Some thoughts on Ethan Bronner at the New York Times
By Jonathan Cook | 12 February 2010
The revelation that the son of Ethan Bronner, the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, is serving in the Israeli military has highlighted an issue that should have been in the spotlight long ago. Ali Abunimah makes some important points about the NYT’s coverage of the Middle East on the Mondoweiss site. Although the paper has a Palestinian reporter in Gaza, Abunimah notes:
“[Taghreed] Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be – I assume – because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week.”
Abunimah is right: there is a very strong assumption among editors in the Western media about who should be allowed to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in what ways. But actually the bias in the Western media runs much deeper than Abunimah allows.
Those who seek to defend Bronner’s continued posting in Jerusalem, despite the obvious – some might say, ultimate – conflict of interest, argue that there are at least as many, if not more, Palestinian journalists covering the region for the Western media as there are Jews and Israelis. That may be true in a literal sense but, because the argument implies that Palestinian journalists are the ones shaping the news agenda, it is entirely misleading. It ignores the reality of how Western news organisations operate in places such as the Middle East. Inadvertently, Abunimah risks creating much the same impression with his reference to Taghreed Khodary’s reporting from Gaza — a posting that can be credited not to the NYT’s policy of diversity among its reporting staff but to the simple fact that Israel’s severe restriction on journalists entering the Strip has left the paper with little choice but to hire one of the “natives”.
What needs emphasising is that Palestinians working for the Western media do not have anywhere near the same standing, or influence, as reporters like Bronner or his Jewish-Israeli colleague in Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner. The vast majority are essentially gofers, even if there is a discernible hierarchy: some are known as “fixers” because they speak the local language, have good contacts, and can set up meetings and translate for the star reporter; others, working for the wire agencies, are fact-collectors (often known as “stringers”), sending information from their localities that is then processed in the bureau’s head office in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; and finally there are a tiny number of very lucky Palestinians, called “super-stringers”, like Khodary, who get a mention in the byline.
In all these examples the Palestinian reporters have no meaningful control over the news agenda of the media outlet that employs them. That agenda is set either by the imported star reporter or by the editors far away in head offices in New York, Washington, London, and so on. That relationship of master-servent is clearest in the case of the fixer, whose job is to arrange whatever it is that the star reporter wants.
Similarly, the wire agencies rely on dozens of Palestinian fact-collectors, or stringers, dotted all over the West Bank and Gaza to supply them with a constant flow of local stories. A stringer might send a tip-off to his editors that a tank has just fired at a building in his village, killing a family of five. He will get the victims’ names and ages, and maybe provide a brief description of what happened, and phone it in to the head office. Often there will be little or no interest, or it will be run as small news item (a brief) offering nothing more than the bare facts. If there is more interest, it will probably be written, or “packaged”, by a reporter or editor in the head office, in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, usually heavily staffed with Israelis and / or Jews. The editors, for example, decide if the firing of the tank shell is to be described as an act of “provocation” or “retaliation”. We know from experience which description they usually prefer.
The story reaches the pages of the NYT only if it fits its news agenda or if it is related to something the star reporter is covering. Again, how these facts are presented to the outside world is almost entirely outside the control of the fact-collector.
Similarly, super-stringers like Khodary have limited influence over the news process in which they take part. To have reached the status of super-stringer, they must have shown that they understand very precisely what is expected of them, what language is used (eg. “fence” or “wall”; “illegal settlement” or “disputed neighbourhood”), what stories are covered and which angles are preferred. In most cases, they will be told what story the editors want from them rather than initiate the story. Their job is often to retell a report from the wire agency, using their own contacts and knowledge to give “added value”. In the main, this is quite unlike Bronner’s role: usually he will advise his editors which topics are important and select his own angles. The difference of status between the “star reporter” and the “super-stringer” is similar to that between a tenured professor and a supply teacher.
A further point worth noting is that Abunimah’s list of recent Jewish / Israeli reporters covering the conflict for the NYT is, as far I know, not exhaustive. My impression is that most of the NYT’s senior reporters over the past two decades have been Jewish or Israeli. Like Abunimah, I am uncomfortable judging a journalist’s record of reporting based on his or her ethnic identification. But these scruples should not blind us to the danger that the apparent long-term structural bias in the NYT’s selection processes may have contributed significantly to distorting Western understanding of what is going on in the conflict. The consistent favouring of Jewish reporters for the Israeli-Palestinian beat needs explaining by the editors of the NYT. This is especially true given my first point about the lack of Palestinian, or Arab, reporters who have any real input into the news-gathering processes of the Western media.
Should there not be concerns about balance, or the appearance of balance, in simple quantitative terms in the NYT’s selection of reporters dealing with such a contested subject? If there are two senior reporting posts at the NYT’s Jerusalem bureau, is it defensible to have them both occupied by Jews and / or Israeli Jews? If Jews are better able to use their connections to cover Israeli and Jewish issues (one argument being put forward), is not the converse true? Would Palestinians not be able to cover some issues in the conflict more authentically and convincingly than Jewish reporters? Should Jews be restricted to covering Israeli stories, and Palestinian to covering Palestinian stories? And if we recoil from that thought, what does that tell us about the current reality in which only Israelis and Jews get to set the news agenda at the NYT (and many other media) for both sides of the conflict?
It is about time we saw a little more transparency and self-reflection from the editors of the New York Times.
US-Led Invasion ‘Bogged Down’ in Marjah
By Jason Ditz, February 15, 2010
US forces continue to press forward in the Marjah region of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, put are said to be struggling mightily with home-made bombs and sniper fire, and were able to advance only 500 yards yesterday.
Despite the pretense that the battle is going “according to plans,” the promises of a quick victory with overwhelming force in Marjah has turned out to be overly optimistic, with some officials now saying the offensive could take upwards of a month.
Still, the optimism isn’t entirely lost, and some US commanders remain convinced, to quote Colonel Scott Hartsell, that “pretty soon, they are going to run out of gas.”
The US has been pledging the invasion for over a month, aimed at installing a Karzai appointee as governor of Marjah. The troops began the invasion on Friday, with Taliban forces pledging to “wait out” the raid.
Cuba’s aid to Haiti ignored by US media
By Tom Fawthrop | Al Jazeera | February 15, 2010
Among the many donor nations helping Haiti, Cuba and its medical teams have played a major role in treating earthquake victims.
Public health experts say the Cubans were the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and to revamp hospitals immediately after the earthquake struck.
However, their pivotal work in the health sector has received scant media coverage.
“It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country,” said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.
The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day.
