China Reiterates Opposition to Iran Sanctions… Again
By Jason Ditz, April 13, 2010
The eternal push for additional sanctions against Iran never changes too much.
Earlier today, President Barack Obama declared that he was “confident” China would back the sanctions, a confidence expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton several times over the past few weeks.
But as has happened every other time this confidence was expressed, China was quick to dismiss the idea and reiterate its opposition to sanctions.
“China always believes that dialogue and negotiation are the best way out for the issue. Pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve it,” insisted China’s Foreign Ministry.
Despite this opposition, the US is still hoping to push forward sanctions against Iran in the next few weeks to punish it over its refusal to accept a third party enrichment deal. Iran has actually agreed to that deal in principle, and reiterated their support again today.
Iran’s willingness to accept a deal and its repeated calls for dialogue do not appear to be stopping the US push for sanctions, ostensibly to punish it for not accepting a deal and not accepting dialogue. This is perhaps unsurprising, however, as the fact that the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran is not enriching uranium to anywhere near weapons grade and is not diverting it to any non-civilian use has likewise done little to dissuade the US from sanctions on the completely false basis of Iran enriching uranium for military purposes.
Hot, Flat, And Paved Over By Tom Friedman’s Family?
By Tom Nelson | April 8, 2010
Thomas Friedman’s World Is Flat Broke | VF Daily | Vanity Fair
[Nov ’08] …based on the bad news coming out of shopping-mall owner General Growth Properties [GGP], it is no wonder Friedman is feeling crankier than usual. That’s because the author’s wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is an heir to the General Growth fortune. In the past year, the couple—who live in an 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda, Maryland—have watched helplessly as General Growth stock has fallen 99 percent, from a high of $51 to a recent 35 cents a share. The assorted Bucksbaum family trusts, once worth a combined $3.6 billion, are now worth less than $25 million.
When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
…
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherf*cking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.
GGP files for bankruptcy
So we have a self-proclaimed progressive lecturing us on our profligate ways and hectoring us about climate change, who lives in a house 6 times bigger than mine, and whose outsized wealth is [was?] largely based on paving over thousands and thousands of acres of land.
Talk about not walking the talk.
‘NYT’ distorts history of nonviolent resistance
By Alex Kane on April 7, 2010
On the front page of the New York Times today, there is a large photo of West Bank Palestinians planting trees, “part of a new, nonviolent approach to assert their land claims,” as Times correspondent Ethan Bronner says. While it’s good that the Times is covering nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, it’s an article rife with omissions, mischaracterizations and distortions, all par for the course from the Times when it comes to Israel/Palestine. Let’s take this opportunity to remind people about the history of nonviolence in the Palestinian movement, a history that has been systematically shut out of mainstream discourse.
The photo caption, and the title of the piece, which is “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” give a preview of the direction the article heads in. In Bronner’s reporting, we’re told that the Palestinians are simply “trying” this “new” way to resist, when in fact Palestinians have been nonviolently resisting Zionist colonization even before the State of Israel was founded, and well after. The 1936-1939 revolt against British colonial rule and Zionist colonization began with a “six-month general strike” that involved “work-stoppages and boycotts of the British-and Zionist-controlled parts of the economy” and was the “largest anticolonial strike of its kind until that point in history, and perhaps the longest ever,” as Rashid Khalidi writes on page 106 in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. The revolt did have an armed component, though, that followed the general strike.
The 1st Intifada was largely nonviolent. And Neve Gordon, in his book Israel’s Occupation, tells us that the 2nd Intifada began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.
Bronner’s reporting states that the nonviolent resistance being carried out all over Palestine is being “forged” by Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and the business community, ignoring the popular, grassroots resistance committees that have led the way. He also omits the anti-“buffer zone” marches that the Palestinians of Gaza have been undertaking.
We learn that “Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march.” Bronner apparently doesn’t think it’s newsworthy enough to include that “local sources in Hebron reported that as Gandhi and his wife tried to visit an illegal settlement outpost installed near the Ibrahimi Mosque, Israeli soldiers tried to prevent them from crossing and installed additional roadblocks,” according to the International Middle East Media Center.
Here’s Bronner on the Israeli military’s response to the nonviolent resistance movement:
“They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.”
As Norman Finkelstein said in a recent interview on Democracy Now!, “damaging” the separation barrier is actually following the law, since in 2004 the International Court of Justice handed down a landmark ruling stating the wall was illegal and should be dismantled.
And although Bronner gives room to Israel to claim that the demonstrations aren’t nonviolent, he omits the fact that Palestinians and internationals participating in nonviolent demonstrations are routinely hurt and have been killed with impunity by Israeli forces. According to this article in the Guardian, Bassem Abu Rahmeh was the 18th person to die in protests against the illegal seperation barrier. Recently, it was reported that the Israeli military had decided to not investigate Rahmeh’s death.
So, Ethan Bronner, who really perpetrates violence?
The Major Jewish American Organizations Defend Israel’s Humiliation of America
By James Petras Ph.D. | Atlantic Free Press | April 7, 2010
“The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, and spat in the face of the President … they wiped the spit off their faces and smiled politely … as the saying goes: when you spit in the face of a weakling, he pretends that it is raining”
– Uri Avnery Israeli Jewish journalist 13/3/2010.
“We (Israel) possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets … most European capitals are targets of our air force … the Palestinians should all be deported. Two years ago, only 7 or 8 per cent of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two months ago, (January 2010), it was 33 percent and now according to a Gallup poll, the figure is 44 percent”.
– Martin Van Crevel Israeli, professor of military history at Hebrew University at Jerusalem and top adviser to the Israeli Armed Forces, March 2, 2010.
Introduction
When Israel announced a major new Jews-only building project of 1600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem, it was not only “spitting in the face” of visiting Vice President Biden, it was demonstrating its power to humiliate America and Americans. Netanyahu was sending a message to world: Israel backed by its billionaire-financed Presidents of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations, leads the US by the nose. The Jewish State can make an agreement with the White House one day and revoke it the next (with characteristic arrogance), US public opinion be damned. No sooner did the Obama Administration react to this most public show of impudence with Biden privately telling the Israeli Prime Minister that, “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”, than Netanyahu openly called on the “American Jewish community” (the major Zionist organizations) to come to the defense of Israel and its claim on all of Jerusalem. And respond they did: turning the insulted victim (America) into the bully and blaming the US, not the Israeli government, for the “crisis” and for the breakdown of Israel’s agreement not to expand colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian land. As we shall describe, the entire Zionist power configuration (ZPC) in the United States (with a few notable exceptions) defended Israel’s effrontery and condemned any attempt by the US government to peacefully resolve a conflict, which threatened US lives, economic interests and prestige. This just confirmed world public opinion, which sees an American electorate willing to be humiliated by this economically insignificant state.
