State legislatures and the U.S. Congress have meanwhile been working hard to pass legislation that blocks and even criminalizes the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) protests against Israeli behavior while universities have been banning anti-Israel demonstrators and groups on campus because they apparently are offensive to the sensitivities of some Jewish students.
The latest outrage against the First Amendment comes from South Carolina, the home state of the arch-Zionist poseur and United Nations Ambassador extraordinary Nikki Haley. A new hate speech law was inserted in the state’s recently approved annual budget. The legislation borrows from the U.S. State Department definition of anti-Semitism, which proscribes speech that “demonizes” or applies “double standards” to Israel “by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” as anti-Semitic.
While the State Department definition is a guideline, South Carolina’s specific inclusion of it in legislation makes explicit that criticism of Israel as hate speech can be subject to criminal penalties. It also is binding on all the state’s universities and educational institutions.
The law was promoted by Alan Clemmons, a Mormon legislator who has led numerous delegations to Israel and who has been described as “Israel’s biggest supporter in a U.S. state legislature.”
Supporters of the Bill of Rights have been universally opposed to the bill, but pro-Israel groups have praised the initiative and are expecting a “new wave” of legislation all across the United States blocking any criticism of the self-described Jewish State. The Brandeis Center has enthused
“This bill gives South Carolina the tools to protect Jewish students’ and all South Carolina students’ right to a learning environment free of unlawful discrimination. We are hoping this momentous step will result in another national wave to, once and for all, begin defeating rising anti-Semitism.”
Other states will undoubtedly follow the South Carolina lead, so it would appear that any criticism of Israel will become illegal in the public square if the many friends of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have their way. And they generally do get what they want from the federal level all the way down to the states and local communities, so be prepared.
Israel also is regularly exploiting the American legal system to punish countries that it has defined as its enemies. Its government sponsored lawfare organization called Shurat Hadin has initiated a number of lawsuits in U.S. courts to punish Palestinians and Iranians. Ironically, it is currently seeking to demonstrate that Hamas is committing war crimes in Gaza, where Israel has been using army snipers to kill unarmed demonstrators.
Other lawsuits filed on behalf of mostly Jewish Americans in U.S. courts seeking compensation from Iranians and Palestinians are also pending, with the tribunals in Manhattan particularly prone to being sympathetic to the plaintiffs. Last week, at the Federal Court for the Southern District of Manhattan, Judge George Daniels issued a default judgment relating to his 2011 determination that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to the hundreds of family members of victims who are named in the case. The judge ordered Iran to pay $6 billion in compensation – “$12,500,000 per spouse, $8,500,000 per parent, $8,500,000 per child, and $4,250,000 per sibling” to the families and estates of the deceased. A 4.96 annual interest rate will also be applied to the amount, starting from September 11, 2001 to the date of the judgement.”
Normally foreign governments have what is referred to as sovereign immunity which prevents their being sued, but that all changed in the U.S. with the passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) of 2016, which permitted individual lawsuits in any federal court involving any government’s alleged participation in international acts of “terrorism.” This has resulted in a series of multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against Iran, the Palestinians and also Saudi Arabia. Many of the lawsuits have Israeli citizens as plaintiffs, suing in American courts.
Though the lawsuit claimed, and Judge Daniels agreed, that Tehran had supported the 9/11 hijackers with training and other assistance, most authorities would question that judgement. Many would consider it to be ludicrous as Iranian Shi’ites were considered to be kill-on-sight heretics by al-Qaeda. The idea that Iran was somehow involved in 9/11 is in reality a ridiculous Israel Lobby contrivance that was first floated in 2015 by ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, a renowned Zionist stooge and conspiracy theorist who is viewed by many as not completely in possession of all his marbles.
Indeed, it is far more plausible that Israel was involved in 9/11 than was Iran. Israel operated a massive spying operation directed against Arabs in the U.S. and several of its intelligence officers were seen in Jersey City to be filming themselves while dancing and cavorting in delight as the twin towers went down, suggesting some prior knowledge.
But, of course, no one would be allowed to sue Israel in an American court. The 9/11 Commission failed to examine the case against Israel even though it allegedly sought to compile a “full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding” the attacks, but it did investigate the possible ties to Iran. It found the only evidence of any Iranian support to consist of certain 9/11 hijackers travelling through Iran on their way to Afghanistan without having their passports stamped.
In his Farewell Address President George Washington warned that
“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot.”
If one believes that deference to the special foreign interest of one powerful and wealthy segment of the population is appropriate in a democracy then I suppose the Jewish/Israeli pander has to be considered acceptable. I happen to believe that, as our first president so clearly articulated, it is not, particularly as much of the concession that Jews are somehow to be treated differently than the rest of the community due to their alleged victimhood contributes to a criticism-free ride for an Israel which is eagerly seeking a new war in the Middle East. It would be a war that the United States would inevitably get pulled into by Israel’s friends in Congress and the media. It would also be catastrophic for all parties involved and it all starts with the belief that Israel should somehow be protected and its enemies punished while also being exempt from being made accountable for its actions.
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 www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
May 8, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Human rights, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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If political terror is defined as the use of fear to achieve political aims then the activities of the self-elected British Jewish Zionist pressure groups seem to fit that definition. Some of these groups have openly tried to coerce political parties by threatening them, setting ‘ultimatums’ and harassing individuals. Political activists have lost their jobs and been ejected from their political institutions merely for criticising Israel or for citing historical facts deemed by some to be anti semitic.
Yet, the recent Local elections in Britain proves that the Brits are strong people, not easily deterred by political terrorism. Despite the relentless campaign against the Labour Party and the vicious slander of Corbyn and his supporters, the Party didn’t lose power. In fact, Labour saw its best London results since 1971. A BBC statistical exercise that applied the local election results to a possible parliamentary election predicted that the Conservatives would lose 38 seats while Labour would gain 21!
The message to the Israeli Lobby is clear. Your game appears to be counter effective. Further, if these threats are viewed by the public as political terrorism they could lead to a backlash against British Jews and perhaps others. Despite your efforts, Labour voters stayed with Corbyn. By now they are likely frustrated by your relentless activity. The British are not blind to your lobbying, and how could they be? The Zionist pressure games are openly aired in public.
May 7, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | UK, Zionism |
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