During a visit to La Paz hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Dr Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) which is in charge of medical coordination between the Cuban doctors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a host of health sector NGOs, described the aid provided by Cuban doctors as “excellent and marvellous”.
La Paz is one of five hospitals in Haiti that is largely staffed by health professionals from Havana.
Haiti and Cuba signed a medical cooperation agreement in 1998. Before the earthquake struck, 344 Cuban health professionals were already present in Haiti, providing primary care and obstetrical services as well as operating to restore the sight of Haitians blinded by eye diseases.
More doctors were flown in shortly after the earthquake, as part of the rapid response Henry Reeve Medical Brigade of disaster specialists. The brigade has extensive experience in dealing with the aftermath of earthquakes, having responded to such disasters in China, Indonesia and Pakistan.
“In the case of Cuban doctors, they are rapid responders to disasters, because disaster management is an integral part of their training,” explains Maria a Hamlin Zúniga, a public health specialist from Nicaragua.
“They are fully aware of the need to reduce risks by having people prepared to act in any disaster situation.”
Cuban doctors have been organising medical facilities in three revamped and five field hospitals, five diagnostic centres, with a total of 22 different care posts aided by financial support from Venezuela. They are also operating nine rehabilitation centres staffed by nearly 70 Cuban physical therapists and rehab specialists, in addition to the Haitian medical personnel.
The Cuban team has been assisted by 100 specialists from Venezuela, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Canada and 17 nuns.
Havana has also sent 400,000 tetanus vaccines for the wounded.
Eduardo Nuñez Valdes, a Cuban epidemiologist who is currently in Port-au-Prince, has stressed that the current unsanitary conditions could lead to an epidemic of parasitic and infectious diseases if not acted upon quickly.
Media silence
However, in reporting on the international aid effort, Western media have generally not ranked Cuba high on the list of donor nations.
One major international news agency’s list of donor nations credited Cuba with sending over 30 doctors to Haiti, whereas the real figure stands at more than 350, including 280 young Haitian doctors who graduated from Cuba. The final figure accounts for a combined total of 930 health professionals in all Cuban medical teams making it the largest medical contingent on the ground.
Another batch of 200 Cuban-trained doctors from 24 countries in Africa and Latin American, and a dozen American doctors who graduated from Havana are currently en route to Haiti and will provide reinforcement to existing Cuban medical teams.
By comparison the internationally-renowned Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors without Borders) has approximately 269 health professionals working in Haiti. MSF is much better funded and has far more extensive medical supplies than the Cuban team.
Left out
But while representatives from MSF and the ICRC are frequently in front of television cameras discussing health priorities and medical needs, the Cuban medical teams are missing in the media coverage.
Richard Gott, the Guardian newspaper’s former foreign editor and a Latin America specialist, explains: “Western media are programmed to be indifferent to aid that comes from unexpected places. In the Haitian case, the media have ignored not just the Cuban contribution, but also the efforts made by other Latin American countries.”
Brazil is providing $70mn in funding for 10 urgent care units, 50 mobile units for emergency care, a laboratory and a hospital, among other health services.
Venezuela has canceled all Haiti debt and has promised to supply oil free of charge until the country has recovered from the disaster.
Western NGOs employ media officers to ensure that the world knows what they are doing.
According to Gott, the Western media has grown accustomed to dealing with such NGOs, enabling a relationship of mutual assistance to develop.
Cuban medical teams, however, are outside this predominantly Western humanitarian-media loop and are therefore only likely to receive attention from Latin American media and Spanish language broadcasters and print media.
There have, however, been notable exceptions to this reporting syndrome. On January 19, a CNN reporter broke the silence on the Cuban role in Haiti with a report on Cuban doctors at La Paz hospital.
Cuba/US cooperation
When the US requested that their military plans be allowed to fly through Cuban airspace for the purpose of evacuating Haitians to hospitals in Florida, Cuba immediately agreed despite almost 50 years of animosity between the two countries.
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Cuban humanitarian aid in Indonesia [Tom Fawthrop] |
Josefina Vidal, the director of the Cuban foreign ministry’s North America department, issued a statement declaring that: “Cuba is ready to cooperate with all the nations on the ground, including the US, to help the Haitian people and save more lives.”
This deal cut the flight time of medical evacuation flights from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba’s southern tip to Miami by 90 minutes.
According to Darby Holladay, the US state department’s spokesperson, the US has also communicated its readiness to make medical relief supplies available to Cuban doctors in Haiti.
“Potential US-Cuban cooperation could go a long way toward meeting Haiti’s needs,” says Dr Julie Feinsilver, the author of Healing the Masses – a book about Cuban health diplomacy, who argues that maximum cooperation is urgently needed.
Rich in human resources
Although Cuba is a poor developing country, their wealth of human resources – doctors, engineers and disaster management experts – has enabled this small Caribbean nation to play a global role in health care and humanitarian aid alongside the far richer nations of the west.
Cuban medical teams played a key role in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and provided the largest contingent of doctors after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. They also stayed the longest among international medical teams treating the victims of the 2006 Indonesian earthquake.
In the Pakistan relief operation the US and Europe dispatched medical teams. Each had a base camp with most doctors deployed for a month. The Cubans, however, deployed seven major base camps, operated 32 field hospitals and stayed for six months.
Bruno Rodriguez, who is now Cuba’s foreign minister, headed the mission – living in the mountains of Pakistan for more than six months.
Just after the Indonesian earthquake a year later, I met with Indonesia’s then regional health co-coordinator, Dr Ronny Rockito.
Cuba had sent 135 health workers and two field hospitals. Rockito said that while the medical teams from other countries departed after just one month, he asked the Cuban medical team to extend their stay.
“I appreciate the Cuban medical team. Their style is very friendly. Their medical standard is very high,” he told me.
“The Cuban [field] hospitals are fully complete and it’s free, with no financial support from our government.”
Rockito says he never expected to see Cuban doctors coming to his country’s rescue.
“We felt very surprised about doctors coming from a poor country, a country so far away that we know little about.
“We can learn from the Cuban health system. They are very fast to handle injuries and fractures. They x-ray, then they operate straight away.”
A ‘new dawn’?
The Montreal summit, the first gathering of 20 donor nations, agreed to hold a major conference on Haiti’s future at the United Nations in March.
Some analysts see Haiti’s rehabilitation as a potential opportunity for the US and Cuba to bypass their ideological differences and combine their resources – the US has the logistics while Cuba has the human resources – to help Haiti.
