Full Spectrum Dominance

Academic research collaboration emboldens Israeli apartheid

Diane Shammas, The Electronic Intifada, 14 September 2010

Israeli universities play no small role in the state’s military strategy. (Keren Manor/ActiveStills)

In July, Donna Shalala, the president of the University of Miami and former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, joined a 13-member delegation of American university presidents to Israel. The delegation’s main objective was to discuss opportunities for academic collaboration with Israeli universities and reciprocal exchange programs for student and faculty. The majority of these Israeli universities, if not all, have been implicated in war crimes and other human rights violations against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians (“Academic boycott against Israel? Umberto Eco misses the point,” Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 10 July 2010).

Prior to the delegates’ arrival in Israel, they drafted and sent individual letters to their executive counterparts at the Israeli universities, stating that they “clearly denounce[d] the boycott of Israeli academics” (“Shalala among delegation of university presidents to visit Israel,” University of Miami news release, 2 July 2010).

The karmic twist to Shalala’s visit to Israel was that in spite of her obsequious endorsement of the anti-boycott stance, she was not spared from a three-hour, humiliating interrogation and detainment upon her departure from the Ben Gurion Airport. Israel’s Ynet News reported that she was detained because of her Arabic surname (“American VIP humiliated at airport,” 6 August 2010). When later interviewed by the Miami Herald, Shalala dismissed the inconvenience of her detention as purely security protocol to ensure traveler safety. Leaving aside all speculations as to why Shalala, an Arab-American, did not speak out against the indignity of her treatment at the airport, the larger conversation should be the strategic marketing and funding of research partnerships between American and Israeli universities.

Research and development collaboration between higher education institutions amount to billions of dollars annually. In 2008, the federal government alone funded $31 billion for academic research and development expenditures of which $1.6 billion were passed through to other university sub-recipients, domestic and foreign (National Science Foundation). Apart from the steady growth of research collaborations with “Asian 8” countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, the research partnerships between American and Israel universities have been consistently strong and significant.

Large corporate donors, like Coca-Cola Company and Quaker Oats, a division of Pepsi-Cola, subsidize many of these collaborative research projects between US and Israeli universities, due principally to their robust ties with the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce (“American Israeli Chamber of Commerce promotes academic and research exchanges between University of Minnesota and Israeli educational and research institutions,” American-Israel Chamber of Commerce press release, 10 August 1998).

While the actual number of US-Israeli research partnerships is not readily available, a proxy indicator is the annual percentage of collaborative science and engineering articles between the two countries. Israel has the third-highest percentage of co-authored articles, 52 percent, with American researchers, after South Korea (54 percent) and Taiwan (53 percent). It is important to point out here if the percentage of co-authorship for Israel appears inflated, it is because their co-authorship output with the US is greater than their considerably smaller educational infrastructure. Therefore, the National Science Foundation has corrected for the infrastructural disparities by placing Israel’s rate of co-authorship with US at 1.21, qualitatively speaking, “higher than expected,” along with similar rankings for South Korea and Taiwan. Shalala’s delegation specifically expressed an interest in collaborating with Israeli universities on the application of technological research to the manufacturing of marketable products.

Israel aggressively courts research partnerships with American universities by hosting academic delegations. For example, Project Interchange, an educational organization of the American Jewish Committee, sponsored Shalala’s delegation to participate in their week-long program. A brief portrait of Project Interchange will illustrate that these academic delegations are political-educational junkets, which subliminally promote a Zionist ideology along with coordinating potential partnerships with Israeli universities.

Project Interchange regularly sponsors academic delegations and conducts programs in a seminar format. According to their website, Project Interchange customizes the theme of the seminar to each group’s interest, but all seminars are framed within the broader discourse of Israeli culture, society and politics — with a predominant focus on Israeli foreign policy.

Project Interchange identifies itself as “non-partisan,” “apolitical” and [an] “educational organization.” If one carefully deconstructs the language that Project Interchange uses on its website to describe its seminars — “challenging and promoting dialogue” and “offering multiple perspectives on complex issues” — it feigns a non-partisan and apolitical agenda by reducing the Palestinian struggle against occupation and dispossession to mere differences of opinion among ostensibly rival equals — Palestinians and Israelis. The message conveyed, therefore, is deceptive, because it completely denies the existence of the relationship between the colonizer — Israel — and the colonized, the indigenous population. The subordinate reference to “also meeting with Israeli Arabs and Palestinians” blatantly exposes Israel’s relegation of the indigenous population to second class citizens.

Another component of Project Interchange’s seminar program is coordinated site visits to the Israeli and Arab/Palestinian communities. In July, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an account of one site visit by a member of Shalala’s delegation, a president from an elite East coast university, who lauds the multi-cultural efforts of the Jerusalem International YMCA Peace pre-school:

“‘Boker tov!’ ‘Sabaah al-khayr!’ ‘Good morning!’ The excited voices of the kindergarten students and their tri-lingual teachers make us all smile as our group of American academic leaders visit the International Jerusalem YMCA peace pre-school … In the preschool, which serves an equal number of Arab (Christians and Muslims) and Jewish students, young people don’t seem to know they’re from different backgrounds and they are supposed to hate each other but they are friends” (“What we can learn from Children,” 16 July 2010).

Even though the delegate acknowledges the preschool’s diversity, his latter remark about the surprising amity among Arab and Jewish children and declaration that “they do not seem to know that they’re from different backgrounds” demonstrates his racial and religious blindness. He blissfully dismisses this purported hatred between Jews and Palestinian Arabs as if it originates from a historical rivalry on equal footing rather than a deep-rooted power imbalance between occupier and occupied.

Moreover, what is astonishingly naive about his comment is that, as a university president, he is (or should be) cognizant of the racial tensions among minority student populations, and yet, he seems to be taken in by the artificial democratic setting of the Israeli preschool, which is precisely the falsely egalitarian image of Israel that Project Interchange is endeavoring to promote by their site visits.

In the final analysis, Project Interchange’s objective is to transform a research collaboration initiative into a commodified, politicized and hegemonic project that is an extension of the Israeli state apparatus. To this end, American universities’ collaboration with Israel’s educational institutions is complicit in the occupation.

The portrait of Project Interchange lends insight into how a United States-Israeli global network intercedes on behalf of US academic leaders to establish strategic research partnerships with Israeli universities. Because Israeli universities mirror the racist institutional structure of the Israeli government and the US enables the Israeli occupation, it is highly unlikely in the present political environment that any research collaboration between American and Israeli universities would comply with the guidelines outlined by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

In recent months, global boycott, divestment and sanctions have made enormous strides and have reported several victories in the areas of economic and cultural boycotts. To that end, American and Israeli university partnerships merit closer scrutiny in particular, as well as the intermediary organizations and the large corporate and private donors and binational foundations that annually fund billions of dollars to them (e.g., Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD)).

Diane Shammas is of Lebanese/Arab American heritage, and holds a Ph.D in International and Urban Education and Policy, with a specialization in Arab American Studies. She currently teaches a course on social construction of race and citizenship. She recently lived in Gaza City for three months, taught at Al Azhar University (Gaza), and passed through the West Bank on her return to the United States.

September 14, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Questioning Foundations: An Interview with Denis Rancourt

By Michael Barker / Dissident Voice / June 17th, 2010

Until recently Denis Rancourt was a tenured physics professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada; however, as a direct result of his commitment to activist teaching at his university, on December 10, 2008, he was being placed under administrative suspension and banned from campus, with the Dean of the Faculty of Science recommending that he be fired. This controversial decision has resulted in an ongoing battle to repeal this decision. This interview was carried out by email in June 2010. A list of Rancourt’s essays on societal topics are here.

Michael Barker: Could you explain what you see as the main differences between hard and soft power?

Denis Rancourt: Hard power is direct hierarchical control over our lives, such as via our jobs at work and via school as students. Hard power is the master’s hand in controlling our access to work and in controlling what our work will be. Hard power is hierarchical and undemocratic. Hard power is the main force in our lives as individuals.

Soft power is all the side-door things we can do with our spare time, participating in culture and interpretation, creating political alliances and resisting at work and at school, practicing sabotage, offering support to targeted colleagues, and so on.

