Did an American Mine Sink South Korean Ship?
By Yoichi Shimatsu | New America Media | May 27, 2010
BEIJING – South Korean Prime Minister Lee Myung-bak has claimed “overwhelming evidence” that a North Korean torpedo sank the corvette Cheonan on March 26, killing 46 sailors. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that there’s “overwhelming evidence” in favor of the theory that North Korea sank the South Korean Navy warship Cheonan. But the articles of proof presented so far by military investigators to an official inquiry board have been scanty and inconsistent.
There’s yet another possibility, that a U.S. rising mine sank the Cheonan in a friendly-fire accident.
In the recent U.S.-China strategic talks in Shanghai and Beijing, the Chinese side dismissed the official scenario presented by the Americans and their South Korean allies as not credible. This conclusion was based on an independent technical assessment by the Chinese military, according to a Beijing-based military affairs consultant to the People Liberation Army.
Hardly any of the relevant facts that counter the official verdict have made headline news in either South Korea or its senior ally, the United States.
The first telltale sign of an official smokescreen involves the location of the Choenan sinking – Byeongnyeong Island (pronounced Pyongnang) in the Yellow Sea. On the westernmost fringe of South Korean territory, the island is dominated by a joint U.S.-Korean base for anti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations. The sea channel between Byeongnyeong and the North Korean coast is narrow enough for both sides to be in artillery range of each other.
Anti-sub warfare is based on sonar and acoustic detection of underwater craft. Since civilian traffic is not routed through the channel, the noiseless conditions are near-perfect for picking up the slightest agitation, for example from a torpedo and any submarine that might fire it.
North Korea admits it does not possess an underwater craft stealthy enough to slip past the advanced sonar and audio arrays around Byeongnyeong Island, explained North Korean intelligence analyst Kim Myong Chol in a news release. “The sinking took place not in North Korean waters but well inside tightly guarded South Korean waters, where a slow-moving North Korean submarine would have great difficulty operating covertly and safely, unless it was equipped with AIP (air-independent propulsion) technology.”
The Cheonan sinking occurred in the aftermath of the March 11-18 Foal Eagle Exercise, which included anti-submarine maneuvers by a joint U.S.-South Korean squadron of five missile ships. A mystery surrounds the continued presence of the U.S. missile cruisers for more than eight days after the ASW exercise ended.
Only one reporter, Joohee Cho of ABC News, picked up the key fact that the Foal Eagle flotilla curiously included the USNS Salvor, a diving-support ship with a crew of 12 Navy divers. The lack of any minesweepers during the exercise leaves only one possibility: the Salvor was laying bottom mines.
Ever since an American cruiser was damaged by one of Saddam Hussein’s rising mines, also known as bottom mines, in the Iraq War, the U.S. Navy has pushed a crash program to develop a new generation of mines. The U.S. Naval Mine and Anti-Submarine Warfare Command has also been focused on developing counterparts to the fearsome Chinese naval “assassin’s mace,” which is propelled by a rocket engine.
A rising mine, which is effective only in shallow waters, rests atop a small platform on the sea floor under a camouflage of sand and gravel. Its detection system uses acoustics and magnetic readings to pick up enemy ships and submarines. When activated, jets of compressed air or solid-fuel rockets lift the bomb, which self-guides toward the magnetic center of the target. The blast rips the keel, splitting the ship or submarine into two neat pieces, just as was done to the RKOS Cheonan.
A lateral-fired torpedo, in contrast, “holes” the target’s hull, tilting the vessel in the classic war movie manner. The South Korean government displayed to the press the intact propeller shaft of a torpedo that supposedly struck the Cheonan. Since torpedoes travel between 40-50 knots per hour (which is faster than collision tests for cars), a drive shaft would crumble upon impacting the hull and its bearing and struts would be shattered or bent by the high-powered blast.
The initial South Korean review stated that the explosive was gunpowder, which would conform to North Korea’s crude munitions. This claim was later overturned by the inquiry board, which found the chemical residues to be similar to German advanced explosives. Due to sanctions against Pyongyang and its few allies, it is hardly credible that North Korea could obtain NATO-grade ordnance.
Thus, the mystery centers on the USNS Salvor, which happened to be yet right near Byeongyang Island at the time of the Cheonan sinking and far from its home base, Pearl Harbor. The inquiry board in Seoul has not questioned the officers and divers of the Salvor, which oddly is not under the command of the 7th Fleet but controlled by the innocuous-sounding Military Sealift Command. Diving-support ships like the Salvor are closely connected with the Office of Naval Intelligence since their duties include secret operations such as retrieving weapons from sunken foreign ships, scouting harbor channels and laying mines, as when the Salvor trained Royal Thai Marine divers in mine-laying in the Gulf of Thailand in 2006, for example.
The Salvor’s presence points to an inadvertent release of a rising mine, perhaps because its activation system was not switched off. A human error or technical glitch is very much within the realm of possibility due to the swift current and strong tides that race through the Byeongnyeong Channel. The arduous task of mooring the launch platforms to the sea floor allows the divers precious little time for double-checking the electronic systems.
If indeed it was an American rising mine that sank the Cheonan, it would constitute a friendly-fire accident. That in itself is not grounds for a criminal investigation against the presidential office and, at worst, amounts only to negligence by the military. However, any attempt to falsify evidence and engage in a media cover-up for political purposes constitutes tampering, fraud, perjury and possibly treason.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, is an environmental consultant and a commentator on Asian affairs for CCTV-9 Dialogue.
Bill Maher’s Cultural Supremacy and Religious Hierarchy
By Nima Shirazi | May 13, 2010
Bill Maher makes no secret of his contempt for religion. Via his comedy routines, his political commentary, his film Religulous, and his duties as host of Politically Incorrect and now HBO’s Real Time, Maher has long warned of the dangers and exploitation of organized religion and how incompatible dogma and doctrine are with the scientific enlightenment of modern society.
Inadvertently and less eloquently paraphrasing Voltaire, who once wrote that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” Maher has said that the belief in religion, which he calls “a neurological disorder,” in our society “stops people from thinking” and “justifies crazies.” In a 2008 interview with Larry King, Maher stated that religion is “the ultimate hustle.”
Maher’s critique (or outright bashing) of religious doctrine, dogma, and zealotry is admirable – or would be, if only he weren’t such an arrogant hypocrite. While Maher himself claims to be “an equal opportunity offender” who thinks that “all religion is stupid and dangerous,” he clearly believes that some faiths are more equal than others. Even though his condemnation of Christianity, notably Catholicism, has won him the animus of bible-thumping bigots like Catholic League head William Donahue and he has excoriated the intolerance of Pat Robertson and reveled in the death of Jerry Falwell, Maher has consistently saved his most virulent attacks for Islam and its followers.
While, in Maher’s estimation, Jews are somewhat quaint and silly and Christian dogma relies on outrageously absurd fairy tales, Muslims – as a rule – are all brainwashed and violent. Whereas other religions are sometimes co-opted by a minority of extremist elements that represent misguided fundamentalism, Islam, according to Maher, is inherently radical and terroristic. For example, during a February 2007 broadcast of Real Time, Maher stated,
“[Religions] are not all alike! [Islam] was extremist to begin with. Mohammad was a warrior. The big lie is that all religions are basically alike. They all preach the same thing. Well, of course the Bible is full of a lot of violence. I mean, God in the Old Testament is a psychopath – he just kills, kills, kills, for no reason, good reasons, bad reasons, he’s jealous, he just wants to kill…But he doesn’t seem to aim it so much at outsiders. He wipes out the Jews except for Noah because they were bad to him or whatever. But he doesn’t keep saying…it seems to me that in the Qur’an, God keeps saying, if you’re not one of us, you’re an infidel, and burning would be too good for you.”
With this unusual statement, Maher clearly demonstrates a striking level of ignorance about both the Qur’an and Judeo-Christian scripture, particularly the Old Testament, especially for someone who talks about religion all the time and then made a movie about it. The Old Testament manifestly overflows with divinely-mandated genocide and the deliberate ethnic cleansing of non-believers in the so-called Holy Land. Take the mythology of Exodus, which sees Yahweh deliver his people from Egypt and promise them a land “flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3.7-8) What is commonly left out of this uplifting tale of deliverance, freedom, and chosen-ness is the rest of Verse 8, which states plainly that this promised land was already “the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” As such, due to the inconvenient presence of a large and diverse indigenous population of non-Hebrew peoples, Yahweh declared to Moses and his followers:
“When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, or worship them, or follow their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in pieces.” (Exodus 23.23-24)
Unfortunately, for the native inhabitants of historic Palestine (or their modern counterparts, for that matter), things didn’t get any better. When the kingdom of Heshbon was conquered, the Bible states, the Israelites “completely destroyed every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children; we left no survivor; we left no one alive. Only the livestock we took as spoil for ourselves, with the plunder of the cities that we captured.” (Deuteronomy 2:31-35) The kingdom of Bashan fared no better, as Moses’ army devastated 60 walled towns, “totally destroying every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children. But all the cattle, all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves.” (Deuteronomy 3:3-7) As usual, Yahweh’s instructions were clear:
“When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites…and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you…you must utterly destroy them…Show them no mercy…For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”(Deuteronomy 7.1-11)
Moses certainly took God’s orders to heart, as he later told his followers:
“But as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as Yahweh your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against Yahweh, your God.” (Deuteronomy 20.16-18)
Furthermore, the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead, including “the women and the infants” were slaughtered by a 12,000-strong army of marauding Hebrews (Judges 21:10) and, as revenge for waylaying the Israelites as they returned from Egypt, Yahweh ordered his people to “go and strike the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them, but kill men and women, children, infants and suckling, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:2-3) Needless to say, there are many more examples of Hebrew aggression throughout the Bible (read about the exploits of Joshua, Aaron, David, Elijah, and Samson, for example), all of them commanded by the Lord Almighty, and all of them against non-Jews. So much for Maher’s contention that the Hebrew god “doesn’t seem to aim [his murderous wrath] so much at outsiders.”
(Incidentally, Maher also appears to be ignorant of certain Muslim rules of engagement, found within the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah, that expressly prohibit the killing of women, children, and the elderly, the cutting or burning of trees or orchards, the slaughter of livestock except for food, and the pillaging, plundering, or destruction of residential areas. Clearly, Yahweh’s own battle conventions were far less strict and more closely resemble the tactics of the Israeli military.)
Perhaps Maher’s decision to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the biblical Hebrews upon the indigenous people of the Levant, in favor of demonizing Islam and its adherents, should not be surprising considering his outspoken support for Zionism and the fact that he is a self-avowed “big supporter of Israel,” who believes not only that “Israel is a democracy in a part of the world that has none” but also that American blood and treasure should be spent in order to ensure the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Almost a decade ago, in the midst of the Second Intifada in late 2001, Maher hosted a panel to discuss Israel and Palestine on his round table talk-show Politically Incorrect. Rather than act as moderator, though, Maher wholly represented the Zionist perspective, complete with revisionist history and the constant invocation of Zionist mythology. After attempting to contextualize his first question by claiming that 4.5 million Jewish Israelis, armed with superior weaponry and a nuclear arsenal, are surrounded by a sea of 280 million hostile, bloodthirsty Arabs, Maher asked, “What if for one hour…the Arabs had the ability to annihilate the Jewish state? Do you think things would be different? Do you think they would show the restraint that Israel has for over 50 years?” One can only wonder what kind of “restraint” Maher was referring to considering Israel’s history of asymmetric aggression, apartheid-style oppression, disdain for international law and human rights, and settler-garrison ethnonationalist policy.
The rest of the show consisted mostly of Maher talking over his guests – the Arab ones anyway – and claiming that there really is no Israeli occupation of Palestine, that Palestinian rejectionism is to blame for statelessness, that Zionism is not a racist ideology, that Palestinians are better off under Israeli authority than under Arab rule, and that the forcible displacement and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Zionist colonialism and military expansion shouldn’t be a big deal considering that, in his view, there are plenty of other places for the indigenous people to resettle. “Here is Israel, this little bit of land,” Maher said, pointing to a map of the region. He continued,
“Here’s Syria. Here’s Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Sudan, Libya. Look at all this. Now, the Arabs purport to be brothers, that’s what we always hear. It’s one Arab nation divided into falsely drawn countries by the colonial powers. If this whole bit of land are all brothers, how come at the time of the partition when they refused to share the land with Israel, and there was only 600,000 Palestinian refugees, how come they couldn’t find any home in this whole area?”