Feinsilver is convinced that “Cuba should be given a seat at the table with all other nations and multilateral organisations and agencies in any and all meetings to discuss, plan and coordinate aid efforts for Haiti’s reconstruction”.
“This would be in recognition of Cuba’s long-standing policy and practise of medical diplomacy, as well as its general development aid to Haiti,” she says.
But, will Haiti offer the US administration, which has Cuba on its list of nations that allegedly “support terrorism”, a “new dawn” in its relations with Cuba?
In late January, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, thanked Cuba for its efforts in Haiti and welcomed further assistance and co-operation.
In Haiti’s grand reconstruction plan, Feinsilver argues, “there can be no imposition of systems from any country, agency or institution. The Haitian people themselves, through what remains of their government and NGOs, must provide the policy direction, and Cuba has been and should continue to be a key player in the health sector in Haiti”.
Elie Wiesel’s Ignoble Recruits
By John V. Walsh | February 15, 2010
Is there nothing that is safe from debasement by the propaganda machine of the U.S. and Israel? A full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times of Feb. 7 provides the answer. Sponsored by Elie Wiesel’s modestly named Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and signed by 44 Nobel laureates, 35 of them in the physical sciences, it urges brutal and lethal actions against Iran.
Before getting to the cruel prescriptions that Wiesel and his recruits offer for Iran, let us consider their reasoning, such as it is. In a single brief topic sentence they assert their central claim that the Iranian government “whose irresponsible and senseless nuclear ambitions threaten the entire world continues to wage a shameless war against its own people.” Two charges are fired off in this brief sentence, and it is all too easy to conflate them. So let us take them one at a time, as is the habit in science when one wishes for clarification.
The first charge deals with Iran’s nuclear “ambitions,” but the ad does not say what these ambitions are. And then it asserts without evidence that such “ambitions” threaten “the entire world.” This is certainly a very grave charge, and some scintilla of evidence should be offered for it. But none is provided, not one word, not even a footnote or reference in this spacious advert. Yes, such allegations are made repeatedly and vehemently by government figures in Tel Aviv and Washington and by many segments of the U.S. and Israeli press. But what is the evidence for these allegations? Many of them turn out to be false as exemplified by a recent AP story, which was pulled after being exposed on Antiwar.com by Jason Ditz. Many of the same voices that now warn that Iran is a nuclear threat “to the entire world” assured us not long ago that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda and that he had weapons of mass destruction, both of which turned out to be shameless lies. And is it not strange that Russia and China, so proximate to Iran, are not obsessed, as is the U.S., about this threat to “the entire world”? The signatories of the ad ought not to make such intemperate and incendiary assertions without at least a reference to unimpeachable evidence. No such reference is provided. Is this the proper standard of thought and reason that a Nobel in the physical sciences implies?
The second claim wrapped up in the topic sentence is that the Iranian government is engaging in a “shameless war on its own people.” This too is quite a striking charge, going far beyond the usual charge that the recent Iranian elections were rigged, which in fact may not be the case. In what does this “shameless war” consist? Certainly there are human rights abuses, and striking ones, in Iran, just as there are in many countries who are U.S. allies, but that does not amount to a government making “war on its own people.” The U.S. and Israel make charges against Iran almost daily, and so Iran is certain to be demonized in our elite press, which so often functions as stenographer for the government. The same media treatment was given to Iraq so very recently, and it is amazing that this fact did not deter the signatories from the intemperate statements in this ad. Earlier, during the presidency of Bush I, we were treated to stories of infants being pulled from incubators and discarded on hospital floors in Kuwait by Iraqi troops during the run-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq in the first Gulf War. These charges uttered by Bush I himself were lies, concocted by a P.R. firm, as we later learned.
Given that there are human rights abuses in Iran, although we do not know their extent, two questions arise. Who are we to criticize Iran when our own government has been abducting, secretly detaining, and torturing people all over the planet? Historically, the CIA overthrew the duly elected Iranian government of Mossadegh in the 1950s and installed the shah, whose brutality was legendary and who was eventually ousted in 1979. Today the CIA is still engaging in “extraordinary renditions” under Obama as it did under Bush and probably before. And Israel is equally guilty of crimes against humanity with the apartheid order it is imposing in the occupied territories, as Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his recent book, this being the most egregious of human rights violations, since it is based on ethnicity.
Now let us turn to the vicious prescriptions called for by Wiesel and his recruits. They first call for “harsher sanctions” without any mention of restrictions on such sanctions. We already know that sanctions as practiced by the U.S. are a recipe for massive death and destruction. We know what the years of sanctions did to Iraq under the presidencies of Clinton and Bush II. When Madeleine Albright was informed in a notorious TV interview that 500,000 Iraqi children had died due to those sanctions, she did not deny it but replied, “This is a very hard choice, but … we think the price is worth it.” Do the signers of this ad agree with Albright’s assessment in the case of Iraq and now Iran? Sanctions are far from harmless, and they fall hardest on the helpless and rarely on the powerful. In 2000 Christian Aid stated:
“The immediate consequence of eight years of sanctions has been a dramatic fall in living standards, the collapse of the infrastructure, and a serious decline in the availability of public services. The longer-term damage to the fabric of society has yet to be assessed but economic disruption has already led to heightened levels of crime, corruption, and violence. Competition for increasingly scarce resources has allowed the Iraqi state to use clan and sectarian rivalries to maintain its control, further fragmenting Iraqi society.”
And yet Wiesel’s recruits call for sanctions almost casually. They would do well to read Brian Cloughey’s essay on “The Evil of Sanctions,” and the sources to which he refers.
But Wiesel’s recruits do not stop there. They go on to call for “concrete measures” to protect the “new nation of dissidents in Iran.” But these concrete measures are not spelled out. What could they be? There are only two that appear on the lips of those who are demonizing Iran these days in Tel Aviv and Washington: “sanctions” and “war.” This ad will certainly be used by those who wish to attack Iran, as Israel has threatened to do. Do the signers understand this? Since they are intelligent men and women, they must. Are they then calling for war?
In signing onto Wiesel’s statement, the laureates have put themselves in very questionable company. Although he claims to speak out for “human rights,” Wiesel is very selective in the cases he chooses. He has not and will not criticize Israel and its apartheid policies; in fact, he attacks those who do. In an interview with Ha’aretz wherein Wiesel announced his ad campaign, he blasted Judge Richard Goldstone, saying his report on the Israeli offensive in Gaza was “a crime against the Jewish people.” Goldstone’s report is in fact quite mild, but it makes clear that the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians of Gaza are atrocities much like those in Sabra and Shatila years ago. Do Wiesel’s recruits know that his view of human rights is quite selective?