That is the most useful distinction between “soft power” and “hard power” that I can make. It’s about the individual’s authentic rebellion via a Freirian praxis of resistance in which solidarity is a coalescence of individual fighters seeking liberation.

MB: I tend to think that most writers have neglected emphasizing the importance of soft power, most specifically that of philanthropy, in legitimizing and extending capitalist relations. What are your thoughts on this matter?

DR: There are two main classes of slaves. Those that need only be obedient and are controlled by direct force and harsh physical conditions, by a constant fear of loss of economic subsistence; and those (the managers, professionals and service intellectuals) who, beyond obedience, need to be indoctrinated, need to adopt and project the dominant ideology of their profession and of the system of exploitation.

The “soft power” of foundations and government grants is just one perfected form of control in which the indoctrinated slave must show that he/she understands the grantor’s intentions and that he/she “authentically” has the same noble intentions. This is brilliantly explained in Jeff Schmidt’s book “Disciplined Minds,” a book that more professional workers and intellectuals need to read. Schmidt points out that if one million dollars worth of funding is made available to do blah, then one million dollars worth of blah will get done. And the doer will be happy to have “freely” done blah.

MB: As a result of publishing your own work, what sort of opposition or support have you obtained from elite knowledge producing networks?

DR: I published more than 100 scientific articles in leading scientific journals. This had the effect of padding my CV, assuring promotions and continued grant support, providing invited and keynote talks at specialized conferences to further pad my CV, assuring me a high rank in the academic pecking order, and wasting a large chunk of my life.

I also write social science essays as part of my liberation and to help me reflect about my liberation. As far as I can tell, this has had no impact in generating liberation in others. It has helped me discover and organize my interpretations about the world, and it has helped me in my discussions with activists, but as a product out there in the mental environment it has probably had a negative impact because it mostly serves the castrated intellectualizations of neutralized-by-design thought activists. (See my essay “Against Chomsky”.)

I’m also looking for ways to use language to jolt readers into discomfort in the hope that this might catalyze a reaction out of the norm, that it might cause readers to glimpse at what rebellion might look like. A recent example of this ends with “Fucking Jesus” and is posted here.

In addition, I run a blog that directly exposes and critiques administrative malfeasance of my former employer, the University of Ottawa, the “U of O Watch” blog. My published writings here have contributed to causing an “elite knowledge producing” institution, my employer, to fire me. This writing does have an impact via what I have called “image leverage.” As seen in access to information documents, the upper administration reads and discusses every post. The executives change their behaviours and their institutional plans in response to the blog. It keeps them on their toes and corrects some of the more flagrant abuses of authority and nepotism.

MB: When do you first remember reading or hearing about critiques of liberal philanthropists and their foundations? What were your initial reactions to such criticisms? Here I am predominantly thinking about the former “big three,” the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

DR: My first encounters with these critiques were via Jeff Schmidt’s 2000 book and the 2002 essay by Andrea del Moral “The revolution will not be funded.”

My immediate reactions were that these critiques sounded true. I believed these analyses.

MB: Following on from the last question, could you briefly explain what you think about the academic/activist literature that is critical of liberal philanthropy?

DR: Useful as an aid to reflection for those practicing a praxis of liberation. Useless and probably harmful otherwise?

It’s like most heavy metals (such as iron and arsenic): They are both essential nutrients (if too little) and toxic (if too much). Iron deficiency versus iron overload disease…

MB: Following on from this, could you please explain in what respect you see critiques of liberal philanthropy to be “useless and probably harmful”?

DR: I mean that virtually all progressive or radical or liberal or other intellectuals are primarily intellectuals who have in practice divorced commentary and analysis from reform via direct challenges to the system at the point of their strongest connection to the system, at work. The point at which the individual has the most leverage in changing the system, in actually changing the system, is the point at which the system has the most power over the individual, the point of the individual’s strongest connection to the economy, at work (university, think tank, law office, etc.).

To refuse to challenge one’s employer, to refuse to fight one’s own oppression, and to mask this refusal with rationalizations and intellectualizations is to do more harm than good. To pretend that the world is somehow changed by “good” ideas, to want to participate in the reflection without significantly participating in the action, is to contribute to hiding the truth about societal change: That change results from directly fighting one’s own oppression and that opposing power in this way has real consequences beyond a difficulty to publish or negative reviews.

Virtually all intellectuals write for other intellectuals in a musical chairs game of ideas that is disconnected from oppression’s realities.

For example, if I come to understand the instrument of my own oppression that are liberal foundations, then I might fight this by publicly ridiculing the foundation’s work, by publicly and institutionally challenging my colleagues’ use of foundation funds, by publicly campaigning to exclude foundation funding from my campus, by publicly campaigning to change promotional criteria based of research funding, by publicly challenging my own denial of promotion, etc. These real actions and others will put me in conflict with my colleagues in which my leverage is applied against their influence to preserve the system. This will have some influence where writing a theoretical paper about foundations would not. Worse, writing that paper alleviates one’s guilt of not actually doing anything and creates the illusion with one’s self-selected readers that “we” are collectively doing something about the problem, that somehow our common opinion will have an influence.

MB: Why do you think that written criticisms of liberal foundations are so few and far between?

DR: A slave does not bite the hand that feeds him/her. Most radical intellectuals are tied within certain bounds. For example, note the radical intellectual’s aversion to “conspiracy theories.” Radical professors play the important role of co-opting activist students and delegitimizing threatening observers.

MB: These are very interesting points, could you expand upon your thoughts on these matters?

DR: Criticism of liberal foundations is akin to criticism of tenure. Most academics that benefit from, or have ties with, colleagues that benefit from these instruments of indoctrination do not feel it would be a strategically clever move, in terms of the class ties that provide them the security of their class privilege, to critique these instruments.

Service intellectuals instinctively know the bounds of discourse, beyond which the full fury of power’s opinion mill and influence will be aimed against the heretic. What happened to Ward Churchill was flexing of ideological muscle well within those bounds. Imagine if Churchill had suggested that 911 was a “black op” and focussed his research on this possibility. Indeed, what was done to Churchill effectively reduces the possibility that the black op research option can be considered among academic researchers.

There are exceptions that push the limits and that may not be publicly executed for fear of further exposure. For these individuals they are simply removed from influential posts and relegated to academic oblivion. I am thinking of William K. Black (e.g., “Exposing the Banksters: The Bill Black Mystery…?”).

Regarding radical professors, it is clear that they serve to co-opt activist students away from activism and reform and towards ideas and radical writing. They bring activist students into the fold of radical intellectuals and take them on as graduate students. The language is classic: The pen is mightier than the sword, a great idea can change the world, good analysis will take us out of darkness… But the radical professor’s example and stance are even more powerful than the contrived rationalizations: A complete separation of thought and action, without ever challenging local structures of oppression, accompanied by a position of privilege and high class status, under the guilt-alleviating and self-congratulatory cover of radical analysis.

MB: How would you describe the general impact of liberal foundations on the evolution of research within universities and on intellectuals more generally?

DR: The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on a “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed” (Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture, 2005). The main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality. In fact, the scientists and “experts” define reality in order to bring it into conformation with the always-adapting dominant mental tapestry of the moment. They also invent and build new branches of the tapestry that serve specific power groups by providing new avenues of exploitation.

If we accept this, then it follows that all systemic instruments (such as liberal foundations) that enable service intellectuals are part of the same program.

MB: Can you describe how liberal foundations and/or individual liberal philanthropists have influenced your own work, and if so how?

DR: Given Canadian academic science granting councils and the exigencies of the tenure track, I ended up doing nuclear spectroscopy of metallic alloys and organic compounds and then in my environmental science phase quantitative analysis of lake and ocean muds rather than the cosmology that got me into physics in the first place and the educational activism that eventually got me into life.

These days I continue to (freely) collaborate with leading soil scientists because I believe I can learn useful things that will allow me to critique mainstream assertions about soil depletion as part of my critique of the environmental science establishment. Also because I bring a unique and much appreciated technical expertise that is helpful in solving the scientific puzzle of soils; something that is intellectually satisfying at times.