The Bigger Issue: Beyond the Biden – Netanyahu Caper
Whatever the insults and crimes of the moment, the conflict between Israel and the US is not about Netanyahu’s hyper-arrogance or a new series of Jerusalem land grabs, or even the frothy spittle on Vice President Biden’s face. It is, in essence, about the relation between states or, better still, the relation between peoples where one group (Israeli Jews and their powerful one percent fifth column agents in the US) exacts tribute and imposes wars in its own interests on another group (the US tax payers, soldiers, workers and businessmen). It arrogates power, not merely yesterday or today, but for the last 50 years.
In a broader historic context, the public humiliation of Vice President Biden in Tel Aviv pales in comparison to the Israeli’s cold blooded sneak attack, which killed and wounded over 200 American servicemen on the USS Liberty in June 1967. An arrogant and homicidal Israel humiliated the US through this attack, confident that then-President Lyndon Johnson would not retaliate but would even silence the survivors from ever telling their story to the American people. When Netanyahu calls on the “Jewish Communities” in the US he is not referring to the majority of American Jews. He, in fact, is addressing the Zionist power configuration whose strategically-placed members designed and promoted the Iraq war policy, which has caused the deaths and mutilation of thousands of US soldiers as well as over one million Iraqi civilians. In essence, the US soldier victims of the invasion of Iraq lost their lives, limbs and sanity for the interests of the Zionist “homeland”.
It is not merely that American Zionists defend the illegal construction of another Jews-only neighborhood in the middle of Palestinian East Jerusalem; the announcement was calculated to humiliate the visiting US Vice President. It’s not just a matter of US Zionist support for Netanyahu’s sabotage of a US peace initiative; nor is it about the unconditional ZPC support for Israeli crimes as they were being denounced by the United Nations and the peoples of the world. The fundamental issue is that the ZPC in the United States is turning our country and its people into defenders of Israel’s sordid crimes, casting the American people as accomplices to ethnic cleansing and degrading our moral sensibilities before the whole world.
Today and Yesterday: Castrating America
Netanyahu’s symbolic spitting in Biden’s face was a calculated act of grave significance. It marked out Israel’s ‘will to power’ – its willingness to publicly humiliate US leaders and flaunt its power over the US before the world. Israel exposed US impotence in the Middle East and beyond. This incident has world-historic consequences for anyone who is not blind. The US is a declining power, which cannot create a secure environment for its soldiers, corporations and citizens anywhere in the Middle East or beyond. No European, Asian, Latin American or Muslim country can look at the US and its citizens without thinking, “Here is a country at the feet of Israeli leaders and at the throat of Israel’s designated ‘enemies’. It is an understatement to say that the US, as a nation and as a people, has “lost prestige”.
Israel has a long and ignoble history of sabotaging peace talks in favor of grabbing land. From its very foundation, Tel Aviv undermined peace offers through unprovoked military attacks. Israel, along with Britain and France, launched a full-scale surprise invasion of Egypt to grab the Suez Canal, after it had promised to consider Egyptian President Nasser’s proposal to negotiate. In more recent times, as soon as Arafat agreed to formally recognize Israel as a state and sign a peace agreement, Jewish tanks and jets attacked the West Bank killing hundreds and surrounding Arafat’s headquarters for months. At the same time it increased the number of the Jews-only settlements in the West Bank ten fold to accommodate over 500,000 fanatical paramilitary Jewish settlers. When the elected Hamas administration implemented a unilateral cease fire, Israel launched a major military assault, ultimately devastating Gaza and killing 1400 mostly unarmed Palestinians.
Israel’s actions, past and present, including land grabs, Jews-only apartheid roads and settlements and military invasions of Palestinian refugee camps and towns have destroyed the possibility of a negotiated peace agreement, which would compromise the Zionists’ vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Greater Israel”.
Given this spiteful history, it’s not surprising that Israel’s current apologists claim that the current land grab to build more Jews-only apartment blocks in Jerusalem is “nothing new”, that it is “part of our history”, that Jews “need the living space” and that “three thousand years of Biblical history tells us that all this land is ours” (quotes from the Daily Alert, March 15 -17, 2010, official mouthpiece of the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations).
The humiliation of Biden was not the first time that Israel acted publicly to embarrass the Obama Administration. In his first meeting with President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu openly rejected any freeze in new settlements. Indeed, Israel escalated its settlement building right after Obama addressed the Muslim-Arab world in his ‘Cairo Speech’.
What is behind Netanyahu’s perverse behavior and his US supporters’ overweening arrogance? How can the US media, hundreds of Congressional Representatives and all the leading Jewish American organizations, support an extremist racist regime, which attacked and humiliated our country with impunity? How can the American Zionists side with a foreign country over issues detrimental to basic US security interests and not be viewed as traitors by other Americans?
In the first place, Netanyahu has the support of 80% of the Israeli-Jewish population as he pursues the policy of evicting the Palestinians and expanding exclusively Jewish settlements on occupied lands despite US President Obama’s ‘peace overtures’. Humiliating the visiting US Vice President on a ‘peace mission’ from Obama only increased Netanyahu’s popularity with Israelis.
Secondly, this impudent projection of Israeli power over the reputed American ‘superpower’ appeals to the self-image of the far-right religious settlers whose leaders form the backbone of the current governing coalition (especially the Shas party).
Thirdly, insulting a gentile President and Vice President would find approval among the supporters of Netanyahu’s gangster Foreign Minister, Avi Lieberman and with the tough Eastern European Hasidic youth who routinely spit on elderly Christian monks and priests in their ancient Armenian and Greek quarters of Jerusalem.
It might seem strange for Israelis, who face increasing isolation throughout the Middle East and are condemned throughout Europe for their brutal colonial crimes, to glorify their thuggish leader as he heaps contempt on their most important military ally and economic supporter, its elected leaders and its citizens. Accumulated Israeli political resentment against world condemnation for their war crimes found an emotional outlet by identifying with Netanyahu’s antics: His relentless brutality against the ‘Untermenschen’ of Palestine and his willingness to openly defy the US Administration, even as Israel extracts $3 billion dollars a year from the Americans, re-enforces their sense of superiority. It is clear that Netanyahu’s totalitarian policies have a mass popular base among Israelis and his swaggering arrogance faithfully reflects the national psyche of Israel.
Netanyahu and his ministers calculated that no matter how hard they squeeze the hapless US taxpayers, themselves caught in the a profound economic crisis, and no matter how often the Israelis threaten to provoke a wider regional war and cause more American soldier casualties, they can always count on the unconditional support of the Zionist Power Configuration in the US to promote Israel’s interest. The entire US mass media applauded the Great Humiliator and even attacked the few American public figures as they (at least temporarily) defended American dignity against Israeli insults. The major Zionist leaders all rushed to support Israel’s humiliation of the US and to denigrate its critics. An endless parade of US politicians, editorial writers, columnists, opinion-makers, “think” tankers, and TV commentators demonstrated their special loyalty to Israel against an American president who was timidly seeking a negotiated peace in the Middle East.