One cannot know the motives that drove Wiesel’s recruits to sign such a thoughtless and cruel document. Certainly the document reflects the wave of propaganda on Iran to which we are all subjected. But that is no excuse. These are, after all, intelligent men and women who should see through such propaganda, given our recent and historical experience. Certainly this writer holds many of these signers in great regard, and one can only hope that their signatures were obtained without time to examine the matter properly. If so, a retraction is in order. Finally, one cannot help but wonder whether Wiesel’s recruits felt that signing on to such a statement would be fine now that Obama is in charge and he is a man they can trust. If so, this is another sign of the gift to the Empire that is Obama.
In the end Wiesel’s signers, Nobel laureates though they may be, are of small stature next to those giants of science, humanitarians as well as thinkers, who were unafraid to take on authority in their work and in their role as citizens. Einstein, Galileo, and many others must be tossing in their tombs over Weisel’s handiwork.
Citizens for Justice in the Middle East responds to Jewish Chronicle
By Jewish Chronicle Readers | 12 February 2010
Two recent pieces in The Chronicle do not serve the best interests of either the Kansas City Jewish community or the wider interests of the United States.
The first is a deplorable editorial Feb. 5 that comes perilously close to calling a local peace organization, Citizens for Justice in the Middle East, both anti-Semitic and criminal. The editorial was titled “Beyond the Pale.” Indeed.
CJME, since 2003, has advocated for a just peace between Israel and Palestine as an obvious benefit to Israel, Palestine, the entire Middle East and, of course, to our own United States. To do that, we have criticized Israel for its 43-year occupation of Palestine and its ongoing confiscation of Palestinian homes, farms and businesses. We have attempted to educate the public to “78/22”, meaning that (fair or not) Israel has been allotted 78 percent of historic Palestine, while Palestine gets 22 percent of the land where lemon, orange and olive trees have been grown for centuries by Arab Christians and Muslims. This arrangement is recognized by international law, as are the boundaries. Alas, the Israeli government wants the whole, as demonstrated by the nearly half-million settlers, illegal by international law, who build in Palestine and who, often at gunpoint, drive Palestinians from their homes. The settlers are supported by Israeli government subsidies and U.S. taxes ($7 to $10 million per day). Check Bob Simon’s “60 Minutes” report online for an excellent primer.
Unfortunately, because so few in the U.S. government will speak freely, the settlers have painted Israel into a corner. Those who consider themselves friends of Israel have done it no favors by funding settlements and by permitting the Israeli government to continually defy the United States and international law.
Citizens for Justice in the Middle East supports aid to Gaza because it’s the right thing to do. The U.S. government and others also send aid to Gaza, as do several groups led by Jews. For The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle to write a scathing article about an event commemorating victims of Operation Cast Lead (“Author of report urging opening to Hamas to visit KC area,” Feb. 5) and to depict Hamas as cartoonish thugs does little to forward the genuine need for discussions that include all parties, if peace is, indeed, the desired outcome. Israel itself is in talks with Hamas, though this is not widely reported.
Some readers may know that Hamas was nurtured and funded by Israel in order to create opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yet when eventually Hamas was elected as the government of Palestine, Israel turned Gaza into a penal colony, putting its 1.5 million citizens under siege. Medicine, food, clothing, building materials — all were restricted or disallowed entirely, causing deaths and malnutrition. This contravenes international law against collective punishment. Operation Cast Lead rained further catastrophe on men, women and children, as Judge Richard Goldstone reported recently. Judge Goldstone, a courageous Jew and a Zionist, was reluctant to take on the investigation, yet he did so — and found war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas. However, his report comes down much harder on Israel as the stronger power.
What has Israel become that it won’t allow Palestinian Fulbright Scholars out of Gaza to study? What has Israel become that it refuses medical travel even for children and their parents? What has Israel become that it denies hundreds of thousands of children food and medicine, clothing and fuel? What has Israel become that it puts families out on the street so that settlers can take over the house?
There is not a Jew in America who wouldn’t reach out to help a starving child, yet The Jewish Chronicle continues to roil its readers with articles that do nothing to embrace the tradition of Jewish progressive values towards all humanity. The Chronicle countenances no criticism of Israel at a time when the Israel that it professes to support is rapidly running out of options and needs its friends to offer realistic advice, not cartoon thugs.
Andrea Whitmore
Fairway, Kan.
Co-signers:
Matt Quinn, Lee’s Summit, Mo.
Jim Kenney, Lenexa, Kan.
Ginger Kenney, Lenexa, Kan.
Congenital Climate Abnormalities
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | February 13, 2010
Science is what we use to explain anomalies, to elucidate mysteries, to shed light on unexplained occurrences. For example, there is no great need for a scientific explanation of the sun rising in the morning. If one day the sun were to rise in the afternoon, however, that is an anomaly which would definitely require a scientific explanation. But there is no need to explain the normal everyday occurrences. We don’t need a new understanding if there is nothing new to understand.
Hundreds of thousands of hours of work, and billions of dollars, have been expended trying to explain the recent variations in the climate, particularly the global temperature. But in the rush to find an explanation, a very important question has been left unasked:
Just exactly what unusual, unexpected temperature anomaly are we trying to explain?
The claim is made over and over that humans are having an effect on the climate. But where is the evidence that there is anything that even needs explanation? Where is the abnormal phenomenon? What is it that we are trying to make sense of, what is the unusual occurrence that requires a novel scientific explanation?
There are not a lot of long-term temperature records that can help us in this regard. The longest one is the Central England Temperature record (CET). Although there are problems with the CET (see Sources below), including recent changes in the stations used to calculate it that have slightly inflated the modern temperatures, it is a good starting point for an investigation of whether there is anything happening that is abnormal. Here is that record:
Figure 1. The Central England Temperature Record. Blue line is the monthly temperature in Celsius. Red line is the average temperature. Jagged black line is the 25-year trailing trend, in degrees per century.
Now, where in that record is there anything which is even slightly abnormal? Where is the anomaly that the entire huge edifice of the AGW hypothesis is designed to elucidate? The longest sustained rise is from about 1680 to 1740. That time period also has the steepest rise. The modern period, on the other hand, is barely above the long-term trend despite urban warming. There is nothing unusual about the modern period in any way.
OK, so there’s nothing to explain in the CET. How about another long record?
One of the world’s best single station long-term records is that of the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. It has been maintained with only a couple minor location changes for over 200 years. Figure 2 shows the Armagh record.