Once a US philanthropic science agency that was doing the rounds flirted with me about my work on the Invar problem of physics and meteoritics. I got a sense that they were interested in being able to say that they “seeded genius,” as a way to prop themselves up and maintain their “track record.” They had no way to recognize value other than what their “trusted advisor scientists” told them, all based on superficial (read relevant) impressions of course.

MB: Do you think anti-capitalist activists can strategically utilize liberal foundation funding to develop an anti-hegemonic movement for social change?

DR: No I do not. I am not an “anti-capitalist activist”. I am an individualist anarchist and I feel much more affinity to individualist libertarians than to anything right or left. I believe that the capitalism of Adam Smith is more consistent (but not consistent) with human freedom than the communism of Marx. I don’t believe that the anarchic ideal can be achieved via socialism or communism (or capitalism). And I believe that what we have now is closer to fascism than anything else.

I believe that the essential ingredient that is missing from our First World middle-class activism is individual rebellion in which individuals fight their own oppressions via a Freirian praxis of liberation. To take an analogy from physics, the essential element for a critical mass is the radioactive isotope. Without it, there can be no critical mass. A majority opinion is just that, nothing more.

Michael Barker is an independent researcher based in the UK. Visit Michael’s website.

September 14, 2010 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia

By Denis G. Rancourt | Activist Teacher | September 12, 2010

Especially left and liberal professionals and service intellectuals but also right-wing members of the intelligentsia vehemently attack and ridicule “conspiracy theories” such as the present 911 Truth movement.

Why?

It’s as though power did not covertly orchestrate its predation of us? Is that not the modus operandi of power?

Is it so difficult to believe that the complex and highly successful military attack on US soil that was 911 (levelling three gigantic sky scrapers, blasting a hole into the Pentagon, and destroying four commercial jets and their passengers) was not orchestrated by a religious zealot from a cave in Afghanistan and executed by failed Cessna pilot trainees with box cutters? Or that those who measurably benefited in the trillions had nothing to do with it?

What the hell? Not even (admittedly rare) authoritative mainstream reports seem to matter [1].

What ever happened to “war is a racket” and “follow the money”?

In rigorous compliance with the true meanings of “academic freedom” [2] and “freedom of the press” virtually no academics or mainstream journalists have made it their research to find truth or to radically (at the root) question the establishment version.

Indeed, all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the finance-corporate-military complex.

What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean attempts to cross that line? [3]

Similarly, even outspoken dissident parliamentary politicians such as George Galloway have ridiculed the concerns of 911 truthers (at his last public talk in Ottawa).

Is such self and projected censorship by star intellectuals only the result of the fear of being mobbed by ridicule? Is asking these questions in public fora so dangerous?

When barred and suppressed Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya was asked about 911 by a truther in Ottawa last year she replied that those who sought answers in this matter should address their questions to the occupiers of the White House. To this writer’s knowledge, this is the furthest that any politician has gone in this direction, coming from “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” no less.

But what shocked the present writer more is the derision to which was subjected the truther at the Malalai Joya Ottawa event, at the hands of an “activist” and “progressive” crowd.

INTELLIGENTSIA SELF-DEFENCE

The intelligentsia appears to be addicted to the illusion that it has a monopoly on valid analysis and understanding. In order to preserve this illusion and to protect its standing in providing interpretations of the World, the intelligentsia must limit the scope of all investigations to domains that fall within its self-established interpretational paradigms (right-left, power politics, geopolitical chess board, corporate motives, etc.) and self-established research protocols.

Those paradigms and protocols, in turn, and the rigorously followed discipline of not supposing the worst in one’s research stance, were established in academia at the time when “academic freedom” was being defined by the cornerstone nineteenth century US battles for professional independence in academia. The academics and society lost that battle [2]:

“[T]he economists were the first professional analysts to be “broken in,” in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable.

Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc.”

Academics and “radical professors” train the intelligentsia…

And power owns the media.

TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH

But much more importantly power owns us, owns our jobs, owns students at school and owns the homeless on the street, the First Peoples on the reserves and the prisoners in the jails. As long as we are owned, information about abuse of power is irrelevant for social change.

This is the sociological fact that the 911 Truth movement has failed to recognize [4]. Truth will not set us free. Truth and information do not lead to action. It’s not a question of how many folks know the truth.

It’s only a question of what the truth means in real terms to however few individuals and will these individuals rebel, actually rebel and individually take back power over their lives.

Contrary to the mantra of our left academic idols, truth and research are not threatening to power in a culture of subservience and obedience. In such a culture, radical-in-thought academics only stabilize the system by neutralizing the more action-minded youth. [5]

In such a culture, the only truth that is threatening to power is one that it perceives as an attack on its self-image [6]. And, in such a culture, psychological self-image arising from power’s connection to the broader society is the only force that can move power to constrain itself [6]. In this measure, in the present culture, 911 Truth could have an impact. In this way, some of the low-level actual perpetrators and facilitators of 911 could eventually be sacrificed in show trials or in mainstream smear campaigns.

In conclusion, the intelligentsia works at protecting itself (and by extension the system) and therefore will be a visceral opponent of 911 Truth until it can integrate 911 Truth and participate in neutralizing 911 Truth in order for power to save face. Or, some citizens might actually rebel? The extent and projection/potential of such pockets of rebellion is the only force capable of leveraging real concessions from power [7][8][9].

Endnotes

[1] “Major media articles on 9-11 raise questions” by Fred Burks, 2010, Want to Know.

[2] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[3] “Questioning Foundations: An Interview with Denis Rancourt” by Michael Barker, 2010, Dissident Voice.

[4] “911 Truth” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[5] “Against Chomsky” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2008.

[6] “Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[7] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[9] “Murder and genocide are natural, therefore rebel!” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

Chomsky dispels 9/11 conspiracies with sheer logic

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

September 13, 2010 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Fascism in Ramallah

By Khalid Amayreh | The People’s Voice | September 4th, 2010

The American-backed, Israeli-tolerated Palestinian Authority has been unmasking its ugly face. In recent days and weeks, ruthless and undisciplined Security forces have been suppressing public dissent, especially opposition to futile talks with Israel. Such talks are looked upon by most Palestinians as a clear surrender to Israeli whims and dictates.

In the West Bank, the Mukhabarat or intelligence Personnel, have been harassing and even beating opposition figures. Clearly undemocratic, even barbaric methods, have been used to intimidate, harass and even terrorize civic leaders and public figures who dared to voice their opposition to the PA decision to unconditionally join so-called peace talks with Israel even though the apartheid Israeli regime continues to vehemently refuse to freeze settlement expansion and stop the ongoing aggressive Judaization in East Jerusalem.

In Ramallah, the seat of the police state without state, known as the Palestinian Authority, or PA, respectable public figures have been assaulted and beaten without any justification. What kind of government would allow ignoramuses and school dropouts to beat and mistreat professors, doctors, engineers and civic leaders, the crème de la crème of society?

Understandably, this repressive behavior represents a serious retreat from the rule of law the PA has been claiming it wants to establish. In fact, what the Palestinian people have seen in recent days and weeks is that the PA is upholding the law of the truncheon, rather than the rule of law. […]

Needless to say, an authority that beats civic leaders and public figures, some of whom spent the prime of their lives in Israeli jails, dungeons, and detention camps, is neither national nor respectable. On the contrary, it is anti-national as its general behavior is decidedly incompatible with fundamental national dignity.

We have seen some PA officials and spokespersons deny the obvious, namely the indulgence of security personnel in acts of repression. However, it is sad that lying to the public has by and large become a modus operandi for PA spokespersons whose spasmodic discourse tells much about their way of thinking.

Unfortunately, lies, even brash, unsophisticated lies, are not only uttered by manifestly ignorant security figures, who continue to indulge in every conceivable violation of the law with total impunity. These lies are often echoed and reiterated by high-ranking officials, such as the President of the PA Mahmoud Abbas and his unelected and controversial Prime Minister Salam Fayyadh.

For example, both routinely claim that the PA doesn’t detain people because of their ideological and political convictions. Needless to say, these claims are not true because innocent people are being arrested on a daily basis because of their ideological and political convictions.

None the less, the insistence on lying by people who are supposed to set an example of virtue and honesty to their people shows that these leaders either lie knowingly, since it is unlikely that they are unaware of what is going on. Or that they don’t know what is going on, which is a greater calamity.