The recent ‘conflict’ between Israel and America over peace in the Middle East –brought on by a crude Israeli provocation – exposed far more profound issues: At the center of power in America, there is an influential group of power-brokers willing to exploit and humiliate the American people in the service of a foreign power. In the past, patriots would have called them ‘traitors’.
Netanyahu’s Hubris ‘Rebuked’
In response to the official Washington show of anger, Netanyahu issued a half-hearted “explanation”: The problem was not the policy of building new settlements in violation of their agreement with Washington; the problem was the timing of the announcement. It was a regrettable “error” by a minor functionary in the Israeli Interior Ministry who made his announcement right after US Vice President Biden had finished groveling at Netanyahu’s feet and was busy pressuring the Palestinian Authority collaborators to rejoin the ‘peace’ charade sponsored by Washington. According to the Israeli media and their US mouthpieces it was a public relations breakdown, not a matter of strategic political and military significance affecting the US in the Middle East. In other words: With Biden out of Israel and collaborator Abbas back at the ‘table’, any announcement violating the “freeze on settlements” would be merely an Israeli “internal policy” and a “continuation of past practices”.
Netanyahu Comes to Washington: Backhanders for Obama, Cheers from AIPAC
Netanyahu, fresh from spitting on Vice President Biden in Tel Aviv, administered a series of humiliating ‘back-handed’ slaps in the smiling face of President Obama, right under the glaring lights of the mass media in the US capital.
Bibi Netanyahu delivered a rabble rousing speech to over 7,000 cheering Zionists at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, DC. He asserted Israel’s will to construct Jews-only housing throughout occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, repeating Israel’s illegal claim that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of the Jewish people. He then demanded and secured a two-hour meeting with Obama, despite his arrogant insult against the US Administration. Adding further humiliation to the already weak US President, the Israeli government announced another Jews-only housing project in Arab East Jerusalem to be built on confiscated Palestinian property. This announcement, just hours before the planned Bibi-Barack meeting, carried an additional threat that the White House charade of ‘peace negotiations’ would be put off the table if the Americans protested this new round of illegal construction. Netanyahu, demonstrating his utter contempt for the White House and the America people, went straight to the Zion-colonized US Congress and secured the House Majority leader Pelosi’s ‘unconditional support…’ for Israeli expansion. And, as if to celebrate its victory and establish its own definition of ‘peace’, the Israeli military assassinated four un-armed Palestinians, two impoverished job-seekers and two young teenage protesters.
Loyalty to the Israeli masters was evident when thousands of Zionists fanatics jumped to their feet and cheered Bibi Netanyahu’s crude repudiation of the American efforts to protect its soldiers’ lives by promoting a peace initiative. Hillary Clinton’s call for a ‘peace settlement based on two states for two people’ was met with dead silence. The entire Zionist-dominated media and all the leading Jewish organizations backed an unprecedented series of humiliations directed against the elected US Administration and the American people. Netanyahu’s demagogic display of Israeli power over the US Congress and the American mass media and his crude willingness to degrade US political leaders in the nation’s capital mocks the very notion of the American people having any voice in their nation’s policies and subordinates America’s military high command over issues of war and peace in the Middle East.
For Pelosi and the Zionized Congress, the thousands of campaign shekels from the AIPAC crowd to fund their re-elections are far more crucial to their careers than the lives and limbs of thousands of US soldiers lost to an agenda of Israel and its domestic Fifth Column.
Israel’s Arrogance Prejudices US Interests
Israel’s leaders not only raised their domestic prestige by undermining the US Administration’s peace initiatives, they also managed to extract billions of dollars from the US taxpayers. The humiliation of the Obama regime derailed efforts by the Pentagon and the State Department to regain influence and credibility among the conservative Arab regimes, non-Arab Muslim nations and among hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. This humbling of the US Administration by a sneering Netanyahu further jeopardizes the work and security of American businessmen and officials operating in the Middle East and undermines relations with their Muslim and Arab counterparts.
There will be major setbacks for the US in its efforts to gain support for its wars in the Middle East and South Asia and its propaganda campaign to discourage young Muslims from joining the anti-US resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. The symbolic image of Vice President wiping away Israeli spittle during an official visit will encourage thousands of young Muslims to resist US occupation, which they view as promoting Israel’s agenda. If an economically insignificant Israeli state can defy the superpower, why can’t they? The logic is simple: The greater the Israeli land-grab, the more submissive the Obama regime, the more extended and profound the hostility of the Muslim people against the Americans, the more emboldened the armed resistance movements and the greater the number of dead and maimed American soldiers stuck in wars promoted by the Zionists.
While the losses of American soldiers in the Middle East have never figured in Tel Aviv’s policy moves, nor influenced the activities of its Fifth Colum in the USA, these losses do affect millions of American families and over 200 million American taxpayers. Even an occasional American General finds the courage to point out that Israel’s colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people has prolonged the war, tied up hundreds of thousands of US troops and undermined the capacity of the US armed forces to successfully operate on multiple fronts to promote US imperial interests.
When the head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Petraeus’ team of senior officers, identified “Israeli intransigence” as “jeopardizing US standing and the lives of American solders in the region (Middle East)” in a briefing before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on January 16, 2010, Petraeus met an onslaught of severe questioning from the ZPC. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullens received the same rebuke from the powerful Israel-Firsters. This was not the first time US military and security considerations were subsumed to Israel’s agenda. Only two years earlier in 2007, the ZPC denounced and successfully buried the annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prepared by 16 US military and civilian intelligence agencies, which had concluded that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons and did not pose a major threat to the US, in favor of Israeli disinformation arguing the opposite. And the same ZPC has been taking the Obama regime to task for daring to criticize Netanyahu.
Over 300 members of the US Congress signed an extraordinary letter supporting Israel against their own Administration, pledging their commitment to “the unbreakable bond that exists between [U.S.] and the State of Israel”. Hundreds of congress men and officials joined the over 7,000 participants at the March 2010 AIPAC conference to cheer Netanyahu and witness the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hail the leader of the Israeli settler state – who had pledged “to continue building in all of Jerusalem just as it does in Tel Aviv”.
General David Petraeus, whose senior officers had expressed his concern about Israel’s policies undermining US military interests to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullins, was no match for AIPAC. The CENTCOM commander contacted his Israeli counterpart General Gabi Ashkenazi to repudiate his own criticism of Israeli policies and, in effect, pledge his unconditional support to the Jewish state even when it jeopardizes US troops.