Later, when confronted by one of the panelists, a Palestinian student at Georgetown University whose family was forced out of its home and into a refugee camp in 1948, who asks how such displacement and aggression can be justified by Israeli apologists, Maher stepped in to explain, “Because your people were offered half the land, and you said no and chose to try to annihilate them, instead.”
Aside from Maher’s awkward understanding of international law, the rights of refugees, and complete disregard for the illegality and immorality of both the annexation of land by conquest and the forcible transfer or deportation of populations, he demonstrates a distinct lack of historical knowledge and perspective required to speak on this matter with authority. He seems to either forget or simply not care that Israel was established in 1948 on land that was already inhabited by an indigenous population. In 1947, despite representing no more than 30% of the total population of Palestine – a percentage reached only after decades of illegal mass immigration to the region – Jews were to be given 56% of the land for their own state as part of the UN Partition Plan, which was accepted only as a non-binding recommendation with a vote of 33 to 13 (and 10 abstentions) after much international bullying by both the US and Russia. As part of the Plan, the “Jewish” state was to be granted control of much of the best land, notably the fertile coastal plain and the hilly northeastern Galilee and Jerusalem was to be an internationally-administered city populated by an equal number of Jews and Palestinians.
While Maher is correct that the Jewish leadership at the time accepted the UN proposal (albeit reluctantly), the Zionist intention was never to live side-by-side an independent Palestinian state. As Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote, “large sections of Israeli society…were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the [brewing 1948] war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN-earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” (Tikkun, March/April 1998.)
Zionist pioneers and Israel’s founding fathers were actually quite explicit in their goals. In 1937, before the horrors of Kristallnacht, Jewish pogroms and ghettos, and The Final Solution of Nazi-occupied Europe, Ben Gurion stated, “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them,” and elaborated elsewhere that, “if we have to use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places…then we have force at our disposal.”
The next year, Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated that “after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine.”
A decade later, Ben-Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948, “The war will give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.” This is the same Yosef Weitz who, in 1940, wrote in his diary, “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped.”
In 1948, after Jewish authorities had agreed to the UN Partition Plan (which was never internationally accepted or legally implemented) and Israel had declared “independence” with total disregard for international law and the self-determination of Palestine’s native population, leader of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun and later Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, Menachem Begin chimed in, declaring, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Maher expunges from his own truncated history lesson the fact that Israel achieved “legitimacy” with the backing of Western world powers and gained “independence” as a colonial state through violent transfer of the native inhabitants, systematic ethnic cleansing, and the massacres and intimidation of paramilitary death squads. Immediately after declaring its creation, Israeli militias fought a war of expansion and annexed an additional 22% of Arab land as its own.
Maher also declines to mention, probably due to his historical ignorance, that immediately following Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in May 1948, the United Nations reassessed its approach to the partition of Palestine and appointed a mediator, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, to come up with new proposal while taking into account “the aspirations of the Jews, the political difficulties and differences of opinion of the Arab leaders, the strategic interests of Great Britain, the financial commitment of the United States and the Soviet Union, the outcome of the war, and finally the authority and prestige of the United Nations.” While Bernadotte’s second proposal was produced in consultation with British and American emissaries, then-President Harry Truman undermined its progress in the UN due to pre-election Zionist influence in the United States. On September 17, 1948, the day after the second proposal was presented to the UN, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by members of the Zionist terrorist organization Lehi (also known as The Stern Gang).
For the next 17 years, Palestinians in Israel were subject to martial law. In 1967, Israel launched a unilateral, unprovoked, preemptive strike on its Arab neighbors and militarily conquered the remaining 22% of Palestine. It has brutally occupied the entirety of historic Palestine ever since.
Later in the program, Maher stated his support for continued Israeli occupation and Jewish colonization of the West Bank due to his incorrect impression that area conquered in warfare becomes property of the victor. When asked about what Israel’s responsibilities actually are under international law, Maher quickly changed the subject and blamed the Palestinians for their own victimization.
Before signing off for the evening, Maher also made sure to claim that the Palestinian use of suicide bombing had more to do with religious dogma than desperate resistance to illegal Israeli occupation maintained by American money, weapons, and equipment. “There is a big difference in the religions [Judaism and Islam], come on, between this life and the other life,” he declared. “Muslims are a little more like the Catholics, ‘It’s gonna happen after you die.’ The Jews are more like, ‘Let’s make the deal now.'”
Little has changed for Maher over the years. Anti-Muslim sentiment is a staple on Maher’s HBO show Real Time, as is easily evinced by looking at a list of his guests, which includes notables such as Ann Coulter, David Frum, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Jonah Goldberg, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Even though Maher’s Real Time panels include “liberal” and “progressive” guests to off-set the right-wing commentators, anti-Muslim rhetoric is rarely challenged, and is more often reinforced, especially when Maher’s guests include such notables as the Lebanese-born neoconservative Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz crony and Council of Foreign Relations board member Fouad Ajami, literary blowhard and ridiculous fatwa-victim Salman Rushdie, “Muslim refusenik” and author of “The Trouble with Islam Today” Irshad Manji, and Muslim-turned-atheist and fellow at the war-mongering, imperialist think tank the American Enterprise Institute Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In early 2007, when Maher hosted Hirsi Ali, whom he introduced as his “hero,” he asked her the extremely leading question, “Is Islam a religion of peace? You are one of the brave people who say it’s not really a religion of peace.” Hirsi Ali eagerly responded, “It’s not a religion of peace. Immediately after 9/11, they should have said, ‘it’s not a religion of peace, we’re up against Islam.'”
Strangely enough, less than three months later, Maher was seen advocating the words of his “new hero,” Congressman Ron Paul, who had impressed Maher during the recent Republican presidential debates. Maher praised Paul, saying, that he “spoke real truth about the war on terror, about 9/11, about Iraq. He said, ‘y’know what? They hate us because we’re over there. They don’t hate because of our freedom or any of those stupid slogans the Bush people put out.” Regarding Paul’s analysis of 9/11, Maher continued, during a satellite interview with Senator Chris Dodd,
“He [Ron Paul] wasn’t saying ‘We were asking for it.’ He was saying was ‘Maybe we should listen to our enemies. And maybe the reason they’re mad at us is because we have been meddling in the Middle East. We were in Saudi Arabia, that’s what Bin Laden was mad at us for. Now we’re in Iraq, and we’re screwing up that country. Maybe if we listen to them instead of just saying ‘We’re always the good people,’ we would actually make ourselves safer.”
Later in the same show, Maher repeated his agreement with the assessment that “They hate us ’cause we’re over there, we’re meddling in their affairs.”
Later that same year, however, Maher seemed to step back from this view during a conversation with the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, who suggested,
“America is fighting a war that doesn’t exist. We’re fighting because our leaders tell us that the Muslims hate freedom and hate liberty and hate women in the workplace, and that’s got nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world, what our policies are, and what our impact is there…”
Whereas Maher replied by saying, “I believe what you say and I think it’s more about our policy than our way of life,” he continued,
“but, would you grant me this, as long as there is an Israel in the world, and I’m a big supporter of Israel, as long as America backs it, the kind of Muslims that take their religion that seriously that they would strap on a suicide belt are always gonna be out for us and always gonna be trying to kill us?”
When Scheuer stated that he didn’t think Israel was “worth an American life or an American dollar,” Maher was flummoxed and almost speechless at the prospect. Unable to fathom how anyone could not support Israel, he just barely managed to respond by repeating Scheuer’s proposal in the form of a question, “You don’t think the existence of Israel in the world is worth an American life or an American dollar?”
Scheuer’s analysis was hardly radical. In fact, he was merely agreeing with an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, which found,
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.
“Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”
Nevertheless, Maher has long advocated the perspective that Judeo-Christian culture is superior to Islamic and Arabic culture and that Israel is a necessary “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” As such, any violations of human rights, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by “Western” countries against Muslims are not only justified, but also encouraged.
In 2003, during his comedy special “Victory Begins at Home,” Maher unabashedly supported the treatment that Middle Eastern abductees were suffering at the hands of the US government in the gulag of Guantanamo Bay. “I don’t feel bad for those 300 killers we’ve got down in Guantanamo Bay, always crabbing about how we don’t respect their religious practices,” Maher declared, as he strutted around the stage. “Y’know what? You lost, eat what we eat! Here’s a cheese-filled snausage, enjoy!”
Maher seemed not to care that the overwhelming majority of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were not, in fact, “killers,” had absolutely no connection to the Taliban, let alone al Qaeda, all were being held as combatants in the Bush-manufactured “war on terror,” and some were subject to, not only torture, but murder at the hands of their American captors.
In case Maher’s central thesis was lost on his audience, he stated plainly, “You have to understand, you have to embrace the values of Western civilization. They’re not just different, they are better.”
More recently, in the wake of the much-hyped controversy over an episode of Comedy Central’s cartoon South Park which depicted the prophet Mohammad in a bear costume (sort of) and resulted in the show’s creators receiving veiled death threats posted on the internet by a group called Revolution Muslim, Maher felt the need to restate his case. As part of the “New Rules” segment that closed his April 30th show, Maher stated that the South Park controversy “served, or should serve, as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists, it’s better.”
What followed was a vitriolic and humorless tirade against all Muslims, not just so-called “extremists,” wherein Maher suggested that as bad as some elements of Western culture may be, nothing compares to the myopia and violence inherent in Islam. When he was finished, Zionist Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was a Real Time guest that evening, leaned over to Maher with a broad grin and could be seen saying, “That was great. That was great.”
Maher began by stating that, in reference to the threats levied at South Park, the developing world’s “religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours.” What Maher failed to point out is that the group on whose website “Islamists” made the threats is based in Brooklyn, New York, that the threats were made by 20-year-old Virginia-native Zachary Adam Chesser (a recent covert to Islam who now goes by the name Abu Talhah al-Amrikee), and that the group itself was founded by “American-born Jew formerly known as Joseph Cohen who converted to Islam after attending an Orthodox rabbinical school.” According to journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail, in 1998, Cohen moved with his wife and family from Brooklyn to the ultra-Orthodox Israeli development town of Netivot where he was a supporter of the ultra-racist Shas political party of Mizrahi Haredi Jews. After he became “disillusioned with Israeli secularism,” Cohen apparently embarked on a two year “theological dialogue” in a Jewish internet chatroom with a persuasive sheikh from the United Arab Emirates and was duly transformed from being a staunch Zionist to a “sudden admirer of al-Qaeda and Hamas” and changed his name to Yousef al-Khattab. Perhaps Maher didn’t feel this information was relevant.
Maher continued by urging his audience to “think about the craziest religious wackos we have here in America…take the worst, the worst is the Christians who bring their ‘God Hates Fags’ signs to soldiers’ funerals. Can’t get worse than that. Now multiply that by infinity and give it an army, that’s the Taliban.” Here, Maher’s comparison is spurious at best. While he rightfully condemns the recent suspected actions of the Taliban involving the poisoning of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, he claims that it’s closest Western analogy is some ignorant bigot holding an offensive sign?
Maher chose not to mention that there have numerous instances of Jewish settlers poisoning water supplies and grazing grounds of Palestinian towns, resulting in the deaths of livestock and illnesses such as liver infections in children. While Maher warns of the tactics of the Taliban, which at its height of power in 2001 boasted a strength of about 45,000 troops, including the elderly and children (a level which has been cut in half in the past decade), there are currently over 400,000 heavily-armed Jewish settlers, subsidized by the Israeli government (and therefore US tax dollars) living in illegal fortified colonies and garrison-outposts all over Palestinian land in the West Bank. These messianic settlers have repeatedly been known to burn Palestinian crops and mosques, throw rocks at Palestinian children on their way to school, and murder Palestinians in cold blood (and sometimes have monuments erected in their honor).
Incidentally, the number 400,000 is applicable elsewhere. The new Quadrennial Defense Review published by the US Department of Defense in February 2010 states, “Including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, approximately 400,000 U.S. military personnel are forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world.”
Furthermore, Maher’s claim that Christian fundamentalism only goes as far as waving stupid banners and pales in comparison to Islamic extremism is absurd. Perhaps his team of writers should have reminded Maher of Jim D. Adkisson who, on July 27, 2008, walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church with 76 rounds of buckshot and a shotgun in a guitar case, opened fire on the 200 member congregation as they watched a child performance of Annie, killing two. His stated motive was that “he hated the liberal movement” which, along with Democrats, African Americans and homosexuals, was destroying American institutions. Maybe Maher’s mention of anti-abortion, right-wing Christian Scott Roeder, who murdered doctor George Tiller in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009 because he felt “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger” (and whose actions elicited praise from other American fundamentalists) was cut from his script due to time constrictions. Doubtful.