Recent days and weeks saw PA security forces storm and desecrate several mosques in the West Bank. The manner in which these mosques were stormed infuriated ordinary, un-politicized citizens who are not affiliated with any political orientation, which really generates a lot of disdain and anger toward the Fatah organization and its authority.

We all know that prior to the establishment of the PA regime in the early 1990s, Israeli soldiers and officers were often reluctant to enter mosques with their boots on. Hence, the disgusting behavior of PA “soldiers” should be severely condemned by all free-minded Palestinians.

Besides, the sweeping arrests of young Islamist activists, who do very little if any besides observing their religious duties, remains a stigma of shame incriminating, even criminalizing, PA treatment of its own people.

There is no moral or legal justification for the recurrent arrest and maltreatment of people because of their political views. The Palestinian law, which the PA government claims to uphold, says so.

Cynically, the PA continues to invoke the so-called “Gaza coup” to justify and extenuate the gravity of its own crimes against its own people. However, while the Gaza government, which was democratically elected by the people, is not without mistakes, it is sufficiently obvious that there is no real comparison between what is happening here in the West Bank and what is happening there in the Gaza Strip.

Here, there is a systematic persecution bordering on an inquisition. What else can be said about the illegal and illegitimate incarceration of thousands of innocent people on no grounds other than the fact that they are religious and supportive of an Islamic political party, Hamas, that won the elections in 2006.

To be sure the arrests are only one aspect of PA repression of its citizens. According to human rights organizations, thousands of teachers and civil servants have been summarily and un-apologetically fired from their jobs for no reason other than having a relative who happens to be an affiliate of Hamas.

If this is not fascism, what is fascism then?

Interestingly, this blind disregard for the rule of law takes place while the PA is continuing rather shamelessly to invoke national unity by urging Hamas to sign a worthless Egyptian document that would perpetuate fascism and tyranny.

Needless to say, Hamas must never ever accept such an arrangement. In the final analysis, the Palestinians have not been struggling for ages to finally settle for a police state without a state which is what the PA is all about!!

More to the point, we all know deep in our hearts that the main motive behind this stupid and barbarian inquisition (barbarian because several people have died under torture in PA custody), has more to do with a sick desire on the part of the PA to obtain a certificate of good conduct from Israel and the US government, especially the American general Keith Dayton who runs the PA security apparatus, than with any legitimate security concerns.

Finally, it is crystal clear that no matter how savagely and brutally the PA treats its own people, especially the political opposition, the thuggish Israeli government would never grant the PA any real award, probably apart from allowing PA officials to walk through Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks. Israel, as we all know, treats the PA as a beggar or quisling entity, and neither the beggars nor the quislings can be choosers, even if they claim sovereignty and dignity.

There are those who argue that savaging the Palestinians is a sin-qua-non for the PA. This argument shouldn’t be dismissed easily. There are real fears among Palestinians that the PA security forces would be eventually used to suppress any opposition to any unacceptable deal with Israel, a deal that would liquidate the Palestinian cause. Some say this is the raison d’etre of the PA security forces.

This is the real looming danger that all free and dignified Palestinians must be vigilant about.

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Khalid Amayreh is a journalist living in Palestine. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983. Since the 1990s, Mr. Amayreh has been working and writing for several news outlets among which is Aljazeera.net, Al-Ahram Weekly, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and Middle East International. He can be reached through politics.indepth@iolteam.com

September 4, 2010 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Smear campaign targets pro-Palestinian Brooklyn College professor; alum suspends ’significant bequest’

By Zoe Zenowich and Alex Kane on August 31, 2010

A campaign reminiscent of past academic battles over Israel is afoot, this time targeting Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, who edited the newly released book titled Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict.

Critics of Bayoumi say it is inappropriate for the college to assign his book, How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, to the approximately 1,500 incoming freshmen, a longstanding tradition meant to engage students in collective dialogue through writing. Critics are accusing Bayoumi’s book of seeking to “inculcate students with a political viewpoint,” claiming the decision lacks “balance.” But upon closer examination of the concocted controversy, it becomes clear that the targeting of Bayoumi is principally for his advocacy for Palestinian human rights. His adversaries are using the college’s decision to have his book read by freshmen as a tool to raise questions about his stance on Israel/Palestine.

Assigning the book to incoming freshmen is meant to “humanize a population that’s being increasingly dehumanized,” Bayoumi told a group of Brooklyn College students today in an afternoon meet-the-author session where students had the opportunity to ask questions.

Bayoumi has been labeled a “radical pro-Palestinian” professor by Brooklyn College alumni Bruce Kesler, who recently wrote that the college will no longer be receiving a “significant bequest” from him. Kesler, a contributing editor to the right-wing group Family Security Matters, a project of the Center for Security Policy, whose members include former Vice President Dick Cheney and neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, has brought the most attention to Bayoumi, with an article citing him appearing in the New York Daily News.

Kesler is not the only person to join in on the smear campaign. The Jewish Week has joined in the fray, citing anonymous professors from the college as saying that Bayoumi’s book will “indoctrinate” students.

Professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, Jonathan Helfand, told Ashley Thorne of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group that opposes “racial, gender, and other group preferences,” that the book on the flotilla “is at best biased, at worst vile propaganda.” The NAS also opposes the use of Bayoumi’s book, referring to it as “polemical,” and the decision to assign it as “troubling.”

Abigail Rosenthal, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, called Bayoumi the “author of a blatantly one-sided collection on the Gaza flotilla” whose book on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. “will intimidate incoming students who have a different point of view.”

And Campus Watch, an organization dedicated to suppressing criticism of Israel on campus, has highlighted an article on Pajamas Media about Bayoumi.

One of the criticisms directed at How Does It Feel to be a Problem? is the claim that the book draws a parallel between “the horrible and pervasive discrimination and injustices that Blacks were subjected to a century ago and Arab-Americans today,” which Kesler labels “ridiculous.” But in their zeal to make it look like Bayoumi’s book on young Arabs in America is their real problem, as opposed to his advocacy for Palestinians, the critics don’t seem to have read the book. The first footnote in Bayoumi’s book, whose title comes from a famous W.E.B. DuBois line, explains that by making a link between blacks and Arabs in the U.S., he means to “draw attention to how difference operates in American society, but this certainly does not mean that Arab-American life since September 11, 2001, is in any way equivalent to the ravages of slavery and segregation.”

Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? has also been used at other colleges, like Johnson State College in Vermont.

So far, Brooklyn College has stood its ground. In a statement given to the Daily News, the college says that it is “regrettable that Mr. Bruce Kesler misunderstands the intentions of the Common Reader experience and the broader context of this selection.”

However, there’s bound to be sympathy among pro-Israel Brooklyn College and City University of New York donors with regard to those sentiments expressed by Kesler and others. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, for one, who sits on the board that governs the city’s public college system, is a prominent supporter of Israel, and was a key player in the witch hunt against the Khalil Gibran International Academy.

The smears against Bayoumi bring to mind similar campaigns, like the one that undid Norman Finkelstein’s tenure bid at DePaul University and the failed attempt to deny Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia University, tenure.

Those campaigns may be a harbinger of things to come for Bayoumi, who is not tenured at Brooklyn College.

Zoe Zenowich is a Senior in the Scholars Program at Brooklyn College, where she is the managing editor of the Excelsior, a student newspaper. She is currently interning for the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and has interned for the Nation and the Economist.

Alex Kane is a college student, journalist and blogger based in New York City. He is a reporter for the Indypendent, and a frequent contributor to this site. His articles have also appeared in Common Dreams, Electronic Intifada, Extra! and Palestine Chronicle. He blogs at alexbkane.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter here.

September 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America

By James Petras – September 1, 2010

Netanyahu –Speaking in New York to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

Introduction

Any serious effort to understand the extraordinary influence of the Zionist power configuration over US foreign policy must examine the presence of key operatives in strategic positions in the government and local Zionist organizations affiliated with mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders. There are at least 52 major American Jewish organizations actively engaged in promoting Israel’s foreign policy, economic and technological agenda in the US (see the appendix).