In January, General Petraeus correctly identified how Israeli intransigence had damaged US interests and operations in the Middle East, infuriated Arabs and ultimately increased attacks on American troops. But in March, the politically ambitious General hastened to retract his briefing before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are few more cravenly disloyal spectacles in US military history than this be-medaled American general prostrating himself for the Zionist lobby.
And yet, for a brief moment, a few desperate anti-Zionists leftists, looked to General Petraeus and Admiral Mullen as potential allies against Israeli-Zionist control of US policy in the Middle East. They ignored the fact that these are the commanders in charge of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and were preparing to confront Iran. Petraeus’ difference with Israel was over specific policies as they undermined the smooth operations of the US war machine in the Middle East and his ‘recantation’ before the Israelis has certainly thrown cold water of this romantic fantasy of a ‘nationalist’ US General.
The tradition of ‘civilian supremacy’ in the US ensures that the military will never confront the issue of Zionist control over the Congress and White House. Petraeus’ briefing will soon be forgotten and the General’s subsequent repudiation is an eloquent example of the grotesquely opportunistic nature of the American high military command.
When civilian leaders point out how Israel’s oppression of 5 million Palestinians jeopardizes American lives and interests in the Middle East, the Zionist power configuration deflects attention from Israel and blames the US (and its ‘permissive’ society) for having instigated the growing Islamist movement, Arab hostility and attacks. When American military leaders, strategists and intelligence officers assert that Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians is a leading cause of regional conflict based on their decades of field expertise, the arm-chair Generals among the Zionists re-interpret this straightforward identification of Israeli policy with attacks on American interests and troops as “another point of view”. In the meantime the ZPC rounds up the usual Congressional or White House Israel Firsters to “disown” their own military.
Israel’s narrowly conceived colonial policy, the eviction of massive numbers of Palestinians and the land grabs to construct Jews-only colonial settlements, undermines US authority in the Middle East among its allies. Israel’s brazen willingness and ability to openly bash President Obama, thoroughly discredits the contention among liberal Zionist apologists like Noam Chomsky that Imperial Washington is “in command” of Western policy in the Middle East and is acting on behalf of much broader Euro-American interests.
In a wider context, Israel’s arrogance damages attempts by US private investors to broker oil deals for multi-national corporations. Arab oil countries, which see themselves as threatened by a regional militarist power like Israel, with its colonial expansion and hegemonic ambitions, are unlikely to cooperate with America, especially when the superpower is impotent to curb Israel’s worst excesses.
Israeli Colonial Ambitions and US Strategic Interests
For Israel and its Fifth Column backers none of the US strategic concerns are as important as the Jewish state’s colonial conquests and its regional projections of power. Nor are the interests of the American people given much consideration when they come in conflict with Israeli expansionist colonial goals. The ZPC never considers or even discusses the fact that Americans have suffered major losses as a result of Israel’s relentless pursuit of military-driven power in the Middle East.
Israel’s primary goal of grabbing land and dispossessing Palestinians goes against the post-colonial ethos of the American people, who experience increased hostility overseas. The only beneficiaries of Israel’s colonial expansion are the small but powerful 51 American Jewish Zionist organizations which identify with and are loyal to the Israeli state.
Israel’s unilateral military aggression and threats against neighboring countries, including Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and its cross-border covert assassinations, most recently in Dubai, are of great importance to Israeli militarists as Israel projects power in the Middle East. The self-esteem of Israel’s militarized citizens is directly linked to their policy of aggression and assassinations without regard to national sovereignty. On the other hand, Israeli power projections have undermined the US efforts to diplomatically expand its own sphere of influence and negotiate multi-billion dollar military sales, trade and investment agreements in the Middle East. The fact that Israeli policies have jeopardized millions of jobs for American workers is an issue of no importance to the Jewish state and its affluent Israel First backers in the US.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon forced the pro-US Hariri faction to form a coalition with the anti-imperialist Hezbollah political-military movement. Israel’s attempt to impose its will on Lebanon through its bombing campaign, torpedoed US diplomatic and political efforts to consolidate its influence with President Hariri.
Netanyahu’s successful bullying of Obama and Biden simply reinforced the ties between the pro-Western Lebanese and the anti-colonial Muslim left, in the face of Washington’s incapacity to constrain the Israeli ‘wildmen’ or resist the ‘internal rot’ eroding an independent American initiative: Better to join forces with Hezbollah, which after all fought Israel to a standstill in 2006.
Israel’s loyal accomplices in the US government have caused enormous damage to the US economy and threaten even greater loss of American lives, as Israel seeks to direct US policy toward Iran. Under the forceful and aggressive direction of Israel Firsters and the powerful Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Stuart Levey, every major US oil and gas company, bank, petroleum exploration and drilling firm and countless other business concerns have given up hundreds of billion dollars in lucrative economic trade and investment deals in the interest of Israel, which has extracted over $60 billion dollars of US taxpayer money and handouts and aid during the last decade.
Iran, which backed the US imperial attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, provided the US military with far more strategic assistance than all the Israeli advisers, ‘experts’ and contracted ‘interrogators’ in Baghdad and Iraqi ‘Kurdistan’ put together. Despite the US recognition of Iranian assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is demonized as ‘the enemy’ by Israeli agents within the US because Tehran opposes Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Israel’s Fifth Column churns out hundreds of articles a month demanding brutal economic sanctions against Iran and a pre-emptive military blitz aimed at destroying the Iranian economy and a nation of over 70 million. Every US military commander in the Middle East has acknowledged that an attack on Iran will expand the war, cut vital shipping of oil in the Persian Gulf plunging the world economy into recession, and threaten the lives of scores of thousands of American soldiers. They also are aware that the prospect of thousands of American casualties would not deter the 51 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, the AIPAC-controlled US Congress members, or the likes of Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey from promoting or provoking a war with Iran. The leading Israel-First advocates for war with Iran are unconcerned with the inevitable thousands of US military casualties and the millions of American jobs lost, as they promote the expansion and supremacy of “Greater Israel” in all its arrogance and glory throughout the Middle East.
Zionist Power Configuration: How Dare You Resist Humiliation!
Is it any wonder that, when visiting American leaders are openly insulted by the racist regime of Prime Minister ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, American Zionists automatically side with Israel and condemn those who protest in defense of American dignity?