Figure 2. Temperature record for Armagh University. Various colored lines as in Figure 1.
We find the same thing in this record as in the CET. The fastest rise was a long, long time ago. The modern rise is once again insignificant. Where in all of this is anything that requires billions of dollars to explain?
Finally, what about the global record? Here, you don’t have to take my word for it. A much chastened Phil Jones (the disgraced former Director of the CRU of email fame), in an interview with the BBC on Friday, February 12, 2010, answered a BBC question as follows:
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.
Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
So in fact, according to Phil Jones (who strongly believes in the AGW hypothesis) there is nothing unusual about the recent warming either. It is not statistically different from two earlier modern periods of warming. Since these warming periods were before the modern rise in CO2, greenhouse gases cannot have been responsible for those rises.
So my question remains unanswered … where is the anomaly? Where is the unusual occurrence that we are spending billions of dollars trying to explain?
The answer is, there is no unusual warming. There is no anomaly. There is nothing strange or out of the ordinary about the recent warming. It is in no way distinguishable from earlier periods of warming, periods that we know were not due to rising CO2. There is nothing in the record that is in any way different from the centuries-long natural fluctuations in the global climate.
In other words, we have spent billions of dollars and wasted years of work chasing a chimera, a will-of-the-wisp. This is why none of the CO2 explanations have held water … simply because there is nothing unusual to explain.
SOURCES:
CET:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html
ARMAGH:
ADJUSTMENTS TO THE CET:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/004482.html
Jones also makes the interesting argument in the interview that the reason he believes that recent warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) is because climate models can’t replicate it … in other words, he has absolutely no evidence at all, he just has the undeniable fact that our current crop of climate models can’t model the climate. Seems to me like that’s a problem with the models rather than a problem with the climate, but hey, what do I know, I was born yesterday …
‘LA Times’ gives Wiesenthal Center a platform to spin falsehoods about Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem
By Philip Weiss | February 13, 2010
Yesterday, and somewhat shockingly, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Rabbi Martin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) defending the desecration of the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem so that the SWC can build its “Center for Human Dignity– Museum of Tolerance” there. I say shockingly because the piece contained so many falsehoods. I excerpt Hier below. Then I will point out the stretchers. Rabbi Hier:
The museum is not being built on what can rightfully be called the Mamilla Cemetery, but on a three-acre site in the heart of West Jerusalem that, for more than half a century, served as the city’s municipal car park. Each day, hundreds of people of all faiths parked in the three-level underground structure without any protest from Muslim religious or academic leaders or interest groups. Additionally, telephone and electrical cables and sewer lines were laid deep below ground in the early 1960s, again without any protest.
As the [Israeli] Supreme Court noted in its ruling, “for almost 50 years the compound has not been a part of the cemetery, both in the normative sense and in the practical sense, and it was used for various public purposes.” It also noted: “During all those years no one raised any claim, on even one occasion, that the planning procedures violated the sanctity of the site, or that they were contrary to the law as a result of the historical and religious uniqueness of the site. . . . For decades this area was not regarded as a cemetery by the general public or by the Muslim community. . . . No one denied this position.”
Now let us go to this week’s petition to international human-rights bodies by a coalition of groups trying to preserve the Mamilla cemetery. In that petition, you will read the following facts:
There has never been any doubt about the centrality of the 33-acre Mamilla cemetery to Muslim practice in Jerusalem. Throughout the 1800s, Ottoman rulers “fastidiously” recognized the boundaries of the cemetery by surrounding it with a wall and roads. As for the Brits who followed, in 1938 and 1944, they officially recognized cemetery as an “Islamic endowment” and an “antiquities site.”
In 1948 the Israelis took over West Jerusalem. And from the beginning of Israeli rule, Muslim authorities appealed to Israel to protect the cemetery. In 1948 the Israeli Relgious Affairs Ministry said the cemetery “is considered to be one fo the most prominent Muslim cemeteries,” with remains going back to the great general of the Crusades, Salah-ah-Din. “Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.”
For a few years the Israelis kept their word. And then the encroachments began. The petitioners write: “Israel has gradually expropriated and destroyed most of the cemetery.” It began by building an “Independence Park” over half the cemetery in the 1960s. Then in 1964, it built that parking lot Hier refers to, over about three acres of the cemetery. Then it built an underground parking garage and ran cables and other infrastructure through the site.
Palestinians have never been silent about the desecration. On at least one occasion they petitioned UNESCO to stop it.
In recent years, the Israeli Antiquities Authority awarded the 3-acre parking lot site to the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build its Tolerance hall on, and an archaeologist was sent in to see what was going on. The report of this “Chief Excavator” was emphatic: There are thousands of graves under this parking lot that date to the 12th century. They have already been disturbed by construction. Some of these bodies have been removed. The construction zone is shrouded in secrecy.
If just one of those bodies were Jewish, the petitioners demonstrate, construction would stop in a nanosecond.
The archaelogist, Gideon Suleimani, was pressured to conclude his work in a perfunctory manner. But he said that the project was an “archeological crime” and “We’re talking about tens of thousands of skeletons under the ground there, and not just a few dozen.”
Suleimani’s report was suppressed by the Israeli government when it went to the Supreme Court to get the opinion that Hier quotes so approvingly above. That is why the Mamilla petitioners, who include Muslim and Jewish groups, are going to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN special rapporteur on religious freedom, the UN special rapporteur on racism, and UNESCO.
As Rashid Khalidi, whose own ancestors are buried in Mamilla, has said: We have exhausted all recourse inside Israel against this “grotesque” project.
The desecration of Mamilla is all about the dangers of occupation. It is about the fact that Jerusalem was deemed to be an international space under the 1947 UN Partition plan– “a corpus separatum”–but its independence has never been respected by the Israelis.
Finally, consider this: Over the last 40 years under its “Protection of Holy Sites Law,” the Israeli Government has recognized 137 designated holy sites. ALL OF THEM ARE JEWISH. The U.S. State Department has protested this discrimination. “Non-Jewish holy sites do not enjoy legal protection under it because the government does not recognize them as official holy sites,” the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report of 2009 stated.
Will this outrage pass? Will the LA Times give equal space to the petitioners to point out Hier’s falsehoods? Will the American Jewish community redeem itself from its blind support for a government that discriminates against an ethnic minority? To be continued…
Update, and my bad: The LA Times did run a piece by Saree Makdisi opposing the Museum of Tolerance (without countering the falsehoods in Hier’s account).
Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Zionism
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | February 12, 2010
Chutzpah, a Yiddish word meaning “shameless audacity,” has been famously defined as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Considering Israel’s increasingly outrageous behaviour, perhaps it’s time for a new definition. The one that springs to mind is “that quality enshrined in a state, which having induced its ‘allies’ into a disastrous invasion of Iraq, then urges them to attack Iran.”
At a recent dinner in honour of visiting Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took yet another rhetorical swipe at Tehran. “Humanity stands before one of its most difficult tests since World War II,” Netanyahu intoned. “The radical Islamic regime threats [sic] the well-being of the state of Israel, the region, and all of humanity.”1
Sounding more like an Israeli envoy than the head of a sovereign nation, Berlusconi responded, “My job is to make sure that world leaders do not commit the same error of the past, the error of indifference that brought about the greatest tragedy in history.”
In Defamation, a highly revealing 2009 documentary on anti-Semitism by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir,2 Professor Norman Finkelstein noted this strategy of invoking past Jewish suffering to justify future wars. “The irony is that the Nazi holocaust has now become the main ideological weapon for launching wars of aggression,” said Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry. “Every time you want to launch a war of aggression, drag in the Nazi holocaust.”
Or, to be more precise, every time Israel wants other countries to launch a war of aggression on its behalf, it drags in the Nazi holocaust. In the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Netanyahu was one of many Zionists who did just that. In a September 20, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Case for Toppling Saddam,”3 Netanyahu laid on the guilt trip: “We now know that had the democracies taken pre-emptive action to bring down Hitler’s regime in the 1930s, the worst horrors in history could have been avoided.”
And as he and other Zionists are now doing with Iran, Netanyahu was in 2002 hyping a non-existent Iraqi nuclear threat. Saddam Hussein, he claimed, was “feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons.” Moreover, “the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs,” the then former Israeli Prime Minister speculated, could be produced “in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country—and Iraq is a very big country.” To uncover Saddam’s hypothetical “portable manufacturing sites of mass death,” Netanyahu warned that “nothing less than dismantling his regime will do.”
One might think that with over a million people dead and almost five million others displaced in Iraq—and not a weapon of mass destruction to be found—that Netanyahu might be showing some remorse. Instead, he’s beating the drums loudest for an even more catastrophic war with Iran.
That should tell us a lot not only about the man but about the nature of the ideology that drives him. Zionism, like the fictional Jewish parenticide, shamelessly attempts to turn reality on its head.
Instead of acknowledging that it is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East,4 Israel and its supporters focus the world’s attention on imaginary threats from its regional rivals.
Rather than apologizing for their crimes against humanity—most notably, the dispossession and virtual imprisonment of the Palestinian people— Zionists arrogantly portray themselves as the defenders of humanity against Islamic aggression.
And instead of admitting that they lied about Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories, Iraqi yellowcake uranium from Niger, and Iraqi meetings in Prague, Zionist propagandists are busy concocting similarly brazen lies about Iran.
If world leaders are indeed committing an “error of indifference,” it is hardly their supposed resistance to Zionist scaremongering. Rather, it is their indifference to the suffering of Arab and Muslim peoples. Foremost among them are the Palestinians—the ultimate victims of the shameless audacity of Zionism.
- Liel Kyzer, “Netanyahu to Berlusconi: You show courage in backing Iran sanctions,” Haaretz, February 7, 2010.
- Yoav Shamir, Defamation, 2009. Watch film online.
- Benjamin Netanyahu, “The Case for Toppling Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2002.
- Israel is not alone in not wanting to acknowledge this fact. Watch President Obama dodge Helen Thomas’ question, “Do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?” “President Obama’s first press conference—Helen Thomas gets to at least ask a question,” You Tube video.
FBI officials accused of directing Pakistan ‘torture’
By Syed Shoaib Hasan | BBC | February 10, 2010
Five US citizens held in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting attacks have alleged that US officials directed their torture to extract confessions. The US embassy in Islamabad has dismissed the claims as “baseless”.
The men, who are being held in the city of Sargodha, earlier stated in court that they had been tortured by the Pakistani authorities. They deny claims they were plotting attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and had sought links with extremists.
The men, aged between 18 and 25, were arrested in Sargodha in November on suspicion of trying to contact al-Qaeda linked groups and plotting attacks against Pakistan and its allies.
Officials say the men were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. The men have denied having links to al-Qaeda and insist that they wanted to go to Afghanistan for charity work. They face life imprisonment if put on trial and found guilty. A Pakistani court has barred their deportation to the US.
US ‘pressure’
“The boys told me that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents were present and were directing their interrogations,” Khalid Khawaja, a human rights activist handling the case told the BBC.
“I have a written statement which says the Americans were asking them to which militant organisation they belonged.
“Pakistanis were beating them up and Americans kept asking them questions.
“The agents demanded they confess that they had come here (to Sargodha) to attack the nearby nuclear plant.”
Mr Khawaja said that the men had also made accusations of torture in the court where their case is being heard. He said it was only because of US pressure that the men had been arrested.
“There is no real evidence against them,” he said. “I intend to file a petition in the next few days asking the court to dismiss all charges against them.”
Defamation: In Search of Antisemitism
By Tali Shapiro | Pulse Media | February 11, 2010
Last month, PULSE published Yoav Shamir’s film, Defamation. I’ve finally gotten around to watching it, and just couldn’t help writing as I watched. Aside from the comical Nancy Drew music, I found it at times very hard to watch. Looking in the mirror is never easy.
The Easy Part – The Adults
There’s something pathetic about a grown man living in unsubstantiated fear. Probably the most pathetic statement in the movie is made by the security guy at Crown Heights:
When a black guy sees two people walking down the street, a black person and a jewish person, his choice to attack someone will not be a black person. With a black person, you never know, does he carry a knife, does he carry a gun?..
This pathetic and racist assertion is forwarded by how many atrocities the Jews went through throughout history, as if the blacks never went through hundreds of years of slavery, their countries colonized by whites. Where’s the ADL when you need them?
Speak of the devil. Watching the ADL’s ineptness in the one thing they should be able to do – find defamation cases – is a rather entertaining exercise. While the American and Israeli press and media is full of racism, homophobia, genderphobia, classism and any other exotic blend of ism and phobia you can think of, the self proclaimed Anti Defamation League is struggling to find antisemitism in all of the United States.
In his search for antisemitism, not even the ADL could help Yoav Shamir. To his somewhat childish disappointment and understandable relief, antisemitism- or more accurately- anti Judaism as a broad and prevailing phenomenon, is a thing of the past. Today’s anti-Judaism is no more common than any other racism towards any other minority, and very possibly less common.