The grassroots membership ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors, activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban) and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history (Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010). New heavily funded Zionist projects designed to capture young Jews and turn them into instruments of Israeli foreign policy includes “Taglit-Birthright” which has spent over $250 million dollars over the past decade sending over a quarter-million Jews (between 18-26) to Israel for 10 days of intense brainwashing (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). Jewish billionaires and the Israeli state foot the bill. The students are subject to a heavy dose of Israeli style militarism as they are accompanied by Israeli soldiers as part of their indoctrination; at no point do they visit the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). They are urged to become dual citizens and even encouraged to serve in the Israeli armed forces. In summary the 52 member organizations of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations which we discuss are only the tip of the iceberg of the Zionist Power Configuration: taken together with the PACs, the propaganda mills, the commercial and University presses and mass media we have a matrix of power for understanding the tremendous influence they have on US foreign and domestic policy as it affects Israel and US Zionism.

While all their activity is dedicated first and foremost in ensuring that US Middle East policy serves Israel’s colonial expansion in Palestine and war aims in the Middle East, what B’nai B’rth euphemistically calls a “focus on Israel and its place in the world”, many groups ‘specialize’ in different spheres of activity. For example, the “Friends of the Israel Defense Force” is primarily concerned in their own words “to look after the IDF”, in other words provide financial resources and promote US volunteers for a foreign army (an illegal activity except when it involves Israel). Hillel is the student arm of the Zionist power configuration claiming a presence in 500 colleges and universities, all affiliates defending each and every human rights abuse of the Israeli state and organizing all expenses paid junkets for Jewish student recruits to travel to Israel where they are heavily propagandized and encouraged to ‘migrate’ or become ‘dual citizens’.

Method: Studying Zionist Power:

There are several approaches for measuring the power of the combined Zionist organizations and influential occupants of strategic positions in government and the economy. These include (a) reputational approach (b) self claims (c) decision-making analysis (d) structural inferences. Most of these approaches provide some clues about Zionist potential power. For example, newspaper pundits and journalists frequently rely on Washington insiders, congressional staff and notables to conclude that AIPAC has the reputation for being one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. This approach points to the need to empirically examine the operations of AIPAC in influencing Congressional votes, nomination of candidates, defeating incumbents who do not unconditionally support the Israeli line. In other words analyzing the Congressional and Executive decision- making process is one key to measuring Zionist power. But it is not the only one. Zionist power is a product of a historical context, where media ownership and wealth concentration and other institutional levers of power come into play and shape the current decision-making framework. Cumulative power over time and across institutions creates a heavy bias in the political outcomes favorable to Israel’s organized agents in America. Once again the mere presence of Jews or Zionists in positions of economic, cultural and political power does not tell us how they will use their resources and whether they will have the desired effect. Structural analysis, the location of Zionists in the class structure, is necessary but not sufficient for understanding Zionist power. One has to proceed and analyze the content of decisions made and not made regarding the agenda of Israel’s backers operating in the USA. The 52 major Zionists organizations are very open about their claims to power, their pursuit of Israel’s agenda and their subservience to each and every Israeli regime.

Those who deny Zionist power over US Mid East foreign policy are left-Zionists namely Noam Chomsky and his acolytes. They never analyze the legislative process, executive decision-making, the structures and activity of the million member Zionist grassroots and the appointments and background of key policy makers deciding strategic policies in the Middle East. Instead they resort to superficial generalizations and political demagogy, imputing policy to “Big Oil” and the “military-industrial complex” or “US imperialism”, devoid of empirical content and historical context about real existing policy making regarding the Middle East.

The Making of Zionist Power in the US Government

To understand US submission to Israeli war policies in the Middle East one has to look beyond the role of lobbies pressuring Congress and the role of political action committees and wealthy Zionist campaign contributions. A much neglected but absolutely essential building block of Zionist power over US foreign economic, diplomatic and military policy is the Zionist presence in key policy positions, including the Departments of Treasury and State, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the White House.

Operating within the top policy-making positions, Zionist officials have consistently pursued policies in line with Israel’s militarist policies, aimed at undermining and eliminating any country critical of the Jewish States’ colonial occupation of Palestine, its regional nuclear monopoly, its expansion of Jews only settlements and above all its strident efforts to remain the dominant power in the Arab East. The Zionist policymakers in Government are in constant consultation with the Israeli state, ensuring coordination with the Israeli military (IDF) command, its Foreign Office and secret police (MOSSAD) and compliance with the Jewish State’s political line. Over the past 24 months not a single Zionist policymaker has voiced any criticism of Israel’s most heinous crimes, ranging from the savaging of Gaza to the massacre of the humanitarian flotilla and the expansion of new settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. A record of loyalty to a foreign power which even exceeds the subservience of the Stalinist and Nazi fellow travelers in Washington during the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Zionist policymakers in strategic positions depend on the political backing and work closely with their counterparts in the “lobbies” (AIPAC) in Congress and in the national and local Jewish Zionist organizations. Many of the leading Zionist policymakers rose to power through a deliberate strategy of infiltrating the government to shape policy promoting Israel’s interest over and above the interests of the US populace. While a degree of cohesion resulting from a common allegiance to Tel Aviv can account for suspected nepotism and selection, it is also the case that the powerful Jewish lobbies can play a role in creating key positions in Government and ensuring that one of their own will occupy that position and pursue Israel’s agenda.

Stuart Levey: Israel’s Foremost Operative in the US Government

Stuart Levey, Department of the Treasury, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

In 2004, AIPAC successfully pressured the Bush Administration to create the office of Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (UTFI) and to name its protégé Princeton graduate Stuart Levey to that position. Before, but especially after his appointment, Levey was in close collaboration with the Israeli state and was known as an over the top Zionist zealot with unbounded energy and blind worship of the Israeli state.

Levey coordinates his campaign with Zionist leaders in Congress. He secures sanctions legislation in line with his campaigns. His policies clearly violate international law and national sovereignty, pressing the limits of extra territorial enforcement of his administrative fiats against a civilian economy. His violation of economic sovereignty parallels Obama’s announcement that US Special Forces would operate in violation of political sovereignty on four continents. For all intents and purposes, Levey makes US policy toward Iran. At each point he designs the escalation of sanctions, and then passes it on to the White House, which shoves it down the throats of the Security Council. Once new sanctions approved by Levey and staff are in place they are there to enforce them: identifying violators and implementing penalties. Treasury has become an outpost of Tel Aviv. Not a single leftist, liberal or social democratic publication highlights the role of Levey or even the terrible economic pain this Old Testament fanatic is inflicting on 75 million Iranian civilian workers and consumers. Indeed like Israel’s Judeo-fascist rabbis who preach a “final solution” for Israel’s enemies, Levey announces new and harsher “punishment” against the Iranian people (Stuart Levey, “Iran’s New Deceptions at Sea Must be Punished” FT 8/16/2010, p. 9). Perhaps at the appropriate moment the Jewish State will name a major avenue through the West Bank for his extraordinary services to this most unholy racist state.

Within the confines of his Zionist ideological blinders, Levey applied his intelligence to the singular task of turning his office into the major foreign policy venue for setting US policy toward Iran. Levey more than any other appointed official in government or elected legislator, formulates and implements policies which profoundly influence US, European Union and UN economic relations with Iran. Levey elaborated the sanctions policies, which Washington imposed on the EU and the Security Council. Levey, organizes the entire staff under his control at Treasury to investigate trade and investment policies of all the world’s major manufacturing, banking, shipping, petroleum and trading corporations. He then criss-crosses the US and successfully pressures pension funds, investment houses, oil companies and economic institutions to disinvest from any companies dealing with Iran’s civilian economy. He has gone global, threatening sanctions and blackballing dissident companies in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America which refuse to surrender economic opportunities. They all understood Levey operated at the behest of Israel, services Levey has proudly performed.

The Strategic Role of Local Power

The Israel Lobby Archive recently released declassified documents of the American Zionist Council (AZC) subpoenaed during a US Senate investigation between 1962-63. The documents reveal how the Israeli state through its American Jewish conduits – the mainstream Zionist organizations – penetrated the US mass media and propagated its political line, unbeknown to the American public. Stories written by a host of Jewish Zionist journalists and academics were solicited and planted in national media such as The Readers Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post among others, including regional and local newspapers and radio stations (Israel Lobby Archive, August 18, 2010). While the national Zionist organizations procured the journalists and academic writers and editors, it was the local affiliates who carried the message and implemented the line. The level of infiltration the Senate subpoenaed Zionist documents in the 1960’s reveal has multiplied a hundred fold over the past 50 years in terms of financing, paid functionaries and committed militants and above all in structural power and coercive capability.