The Daily Alert, principle bulletin of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, provides a useful compilation of the articles, editorials and government documents, defending Israel against the US Administration’s efforts to seek diplomatic solutions. From March 15 – 19, 2010 the Israeli-ZPC juggernaut released a remarkable propaganda offensive, vividly underscoring the immense power of the Zionist power configuration in the US. As soon as the White House publicly rebuked Prime Minister Netanyahu for insulting Vice President Biden during his official visit to Israel, the Zionist power configuration, claiming to speak for all the “Jewish communities”, came out in defense of Israel and attacked the Obama Administration. A barrage of articles, editorials and press conferences materialized overnight, with the usual parade of zombie-like Congressional mouthpieces parroting the Zionist line and applying direct pressure on the White House. This multi-prong Zionist offensive, under Netanyahu’s direction, was successful in persuading the White House to return to its characteristic belly-crawl: Clinton, Biden and the rest of their gang retreated, reasserting the US “unconditional defense of Israel”, declaring the ‘non-existence’ of the crisis and asserting the ‘rock solid’ American relationship with Israel. The chain of command is revealing: The Israeli state orders the Zionist power configuration into action; the mass media disseminates the line; Congress marches lock-step for the Zionists and the White House retreats. Delighted with their success, Zionist propagandists roll out their own polls claiming the US public support for Israel — a public saturated with Israeli manufactured and American Zionist trumpeted propaganda. Clearly what such “polls” measure is the effectiveness of a monolithic mass media campaign.
The propaganda tactics utilized in this blitzkrieg media campaign involved placing blame on the insulted victim and attacking “the Administration for sparking a full blown crisis” (Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2010). It went on to denounce the US Administration officials for “condemning” and “pushing” Israel (Washington Post, March 15 – 19, 2010). Other publications accused President Obama of ‘playing into the hand’ of Arab extremists and “fanning the flames” ,(Fox News and Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 2010). It was the US President, who had been “hindering the peace talks” by “encouraging Palestinian intransigence”. Haaretz, Israel’s liberal newspaper, which has published articles critical of the Israeli Occupation, released a series of articles, opinion pieces and editorials by ‘experts’ and ‘military strategists’ accusing the US Administration of “orchestrating the crises” (March 14, 2010) and called for the Israeli government not to ‘grovel’ by apologizing to the US Vice President (March 15). CBS claimed that “Obama was pushing the US-Israeli alliance to the brink” (March 15). And on March 17, the Boston Globe accused Obama of “aggravating Israel’s mistake”. AIPAC methodically contacted its usual Congressional flunkeys to denounce the White House for rebuking the Israeli government.
By March 19, the Washington Post had published over a dozen diatribes calling for US acceptance of Israel’s settlement expansion. Zionist think tanks and front groups with deceptive names, like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, blamed the displaced Palestinians for sabotaging “the peace process” by protesting the accelerated Israeli land confiscation and settlements (Scripps – Howard and Fox News, March 18, 2010). Predictably, the New York Times provided a slightly liberal gloss by calling for reconciliation and an end to the crises, while never mentioning the public Israeli humiliation of Vice President Biden or considering how Israel’s latest grab of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem might endanger US lives and interests. The Times ignored General Petraeus testimony before Congress and his briefing, critical of Israeli policy, before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while giving prominence to Netanyahu’s “peace talks” (March 18, 2010).
A few fissures have appeared in the pro-Israel monolith: David Axelrod, Obama’s chief adviser, condemned Netanyahu’s provocation as an “insult”; New York Times top columnist, Thomas Friedman, described the Israeli leaders as “drunken drivers”; and a leading US rabbi called for a building freeze in Jerusalem. These few liberal Zionist critics were overwhelmed by scores parroting ZPC ‘talking points’: Bronner and Sanger of the New York Times, Walter Mead of American (SIC) Interest and Goldberg of the New Yorker, among others.
The craven capitulation, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was inevitable. On March 16 Secretary Clinton declared that, “we have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people”. To prove her fealty to Israeli and Zionist interests, Clinton became featured speaker at the APAC Conference, March 21 – 26, 2010, sharing the platform with a triumphant Bibi Netanyahu.
Conclusion
Israel had to openly humiliate the US as a show of its power. Given Israel’s strategic domination of the US political system and the ZPC control over mass media and their enormous wealth, a Zionist-controlled administration, like Obama’s, would have to capitulate. Israeli and US Zionist pressure forced the American leaders to subordinate their international image and national self-respect and accept the unlimited expansion of Jews-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, no matter how this might undermine US standing in the region and jeopardize US troops. By ‘whipping’ the Obama Administration into line, Israel has set the stage for the launching of its top priority: Forcing a direct US military confrontation with Iran in Israel’s strategic interests. It is clear that the entire ZPC will stand with Israel as it promotes its militarist agenda against Iran, regardless of the consequences to the United States.
It has been proven beyond a doubt by the recent events, that the ZPC has the ultimate say with the Obama Administration, against the advice of top US military officials and against the basic interests of the American people. In plain English, we are a people colonized and directed by a small, extremist and militarist ‘ally’ which operates through domestic proxies, who, under any other circumstance, would be openly denounced as traitors.
Can the ZPC be defeated? They are the “most powerful lobby in Washington”, to whom Presidents, Administration officials, Generals and Congress people must submit or risk having their careers ruined and being ousted from public office. Meanwhile,outside of the United States, the international community openly despises Israel as a brutal, racist colonial state, a war criminal and chronic violator of human rights and international law. The Middle East Quartet, made up of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, has condemned Israel’s plan to build another 1,600 homes exclusively for Jewish extremist settlers in Arab East Jerusalem. The Quartet demanded “the speedy creation of a Palestinian state and the end to provocative actions”. But the ‘Quartet’ is powerless to stop Israeli plans. The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations tell their followers that global “anti-Semitism” motivates the ‘Quartet’. The huge AIPAC “Hail Israel” Conference in Washington D.C. in late March celebrated the triumph of unfettered Israeli expansionism.
Nevertheless, some Israelis are beginning to express unease. After their initial euphoria over Netanyahu’s slap-down of Biden and face-up to Clinton, there is growing fear of Israeli being ‘weaned’ away from the American treasury and losing their unfettered access to the US latest military technology. A poll published on March 19 in Yedroth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s biggest dailies, revealed that 46% of their readers responded that the government should freeze settlement building in East Jerusalem, much to the chagrin of the US Israel Firsters, who might in other circumstances, have labeled these Jews anti-Semites.
Fissures in the Zionist monolith are beginning to appear. These would deepen if and when the American public realizes that Israel’s’ dispossession of Palestinians is raising havoc with American lives and with American interests in a vital part of the world populated by 1.5 billion Muslim. As more issues arise, the critical choice between following the lead of the ZPC in pledging unconditional allegiance to Israel and enduring its provocations and humiliations, or standing up for the dignity, basic interests and integrity of America, will have to be made. More fissures will appear and the AIPAC and other members of the ZPC will be seen for what they are: Swaggering bullies acting on behalf of a foreign power.
Iran rejects US claim of arms aid to Afghan militants
Press TV – April 5, 2010
Iran has rejected accusations by the top US military commander that it is providing weapons to the militants in Afghanistan.
The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen claimed in a Kabul news conference that Iran has shipped arms to Taliban militants in Kandahar.