Additionally, Maher failed to address the fact that George W. Bush was a born-again Christian who often claimed his imperial foreign policy agenda was divinely inspired. Five days after the September 11 attacks, as plans to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq had already been drawn up, Bush declared that “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” Five months later, as he addressed American soldiers in Alaska, he spoke again of “this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom.”
In 2003, Bush even declared to then-Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
And what about the reports that Bush’s top-secret daily briefings, the Pentagon’s Worldwide Intelligence Update, prepared by US General Glen Shaffer, and delivered by hand by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, routinely had images of American military might and warfare juxtaposed with inspirational verses from the Bible?
But Maher was just warming up. He continued,
“Now, I’ve been known to make fun of Christians, but I have the perspective to know that they’re a lot more evolved than people who target girls for going to school…And that’s because Muslims still take their religion too seriously.”
It can only be assumed that Maher didn’t mean the “enlightened” Christians who subscribe to “biblical discipline,” a form of corporal punishment intended to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God, which recently resulted in a Montana couple beating their adoptive children to death. Obviously, Maher also meant to exclude “enlightened” Mormon fundamentalists like brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty who committed double murder or Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, all in the name of God.
Naturally, Maher also didn’t feel like telling his audience about the more than 280 kindergartens, schools, and universities that the “enlightened” Israeli military deliberately destroyed during the 22-day assault on Gaza or about Palestinian children like Abir Aramin who are murdered by “enlightened” Israeli soldiers on their way to school.
Maher also makes sure to clarify that he wholly endorses painting all 1.2 billion Muslims, one quarter of the world’s population, with the same brush, by declaring, “It should, in fairness, be noted that in speaking of Muslims, we realize that, of course, the vast majority are law-abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace.” With this statement, Maher reveals his true agenda. He is not simply talking about a fundamentalist approach or extreme interpretation of a religion; he is stating, quite plainly, that all those who practice that religion are themselves fundamentalist and extreme. (Perhaps Maher would think it fair to claim that all Catholics are child molesters or all Jews are Ariel Sharon?)
This narrow-minded approach to Islam and its followers proves Maher’s bigotry. Apparently, in Maher’s view, all Muslims are misogynistic men and a poor, brainwashed, and beaten women. To Maher, all Muslim majority countries are oppressive dictatorships and Muslim culture is a monolithic entity that remains identical across thousands of miles, different geography, countries, ethnic backgrounds, races, and traditions.
He seems to think that all Muslim women are forced against their will to wear burqas and veils by their domineering and repressive husbands and fathers. Disproving this assumption hardly seems worth the time; nowhere in the Qur’an does it say that women must cover their hair or wear a veil, only that women (and men, for that matter) should be modest in their dress and actions. Incidentally, both Judaism and Christianity preach the same. Some Orthodox Jewish women shave their hair and wear wigs. Depictions of the Virgin Mary invariably show her in hijab. Does Maher feel that Catholic nuns are unjustly subjugated?
Muslim women from Albania to Morocco to Indonesia to Palestine to Tunisia to Pakistan to Egypt to Jordan choose whether or not they want to wear hijab. Well over 50% of college students in Iran are female (women make up 70% of Azad University’s Applied Physics Department graduates) and women hold high level jobs in all kinds of professions; they are business owners, university professors, filmmakers, artists, writers, and Cabinet ministers.
Unfortunately, Maher’s image of Islam seems to stop short at the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Qutb-inspired fundamentalism of Al Qaeda, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It’s apparently irrelevant to him that many Muslim countries, from Azerbaijan to Bangladesh to Niger to Lebanon to Gambia to Turkey, are secular presidential republics and parliamentary democracies or that women in Muslim Kyrgyzstan were granted voting rights two years before women in the United States. Obviously, no mention need be made about the eighteen female MPs elected to the Turkish Parliament in 1935, at a time when women in a significant number of other European countries had no voting rights whatsoever, or that women in Switzerland (a country so enlightened it banned minarets) couldn’t vote until 1971, or that Benazir Bhutto was twice elected Prime Minister in the Islamic state of Pakistan while the United States has never had a female president or vice president.
Maher rightly insists that separation of church (or mosque) and state is integral for a free and democratic society to flourish, yet seems to promote the idea of legally banning Islamic dress in Western societies, as is the case in France and, soon, Belgium. Oh, the irony.
But Maher still wasn’t finished. “I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “Civilized people don’t threaten each other…Threatening, that’s some old-school desert shit.”
By “civilized,” Maher clearly meant “American” or, at least, “Western” people, as opposed to the backwards, savagery of the Islamic world. One can only assume he was preferring our civilized overthrow, both overt and covert, of dozens of sovereign nations by the United States in the past century. Maybe Maher meant our civilized practice of “enhanced interrogation,” waterboarding, and torture. Or our civilized indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassination, black sites and secret prisons, and inhumane SAMS detention practices.
If Maher is so worried about threats, perhaps he should have mentioned the harassment US Congressman Bart Stupak has received lately by anti-choice nutjobs disappointed in his support for the new health care bill (which, incidentally, offers absolutely no federal funding for abortions). “In the past few weeks,” Stupak recently wrote in Newsweek, “I’ve received so many death threats that I was advised to get a security escort around Washington. My wife, Laurie, has had to unplug our home phone to avoid drunken messages from people screaming, swearing, and generally acting profane… One day I got 1,500 faxes, all hate mail.” Maher could have talked about the cancellation of a Texas college production of the Terrence McNally play “Corpus Christi” (which features a homosexual Jesus character) after the school was inundated with “threatening calls and e-mail messages.” Glenn Greenwald reminds us that this is “same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of “anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally.”
He also could have discussed the medieval Hebrew curses hurled by Rabbi Mordechai Aderet at a household of Iranian Jews in Great Neck, Long Island, the invective spewed by those offended by Danish artists Surrend who recently posted maps of the Levant all over Berlin with the name “Ramallah” replacing “Israel” and a title reading “The Final Solution” at the top, the desecration of the graves of Muslim WWII soldiers in a French cemetary, or the death threats, hate mail, and defacing of the home of outspoken Israel-critic Rabbi Michael Lerner by right-wing Zionists who disagree with his vocal anti-occupation stance. Maybe Maher should warn his viewers of the dangers of Israeli Rabbis like Yitzhak Shapira and Yossi Elitzur of Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in Yitzhar near Nablus, who last year published a 230-page guide to Biblical laws governing the killing of non-Jews. Maher could point out that the yeshiva itself is funded by tax-deductible donations from America. He could also throw in some information about the Israeli Jewish Rabbinate which, during the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, indoctrinated young Israeli troops with pamphlets claiming that they were holy warriors fighting to expel the “murderers” (all Palestinians) who are “interfering with our conquest of this holy land.” The rabbis preached that showing mercy was “terribly immoral.”
One might think Maher would mention the ecstatic Jews in New York City, who danced in the street in support of the Israeli military’s slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza. Or the signs posted around the wealthy Riverdale section of the The Bronx which advertise “Camp Jabotinsky,” a self-described “Jewish Survival Camp” in Upstate New York where “Jewish youth learn how to shoot,” in addition to learning “karate, legal and proper weapons training, street fighting and how to be a proud Jew who can defend the Jewish people,” boasting that “the Nazi Scum better watch out.” It’s not a joke.
Neither is the fact that Maher’s beloved “only democracy in the Middle East” isn’t actually a democracy at all and that a recent Tel Aviv poll revealed that the democracy-loving Jewish Israelis (remember, the ones serving as a civilized vanguard against the barbarous Muslims of the Orient?) don’t care much for Maher’s much-touted Western values. The survey found that over 57% of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, the majority felt that “there is too much freedom of expression” in Israel, 43% said “the media should not report information confirmed by Palestinian sources that could reflect poorly on the Israeli army,” 58% “opposed harsh criticism of the country,” 65% thought “the Israeli media should be barred from publishing news that defense officials think could endanger state security, even if the news was reported abroad,” and 82% said they “back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the defense establishment.”
The poll also found that “most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.” Additiontally, of those polled who said they were right-wing, 76% said “human rights groups should not have the right to freely publicize immoral conduct on Israel’s part.” How “civilized.”
It’s true that the “civilized” people Maher praises sometimes don’t issue threats, as he claimed Muslims do. More often, they just drop bombs and shot bullets at the viciously brutal Muslims. For example, it may be difficult for Maher to pick out the most civilized massacre committed by US troops in Iraq when given a choice of so many, from the 1991 Amiriyah shelter massacre to the more recent massacres in Haditha (24 killed, ages 1 to 76 years old), Fallujah (over 600 killed), Ishaqi (11 killed, ages 6 months to 75 years old), and Nisour Square (17 dead), not to mention the rape/murder of a 14-year-old girl and the murders of her family in Mahmudiyah by US Army soldiers and the bombing and shooting of a wedding party in Mukaradeeb that killed 42 civilians. And that’s not all.
Maybe Maher was speaking of the “civilized” – dare someone say “righteous? – invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, where the enlightened US troops just can’t seem to stop murdering hundreds of civilians and then trying to cover it up.
Maybe the “civilized” thing to do is to murder hundreds of Muslims via remote-controlled Predator drones. Perhaps though, like US General Tommy Franks, Bill Maher doesn’t “do body counts.” Or maybe, like George H.W. Bush, Maher should just declare, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are!” Moral superiority in the face of genocide has been a staple for Western civilization for a while.
How else could all those “civilized” American soldiers bear to call their supposed adversaries japs, nips, gooks, ragheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers, and hajjis, or simply scum while they were busy killing journalists, women and children and using gruesome chemical weaponry like depleted uranium and white phosphorus against civilian populations? If the troops weren’t so “civilized,” how else would they be able to rape all those women in Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, and within their own ranks? Is it any wonder that, in our “civilized” nation, the unemployment rate for military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan has reached 14.7% (nearly 50% higher than the national rate), on any given night well over 100,000 veterans are homeless, and the chilling reality is 18 veterans commit suicide every day.
Maher must be aware that the “civilized” United States will have a military budget of over $767 billion next year, a staggering total that, if allocated elsewhere could single-handedly eradicate world hunger for our planet’s 1.02 billion undernourished and starving population for almost four years. But that obviously won’t happen since “civilized” people believe that murdering half a million children under five, that committing “genocide,” that “destroying a entire society,” through economic sanctions is the price some have to pay for the rest of us to remain “civilized.” As one of the leaders of “civilized” America declared on behalf of the Western world, “We think the price was worth it.”
In 2006, when the first free democratic elections in the Arab world brought Hamas to power in Gaza, democracy stalwarts Israel and the United States decided that they didn’t like the results and would place heavy economic sanctions on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the already besieged Strip to punish them for their brazen self-determination. The Israeli prime minister’s advisor reportedly joked to a team of government and military officials, “It’s like an appointment with a dietitian. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.” The crowd rolled with laughter. As a result, 95% of businesses have been shuttered, unemployment is over 60%, and more than 80% of Gaza’s residents are dependent on food aid when they’re not being murdered by Israeli soldiers with American weapons in their own homes. Is this the Western civility of which Maher speaks so fondly?
Perhaps Maher forgets that Fascism, Nazism, and Zionism are all Western – not Muslim – ideologies. Or that Muslims didn’t drop two atomic bombs on innocent Japanese civilians. Nope, superior American values did that.
Yes, Bill Maher is a comedian. He makes that clear whenever he derides Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, by quickly following up his jab by saying, “I kid, I kid!” But he doesn’t ever do that with Muslims. Why? Because he’s not kidding. Unfortunately, as a comedian, Maher should have more perspective and less invective.
It seems that Bill Maher’s major problem with Muslims is not so much that “they” are more inherently dangerous and violent based on their chosen religious affiliation, but rather that he is more scared of them. As a result, rather than being the clear-headed, out-spoken realist that he’s conjured himself to be, Maher winds up being more of a holographic torchbearer of truth, a peon of moral relativism rather than a champion of moral obligation.
As such, Maher is not the “equal opportunity offender” he claims to be since he clearly discriminates against one group of people and holds other groups of people – groups he belongs to – as superior. In this way, he is no better than the zealots that so offend him. Just last Friday, in response to the bogus justification for aggressive imperialism, We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here, Maher made sure to remark, “There’s already millions of Muslims in America. The problem is in their head.”
American literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.”
It is with this in mind that Maher’s insistence, addressing an audience on premium cable from a Los Angeles television studio, that “our system is better” rings hollow and shameful.
John Lennon once said, “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” As usual, John is right. Especially if that TV is tuned into Real Time.
Sometimes Conspiracy Theories Are True
By Alexander Cockburn | The American Conservative | July 1, 2010 Issue
Unlike the French or the Italians, for whom conspiracies are an integral part of government activity, acknowledged by all, Americans have been temperamentally prone to discount them. Reflecting its audience, the press follows suit. Editors and reporters like to offer themselves as hardened cynics, following the old maxim “Never believe anything till it is officially denied,” but in truth, they are touchingly credulous, ever inclined to trust the official version, at least until irrefutable evidence—say, the failure to discover a single WMD in Iraq—compels them finally to a darker view.
Once or twice a decade some official deception simply cannot be sedately circumnavigated. Even in the 1950s, when the lid of government secrecy was more firmly bolted down, the grim health consequences of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, Utah, and Nevada finally surfaced. In the late 1960s, it was the turn of the CIA, some of its activities first exposed in relatively marginal publications like The Nation and Ramparts, then finally given wider circulation.
Even then the mainstream press exhibited extreme trepidation in running any story presuming to discredit the moral credentials of the U.S. government. Take assassination as an instrument of national policy. In these post-9/11 days, when Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, publicly declares, as he did before the House Intelligence Committee, that the government has the right to kill Americans abroad, it is easy to forget that nothing used to more rapidly elicit furious denials from the CIA than allegations about its efforts, stretching back to the late 1940s, to kill inconvenient foreign leaders. Charges by the Cubans through the 1960s and early 1970s about the Agency’s serial attempts to murder Fidel Castro were routinely ignored, until finally the Senate hearings conducted in 1976 by Sen. Frank Church elicited a conclusive record of about 20 separate efforts.
Indeed, there was a brief window in the early ’70s, amid revulsion over the Vietnam War and the excitement of the Watergate hearings, when the press exhibited a certain unwonted bravado, in part because investigative committees of Congress, enlivened by Watergate, made good use of subpoena power and immunity from threats of libel. Hence the famous Lockheed bribery hearings.
Decorum soon returned, however, amid stern warnings by the late Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company. “The press these days should … be rather careful about its role,” she told the Magazine Publishers’ Association. “We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and seeing conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” Mrs. Graham’s employees duly took heed. “Conspiracy-mongering” can be a deadly charge leveled at a reporter or an editor.
Just over 20 years later, in 1996, the Washington Post fired off a six-part series, concocted with the help of Harvard profs, decked out with doleful front-page headlines such as “In America, Loss of Confidence Seeps Into Institutions.” Cutting through the underbrush of graphs and pizza-slice charts, one found something simple: it’s as if P.T. Barnum set forth across the country to see if one was being born every minute, got to the edge of the Midwest, looked around and then muttered to himself mournfully, “No suckers!” The Post’s earnest message was that mistrust is bad and that it is better for social stability and contentment to trust government, as in the golden ’50s, which, the older crowd may recall, was a time when government told soldiers it was safe to march into atomic test sites and when government-backed doctors offered radioactive oatmeal to retarded kids without their parents’ knowledge.
The mainstream press—what’s left of it—sees an important duty to foster confidence in public institutions. On May 6, right after disclosure of Goldman Sachs’ double dealing, came the plummet and surge in the stock market that for a brief moment sliced 998 points off the Dow, prompting serious losses to small investors who had placed stop-loss orders on individual stocks. On Comedy Central, Jon Stewart showed a stream of news anchors characterizing everything from the GM bailout to the mortgage crisis to the rescue of AIG as caused by a “perfect storm.” Stewart said, “I’m beginning to think these are not perfect storms. I’m beginning to think these are regular storms and we have a s—ty boat.” But the mainstream press zealously steered clear of suggestions that market manipulators might have engineered a killing.
The integration of journalists into Washington’s policy apparatus, with its luxuriant jungle of lobby shops thinly disguised as nonprofits, with their seminars, “scholars in residence,” and fellowships, has led to a decorous tendency to ignore the grime of politics at the level of corruption, blackmail, and bribery—mostly inaccessible anyway without the power of subpoena. There’s an interesting genre of books, some written by political fixers in the aftermath of exposure or incarceration—Bobby Baker’s Wheeling and Dealing is a good example—that usefully describe the grime, but these are rarely reviewed in respectable journals.
Sometimes a cover-up does surface, propelled into the light of day by a tenacious journalist. Then there’s the outraged counterattack. Are you suggesting, sir, that the CIA connived to smuggle cocaine into America’s inner cities? Gary Webb’s career at the San Jose Mercury News was efficiently destroyed. Those who took the trouble to read the subsequent full report of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz found corroboration of Webb’s charges. But by then the caravan had moved on. A jury issued its verdict, but the press box was empty.
Maybe now the decline in power of the established corporate press, the greater availability of dissenting versions of politics and history, and the exposure of the methods used to coerce public support for the attack on Iraq have engendered a greater sense of realism on the part of Americans about what their government can do. Perhaps the press will be more receptive to discomfiting stories about what Washington is capable of in the pursuit of what it deems to be the national interest. Hopefully, in this more fertile soil, Syd Schanberg’s pertinacity will be vindicated at last, and those still active in politics who connived at this abandonment will be forced to give an account. 
Climate alarmism in Britain: “…the poll figures are going through the floor.”
Excerpts from the New York Times:
Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL | May 25, 2010
LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”
Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.
And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.
…
“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago… Read the complete story here
On Being the Wrong Size
By Willis Eschenbach | May 23, 2010
This topic is a particular peeve of mine, so I hope I will be forgiven if I wax wroth.
There is a most marvelous piece of technology called the GRACE satellites, which stands for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is composed of two satellites flying in formation. Measuring the distance between the two satellites to the nearest micron (a hundredth of the width of a hair) allows us to calculate the weight of things on the earth very accurately.
One of the things that the GRACE satellites have allowed us to calculate is the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Cap. There is a new article about the Greenland results called Weighing Greenland.
Figure 1. The two GRACE satellites flying in tandem, and constantly measuring the distance between them.
So, what’s not to like about the article?
Well, the article opens by saying:
Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global warming.
Now, that sounds pretty scary, it’s losing a third of the volume of Lake Erie every year. Can’t have that.
But what does that volume, a third of Lake Erie, really mean? We could also say that it’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools, or 400 times the volume of Sydney Harbor, or about the same volume as the known world oil reserves. Or we could say the ice loss is 550 times the weight of all humans on the Earth, or the weight of 31,000 Great Pyramids … but we’re getting no closer to understanding what that ice loss means.
To understand what it means, there is only one thing to which we should compare the ice loss, and that is the ice volume of the Greenland Ice Cap itself. So how many cubic kilometres of ice are sitting up there on Greenland?
My favorite reference for these kinds of questions is the Physics Factbook, because rather than give just one number, they give a variety of answers from different authors. In this case I went to the page on Polar Ice Caps. It gives the following answers:
Spaulding & Markowitz, Heath Earth Science. Heath, 1994: 195. says less than 5.1 million cubic kilometres (often written as “km^3″).
“Greenland.” World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book, 1999: 325 says 2.8 million km^3.
Satellite Image Atlas of Glaciers of the World. US Geological Survey (USGS) says 2.6 million km^3.
Schultz, Gwen. Ice Age Lost. 1974. 232, 75. also says 2.6 million km^3.
Denmark/Greenland. Greenland Tourism. Danish Tourist Board says less than 5.5 million km^3.
Which of these should we choose? Well, the two larger figures both say “less than”, so they are upper limits. The Physics Factbook says “From my research, I have found different values for the volume of the polar ice caps. … For Greenland, it is approximately 3,000,000 km^3.” Of course, we would have to say that there is an error in that figure, likely on the order of ± 0.4 million km^3 or so.
So now we have something to which we can compare our one-third of Lake Erie or 400 Sidney Harbors or 550 times the weight of the global population. And when we do so, we find that the annual loss is around 200 km^3 lost annually out of some 3,000,000 km^3 total. This means that Greenland is losing about 0.007% of its total mass every year … seven thousandths of one percent lost annually, be still, my beating heart …
And if that terrifying rate of loss continues unabated, of course, it will all be gone in a mere 15,000 years.
That’s my pet peeve, that numbers are being presented in the most frightening way possible. The loss of 200 km^3 of ice per year is not “some of the most powerful evidence of global warming”, that’s hyperbole. It is a trivial change in a huge block of ice.
And what about the errors in the measurements? We know that the error in the Greenland Ice Cap is on the order of 0.4 million km^3. How about the error in the GRACE measurements? This reference indicates that there is about a ± 10% error in the GRACE Greenland estimates. How does that affect our numbers?
Well, if we take the small estimate of ice cap volume, and the large estimate of loss, we get 220 km^3 lost annually / 2,600,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.008%, and a time to total loss of 12,000 years.
Going the other way, we get 180 km^3 lost annually / 3,400,000 km^3 total. This is an annual loss of 0.005%, and a time to total loss of 19,000 years.
It is always important to include the errors in the calculation, to see if they make a significant difference in the result. In this case they happen to not make much difference, but each case is different.
That’s what angrifies my blood mightily, meaningless numbers with no errors presented for maximum shock value. Looking at the real measure, we find that Greenland is losing around 0.005% — 0.008% of its ice annually, and if that rate continues, since this is May 23rd, 2010, the Greenland Ice Cap will disappear entirely somewhere between the year 14010 and the year 21010 … on May 23rd …
So the next time you read something that breathlessly says …
“If this activity in northwest Greenland continues and really accelerates some of the major glaciers in the area — like the Humboldt Glacier and the Peterman Glacier — Greenland’s total ice loss could easily be increased by an additional 50 to 100 cubic kilometers (12 to 24 cubic miles) within a few years”
… you can say “Well, if it does increase by the larger estimate of 100 cubic km per year, and that’s a big if since the scientists are just guessing, that would increase the loss from 0.007% per year to around 0.010% per year, meaning that the Greenland Ice Cap would only last until May 23rd, 12010.”
Finally, the original article that got my blood boiling finishes as follows:
The good news for Luthcke is that a separate team using an entirely different method has come up with measurements of Greenland’s melting ice that, he says, are almost identical to his GRACE data. The bad news, of course, is that both sets of measurements make it all the more certain that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than anyone expected.
Oh, please, spare me. As the article points out, we’ve only been measuring Greenland ice using the GRACE satellites for six years now. How could anyone have “expected” anything? What, were they expecting a loss of 0.003% or something? And how is a Greenland ice loss of seven thousandths of one percent per year “bad news”? Grrrr …
I’ll stop here, as I can feel my blood pressure rising again. And as this is a family blog, I don’t want to revert to being the un-reformed cowboy I was in my youth, because if I did I’d start needlessly but imaginatively and loudly speculating on the ancestry, personal habits, and sexual malpractices of the author of said article … instead, I’m going to go drink a Corona beer and reflect on the strange vagaries of human beings, who always seem to want to read “bad news”.
Lies and Forgeries on Iran´s Nuclear Program
by Toles
By Yusuf Fernandez | Al-Manar TV* | May 14, 2010
Nowadays, everyone knows that the US invaded and occupied Iraq through lies, which were echoed by US mass media. These media projected lies as corroborated facts. A large part of this information, including the discredited claim that Iraq wanted to acquire uranium from Niger, came from Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, two pro-Israeli neocons. With the White House’s support, they created the so-called Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon in 2001 in order to collect and spread disinformation and lies that could be used to “justify” the invasion of Iraq. After the invasion, the Office was disbanded. Admitted spy for Israel Larry Franlkin worked at the OSP.
Now, history is repeating. The US has accused Iran, without any evidence, of deviating from peaceful goals in its nuclear program. Any progress in Tehran´s program is denounced as a new effort in this sense. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not found any proof of a nuclear military program in Iran.
The US authorities have not refrained from using fake documents in its anti-Iran campaign. They were accused of presenting fabricated papers to French courts in order to support their demand for extradition of Majid Kakavand, an Iranian engineer who was detained in France in March 2009 at the request of the US authorities, which demanded his extradition for allegedly breaching the US embargo against Iran.