While the national leaders in close consultation with Israeli officials receive instructions on which issues are of high priority, the implementation follows a vertical route to regional and local leaders, politicians, and notables who in turn target the local media and religious, academic and other opinion leaders. When national leaders ensure publication of pro Israeli propaganda, the locals reproduce and circulate it to local media and non-Zionist influentials on their “periphery”. Letter campaigns orchestrated at the top are implemented by thousands of militant Zionist doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They praise pro-Israel scribes and attack critics; they pressure newspapers , publishing houses and magazines not to publish dissidents. The national and local leaders promote hostile reviews of books not promoting the Israeli line, influence library decisions to pack their shelves with pro Israeli books and censor and exclude more balanced or critical histories. Local militants in co-ordination with Israeli consuls saturate the public with thousands of public meetings and speakers targeting Christian churches, academic audiences and civic groups; at the same time local Zionist militants and, especially millionaire influentials, pressure local venues (university administrators, church authorities and civic associations) to dis-invite any critic of Israel and their supporters from speaking. In the last resort, local Zionists demand that a pro-Israel propagandist be given equal time, something unheard of when an Israel apologist is scheduled to speak.

Local Zionist organizations make yeoman efforts to recruit mayors, governors, local celebrities, publishers, church people and promising young ethnic and minority leaders by offering them all expenses paid propaganda junkets to Israel and then to write or give interviews parroting what they were fed by Israeli officials. Local leaders mobilize thousands of militant activist Zionists to attack anti-Zionist Jews in public and private. They demand they be excluded from any media roundtables on the Middle East.

Local Zionist functionaries form rapid response committees to visit and threaten any local publisher and editorial staff publishing editorials or articles questioning the Israeli party line. Local leaders police (“monitor”) all local meetings, speaker invitations, as well as the speeches of public commentators, religious leaders and academics to detect any “anti-Zionist overtones’ (which they label “covert anti-Semitism”). Most of the major Jewish religious orders are lined up as the clerical backbone of local Israeli fund-raising, including the financing of new “Jews only” settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.

Local functionaries are in the forefront of campaigns to deny independent Middle East specialists and public policy academics, appointments, tenure or promotion, independently of the quality of their scholarship. On the other hand, academic hacks who toe the pro-Israel line, by publishing books with blanket attacks on Israeli critics among Christians and Muslims and countries like Turkey, Iran or whoever is a target of Israeli policy, are promoted, lauded and put on the best seller list. Any book or writer critical of Zionist Power or Israel is put on a local and national ‘index’ and subject to an inquisition by slander from a stable of Jewish Torquemadas.

Conclusion

The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence and leadership of powerful Washington based “pro-Israel lobbies”, like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers, professors and others, the “lobby” would be unable to sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of Americans outside the major metropolises. As we have seen from the Senate declassified documents, over a half-century ago, local Zionist organizations began a systematic campaign of penetration, control and intimidation that has reached its pinnacle in the first decade of the 21^st century. It is no accident or mere coincidence that University officials in Northern Minnesota or upstate New York are targeted to exclude speakers or fire faculty members critical of Israel. Local Zionists have computerized data banks operating with an index of prohibited speakers, as the Zionists themselves admit and flaunt in contrast to “liberal” Zionists who are prone to label as “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorists” writers who cite official Zionist documents demonstrating their systematic perversion of our democratic freedoms.

Over the decades, the distinction between Zionist power exercised by a “lobby” outside the government and operatives “inside” the government has virtually vanished. As we have seen, in our case study, AIPAC secured the undersecretary position in Treasury, dictated the appointment of a key Zionist operative (Stuart Levey) and accompanies his global crusade to sanction Iran into starvation and destitution. The planting of operatives within key Middle East positions in government is not the simple result of individual career choices. The ascent of so many pro-Israel Zionists to government posts is part of their mission to serve Israel’s interest at least for a few years of their careers. Their presence in government precludes any Senate or Congressional investigations of Zionist organizations acting as agents of a foreign power as took place in the 1960’s.

As the major Zionist organizations and influentials have accumulated power and abused the exercise of power on behalf of an increasingly bloody racist state, which flaunts its dominance over US institutions, public opposition is growing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is gaining strength even in the US (see Harvard divestment in Israeli companies). US public support for Israel, by all measures, has dropped below 50%, while polls in Western Europe show a marked increase in hostility to Israel’s ultra-rightist regime. Anti-Zionist Jews are growing in influence especially among young Jews who are appalled by the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and assault on the humanitarian flotilla. Equally important the presence of anti-Zionist Jews on panels and forums has given courage to many otherwise intimidated non-Jews who heretofore were fearful of being labeled “anti-Semitic”.

The Zionist power configuration rests on a declining population base: most young Jews marry outside the confines of the ethno-religious Jewish-Israeli nexus and many of them are not likely to form the bases for rabid campaigns on behalf of a racist state. The Zionist leadership’s high intensity and heavily endowed effort to fence in young people of Jewish ancestry via private schools, subsidized “summer programs” in Israel etc. are as much out of fear and recognition of the drift away from clerical chauvinism as it is an attempt to recruit a new generation of Israel First militants.

The danger is that the US Zionist support for the ultra-rightist and racist regime in Israel is leading them to join forces with the far right in the US. Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan rednecks are fomenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called “Mosque controversy”) as a distraction from the economic crises and rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamophobia, so near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game. If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel’s operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued Jewish Motherland.

Appendix

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

Member Organizations

Ameinu
American Friends of Likud
American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
America-Israel Friendship League
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Congress
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
American Sephardi Federation
American Zionist Movement
Americans for Peace Now
AMIT
Anti-Defamation League
Association of Reform Zionists of America
B’nai B’rith International
Bnai Zion
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds
Emunah of America
Friends of Israel Defense Forces
Hadassah, Women’s Zionist Organization of America
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
Jewish Community Centers Association
Jewish Council for Public Affairs
The Jewish Federations of North America
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Jewish Labor Committee
Jewish National Fund
Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
Jewish War Veterans of the USA
Jewish Women International
MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement
NA’AMAT USA
MCSK” Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Young Israel
ORT America
Rabbinical Assembly
Rabbinical Council of America
Religious Zionists of America
Union for Reform Judaism
Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
WIZO
Women’s League for Conservative Judaism
Women of Reform Judaism
Workmen’s Circle
World ORT
World Zionist Executive, US
Zionist Organization of America

September 1, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The “12 Commandments” of the Israel Lobby

By Lawrence Swaim | InFocus News* | August, 2010

Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania is the latest to take heat from the Israel Lobby, mainly because he once attended a meeting with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and also refused to sign a letter written by AIPAC. So they created a TV ad that tries to tie him to terrorism. Never mind the fact that Sestak acted on his conscience in both instances—anybody who flouts the dictates of the Israel Lobby has to be punished.

The people who are promoting this latest experiment in intimidation are pretty open about what they’re doing, and why. “We’re the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community,” exults neo-con godfather William Kristol. So here’s the crazy part—we’re not supposed to acknowledge that there’s an Israel Lobby, even though its main players talk openly about their activities! No, as Abraham Foxman pointed out in his book “The Deadliest Lies,” the existence of an Israel Lobby is a scurrilous falsehood made up by anti-Semites.

Got that? There’s no Lobby, but you’d better do what the Lobby says.

To help readers with this Orwellian dilemma, I offer these “12 Commandments of the Israel Lobby,” to be memorized if possible in a venue featuring the theme song of “The Twilight Zone” in the background.

1. The Israel Lobby does not exist. In those cases where it does exist, its conclusions cannot be questioned.

2. All criticisms of Israel are false. They are invented by anti-Semites, self-hating Jews, and terrorists. Also by crypto-Nazis, apostates and liars.

3. All critics of Israel must be punished by extracting a public apology. Some offenders may be required to apologize more than once, if they do not grovel sufficiently the first time around.