In a statement released on Monday, the Iranian Embassy in Kabul rejected the charges as “recurring allegations” and a sort of “fabrication” by the US in order to justify its defeat in Afghanistan.
The statement added that Washington is attempting to “deceive the public opinion” by accusing other countries of sending weapons to militants in the war-torn country.
It urged the US to “find more logical ways to fight terrorism rather than accusing others” of providing arms to the militants.
“Iran always supports the nation and the government of Afghanistan,” the embassy statement added.
The United States has frequently accused Iran of supplying aid to the Taliban militants in Afghanistan. Such claims come in face of the fact that the Taliban, which follow the radical Wahhabi sect, have opposed Iran since long ago and have murdered eight Iranian diplomats when they took over most of Afghanistan in the 1990’s.
“Iran is working to increase its influence in the area. On the one hand, that’s not surprising; she is a neighbor state, a neighbor country. On the other hand, the influence I see is all too often negative,” Mullen told a news conference during a visit to Kabul on Wednesday.
“I was advised last night about a significant shipment of weapons from Iran into Kandahar, for example,” Reuters quoted Mullen as saying.
How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan
By Glenn Greenwald | April 5, 2010
On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.
Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was “reported” by CNN on February 12:
Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an “honor killing.” The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an “unnamed senior military official said” about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:
An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.
The U.S. official said it isn’t clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.
“It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing,” said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .
The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity. A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.
Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were “varying accounts of what happened” among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon’s false version of events with no questioning. Here’s the NYT‘s February 12 article in its entirety:
Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed,” the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said the dead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.
CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYT simply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village — notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning. Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon’s claims were true before “reporting” them as fact; this is what Shah found:
However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.
A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as “U.S. special forces” surrounded the compound.
When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.
“Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him,” he said.
Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.
A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.
“Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry,” he said.
The Pentagon’s version of events was vehemently disputed from the start. But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT “reporting,” which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces. That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that “a combined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province’s Gardez district,” and “members of the combined force found the bodies inside.” Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way: “‘ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,’ ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said.” On March 16 — more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London — the NYT ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media’s original claims about what took place.
Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting by Afghans. Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):
US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official’s residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney’s office, and three women. . . .
But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night. “The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed,” the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .
When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed. “The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room.”
Note the crucial difference: the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon’s version of events. Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.
* * * * *
All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically. Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad. The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers’ claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity: until a video emerged proving the villagers’ claims were true and the Pentagon’s false. Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points: “to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.” And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.
At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this. Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail: (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war. Starkey wrote under this headline:
In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO’s claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:
The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.
NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .
It’s not the first time I’ve found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.
There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military’s monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are “cowards,” NATO attacks on civilians are “tragic accidents,” intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.
Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims: resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the “embed culture.” But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims. Illustratively, in response to Starkey’s March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was “categorically false.” As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming — falsely — that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise.
There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets. It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative report by the NYT‘s Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon’s false claims. But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American “journalism.” And no matter how many times this process is exposed — from Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight to Pat Tillman’s death by Al Qeada — this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.
‘Simpsons’ go to the ‘happiest place on earth’
By Barnabe Geisweiller on April 3, 2010
When I learned the Simpsons, America’s famous cartoon family, were going to Israel (S21E16), I thought: Oy vey!
The episode predictably glosses over the real Israel. All is well in cartoon Israel. The Muslims in Jerusalem are voiceless, sour-faced caricatures that prostrate themselves in the street (perhaps the Israeli security forces had sealed off the entrance to the Noble Sanctuary, home of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque). There is of course no mention of that dirty, little word: Palestine. No, Israel is the Holy Land, Jerusalem is “the happiest place on earth.”
But the writers of the episode seemed intent on doing more than just ignoring the reality of the 5 million Palestinians in Israel-Palestine: they thought it would be funny to diss them too.
The Simpsons’ Israeli tour guide takes the family straight to the Dome of the Rock, as though that was no big deal, and stupidly tells Marge: “OK, this shrine contains the rock on which Abraham was going to sacrifice his son. And Muslims believe something, too. To find out, hire a Muslim tour guide—that’s a barrel of laughs.”
But the real insult comes earlier on as the Simpsons land in Israel, and Krusty the Clown heads to the Gaza Strip Club. Get it? Gaza Strip. Gaza Strip Club. It’s comedic retardation, and it’s unbelievably insulting to the 1.5 million Palestinians forced to live there under an Israeli blockade. The Gaza Strip was intentionally de-developed after Israel withdrew its colonial-military infrastructure, and much of the strip was devastated by Israel’s offensive there over a year ago. To compare the Gaza Strip to something that is consider haram, meaning against God, in Islam, is an outrage. Could you imagine Krusty the Clown going to the Darfur Whore House, or the Haiti Bordello? No, people would be livid. But the Palestinians have been so thoroughly dehumanized in America that this tasteless joke raised no eyebrows.
Oh, I forgot to mention the special guest appearance. That was Sacha Baron Cohen playing the Israeli tour guide. The same guy that did this:
The Bomb-Bomb-Iran ‘Parlor Game’
Robert Parry | Consortium News | April 2, 2010
Normally, if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we’d tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression.
You might think that – unless you were told that the two nuclear-armed countries are Israel and the United States and the non-nuclear country is Iran. Then, different rules apply, especially it seems in leading American news outlets like the New York Times.
In what reads like a replay of the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Times and other major U.S. news media appear onboard for war, again happy to make the likely aggressors the “victims,” and to turn the prospect of a bloody conflict in a Muslim country into a parlor game.
Indeed, the New York Times on March 28 presented the idea of “imagining a strike on Iran” as “Washington’s grimmest but most urgent parlor game,” assessing how a military strike by Israel, “acting on its fears that Iran threatens its existence,” would play out.
That same day, the Times also led its front page with an alarmist story about Iranian atomic energy official Ali Akbar Salehi saying Iran might soon begin work on two new nuclear enrichment sites built into mountains to protect against bombings.
The article by reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad repeated a recurring falsehood in the Times, that it was President Barack Obama who “publicly revealed the evidence of a [previous] hidden site,” a hardened facility near Qum.
The actual chronology was that Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency about the non-operational Qum site on Sept. 21, four days before Obama joined with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in highlighting its existence.
At the time, the Obama administration spun Iran’s earlier disclosure of the Qum facility as having been prompted by Tehran’s awareness that the United States was onto the plant’s existence, but there was no independent evidence of that and the undisputed fact is that Iran disclosed the facility’s existence before Obama’s revelation.
Yet, the Times has now altered the chronology to put Obama’s announcement first, and thus cast Iran into a more sinister light.
Who’s the Victim?