Recently, he was acquitted of all charges brought against him in France and vowed to take legal action against US authorities. “Given that I have spent fourteen months in jail on false charges, it is my legal right to sue US authorities as soon as possible,” said Kakavand, who arrived in Tehran, IRNA reported. Kakavand´s advocate Diane Francois said that some of the documents included e-mail copies with attachments that did not have corresponding dates concluding that the documents were falsified, reported Expatica.com on March 31.
Iran, for its part, had demanded Kakavand´s immediate release. On March 16, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said: “The innocence of (Majid) Kakavand is evident and we urge France not to be trapped in American propaganda and release him.”
US propaganda has also spread rumors about an alleged Iranian plan to build ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States in five years. However, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi has rejected the reports. The intention behind these allegations is clear: to persuade the US public that the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has never attacked another country – except when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein´s army in the 1980-88 war, is a “threat” to the US.
While the US and Western countries have reacted with suspicion to Iran’s development of new deterrent missiles, Tehran has made it clear that its missile capabilities only serve defensive purposes against a possible attack. Actually, the US stance is completely hypocritical. It threatens Iran with a military attack and at the same time it considers any Iranian military development as a “threat”.
Washington and its allies are trying to boost their campaign for sanctions in the international media. In this framework, the British daily ‘Times’ published on December 14, 2009 a story that claimed that Iranian scientists had conducted experiments into neutron sources aimed at producing the trigger for a nuclear bomb. The report was based on an undated two-page document in Farsi (Persian) that according to unnamed “foreign intelligence agencies” would have been written in early 2007. The Times did not mention the source of the document, but it quoted “an Asian intelligence source” – a term some media outlets use for Israeli intelligence officials.
The document was intended to be used as a possible pretext for war. International Institute for Strategic Studies analyst Mark Fitzpatrick told The Times: “The most shattering conclusion is that, if this was an effort that began in 2007, it could be a casus belli. If Iran is working on weapons, it means there is no diplomatic solution.” The story of the alleged Iranian document provoked a new round of expressions of US and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran.
The article had all the signs of a fabricated story designed to generate public concern about Iran´s nuclear program. It also sought to undermine a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued by US intelligence agencies in late 2007 that concluded that Iran had put an end to any military nuclear program in 2007. The 2007 NIE was harshly criticized in the US and Israel by those promoting tougher measures, including military attacks, against Iran.
Tehran dismissed the claims as “baseless”. Like other reports provided to the IAEA by Western intelligence services that supposedly revealed Iran’s weapons documents, there were lots of doubts about the authenticity of this one. It is noteworthy to point out that that key documents used by the Bush government to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003 -involving Baghdad´s alleged acquisition of uranium in Niger- were proven to be forgeries.
Soon, the hallmarks of a forgery could be seen. Analyst Gareth Porter exposed three of them in an article published by IPS and other outlets with the title of “New Revelations Tear Holes in Nuclear Trigger Story”:
First of all, a columnist for the Times acknowledged that the document published by the newspaper was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original. A translation of a second document also published by the Times contradicted the claim by the newspaper itself that the “nuclear trigger” document had been written within an organization run by an Iranian military scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Secondly, George Maschke, whose specialty is Near Eastern languages and culture, pointed out: “This allegedly Iranian document was composed on a computer that evidently lacked Persian (Farsi)- the Iranian national language- resources. It is readily apparent that the document was composed using Arabic and not Persian letters. For example the Arabic letter corresponding to the English “y” is ي
In Persian, however, the dots are always omitted when the letter appears at the end of the word.”
Thirdly, the subject of the document would be highly classified under any state’s security system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking on the document, as can be seen from the photograph of the original published by the Times.
Iran insisted that Fakhrizadeh had procured the technologies in question for nonmilitary uses by various components of the Imam Hussein University, where he was a lecturer.
IPS also quoted [former] Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi, who said that US intelligence judges the “nuclear trigger” document to be a forgery. The IPS story also pointed out that the document lacked both security markings and identification of either the issuing organization or the recipient. Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told Gareth Porter that intelligence sources had pointed out that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources did not rule out a British role in the fabrication either.
Porter indicated that The Times “is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.” “The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government,” Giraldi said.
Porter concludes his report claiming that “after reviewing documentation submitted by Iran and verifying some of its assertions by inspection on the spot, the IAEA concluded in its February 22, 2008, report that Iran’s explanation for Fakhrizadeh´s role in obtaining the items had been truthful after all.”
Another stage of the anti-Iranian campaign started last year after Tehran announced the existence of the Qom enrichment plant, situated within a mountain, which would assure continuation of enrichment if the Natanz Enrichment Plant were attacked. Washington immediately claimed that Iran had been working in the plant for several years and it was an evidence of a covert military nuclear program. Obama called the second enrichment facility “a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the non-proliferation regime”, saying Iran had broken “rules that all nations must follow”.
In November and after IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site, former Director General Mohamed ElBaradei commented that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It is a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.
Some Western media have also reproduced the fabricated story about an alleged Iraqi attempt to acquire uranium in Niger -which was used before the invasion of Iraq by then US Vice President Dick Cheney to justify the war- but changing this time some of the players: Iran instead of Iraq and Zimbabwe instead of Niger. On April 25, a report published in the British daily Daily Telegraph claimed that a deal had been reached between Iran and Zimbabwe. According to the agreement, Zimbabwe would allow Iran to mine Zimbabwean uranium reserves in exchange of the African country´s access to Iranian oil.
The report said that the agreement was sealed secretly last month during a visit to Tehran by a close aide to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Britain and other Western powers have passed sanctions against Zimbabwe and have showed their support for a regime change in this country.
Industry and Commerce Minister Welshman Ncube rejected the report, saying there was no evidence suggesting that Zimbabwe had such deposits. “It is not true. No such agreement was signed,” said Ncube.
The story was published some days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad paid an official visit to Zimbabwe last week. During his visit, he met his counterpart Robert Mugabe, attended the official opening of Zimbabwe’s International Trade Fair and signed a number of trade and cooperation agreements in the areas of banking, finance and insurance. The Iranian president told reporters before his departure that the visit came as part of his government´s plan to consolidate ties with African countries.
*Additional editing by Aletho News
NPR report on West Bank expulsion order turns horror into a he-said/she-said debating point
By Susie Kneedler on May 12, 2010
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and NPR have at last reported on the month-old Israeli “military order” that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an “infiltrator,” simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue. Garcia-Navarro details the suffering of the Palestinian people more fully than any recent NPR reporter, but her “report” perfectly embodies the failure of “she said–she said journalism,” in which oppression becomes merely a matter of perspective.
Garcia-Navarro does document the horrific fear that Israeli government policies inflict on one woman and her family. We hear the anguish in Palestinian Umm Qusay’s voice beneath the translation; and the broadcast closes with a line deleted from the online article: “Qusay says the wider implications don’t matter to her. After waiting ten years to join her husband and children, she just wants to stay here.”
But Garcia-Navarro allows an Israeli military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, to assure us that, “The amendments to this law actually help the Palestininans or the other illegal residents that are here.” We hear Leibovich declare in sunny tones that, “There is a committee of judges which is reviewing the material and deciding whether to begin with the process of repatriation or not” [Leibovich’s emphasis]. Garcia-Navarro does not challenge the fairness of Israeli judges, let alone that of military courts, to Palestinian plaintiffs or defendants.
The “wider” ramifications may not matter to Qusay in her desperation to care for her children, but they determine whether listeners are informed or given only the false equivalence of those cliched “competing narratives.” Even Garcia-Navarro’s description of Qusay’s husband as merely a “resident”—not a native –of the West Bank minimizes how Israel wrongs the family.
Where is the research that would sort out rival claims, the obligation of a journalist to check facts? Four whole weeks have dragged on between what Garcia-Navarro calls the “new Israeli army order” and today’s story –plenty of time for investigation. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro should read the Geneva Conventions, the Oslo Accords, and other agreements to verify that, “the new military order contravenes international law and previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.” She could ascertain roughly how many people are marooned in hiding. She might look into the harm to “civil society.” Instead, she leaves all questions open.
In sum, nowhere does Garcia-Navarro grapple with the terrible inhumanity of a regime that has kept other people stateless for 60 years, depriving them not just of civil but human rights. A military occupation that arbitrarily defines the legitimate owners of a land as “infiltrators” is unspeakable. Why is “our” U.S. government paying for the illegal expulsions?
Stephen Zunes and the Zionist Tinderbox
“[A]nti Zionism may be a ‘fool’s anti-imperialism,’ where Jewish nationalism itself is erroneously seen as the problem rather than the alliance its leaders have made with exploitative Western interests.” – Stephen Zunes, 2006.1
By Michael Barker | Pulse Media | May 12, 2010
Who is Stephen Zunes? Well according to his web-site, he is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, who in 2002 won recognition from the Peace and Justice Studies Association as Peace Scholar of the Year. Although Zunes describes himself as a committed peace loving, anti-imperialist activist, by reviewing just one of his books this article will demonstrate that in actual fact his scholarly actions belie such intent. The book in question is Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Zed Books, 2003), a popular text that received glowing accolades from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, and Saul Landau (amongst others). This essay will illustrate how Zunes’ proclivity for defending Zionism ultimately leads hims to promote a “fool’s anti-imperialism.”
That is not to say that Zunes is uncritical of U.S. foreign policy, far from it, just that his work serves as a smokescreen for understanding the real drivers of U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.
For example, on the antagonist relationship between U.S. elite interests and human rights, he recognizes that:
- Human rights violations by foreign governments and their lack of democratic institutions generally get the most attention in the United States when a given administration has called attention to them in order to mobilize domestic and international opinion against a regime the U.S. government opposes. (p.10)
However, Zunes continues, “since at least the 1970s” U.S. administrations — or should we say regimes — have “to some degree” been forced to respond to “public and Congressional pressure regarding the lack of democracy and human rights in allied countries.” Typical responses often “constitute little more than lip service and damage control,” but significantly, “the very region that receives the largest amount of American arms and aid has been notably absent from the public debate: the Middle East.” Indeed, with regard the U.S.’s special commitment to Israel, U.S. aid “has generally increased as the government’s repression in the occupied territories has worsened.”2 Moreover, Zunes points out, this relationship…
- … is unlike any other in the world, or indeed, like any in history. In sheer volume, it is the most generous foreign aid program ever between two countries, totaling over $100 billion. No country has ever received as much Congressionally mandated aid as has Israel. What is perhaps even more unusual is that Israel, like its benefactor, is an advanced, industrialized, technologically sophisticated country, as well as a major arms exporter. (p.109)
So how might we come to understand the existence of this enduring toxic relationship? Well according to Zunes, such aid actually runs counter to the best interests — that is, “legitimate defence needs” — of both Israel and the United States. Therefore, as neither State profits from this situation U.S.-based arms manufacturers must be largely to blame, as he says, they are the people who profit most from this insecurity. To support this point Zunes draws upon the words of Matti Peled, the late Israeli major general (and Knesset member), who in the early 1990s “argued that he and other Israeli military leaders saw the [$1.8 billion Israeli military] aid package as little more than a U.S. government subsidy for American arms manufacturers.”3
Zunes does not seriously consider the possibility that an alternative explanation for this state of affairs is that neither the U.S. nor Israel are intent on pursuing peace in the Middle East. Indeed it seems fairly obvious that Israel has no interest in promoting what Zunes considers to be its “legitimate defence needs,” as leading Zionist elites are quite happy escalating tension in the region to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This might explain why “it appears that the priority of both the executive branch and Congress in recent decades has not been Israeli security, but maintaining the flow of American arms exports.”4 Yet, Zunes is convinced that the root of the problem lies not with Zionism but with the arms manufacturers, thus he writes:
- Much attention has been given to the clout of pro-Israel Politcal Action Committee (PACs) and their alleged role in convincing members of Congress to support these taxpayer-funded arms transfers to Israel. However, contributions by PACs affiliated with military contractors far surpass the pro-Israel PACs. For example, during the 1999-2000 election cycle, just slightly over $2 million in campaign contributions came from the pro-Israel PACs, while PACs affiliated with the arms industry came close to $5 million.5
This gross underestimation of the power of the Israel lobby is almost identical to Noam Chomsky’s arguments which have already been thoroughly rebutted elsewhere. Thus it is fitting that Zunes, like Chomsky, plays the oil card, and says that the “primary reason” why the U.S. supports Israel is because of their need to control oil supplies, which is facilitated by Israel’s ability to prevent “victories by radical nationalist movements” in the Middle East.6 As before, this is an erroneous, unsupported statement that has been convincingly debunked.