4. Those who criticize Israel and do not publicly apologize must be endlessly harassed, and fired from their jobs if possible. In academia they must be denied tenure.

5. Any Arab or Muslim that criticizes Israel is a terrorist, and deserves to die.

6. To praise anybody who ever criticized Israel is the same thing as criticizing Israel. Just as all things Israeli are good, anybody that criticizes Israel is bad.

7. In any conflict involving Israelis and Palestinians, the Israelis are always the victims. If an Israeli hurts a Palestinian, the Israeli is still the victim because the Palestinian is trying to make the Israeli feel bad.

8. Israel/Palestine is never debated. That implies another side to the issue, and there is only one side. Therefore debate is suppressed or disrupted.

9. The United Nations, the World Court, the various UN agencies, every human rights organization and non-governmental organization in the world that isn’t approved by the NGO Monitor [an Israeli screening operation] is anti-Semitic. That is because these organizations are likely to criticize Israel’s human rights record—and as any fool knows, that means they’re anti-Semitic.

10. The interests of the US are exactly the same as the interests of Israel. If they aren’t, the interests of Israel take precedence.

11. Any war that the US is likely to be involved in must be evaluated from the point of view of its helpfulness to the current government of Israel.

12. Anybody who threatens to make sense while criticizing Israel must be immediately shouted down. If shouting doesn’t work, screaming and crying are recommended. As a last resort, one must declare that criticisms of Israel are making one feel “unsafe.”

These rules, while meant to be humorous, reflect a reality that is petty, tiresome and essentially undemocratic. Thereore let us answer them by answering the call from Palestinian civil society for international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israeli apartheid. The purpose is to end the longest and most brutal military occupation of our time, and in so doing resolve the one issue most likely to cause religious war. But there is another reason to support BDS. The Israel Lobby operates as a thought police, spending millions of dollars to stop anybody in public life who would have a candid discussion of American interests in the Middle East. For this reason, we must counter the intimidation of the Israel Lobby in order to restore free speech and freedom of association to American discourse.

* IFN is circulated nationally, and is the largest Muslim newspaper in the US.

August 31, 2010 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

‘Firedoglake’ is progressive– just don’t talk about Palestine

By Philip Weiss on August 28, 2010

Here is an important matter that I have been sitting on for days and that people who care about American support for Palestinian oppression need to be aware of: the extent to which Firedoglake, a leading progressive site, suppresses criticism of Israel. The battle demonstrates that even inside the left, the Israel lobby is a strong force. Indeed, the founder of the site, movie producer Jane Hamsher, has dismissed concern for Palestinians as a “pet issue.”

As I have said often, our country cannot make progress on this critical policy issue until people who care about Palestinian freedom find one another and make a political combination to take on the Israel lobby. And one way we will find one another is by taking on the corruption inside the left when it comes to human rights in Palestine.

The latest evidence of FDL’s entrenchment is an exchange yesterday at Firedoglake’s community site, The Seminal. An FDL author whom I follow– Kathleen Galt, who writes under the name Leen and for whom Palestine is front and center– did a post called “Change?” saying that Israel/Palestine continues to be off limits for the liberal mainstream media:

Does the Israeli Palestinian conflict, expanding illegal settlements, humiliation of Palestinians, bulldozing of Palestinians homes, destruction of Palestinian olive trees, continue to be off limits to so called progressive MSM host like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Dylan Ratigan, Ed etc? I think this critical issue is still off limits to most MSM outlets.

Galt did a search of several progressive broadcasts and found not a peep about Palestine.

“So my question is this. Do folks think that anything has changed about the amount, depth, honesty of coverage by our T.V. MSM over the last several years? Has anything changed?”

In the subsequent comment thread, Galt complained that leftwing blogs were also blindered. And she specifically mentioned Rayne, the moderator of The Seminal.

I am also very interested in which so called progressive sites were blocked to discussing this critical issue, which sites drug their progressive feet on the issue, demanded higher standards of definitions of terms “zionism” than they demand of other over used general terms? Selective discrimination etc of certain issues but not others. Avoid having their heavy hitters or bringing on a heavy hitter to blog about this critical issue every week? Blog clogs of sorts specifically clogged on this issue.

Crooks and Liars has been closed down to this issue from the beginning, Huffington Post has opened up…

Still wondering why Rayne has specifically targeted this topic and is demanding higher standards for this issue more so than any other issue?

Rayne responded with a sharp rebuke:

…Let’s make this perfectly clear again that you are not an editor, moderator, site owner or host at this site, and that simply because you personally feel an issue should be handled in a particular fashion doesn’t mean it’s going to happen as you demand.

Give some thought to the possibility that your constant harangue about the manner in which this site operates drives off others — readers, commenters, diarists alike — who may not want to encourage your posts and posts like yours by recommending them.

Inside the last several weeks you’ve already attacked the owner/founder of the FDL family of sites for not fulfilling your personal expectations. You did not take the hint at the time about your behavior. And don’t think I haven’t seen your terse comments directed at me, either. This is yet another warning to you that you need to focus on subjects of your choice, stop haranguing the site’s policies and operations, or risk moderation….

Galt responded in her typically thoughtful manner:

Many of my posts have been recommended. There have been times where folks have come out of the woodwork and folks who regularly make comments here and stated that they greatly appreciate what I have posted here…. [I am] just suggesting that having a qualified individual do regular post[s] about the I/P conflict might just might be a path for FDL to take on this critical issue. This is not just my issue. You may personally [be] in the dark about this issue. For decades middle east leaders, former Presidents, former heads of the IAEA, former and present weapons inspectors, former and present CiA analyst etc have stated that the I/P issue is the most critical issue to resolve in the middle east. Now you can keep attempting to minimize the importance of this conflict but that does not change the situation. You can attempt to close down the discussion, debate etc here but that in and of itself says a great deal…

Beautiful, huh? And obvious.

August 28, 2010 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Military court convicts anti-wall leader

Ma’an – 24/08/2010

BETHLEHEM — An Israeli military court on Tuesday found the leader of a West Bank protest movement guilty of incitement and organizing illegal demonstrations.

Abdallah Abu Rahmah of Bil’in, near Ramallah, could face jail time for his leadership in the popular campaign against Israel’s wall, which severs the West Bank village for to protect nearby settlements.

The verdict was read in a military courtroom packed with friends, supporters, and family members, concluding an eight-month trial. Diplomats from Europe including a representative of the European Union attended.

According to his supporters, Abu Rahmah’s conviction was based only on testimonies of minors who were arrested in the middle of the night and denied legal counsel despite significant ills in their questioning.

The court threw out two charges, stone-throwing and arms possession, activists said. The arms charge was over Abu Rahmah’s collection of used tear-gas projectiles and bullet cases, the indictment said.

“This absurd charge is a clear example of how eager the military prosecution is to use legal procedures as a tool to silence and smear unarmed dissent,” the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said in a statement.

Abu Rahmah’s case was the first time the prosecution had used the organizing and participating in illegal demonstrations since the First Intifada, the committee said.

Military law defines illegal assembly in a much stricter way than does Israeli civilian law, in practice forbidding more than 10 people from assembling without receiving a permit from the military.

Abu Rahmah was detained in December during a night raid, but he “did not find himself behind bars because he is a dangerous man,” the committee insisted.

“Abdallah, who is amongst the leaders of the Palestinian village of Bil’in, is viewed as a threat for his work in the five-year unarmed struggle to save the village’s land from Israel’s wall and expanding settlements.”

Abdallah is the recipient of the the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for Outstanding Service in the Realization of Basic Human Rights, which awarded by the International League for Human Rights in Berlin.

August 24, 2010 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Holocaust ‘denier’ death, Mossad linked

Press TV – August 22, 2010

Dariusz Ratajczak

American writer JP Bellinger does not rule out the the involvement of Israeli spy agency, Mossad, in the tragic death of a Polish historian, who was researching on the Holocaust.

Dariusz Ratajczak, a former professor at the University of Opole, was found dead in a car parked near a shopping center in Opole on June 11, 2010.

Forensic reports indicated that the body was in the car for nearly two weeks, but was in an advanced state of decay, suggesting that it was moved to car long after Ratajczak’s death.