The Times’ biased approach toward the Iranian nuclear issue is underscored further by the Times’ refusal to mention that the presumed “victim” in this story, Israel, possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated nuclear arsenals yet has neither publicly admitted that it has nukes nor signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Indeed, it is the fact that Iran is a treaty signatory — and renounces any interest in building a nuclear bomb — that is the basis for IAEA inspections of its facilities and for the legal requirement that it disclose new facilities, such as the one at Qum.
But the through-the-looking-glass quality of the Times coverage is that it portrays Israel as the “victim,” although it is a rogue nuclear-weapons state and refuses to abide by international inspections or other safeguards, restrictions that Iran accepts.
Even more remarkable, Israel is openly contemplating bombing Iran, an act that supposedly would be justified by Israel’s assertion that a possible Iranian nuclear bomb would represent “an existential threat” to Israel.
It is true that some Iranian leaders favor a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse, i.e. making the territory of Israel and the West Bank into a non-religious state where both Jews and Arabs would live as equals. Israel also has cited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s wish that the “Jewish state” would disappear.
This claim of an “existential threat,” in turn, has become the rationale for Israel openly plotting to bomb Iran and its nuclear facilities.
On March 28, David Sanger wrote a “Week in Review” story about the unabashed discussions underway in Tel Aviv and Washington about the geopolitical consequences of attacking Iran, doing what Sen. John McCain once playfully sang about as “bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”
Sanger’s article noted that in 2008, “the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran’s … nuclear sites. They were turned down, but the request added urgency to the question: Would Israel take the risk of a strike? And if so, what would follow?
“Now that parlor game question has turned into more formal war games simulations. The [U.S.] government’s own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy [a neoconservative adjunct] at the Brookings Institution created its own in December.”
The war game, directed by Kenneth M. Pollack, assumed that Israel would attack Iran without notifying the Obama administration, which would then demand that Israel halt the bombing even as Washington beefed up its own military forces in the Persian Gulf.
As the war game played out, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli targets and Saudi oil fields, spiking oil prices and pushing the United States toward the brink of its own attacks to destroy Iran’s military capability to disrupt oil supplies. At that point – a hypothetical eight days into the conflict – the war game ended.
It would seem that if the Times truly wanted to provide an objective assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue – including Tehran’s possible motives for wanting a nuclear bomb – the Times would routinely make reference to the region’s rogue nuclear states of Israel, India and Pakistan.
That the Times typically ignores that key fact suggests the Times sees its journalism on Iran as similar to its credulous reporting about Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, more as propaganda than as a fair-minded presentation of the relevant facts.
What War with Iran Means
By Patrick J. Buchanan | April 02, 2010
“Diplomacy has failed,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told AIPAC, “Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that.”
“We have to contemplate the final option,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., “the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
War is a “terrible thing,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., but “sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time.”
Graham then describes the war we Americans should fight:
“If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion. The Iran government’s ability to wage conventional war against its neighbors and our troops in the region should not exist. They should not have one plane that can fly or one ship that can float.”
Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, Neocon Central, writes, “The only questions remaining, one Washington politico tells me, are who starts it, and how it ends.”
As to who starts it, we know the answer. Tehran has not started a war in memory and is not going to launch a suicide attack on a superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons. As with Iraq in 2003, the war will be launched by the United States against a nation that did not attack us — to strip it of weapons it does not have.
But to Graham’s point, if we are going to start this war, prudence dictates that we destroy Iran’s ability to fight back. At a minimum, we would have to use air strikes and cruise missiles to hit a range of targets.
First, Iran’s nuclear facilities such as the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, the U.S.-built reactor that makes medical isotopes, the power plant at Bushehr, the centrifuge facility near Qom and the heavy-water plant at Arak.
Our problem here is that the last three are not even operational and all are subject to U.N. inspections. There are Russians at Bushehr. And there is no evidence that diversion to a weapons program has taken place.
If Iran has secret plants working on nuclear weapons, why have we not been told where, and demanded that U.N. inspectors be let in? Why did 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, three years ago, tell us they did not exist and Iran gave up its drive for a nuclear weapon in 2003?
If Iran is on the “verge” of a bomb, as Schumer claims, the entire U.S. intelligence community should be decapitated for incompetence.
This week, in a hyped headline, “CIA: Iran capable of producing nukes,” the Washington Times said that a new CIA report claims, “Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.”
Excuse me, but this is mush. We could say the same of a dozen countries that use nuclear power and study nuclear technology.
But let us continue with Graham’s blitzkrieg war.
To prevent a counterattack, the United States would have to take out Iran’s 14 airfields and all its warplanes on the ground. We would also have to sink every warship and submarine in Iran’s navy and destroy some 200 missile, patrol, and speedboats operated by the Revolutionary Guard, else they would be dropping mines and mauling our warships.
Also, it would be crucial on day one to hit Iran’s launch sites and missile plants for, like Saddam in 1991, Iran would probably attack Israel, to make it an American and Israeli war on an Islamic republic.
Among other critical targets would be the Silkworm anti-ship missile sites on Iran’s coastline that would menace U.S. warships and oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Any Iranian attack on ships or seeding of mines would likely close the gulf and send world oil prices soaring.
Revolutionary Guard barracks, especially the Quds Force near Iraq, would have to be hit to slow troop movement to and across the border into Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers and civilians. The same might be necessary against Iranian troops near Afghanistan.
With Iran’s ally Hezbollah in south Beirut, all U.S. civilians should probably be pulled out of Lebanon before an attack lest they wind up dead or hostages. And how safe would Americans be in the Gulf region, especially Bahrain, home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, a predominantly Shi’ite island?
And whose side would Shi’ite Iraq take?
Would we have to intern all Iranian nationals in the United States, as we did Germans and Italians in 1941? How many terror attacks on soft targets in the USA could we expect from Iranian and Hezbollah agents in reprisal for our killing thousands of civilians in hundreds of strikes on Iran?
Before the War Party stampedes us into yet another war, the Senate should find out if Tehran is really on the “verge” of getting a bomb, and why deterrence, which never failed us, cannot succeed with Iran.
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Obama Can Stop Funding Illegal Settlements
Pull the Jewish Agency’s US Tax Exemption, and the Settlement Problem Goes Away
By Grant Smith | April 02, 2010
President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton have been uncharacteristically frank about how illegal Israeli settlements obstruct prospects for Middle East peace. General Petraeus went even further, advising a reluctant Congress that Arab perceptions of one sided US support for Israel actually harms US national security and endangers troops. It is now time for President Obama to cut off hidden US funding — private and public — to illegal Israeli settlements.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee marshaled all of its congressional beneficiaries of Israel lobby campaign contributions. AIPAC demands [pdf] the administration stop publicly confronting Israel, take the dispute behind closed doors and get back to the AIPAC agenda against Iran [pdf]. But Obama long ago stated backroom deals with the Israel lobby were off the table, because such deals have a track record — like illegal settlements — of derailing efforts toward peace in the region.