Actual Defamation
Defamation does actually get intimate footage of true anti-Judaism. It’s not exactly the Arian Brotherhood, but it’s an important example of how all groups harbor racism when they are separated and don’t know each other on a personal level. A great example is the African American community of the aforementioned Crown Heights neighborhood. When engaged in conversation about their Jewish neighbors, the black residents seem to have a lot of preconceived notions about them, or more precisely, Jews in general. One could go into an “antisemites” tantrum, or realize that in order to solve the root of this problem, the members of both Crown Heights communities need to borrow more sugar.
The Hard Part – The Children
While the ADL is a bit of a laugh, the parts with the teenagers tore my heart out. I could see myself there. Though I have slightly different memories and remember my “roots voyage” as the scratching the surface off of the Zionist illusion, I remember this fear of the boogie antisemite.
Children who want to “Not forget and not forgive” are a cause for concern. A child isn’t born vindictive. Israeli children are vindictive, though many enjoy a comfortable life. The high-schoolers Shamir chose to follow are middle-class-and-up, and they embody the dichotomy that is the Zionist identity: On one hand, they “know” they are hated and seek revenge to different extents; on the other, you can see their blank stares as they are faced with shocking images of what has become known as the holocaust (with a capital H). In their own words, they “don’t feel it” (“it” not being pain, but revenge) which is absolutely normal. What isn’t normal is that they want to feel it. An Israeli child is expected to somehow contain such horrors as if they were their own.
Now, my own dichotomies come into play: On the one hand, I can easily relate to them at that age; on the other, I pity them – their minds abused at such a young age; and on another, they are tomorrow’s soldiers. As I look into their soft faces I wonder: Which of them will be gassing me in Bil’in next week? Which of them will call me a Nazi, as they did last week? In their head they are fighting their own extinction. Fighting for their lives. While in reality they are bigger and stronger than most. Yet another dichotomy that will traumatize them, and ironically, will turn them into exactly what they’re most afraid of.
The Thirst for Holocaust Porn
“The real journey begins now”, says one of the girls as she enters the (unbeknownst to her) partially recreated Majdanek with the Israeli flag in her hand and a white shirt with a blue tie (the national colors of Israel) and a star of david on the back (so many ironies, so little time). She was taught to act like this at a very young age, and school, yet again, provides her with the correct nationalistic props. I can relate, though I chose not to wrap myself in a flag (the trend in my day) for my own reasons. I remember Majdanek very vividly, due to the fact that it’s very…well… vivid. What I don’t remember, however, are the horror stories. Throughout Defamation I can definitely see an escalation in scare tactics. While stories I remember being told sounded more like rumors, something a testimony may sound like- hearsay, the stories these kids are being told take on mythical proportions (the bloodthirsty Lady Godiva is my personal favorite).
I remember, about a year ago, in the midst of a debate (if you can call it that) with a fascist Zionist, who perceives himself as a leftist, he threw the accusation at me that I want another Gaza, so I can wave more dead babies at the UN. The cynicism of such remarks is not what astonishes me, but the relentless displacement disorder that’s so typical of Zionists. As Zionists abuse the horrors of the holocaust for their personal gain, they blame the Palestinians for sanctifying death. “They want martyrs,” is a commonly uttered sentence.
Incredibly enough, this thirst for evidence of anti-Semitism isn’t calculated (at least, not anymore), but engrained so deeply in our education that it becomes an obsession. Maybe I’m having an embarrassing outing right now, thinking there must be more like me, when in fact the room is full of crickets, but after seeing the kids of Defamation, I feel I may have a potential support group, so here goes:
Until I got to Auchwitz, I was obsessed with holocaust porn.
I’m not talking about Nazi sex fantasy pulp fiction. I’m talking about the need to hear more stories and in as much detail as possible. The more gruesome, the better. Naked women run around the camp under the guise of a collective medical examination? Oh yes! Mama had to choose which baby lives and which one dies, burning in an old train cart? Give me more! Babies thrown out of windows and used as target practice plates? That hit the spot! Give me 5 minutes and tell me more!
What are we doing to these kids?
That’s ultimately the question that Defamation deals with. The director, like myself, is taking a hard look in the mirror, trying to understand what has brought him thus far. A personal journey that’s undetachable of social nurture. A personal journey which understands that the past is the past and you can’t undo it, you can only take responsibility for it and try to do better in the future.
Israel Demands an Act of War
Netanyahu to EU envoys:
“In the last two days the brutal regime in Tehran has made more outrageous statements, including the implicit call for the extermination of my country. Israel expects all responsible governments, including all those represented here, to forcefully condemn these outrageous statements.”
“But I think what is required is a lot more than words, Iran is racing forward to produce nuclear weapons in brazen defiance of the international community. And the international community must decide if it is serious about neutralizing this threat to Israel, the region and the entire word. I believe that what is required right now is tough action from the international community.”
“This means not moderate sanctions or watered down sanctions, this means crippling sanctions, and these sanctions must be applied right now.” – February 9, 2010
Time for an American Intifada?
By Jeff Gates | February 7, 2010
During the 1960 Christmas season, Americans flocked to the theaters to see Exodus, a 3-1/2 hour epic film featuring handsome freedom fighters and a riveting romance amidst the heroic triumph of Jewish Destiny over Arab Evil Doers. Set against a Yuletide backdrop of Biblical prophecy, moviegoers marveled as exiled Jews returned to their fabled promised land, a staple of popular culture to which Americans are first exposed as children in “Sunday school.”
Many moviegoers failed to realize that Exodus was not fact but fiction. Even now, few Americans realize the storyline was adapted for the screen from a 1958 novel by Leon Uris. The biggest bestseller since Gone with the Wind-a novel set during the Civil War of the 1860s-the filmadaptation was directed by Hollywood icon Otto Preminger. The blockbuster’s stars included a young Paul Newman with his leading lady a blond Eva Marie Saint.
The cast included character actor Lee J. Cobb and Peter Lawford, married to Pat Kennedy, a sister of John F. Kennedy who was elected president the same year. By then, Lawford was a famous member of pop culture’s high profile “Rat Pack” that included singer Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Joey Bishop. Italian crooner Sal Mineo, then a teen heartthrob, received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a Jewish émigré.
An Oscar should have been awarded to Israel and its supporters for portraying this extremist enclave as a legitimate nation-state when, in reality, its founding traces to an alluring storyline. Forty-five years after the release of Exodus, American naiveté was again targeted by Jewish storytellers to induce the U.S. to war in the Middle East-only this time for real.