“After being questioned, a number of witnesses told the police that the car had only recently been parked there,” Bellinger wrote in his article.

“Professor Ratajczak’s death was ruled a ‘suicide,’ but skeptical people, perhaps bearing in mind the recent arrest of a Mossad assassin operating in Poland, are asking how a person in an advanced stage of decomposition was able to drive to a public parking lot and park a car?” he inquired.

He was referring to Uri Brodsky, Mossad agent accused of helping fake a German passport that was used by one of the members of a hit squad involved in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas commander, in a Dubai hotel in January.

Bellinger went on to say that Ratajczak’s troubles began with the publication of his booklet, “Dangerous Topics,” in March 1999 for which he was convicted of Holocaust denial in Poland.

“What possesses greater intrinsic value? Maintaining the mainstream version of the Holocaust at any cost or the life of a single human being whose only offence was to engage in historical research in a quest for the truth?”

Ratajczak believed it was not possible to kill millions of people in the Nazi gas chambers — a view that provoked a firestorm of criticism among his contemporaries and Israel’s lobbies.

Michael Sobelman, the spokesman the Israeli Embassy in Poland, accused Ratajczak of anti-Semitism and expressed “surprise” that “such a man works at a Polish university.”

Sobelman’s comment preceded Ratajczak’s expulsion from the University of Opole.

Ratajczak believed that the charge of anti-Semitism had become a sort of exceptionally brutal weapon, which the “establishment” uses ruthlessly against independent thinking men.

“What hurts me most is that I found myself in a group of historians who have been muzzled. After all, please see: from 45 years to now the number of Jews murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau has dropped from six million to less than one million. It’s official data. Indeed, even if they had killed one man, that would be a tragedy. But how is it that some historians may legitimately question the numbers of the Holocaust, and others can not? How is it that some people can reduce the six million to less than a million and nothing bad is happening to them? How is it that some people are not allowed to examine this subject and even be wrong, while other historians are allowed all this?” Ratajczak commented.

Bellinger says disturbing news of Ratajczak’s death shocked some traditionalist and patriotic organizations in Poland, and concludes by asking, “Is questioning the holocaust, or holocaust ‘denial’ of more intrinsic worth than the life of any human being?”

August 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Israel tells schools not to teach nakba

Jonathan Cook | The National | August 21, 2010

NAZARETH // Government officials warned Israeli teachers last week not to cooperate with a civic group that seeks to educate Israelis about how the Palestinians view the loss of their homeland and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Israel’s education ministry issued the advisory after Zochrot – a Jewish group that seeks to raise awareness among Israeli Jews of the events of 1948, referred to as the “nakba” by Palestinians – organised a workshop for primary school teachers.

The ministry said the course had not been approved and told teachers not to participate in Zochrot-sponsored activities during the coming school year.

In a letter to the education ministry protesting against Zochrot’s activities, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, an advocacy group for Jewish settlers, had called the group’s educational materials “part of a criminal vision to wipe Israel off the face of the earth”.

It was unclear whether participants in the workshop for primary school teachers would be punished, but a teacher identified as a trainer for the seminar might be investigated by the education ministry, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The warning is the latest move by the education ministry, headed by Gideon Saar, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, to use school curricula to advance a more strident Zionist agenda.

In March, for instance, the ministry banned Israeli schools from distributing a booklet for children about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Critics had objected to parts of the declaration that refer to freedom of religion and protection of asylum-seekers.

The ministry’s latest move involves the controversies that still swirl over the events that led to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 – what Israelis describe as their “War of Independence” and what Palestinians call the nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”.

Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot’s director, said the ministry was trying to “frighten off” teachers from learning about a period in Israel’s history that until now, he said, had been presented in schools only from a “triumphalist perspective”.

The group, which was founded eight years ago and whose Hebrew name means “remembering”, has provoked controversy by organising visits to some of the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli army during and after the 1948 war.

Zochrot members place signposts at the former villages using their original Arabic names, and bring Palestinian refugees back on visits, upsetting Jewish residents who live in communities built on those lands.

In recent months, Zochrot has concentrated on developing a programme on the nakba for schools, allowing teachers to address the subject from a Palestinian perspective for the first time.

Mr Bronstein said more than 300 high school teachers had asked for Zochrot’s information kits over the past year, and a few primary school teachers had started to show an interest too. That has provoked a backlash from education officials and right-wing groups.

“A small but growing number of teachers are curious about the nakba and want to find out more,” he said. “The problem is that the education authorities see this development as threatening and are prepared to intimidate teachers to stop them from getting involved.”

Last week’s workshop was the first Zochrot had arranged for primary school teachers.

Hebrew textbooks focus chiefly on the success of Israel’s troops during the 1948 war. The books say that the 750,000 refugees either left voluntarily or were ordered to leave by Arab armies. Most historians now say that Israeli troops either physically expelled the Palestinians or frightened them so much that they fled.

In 2006 an Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, published a popular book in English – but little read inside Israel – that went farther, arguing that Israel had implemented a military plan to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians even before Israel’s founders declared statehood.

A year later Yuli Tamir, the dovish education minister, provoked public outrage by approving for the first time the use of the word “nakba” in an Arabic textbook for the quarter of the school population who belong to the country’s Palestinian minority.

The book was banned last summer by Mr Saar, Ms Tamir’s successor.

Mr Saar has also backed legislation to punish groups and individuals who commemorate the nakba. The bill, which enjoys wide support, is working its way through the parliament.

Zochrot’s kit includes teaching units on life among Palestinians before and after the 1948 war, personal stories from refugees, a tour of a destroyed village, and a discussion of the refugees’ right of return.

Amaya Galili, Zochrot’s educational coordinator, said that although the group offered complete lesson plans, most teachers incorporated only elements of the programme so that officials would not notice they were using Zochrot’s material.

A history teacher in Jerusalem, who did not want to be identified, said she was one of half a dozen in the city who had participated in Zochrot’s courses.

She said, however, that her new-found understanding of the nakba had had almost no impact on either the curriculum or the pupils at the school.

“There are many other ways for the school to make sure that an atmosphere of fear prevails towards Palestinians. It’s easy to insert a nationalistic and religious agenda into the classroom – and, after all, I am just one teacher.”

The changes at the education ministry have become increasingly apparent since Mr Saar’s appointment nearly 18 months ago.

Earlier this year, the ministry demanded that its logo be removed from a joint Hebrew and Arabic website called Common Ground, which aims to promote greater understanding between the country’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Officials had objected to Zochrot’s posting of a story written by a Palestinian girl about the nakba.

Ms Galili said the ministry’s response to Zochrot’s work contrasted strongly with its encouragement of private initiatives by right-wing groups.

One, called Gush Katif week, brings former Jewish settlers from Gaza into 400 schools to celebrate life before Israeli troops and Jewish settlers withdrew from the Strip in 2005. Another, Mibereshit, run by a far-right rabbi and financed by evangelical Christians in the US, offers pupils tours of the country, including the settlements, in a bid to “strengthen Zionist education”.

“Many of these programmes sound superficially reasonable. They’re presented as ‘instilling positive values’ or ‘learning to love the land’. But, in fact, they are cover for dubious initiatives by religious and settler groups”, Ms Galili said.

Over the past year, Mr Saar has emphasised courses on Zionism, Jewish heritage and Judaism. He also has increased pupils’ visits to Jerusalem’s Palestinian districts and introduced a programme to bring soldiers into the classroom to help enlist pupils into the military.

August 22, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Illegal Israeli PR in America: Declassified

By Grant Smith | Pulse Media | August 18, 2010

A huge trove of newly declassified documents subpoenaed during a 1962-1964 Senate investigation reveals how Israel’s lobby pitched, promoted, and paid to have content placed in America’s top news magazines with overseas funding. The Atlantic (and many others others) received hefty rewards for trumpeting Israel’s most vital – but damaging – PR initiatives across America.

The relevant documents are now online

Media strategies on display include:

Cover-ups: “The [Dimona] nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists. Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.”

Payola: “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.”

Pressure: “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position. There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.”

Ghost Writing: “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….”

A defunct Dow Jones report noted “The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on…”

August 18, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen

By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026

For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.

Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.

“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.

I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.

Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”

And he does. … continue

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