Either way if one follows Zunes’ assertion that aid to Israel threatens their national security, “should U.S. policy,” Zunes asks, “then, really be considered ‘pro-Israel?’” He argues not: such aid is counterproductive, as it endangers Israel by encouraging militaristic elements within Israel’s ruling class.7 This inelegant mislogic is used to bolster his case that U.S. support for Israel must be predominantly driven by arms manufacturers and big oil; no need for hard evidence though.
Now that Zunes has cajoled his readers into accepting his fallacious arguments, he provides other “evidence” to help understand what “motivates the strong American bias against the Palestinians.” Thus in addition to the military and oil lobbies, Zunes identifies four other contributing factors to explain this bias: these are (1) a mixture of sentimental attachment combined with guilt (driven by the history of Western anti-Semitism), “friendships with Jewish Americans who identify strongly with Israel, and fear of inadvertently encouraging anti-Semitism,” (2) the rising power of the Christian Right in the United States, which interprets the Israeli-Palestine conflict as “simply a continuation of the Biblical battles between the Israelites and the Philistines,” (3) the “failure of progressive movements in the United States,” and (4) the Israel lobby. No doubt the first three points are all relevant to some degree, but their contemporary significance have all been amplified, and in some cases driven, by the far-reaching influence of the Israel lobby.8
On point four however — that is, the Israel lobby — Zunes suggests that caution must be heeded, because Jews are generally peaceful and only make up a small percentage of the U.S. population (“less than 4 percent”): moreover, “[m]any of the most outspoken members of Congress supportive of Israel’s occupation policies are from states or districts with very small Jewish populations.”9 Yet here Zunes’ argument is nonsensical (again), as the number of active Zionists is insignificant, as ultimately it is the power they exert, not their numbers, that matters most. Furthermore, no one is arguing that all Jews are Zionists, indeed it is only the small but extremely influential Jewish population residing in the American ruling class — along with their non-Jewish Zionist recruits — who give the Israel lobby its tremendous clout. Here as an example of the influence of the Israel lobby we might look to Stephen Green’s book, Taking Sides, America’s Secret Relations with Militant Israel (William Morrow, 1984), which Jeffrey Blankfort observes …
- … was the first examination of State Department archives concerning US-Israel relations. Since the Eisenhower administration, wrote Green in 1984, “Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American Presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with the tactical issues.”
Although Blankfort admits that this is a “slight exaggeration, perhaps,” it is ironic that Zunes refers to Green’s book to support his contention that Israel helps U.S. foreign policy elites, not vice versa.10 But irrespective of contrary evidence, Zunes asks that we put aside our critical faculties because “the strength of the lobby is often greatly exaggerated.”11 Furthermore, to ensure his readers are less likely to believe that the Israel lobby has a significant impact on guiding U.S. foreign policy, Zunes caricatures proponents of this point of view as belonging to the radical Right. No mention is made of Leftists who have long warned of the power of the lobby, like Edward Herman, Alexander Cockburn, and Jeffrey Blankfort; instead, Zunes points to anti-Semitic conservatives, like the politician Patrick Buchanan.12 Lest we forget, oil is the “primary issue.” Thus following Zunes’ example of using Zionists to back his unconvincing case for the overwhelming power of the U.S. arms industry, we could just as easily cite such Zionist sources to undermine his oil argument. For example, in the early 1980s, Morris Amitay, the former executive director of AIPAC, said: “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues… In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”
As this essay has demonstrated, being a progressive scholar does not necessarily guarantee that your analyses will effectively challenge the status quo. Thus while Zunes self-identifies as an anti-imperialist activist, he is a liberal Zionist at heart, and he is certainly not comfortable with advocating the type of systemic social change that we need to eradicate capitalism: by way of a contrast even the moderate civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, recognized that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism” (King’s words). This explains why Zunes counsels U.S. citizens that “bringing about a more enlightened foreign policy is necessary for national security.”13
Instead of problematising the obvious contradictions between democracy and capitalism, Zunes suggests that the United States political system is simply being misused. He writes that “there is a growing sense that the Bush Administration is cynically manipulating the country’s genuine need for security for the sake of its rigid ideological constructs and its wealthy financial supporters.”14 Unbeknown to Zunes, cynical manipulation is nothing new, it is simply part and parcel of the misnomer that is capitalist democracy. Such shallow thinking necessarily leads Zunes to observe that one of the key problems of America’s counter-terrorism policies is that they confront “the symptoms rather than the cause.” But this will always be the case under capitalism: one would hardly expect the ruling class to attempt to address the root cause of injustice — that is for us to do. A capitalist elite would have lost its marbles if it ever traced universal exploitation back to capitalism itself.
Finally, it is critical to recognize that Zunes’ failure to differentiate between polyarchy (or low-intensity democracy) and more popular understandings of democracy, enables him to suggest with no sense of irony that “worldwide trends [have been] toward democracy and greater individual freedom throughout the world”. Furthermore, he is naïve enough to believe that the popularity of the United States “can be restored, but only if the United States shifts its policies to become more consistent with support for human rights, international law, sustainable economic development and demilitarization.” What Zunes fails to recognize is that the U.S. is already the foremost promoter of human rights — along with Israel — but only a neutered, low-intensity form of rights better known as humanitarian imperialism (see “The Project for A New American Humanitarianism”). Zunes, however, closes his eyes to such suggestions, which he refers to as “conspiracy theories,” and instead argues that what the world needs is just a more benign form of capitalism. “Foreign aid,” he writes, “should be directed toward poorer countries and in support of grassroots development initiatives and away from support for the wealthier countries and/or corrupt and autocratic governments.”15 But here he misses the point, the real solution is not capitalist foreign aid, the real solution is grassroots organizing unhindered by the manipulative funding regimes of U.S. foreign policy elites. This is why Zunes, like capitalism and Zionism, fails to provide the radical theory necessary to eradicate both capitalism and Zionism.
Michael Barker is an independent researcher who is currently based in the UK. His web site is http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com. The author submitted this piece to PULSE.
– Notes –
- Stephen Zunes, “Defending Israel While Challenging its Policies,” in Alan Dershowitz (ed.) What Israel Means to Me (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), p.359. Zunes’ contribution to this book by the notorious Alan Dershowitz speaks volumes of the manner by which Zunes is willing to lend his anti-imperial writings to support Zionism. This is similar in many respects to Zunes’ service as the chair (since 2006) of the academic advisory board of the misnamed International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, and his willingness to help run a “Middle East Orientation Course” for the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School (Hurlburt Field, March 15-16, 2007) — a fact advertised nonchalantly on his current CV (pdf).
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.13. For example, in October 2000, “after a series of scathing human rights reports from reputable non-governmental organizations criticizing Israeli actions, Congress approved a foreign aid allocation of $2.82 billion to Israel, which critics charged was essentially rewarding the government for its repression.” (p.26) The reputable groups referred to here include Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.Likewise on May 2, 2002, the U.S. Senate, in a 94-2 vote, passed a resolution which referred to “the Israeli assault on Palestinian towns and refugee camps as ‘necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas.’” Such actions are obviously interpreted by “observers in the Arab and Islamic world as an act of racism”; indeed, “the majority of liberal Democrats — most of whom were on record in support of human rights in Guatemala, East Timor, Colombia, Tibet, and elsewhere — had decided, in a situation where the victims of human rights abuses were Arabs, to instead throw their support to the perpetrator of the human rights abuses. In fact, one of the two sponsors of the House resolution was California Democrat Tom Lantos, who is the long-time chairman of the Human Rights Caucus.” (p.30) Although not mentioned by Zunes, the late Tom Lantos, “the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress,” was a well known Zionist.
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.40
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.40 Zunes later adds: “The irony of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf is that is has little strategic justification given the costs.” He continues, that their policies “actually endangers the security of both the United States and its Gulf allies.” Yet to Zunes this imperialist foreign policy should be deemed some sort of mistake, “a kind of foreign policy by catharis rather than based on any rational strategic calculation.” (p.104) If only Zunes would read such foreign policy blueprints like those of the Project for a New American Century, it would become apparent that U.S. foreign policy is based on very rational criteria, but of course not criteria that is in the rational best interests of either the U.S. or global populous. Zunes observes that: “The worst single terrorist atrocities in the Middle East in recent decades were committed by Christians: the Phalangists, a Lebanese Maronie militia, were responsible for the massacres of thousands of Palestinians at the Tal al-Zataar refugee camp in June 1976 and the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982.” (p.171) Later Zunes fills in more details on the background of this group, writing: “The ‘Muslim’ side of the Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s was actually a largely secular grouping known as the Lebanese National Movement (LNM)… Seeking to block the LNM’s demands for constitutional reform to create a more representative political system that would likely enact policies less sympathetic with the West, the United States clandestinely supported the Phalangist militia, a neo-fascist grouping based in the country’s Maronite Christian community.” (p.184) On a related matter, “the most serious single terrorist bombing against a civilian target in Middle East history was the March 1985 blast in a suburban Beirut neigbourhood that killed 80 people and wounded 200 others.” As Zunes relates, this attack “was ordered by CIA director William Casey and approved by President Reagan as part of an unsuccessful effort to assassinate an anti-American Lebanese cleric.” (p.200)
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.41. Zunes reference for this point is wwww.politicalmoneyline.com On the previous page of his book to support the same point he refers to Alan Kronstadt et al, Hostile Takeover: How the Aerospace Industries Association Gain Control of American Foreign Policy and Doubl e Arms Transfers to Dictators (Project on Demilitarization and Democracy, 1995).
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.161. Zunes say that this policeman service is supplemented by Israel’s role in allowing “battlefield testing of American arms,” in exporting homegrown munitions to U.S. allies, and in funneling U.S. arms to groups “too unpopular in the United States for openly granting direct military assistance”. (p.161)
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.154. “The rise of the rightist Likud Bloc in Israel and the right-ward drift in the Labor Party since 1967 is in large part due to this large-scale American support. Rightist Israeli political leaders such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon would certainly have existed without U.S. backing, but they would have likely been part of a small right-wing minority in the Knesset and would have never become prime ministers.” Zunes, Tinderbox, p.155.
- Zunes, Tinderbox, pp.157-8. With respect to the peace movement, Zunes writes: “For many years, most mainstream peace and human rights groups avoided the issue, not wanting to alienate many of their Jewish and other liberal constituents supportive of the Israeli government.” (p.158)
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.158, p.159.
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.162 (footnote 110)
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.159. “For an elaboration of this argument,” Zunes points us to his article, “The Roots of the U.S.-Israeli Relationship,” New Political Science, Nos 21-22, Spring-Summer 1992. He also points to A.F.K. Organski’s, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (Columbia University Press, 1990).
- Zunes adds that: “In a classic case of exactly this type of anti-Semitic scapegoating, members of Congress and their aides will claim — always off the record — that they or their boss has to take pro-militarist and anti-human rights positions towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the need for Jewish campaign contributions. Similarly, as a means of diverting Arab criticism from U.S. policy makers, American diplomats routinely tell representatives of Arab governments that wealth Jews essentially dictate U.S. Middle East policy. The senior President Bush made it clear that such scapegoating is acceptable when — during the debate on the proposed $10 billion loan guarantees to Israel in 1992 — he claimed that he was just ‘one lonely little guy’ standing up to ‘a thousand lobbyists’ swarming on Capitol Hill.” (p.164)
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.217.
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.221. Ironically, the majority of the U.S. governments “wealth financial supporters” happen to be Jewish.
- Zunes, Tinderbox, p.14, p.225, p.226. Zunes later adds that: “There is nothing inherently wrong with the United States or other countries supporting democratic opposition movement against autocratic regimes”; although he counsels that in the case of Iraq this would be counterproductive owing to the United States’ damaged credibility in the region. However, he adds that before the United States can work in such a manner it must first “encourage greater freedom in countries it considers it allies, such as Saudi Arabia”. (p.229)
Pakistan denies Taliban link to Times Square bomb suspect
Investigators dismiss US claims that Faisal Shahzad was working under direction of Pakistani Taliban
Saeed Shah | guardian.co.uk | 11 May 2010
Pakistani investigators have found no evidence to support American claims that the failed Times Square bomber was working under the direction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
Senior officials in Washington – including the attorney general, Eric Holder, and John Brennan, the White House’s special adviser on counterterrorism – have said that the suspected bomber, Faisal Shahzad, conspired with militants in Pakistan, but a Pakistani security official with knowledge of the investigation said: “No Taliban link has come to the fore.”