Then as now, Americans are easily swayed by sympathetic portrayals of an enclave granted nation-state recognition by President Harry Truman, a Christian-Zionist. The Missouri Democrat had famously read the Bible cover-to-cover five times by age 15. Truman was a True Believer in the same way that fundamentalist Christians believe-truly believe-that their Messiah will not return until the “Israelites” recover their ancestral home.
Preying on similar beliefs, Republican George W. Bush, another Christian-Zionist president, was induced with phony intelligence to wage war in Iraq. The false intelligence was traceable to Israelis, pro-Israelis or assets developed for that purpose. That invasion had long been a priority goal of those who believe-truly believe-in their right to an expansionist Greater Israel.
Yet as Shlomo Sand chronicles in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), the historical evidence is scant either for an exile or an “exodus.” As with the movie, the return of a “Jewish People” to a Jewish homeland is “a conscious ideological composition” meant “to claim a higher cultural lineage” than what can be supported by the facts.
In lieu of the novel-writing skills of Leon Uris, the Zionist narrative featured Biblical archeologists such as William F. Albright who, in the 1920s, traveled to the Holy Land to excavate artifacts that would, as Sand puts it: “reaffirm the Old Testament and thereby the New.”
By interpreting his finds in Christian-Zionist terms, Albright and his colleagues not only unearthed Biblical “facts” that shaped the Sunday school curriculum, they also helped pre-stage the perceived legitimacy of a Jewish people returning from exile to a Jewish homeland. As Sand points out, if there was no exodus, how can there be a return? If there is no “Jewish People,” how can there be a homeland?
Yet these widely held beliefs remain the premise underlying Israel’s expansionist agenda and its rationale for heaping six decades of abuse on Palestinians who have lived there for centuries.
Political Expedience or Biblical Prophecy?
White House counsel Clark Clifford cautioned Truman that his reelection was unlikely absent the funding that Jewish-Americans-with Israel’s recognition-were eager to provide. In early May 1948, General George C. Marshall, Truman’s Secretary of State, argued vigorously against recognition. Strong objections were also heard from the diplomatic corps, the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Marshall, the top-ranked U.S. military officer in WWII, was outraged that Clifford put domestic political expedience ahead of U.S. foreign policy interests. Marshall told Truman that he would vote against him if he extended sovereign status to an enclave of Zionist terrorists, religious fanatics and what Albert Einstein and Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt called “Jewish fascists.” Marshall insisted that State Department personnel never again speak to Clifford.
In March 1948, a Joint Chiefs paper titled “Force Requirements for Palestine” predicted the “Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” Those objectives included an expansionist agenda for Greater Israel that envisioned the taking of Arab land, ensuring armed clashes in which the U.S. was destined to become embroiled.
The Joint Chiefs listed Zionist objectives as:
– Initial Jewish sovereignty over a portion of Palestine,
– Acceptance by the great powers of the right to unlimited immigration,
– The extension of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine,
– The expansion of “Eretz (Greater) Israel” into Transjordan and portions of Lebanon and Syria, and
– The establishment of Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.
Akin to the fictional portrayal in Exodus, those Zionists lobbying Truman assured him they would remain within the initial boundaries. We now know that was a lie. They also promised that the Zionist state would not become what it quickly became: a theocratic and racist enclave-albeit widely marketed by pro-Israeli media as the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
To remove all doubt as to the extremist goals of the Zionist project, the Joint Chiefs assessment added ominously:
“All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders. The program is openly admitted by some leaders, and has been privately admitted to United States officials by responsible leaders of the presently dominant Jewish group–the Jewish Agency.”
Deceit from the Outset
A beguiling combination of Hollywood fiction, manipulated beliefs and outright lies remain at the core of this entangled alliance and the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.” The deceit deployed to advance the hegemonic goals of the Zionist project remains obscured by an undisclosed media bias reinforced by a widespread pro-Israeli influence in popular culture. As with the 1960 film, the ongoing manipulation of thought and emotion lies at the core of this duplicity a half-century later.
In The Persuasion Explosion (1985), author Art Stevens reports that Exodus was a public relations ploy launched by Edward Gottlieb who sought a novelist to improve Israel’s image in the U.S. The name Uris originates with Yerushalmi, meaning “man of Jerusalem.” The film rights to Exodus were sold in advance of the book’s publication. Translated into dozens of languages, this masterpiece of mental and emotional manipulation quickly became a global phenomenon as its created favorable impressions of Israel.
The rewards are real for those who offer aid and comfort to this trans-generational deceit. When Truman’s campaign train traversed the nation as part of a 1948 whistle-stop tour, grateful Jewish nationalists refueled his campaign coffers with a reported $400,000 in cash ($3.6 million in 2010 dollars). Those funds helped transform his anticipated loss into a victory with support from pro-Israeli editorial boards that-after recognition-boosted Truman’s sagging popularity.
The Creation of Reliable Assets
Clark Clifford was rewarded with his career goal when he emerged as a top-paid Washington lawyer. After proving himself a pliable personality, he remained a reliable asset. During the G.H.W. Bush presidency, his combination of political prominence and perceived credibility provided cover for a massive bank fraud involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International aided by Roger Altman, his Ashkenazi law partner.
In 2009, Hollywood released an action thriller (The International) starring Clive Owen and a similar storyline involving the International Bank of Business and Credit. Neither Clifford nor Altman had experience in banking when their law firm enabled what prosecutors charged was a global criminal operation.
Media reports described the BCCI scheme as the largest bank fraud in history. This $20 billion transnational operation even featured the requisite Hollywood component: Clifford’s protégé was married to Lynda Carter, the star of Wonder Woman, a 1970s fantasy-adventure television series.
The real fantasy in this long-running geopolitical fraud lies in why U.S. lawmakers continue to befriend and defend a “nation” that has for so long-and so consistently-deceived and betrayed its most loyal ally. As a badly miscast Eva Marie Saint asked in her most memorable line in Exodus: “When will it ever end?”
The greatest wonder will be if, based on facts confirming the depth and duration of this duplicity, those lawmakers urging continued support for Israel are not charged with treason. [See: “How the Israel Lobby Took Control of U.S. Foreign Policy”]
To restore its national security, the U.S. must shake off its entangled alliance with this extremist enclave. “Shaking off” is the literal translation of “intifada.” Those who know the true facts behind this trans-generational deception are quickly reaching the conclusion that the recognition of this enclave as a legitimate state was key to this ongoing fraud. Others may be waiting for the movie, American Intifada.
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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
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