The interrogation of Muhammad Rehan, a friend of Shahzad who was arrested last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi, has not yielded a link to the Pakistani Taliban or any other militant group. Rehan, a member of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad extremist group, remains the only suspected link found between 30-year-old Shahzad and the militant underworld in Pakistan.
Officials in Islamabad are perplexed and angry at statements from Washington about Shahzad’s links with the Pakistani Taliban, believing that the US is exploiting the issue to apply pressure for new military offensives in Pakistan’s tribal border area with Afghanistan, in the north Waziristan region.
“We have not found any involvement of Rehan [in the New York attempted bombing]. He didn’t introduce Faisal Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban,” said the security official.
“There are no roots to this case, so how can we trace something back?”
An FBI team which flew into Pakistan after the arrest of Shahzad was allowed to question Rehan on Sunday. More than a dozen other suspects taken into custody in Karachi have been released, but the investigation is continuing, so new leads could yet emerge.
Rehan’s arrest as he left prayers at the Karachi mosque was seized on by the international press as evidence of Shahzad’s involvement with Pakistani militant groups. It emerged that Rehan and Shahzad had last year taken a 1,000-mile road trip from Karachi to Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan’s tribal area, raising further suspicions.
However, Pakistani investigators have found that Rehan was not a very active member of JEM, a violent group primarily against India and with no history of global activities. He knew Shahzad because he is related to Shahzad’s wife… Full article
Taiwan sinking: Subsidence or Global Warming Induced Sea Level Rise?
By Anthony Watts on May 10, 2010
This news story about Taiwan has been making the rounds with the usual alarming news outlets. My view is clearly on subsidence, caused by poor land use practice. See below the Continue Reading line for the easily found reasons.
Excerpts: from AFP via Yahoo News
Rising sea levels threaten Taiwan
TUNGSHIH, Taiwan (AFP) – When worshippers built a temple for the goddess Matsu in south Taiwan 300 years ago, they chose a spot they thought would be at a safe remove from the ocean. They did not count on global warming.
Now, as the island faces rising sea levels, the Tungshih township is forced to set up a new temple nearby, elevated by three metres (10 feet) compared with the original site.
“Right now, the temple is flooded pretty much every year,” said Tsai Chu-wu, the temple’s chief secretary, explaining why the 63-million-dollar project is necessary.
“Once the new temple is completed, we should be able to avoid floods and the threat of the rising sea, at least for many, many years,” he said.
The temple of Matsu, ironically often described as the Goddess of the Sea, is only one example of how global warming is slowly, almost imperceptibly piling pressure on Taiwan.
…
And unlike the temple, none of these crucial economic establishments can possibly be lifted, leaving them exposed to the elements.
“If the sea levels keep rising, part of Taiwan’s low-lying western part could be submerged,” said Wang Chung-ho, an earth scientist at Taiwan’s top academic body Academia Sinica.
…
Still, environmentalists consider the risk too high to ignore, and they point out that it is compounded by the overpumping of groundwater both for traditional agriculture and for fish farming.
This has caused the groundwater level to fall and land to subside below sea level in some coastal areas, experts warn.
The greatest extent of seawater encroachment has been estimated to be as far as 8.5 kilometres inland with an affected area of about 104 square kilometres (40 square miles) in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung county, according to a study co-written by Wang.
Once low-lying areas are routinely invaded by sea water, it is very hard to turn back the tide, analysts warned.
…
In its 2007 assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations said that due to the global warming, the world’s sea level is projected to rise by up to 0.59 metres before the end of this century.
However, Wang was more pessimistic, citing recent findings that greenhouse gas emissions are growing faster than previously believed.
Read the rest of the story here: AFP via Yahoo News
###
And where is Pingtung County in Taiwain?
But that is not where the Matsu temple that is the focus of the story is, it is a misdirection. Read on.
Now consider this news story about a hi-speed rail system in Taiwan from China Daily that says:
Safety concerns were raised after according to the Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) figures revealed that at its worst, the land at one site along the stretch in Yunlin County has sunk 55 centimeters over the past seven years.
Over-pumping of underground water for irrigation has been blamed for the subsidence, and the Water Resources Agency (WRA) has identified 1,115 wells in the area that need to be sealed to stop the sinking.
Seems pretty clear that subsidence is happening quickly in that county. Here’s a paper studying the Yuanlin area, Changhua County. PDF here. Note the mention of Yunlin County, save that for later.
Using Radar Interferometry to Observe Land Subsidence in Yuanlin area, Changhua County, Taiwan
Abstract: The behavior of land subsidence in Yuanlin area, Changhua County, Taiwan has been monitored by the two-pass method of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) during the period from 1995 to 2002. Our interferometric result has shown that the subsidence behavior is unusual right before and after the Chi-Chi earthquake. Two-month before the earthquake, the pre-seismic differential interferogram detects a substantial increase in land subsidence with a prominent U-shaped pattern of groundwater level change. Two days after the devastating earthquake, our one-month image-pair shows a five-fold increase in land subsidence and an apparent shift of subsidence center. In this study, we suggest mechanisms that contribute to land subsidence in pre-seismic, co-seismic and post-seismic. We tend to believe that the circular/elongated pattern shown in our interferograms are caused by a point-source deformation. Besides, strain also plays a very important role in accelerating land subsidence shown in the post-seismic differential interferogram. It causes a very sudden, step-like surge in groundwater. The shaking of the earthquake as well as the increase of groundwater trigger the occurrence of soil liquefaction, in return, accelerating land subsidence. We propose there are two center of land subsidence right after the Chi-Chi earthquake though only one subsidence center can be observed in our differential interferogram.
Here’s what the Taipei Times shows happening as a result of land subsidence:
Land subsidence causes damage to a house in Tungan village, Kaohsiung County. PHOTO: HSU PAI-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Here’s an interesting passage from the Geography Department at NTU titled The Hazards of Taiwan:
The fish-farming industry in western and northeastern Taiwan requires several times more ground water than is needed for irrigation. This kind of over-pumping of ground water results in serious land subsidence or sinking in the coastal areas. According to a recent survey, an area of up to 1,097 square kilometers suffers from subsidence: this is 3% of the island’s total land area and 9% of its flat area. This problem obviously needs an immediate and effective solution.
So even though there is plentiful evidence that local land use abuse resulting in subsidence is the primary cause of seawater incursions, the reporter, Benjamin Yeh, chooses instead to make “global warming” the primary culprit.
His paragraph says it all:
The temple of Matsu, ironically often described as the Goddess of the Sea, is only one example of how global warming is slowly, almost imperceptibly piling pressure on Taiwan.
Religion and global warming, a match made in heaven.
From this Taiwan Government Report on Water Resources we find this paragraph, red emphasis mine:
Land Subsidence
Lured by profits, many farmers in the coastal areas of Yunlin, Changhua, Pingtung, Chiayi, and Ilan have expanded into aquaculture. Aquaculturalists have dug 170,000 illegal wells and pumped excessive amounts of groundwater, because it is cheap and stable in temperature. In addition to being used in aquaculture, groundwater is also pumped for industrial, residential, and standard agricultural uses. Recent data shows that while 5.94 billion cubic meters of groundwater is being pumped annually, only four billion cubic meters is being replaced. This deficit has caused land in many areas to subside, especially along the southwestern coast and on the Ilan Plain. Overall, almost 865 square kilometers of Taiwan’s plains, or a full 8 percent, tend to subside. The most serious subsidence has occurred around Chiatung in Pingtung County, where sites have sunk by as much as 3.06 meters. The average rate of subsidence in the coastal areas is between five and 15 centimeters each year.
The Temple of Matsu is in Yunlin County which is located on this map:
Another study on groundwater and subsidence from the Department of Geomatics, National Cheng Kung University says:
For example, the overall amount of subsidence in Yunlin area in the past 30 years reaches about 2 meters, and the total affected area of subsidence is about 516 km2. Land subsidence has increased the vulnerability in this area, and a large portion of which lies below the mean sea level.
When badly flawed articles like this one from AFP appear, blaming global warming for flooding clearly caused by land subsidence as a result of poor land use practice, we need to complain loudly to editors.
See also:
Quartet ex-envoy’s investment helps Israel greenwash settlements
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 6 May 2010
 |
| Better Place’s Tel Aviv headquarters. |
Former World Bank president and Middle East Quartet envoy James D. Wolfensohn is an investor in an Israeli company that is developing transport infrastructure for Jewish-only settlements built in the occupied West Bank in violation of international law, an investigation by The Electronic Intifada reveals.
Wolfensohn provided some of the start-up capital for Better Place, a company founded by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi. The company owns and operates Better Place Israel (BPI), a division which is establishing a system of charging stations for electric vehicles throughout Israel and for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The company has been a poster child for efforts to greenwash Israel — presenting it as a haven for environmental technologies — yet it has close ties to Israel’s military and political establishments and its principal officers express an explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab agenda.
BPI’s chief executive officer is former general Moshe Kaplinsky, who commanded Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank during the second Palestinian intifada, a period of massive, well-documented violations of Palestinian human rights. Kaplinsky was also deputy chief of staff of Israel’s army during its 2006 war on Lebanon when Amnesty International and other human rights groups charged that Israel committed numerous war crimes including widespread use of cluster bombs in residential areas.
Better Place’s goal is to bring fully-electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them to the mass market — starting with Israel. It also has pilot projects as far afield as Denmark, Canada, California, Australia and Japan.
Specially-built electric cars, due to be available to the public in Israel next year, are manufactured by French-Japanese conglomerate Renault-Nissan under an agreement with Better Place. Better Place had also recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Chinese car manufacturer Chery to jointly develop electric car technology for the Chinese market.
“What we do to make it convenient is we set [a] massive number of charge spots across an entire country or entire region,” Agassi explained to the BBC World Service’s One Planet program in January 2009. “And we set up battery exchange systems so that wherever you drive you don’t need to sit and wait for your battery to charge, you can just swap it and keep on going.”
Building infrastructure in the occupied West Bank
Before BPI sells its first car in Israel it is establishing a network of thousands of charging spots on the country’s entire road system including settler roads and in settlements in the West Bank.
One of the largest investors in BPI is billionaire Idan Ofer, owner of Dor-Alon energy group, Israel’s largest oil refiner. Dor-Alon has signed an agreement to install Better Place charging and battery exchange spots throughout its network of gas stations.
Israel’s Hebrew-language financial publication Globes reported on 3 February that “According to estimates, the deployment [of charging stations] will stress the more extensive and popular refueling locations of Dor-Alon, which enjoys a dominance on primary transportation routes, such as its four stations on the Cross Israel road (Highway 6) and the stations on Highway 443 and the Coastal Highway.”
Highway 443, significantly, is a road used by thousands of Israeli commuters daily. Half of the road’s approximately 30-kilometer length runs through the occupied West Bank. Israel has banned Palestinians whose land and villages the road traverses from accessing it, reserving it effectively for Jews only. Prior to Israel’s seizure of the road, it had been a main artery for Palestinian traffic south of Ramallah (“Route 443 — West Bank road for Israelis only,” B’Tselem).
The Electronic Intifada (EI) independently confirmed BPI’s expansion into the West Bank when it sent an undercover reporter to visit the company’s headquarters situated in a massive renovated fuel storage tank in northern Tel Aviv.
During the tour, the EI reporter, along with other visitors, was shown an IMAX-style video presentation which explained that each customer who buys a BPI electric vehicle will also have a charging spot installed at their home — a short post with an outlet that connects to the car via a nozzle-type input, and wirelessly links to the BPI communications network.
When the EI reporter asked a BPI spokesperson if these charging stations could be installed inside settlements in the West Bank, the spokesperson said that they would be installed “anywhere … that you want to live.” On a map shown during the video presentation, charging stations were shown in areas in the Jordan Valley and along major routes going east from Jerusalem — indicating that BPI has already installed charging stations inside the West Bank, and plans to install many more.
Wolfensohn an early booster of Better Place
James Wolfensohn’s investment firm, Wolfensohn & Co., is listed on BPI’s website along with Australia-based firm Macquarie Capital and US-based investment bank Morgan Stanley, among others as investors. Macquarie invests in and operates transport infrastructure all over the world, including the Chicago Skyway toll bridge, the Indiana Toll Road and the M6 Toll motorway in the UK.
Contacted by EI, Wolfensohn & Co. declined to disclose the size of its stake or provide any other comment for this story. Yet as one of the first investors it may have been influential in helping BPI attract additional capital.
BPI recently secured a $350 million equity investment from international bank HSBC, expanding the company’s estimated worth to $1.25 billion.
“Israel is a perfect test tube” for the electric car, Wolfensohn was quoted as saying in the February 2008 issue of Israel High-Tech & Investment Report. “It needs to be tested, and [BPI founder Shai] Agassi is to be commended for testing it and the Israeli government for trying it out.”
While operating as a private company — with its head office nominally in California — Better Place has been dependent on Israeli government support from the start. Initially, Agassi wrote a concept paper for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders initiative. Agassi shopped it to various world leaders but found no takers, he told the BBC’s One Planet. “Then President [Shimon] Peres of Israel picked up on it,” Agassi recalled. “But the challenge to me was don’t ask us to do it. If you think it’s such a great business, go do it yourself. And that’s how it became a company instead of a government agency.” More recently Agassi told CNN, “I would not be doing this today were it not for [Peres]” (“Shai Agassi: One man’s mission to turn all cars electric,” CNN, 19 April 2010).
Wolfensohn’s investment in and personal endorsement of an Israeli company that is helping to build and solidify the infrastructure of occupation is surprising. Until 2006, Wolfensohn served as envoy for the Quartet, the ad hoc, self-appointed committee of representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the UN Secretary-General that has monopolized the so-called “peace process.” Wolfensohn was tasked with assisting Palestinian economic development in the Gaza Strip after Israel removed its settlers in 2005 and moved its occupation forces from the interior to the perimeter of the besieged territory that imprisons 1.5 million Palestinians, mostly refugees.
Wolfensohn resigned in frustration after the Quartet decided to boycott, and freeze aid to, the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won the January 2006 election. “It would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians,” Wolfensohn said in a parting shot aimed at Israeli and Quartet policies (“West ‘has to prevent collapse’ of Palestinian Authority,” Financial Times, 3 May 2006).
Wolfensohn had previously been highly critical of severe movement restrictions on Palestinians between and within the occupied territories — such as those along Highway 443 — that have devastated the Palestinian economy. Wolfensohn was succeeded as Quartet envoy by Tony Blair.
 |
| Former Israeli army general Moshe Kaplinsky in Better Place’s promotional video. |
Islamophobia under the guise of environmentalism
BPI’s promotional video claimed that the funding of “extreme and unstable regimes … that fund organizations not positive for humanity” is one of the major reasons the firm is interested in getting Israelis out of their gas-guzzling cars and into fully-electric vehicles. Both Israeli President Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are shown extolling the virtues of BPI’s mission, with Netanyahu commenting that this is a part of a “changing world order … shaking off our dependence on oil.”
The canard that proceeds from the gasoline that motorists around the world pump into their cars directly funds terrorism has become popular with liberal environmentalists in recent years. While implicitly racist toward Arabs and Muslims, BPI has made such prejudiced and inflammatory claims an explicit part of its business model.
CEO Moshe Kaplinsky told the BBC’s One Planet, “I was a general in the IDF [Israeli army] and I understand where the money from the oil is going and what it cause to our society in the Western side of the globe [sic].”
When asked why he was an early booster of Better Place, Israeli President Peres told Wired magazine, “I thought that the greatest problem of our time was oil. Oil on one hand is polluting the land, and on the other hand it’s financing terror” (“Drive: Shai Agassi’s Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road,” 18 August 2008).
Rebranding Israel
Following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US, Israeli companies selling “security” and “anti-terrorist” expertise became an engine of the country’s exports. In the age of US President Barack Obama, and concern about climate change, there has been a concerted effort to soften Israel’s image, especially in the wake of the UN-commissioned Goldstone report into Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.
Better Place has become a flagship for this strategy — the Reut Institute’s Gidi Grinstein, for example, used images of the Better Place logo in his notorious powerpoint presentation at the Herzliya conference, on efforts to rebrand Israel as Earth-friendly while urging its intelligence agencies to “sabotage” and “attack” the growing global Palestine solidarity movement.
The success of Better Place in raising money from Wolfensohn & Co. and other international firms, as well as the positive publicity the company has received, serve as warnings that Palestinians and the growing global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement must be ever more vigilant against Israel’s efforts to disguise its illegal and brutal colonization and apartheid behind a green mask.
Photos by The Electronic Intifada.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Peoples’ Destinies at the Mercy of False Reports
By Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban | May 3, 2010
The rumors spread by Israeli president Shimon Peres in his statement to Mossad-linked media outlets about a Syrian role in providing Hezbollah with Scud missiles and the official American reaction to these rumors bring to mind the spectacle of Colin Powell, who served under both war makers, Bush senior and Bush junior, in the UN Security Council in 2003. He held a small glass container and claimed in front of the whole world that biological weapons the size of that container would endanger the lives of millions, that there was no doubt that Iraq was deceiving international inspectors and that the United States’ patience with Iraq was over.
I recall Security Council meetings in February 2003, when the then French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin made his famous speech in defense of extending the mandate of international inspectors. When former international U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix asked for six more months to complete inspections and provide the final findings to the Security Council. He gave evidence that Iraq was cooperating fully in facilitating inspections and affirmed that the mission was capable of completing its work in six months.
I remember how a number of European foreign ministers said, without the slightest sense of responsibility, that the system was no longer acceptable, even for days, that Saddam has been deceiving them for over twelve years and that the international community should put an end to that deception. I was in the Security Council hall hosting those historic meetings, looking at their faces and knowing that they were absolutely certain that they were mouthing lies and that they were using legitimate fear of nuclear weapons as a pretext to launch war on Iraq, destroy it and return it to the Middle Ages, as James Baker told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tareq Aziz in January 1991.
Here we are, more than seven years after those Security Council meetings, and after a devastating war in which Bush and his clique of neo-conservatives were responsible for killing over a million unarmed civilians in Iraq. Now that Powell has left the public stage and became capable of telling the truth about what he knew and believed then, he acknowledges that what he told the Security Council was not true. Some people see in this ‘a virtue’ indicating the greatness of democracy instead of bringing to account those responsible for fabricating those lies.
Now, days after Shimon Peres unleashed his lie, one of his ministers hastened to repeat Baker’s threats about Israeli attacks to destroy Syria’s bridges, roads, power generation plants and “returning it to the stone age”. The media also caught the lie and promoted it during the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington two weeks ago. The statement is a stark lie, and merits derision rather than a response. Scud missiles are tens of meters long; and every missile needs a huge truck to carry it. Moreover, a small country like Lebanon in whose airspace reconnaissance drones fly on a daily basis, cannot hide them. Moreover, technical experts know that launching a Scud needs time and effort and collective work which is not compatible with the type of battles in which Hezbollah engages in its defense of Lebanon against Israeli attacks.
The mere circulation of this lie raises doubts about its objectives. Without bothering to ask Israel to provide any evidence of its allegations, Assistant Secretary of State Geffrey Feltman said it would be an “incendiary, provocative action” if it turned out to be true; and that the United States has a “full range of tools” available to make Syria reverse any delivery of ballistic missiles to Hezbollah.
Two American representatives put forward a draft resolution to tighten sanctions against Syria. Representatives Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Mark Kirk, R-Il, known for their extreme hostility to Arabs, said in a statement that providing Hezbollah with these missiles “destabilizes the Middle East and is an existential threat to Israel and the independence of Lebanon”.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S expressed deep concern about reports of certain missiles being transferred to Syria and the possibility of then transferring them to Hezbollah. She saw in sending an ambassador to Syria “a tool that we believe can give us extra leverage, added insight, analysis, information with respect to Syria’s actions and intentions”. She pointed out Washington’s “long list of areas that we have discussed with the Syrians, and we intend to continue pushing our concerns” which include hosting Palestinian radicals and feeding the violence in Iraq. The statements of Clinton, Feltman and the two representatives are parrot repetitions of statements made by Netanyahu and other Israeli extremists about Syria without bothering about the possibility that these lies will be blown off in the future.
It is clear that the Scud lie and the parrot statements came to cover for the failure of the Obama administration to face the intransigent Netanyahu government which rejected all American calls to stop settlement or move towards just and comprehensive peace. At this particular time the Scud lie was fabricated in order to divert attention from the truth which has become abundantly clear: Israel is the only obstacle to peace in the Middle East. It also came to undermine the positive developments achieved in the Syrian American relations under the Obama administration. Sine Obama became president, and whenever he made a real and sincere effort to improve relations with the Muslim world through normalizing relations with Syria and defending justice in Palestine, the Israelis come out with a story either of ‘allowing terrorists to enter Iraq’ or ‘feeding Palestinian extremism’ or arming Hezbollah, in order to put an end to any real development of these relations.
The world realizes now that Israel is the enemy of peace in the Middle East. It promotes barbaric wars against the Arabs and prevents achieving any stability in the relations between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Extremist Israelis and their allies in the United States invent lies which lead to war and human suffering. They are responsible for tarnishing the image of the United States, shedding the blood of its soldiers and wasting its money on wars against the Muslim world. They are responsible for harming both the American people and the peoples of our region by promoting such naked lies.
Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban is the Presidential Advisor for Political and Media Affairs with the Rank of Minister in Syria. She has been a writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985. Before assuming her current ministerial position, Dr. Shaaban occupied the post of Director of the Press Office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Syria. She received her PhD in English Literature from Warwick University in the UK in 1982 and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an advisor in 1988. Since then, she has represented Syria as a spokeswoman on the international level. In 2005, Dr. Shaaban was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in the same year, was presented with the ‘Most Distinguished Woman in a Governmental Position Award’ by the Arab League. Dr. Shaaban has published four books, and contributed to numerous others.
Featured Video
John Mearsheimer: Toward All-Out War With Both Russia & Iran
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
“Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked:” A confession from John Ioannidis
Retraction Watch – March 16, 2016
John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” One of the most highly cited researchers in the world, Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford, has built a career in the field of meta-research. Earlier this month, he published a heartfelt and provocative essay in the the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology titled “Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked: A Report to David Sackett.” In it, he carries on a conversation begun in 2004 with Sackett, who died last May and was widely considered the father of evidence-based medicine. We asked Ioannidis to expand on his comments in the essay, including why he believes he is a “failure.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Operation Geschäftsfreund: How West Germany Paid for Israel’s Nuclear Bomb
- Italian port authorities halt Israel-bound shipments of ‘military-grade steel’ from India
- Kata’ib Hezbollah warns Jordan over allowing US-Israeli reconnaissance missions against Iraq
- China firmly supports Cuba in safeguarding sovereignty, security
- US-Israeli war on Iran unlikely to resume due to global opposition: Pakistani defense minister
- Estonia shoots down alleged Ukrainian drone
- Trita Parsi: Iran War Marks the End of American Primacy
- General strike across Italy in solidarity with Gaza and in protest against the attack on Sumud Flotilla
- Iran says any agreement with US must end war on all fronts, lift blockade and sanctions
- Iran asserts sovereign rights over Hormuz fiber-optic routes
- If Americans Knew
- Who on Earth Feels Threatened by a Nun?
- Antisemitism? Really? The 33 Most Absurd Examples Listed in the ADL’s New Database
- Gaza’s water crisis: Families survive on less than 10 liters a day amid Israel’s ongoing genocide
- Why the Zionist Establishment Wants Progressives Talking About ICE Instead of Gaza
- The Media’s Double Standards on Rape in Palestine and Israel
- Leaked Documents Show Cisco Systems’ Deep Relationship with Israeli Security State
- Israel Can Sue New York Times Over Sexual Abuse Allegations, But Can’t Erase the Truth
- Israeli military commits piracy (again), kidnaps “hundreds” of humanitarians – Daily Update
- Israeli Soldiers Kill A Palestinian Teacher In Jenin
- Earworm Kars4Kids jingle yanked from California airwaves for false advertising
- No Tricks Zone
- Even The DNA Of Single-Celled Plankton Can Upend Alarmist Arctic Sea Ice Melt Claims
- Scandal: Although Climate Panic Is Canceled By IPCC, Europe’s Policymakers Continue With Their Crushing Policies
- How Once Hardcore Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Realized It Was All A Scam, Brainwashing
- German Expert: “No Climate Crisis” …”Warming Generally Better For Humanity”
- New Paleo Research: Modern ‘Climate Change’ Has Had No Apparent Impact On Precipitation Patterns
- 90% Subsidized… Bielefeld Germany’s €7 Million Hydrogen Garbage Truck Fleet Sits Idle
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
Aletho News 