Both Israel and its US lobby have long followed the doctrine that transgressions committed to advance Israeli interests would never be prosecuted in the United States. David Ben-Gurion established an enormous US arms procurement, theft, and smuggling network [pdf] — violating scores of US export controls [pdf] in the 1940s — during his visits to the United States as an officially registered foreign agent of the Jewish Agency beginning in September of 1943. The Jewish Agency, a nonprofit corporation established to realize Theodore Herzl’s vision of a Jewish State in Palestine has constantly clashed with Presidents and the US Department of Justice not only over arms smuggling but money laundering into the US for covert lobbying and public relations campaigns, and failing to disclose its secret covenants with the Israeli government in mandatory US foreign agent activity reports. More recently the Jewish Agency and its twin sister (the World Zionist Organization) were identified in a lengthy official 2005 report by Israeli prosecutor Thalia Sasson as being at the very core of illegal settlement activity — a secret venture that has laundered $50-60 billion according to USA Today.
Historically both the Jewish Agency and its US startups dodged accountability by changing shell corporations like agile hermit crabs. AIPAC scuttled out from under the protective shell of the American Zionist Council a mere six weeks [pdf] after the Department of Justice ordered its parent to register as the foreign agent of the Jewish Agency in 1962. The Jewish Agency-American Section, which laundered funds into the AZC, also claimed to the DOJ that it “reconstituted itself” into two unique and separate organizations after damning Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigators and US watchdogs caught it failing to properly file declarations of its secret ties to the Israeli government. But even in 1970, the DOJ found this claimed rehabilitation to be “very sketchy” [pdf]. Today the Jewish Agency still claims to somehow be separate from its sister organization, the World Zionist Organization, even though one director heads “both” organizations, provides all of the funding and shares the same physical facilities. Arcane Jewish Agency history is important to Americans. As in the 1960s, US tax-exempt funds donated to the Jewish Agency are still quietly recycled back into the United States through the World Zionist Organization’s American Section, itself conveniently located in the same New York office building as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Their major function is lobbying the White House and organizing AIPAC’s executive committee.
Israel’s leaders and lobbyists have long used intricate wire diagrams to obfuscate through complexity blatantly obvious (and unlawful) activities. In the past, this has assuaged compliant US regulators during times of crisis. The alphabet soup of ever changing, similar sounding Israel lobby organizations is as confusing to average Americans as it is to regulators — and that’s because it’s designed to be that way. The Jewish Agency let lose another wire diagram in 1971 as it tried to convince skeptical Department of Justice officials that it would behave and stop infiltrating the US advice and consent process through covert lobbying and public relations campaigns. Benjamin Netanyahu recently foisted one on Obama to show how he couldn’t possibly be held accountable for the timing of the infamous 1,600 East Jerusalem housing units. These ploys have grown very, very tiresome.
Analysis of cash flows confirms that funds for illegal settlement expansion continues to move from the US like water — pumped by US tax exemptions for committed donors as well as through Congressional siphoning of unsuspecting US taxpayers. The Jewish Agency received at least $140 million in tax-favored donations in 2008 from US charitable federations. Congress allocates $40 million a year in US taxpayer contributions to the Jewish Agency, but exercises no real oversight into how it actually uses the funds. In addition to building illegal settlements, the Jewish Agency funds think tanks such as the Jewish People Policy Institute, which Dennis Ross established in 2002 and chaired before joining the Obama administration to spearhead efforts against Iran. The Jewish Agency has long been the world’s largest quasi governmental nonprofit corporation, its budget was $592 million in 2007.
It is no secret that United Jewish Communities is the currently the designated lead US nonprofit funding umbrella for federations providing unrestricted funds to the Jewish Agency — though it has never revealed this simple fact in its mandatory public IRS filings. US tax exemptions are supposed to be granted only to promote social welfare within designated US municipalities. Land grab campaigns against foreign nations with which the US is at peace are not even legal, much less a charitable activity. Tax exemptions for feeder funds and the Jewish Agency itself were granted so long ago the IRS doesn’t even remember [pdf] precisely what justified many of them. No new wire diagrams, appeals for secrecy, or shell company reorganizations can obscure the fact that US tax exemptions and tax dollars have long been misused to create “facts on the ground” that imperil US national security.
No unit of government is more responsible for enabling illegal settlement money laundering than the US Treasury Department. In the days of Henry Morgenthau Jr., opaque Treasury busybodies even helped and ferried pre-state terrorists through Europe and into the US — just as today they quietly wage economic warfare on Iran beyond the reach of broad public scrutiny or the Freedom of Information Act. In 1968, two years after the AZC foreign agent battle ended, AIPAC applied for a tax exemption. The Internal Revenue Service of the Treasury Department not only granted it two months later, but made it retroactive to 1954 so that AIPAC could lay claim to a much longer existence than actual corporate filings or the press record warrant. AIPAC then happily conducted the AZC’s business as usual as if the 1962 DOJ foreign agent registration order never happened — what maneuverability the DOJ temporarily took from the Israel lobby, the US Treasury Department permanently restored.
Today public complaints about the Israel lobby’s charitable money laundering are treated with the same contempt Harry Markopolos experienced years ago when he tried to warn the Securities and Exchange Commission about the Madoff Ponzi scheme. US political appointees at Treasury in a position to make a difference simply refuse to receive petitions in Washington, much less enforce the law. Although IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman was recently urged to tackle tax exempt donation laundering on National Public Radio, only action against Muslim charities is carried out behind the impenetrable wall of bureaucratic Treasury disinterest. Dwight Eisenhower once threatened to cut off such misused tax exemptions and Treasury enablers — like Ike, ending US illegal settlements funding is something only president Obama can do.
President Obama should revoke the Jewish Agency’s 1948 US tax exemption. This would immediately shut down all US charities acting as feeder funds and throw into question the deductibility of individual US donor contributions. This strong message would be timely, but generate some political backlash. Israel lobbyists inside and outside the federal government exploit elected American politicians’ own insatiable thirst for campaign contributions from the tributaries of this massive slush fund — politicians know they are only welcome to partake if they unconditionally support Israel and its lobby — no matter the cost to their American constituents.
But canceling all US tax exemptions for major charitable Jewish Agency feeder funds until Israel takes the necessary steps toward peace wouldn’t necessarily be controversial if American donors and concerned citizens are properly educated. Sordid recent events may even convince grassroots donors to welcome an Obama ban — donors are often held in pure contempt by elite Israel lobby officialdom anyway. Their donations have been constantly misused for nonexempt political activities and unlawful attempts to subvert the advice and consent participation in government of their fellow countrymen. The most toxic donor contempt is perhaps no clearer than in former lobbyist Steven J. Rosen’s insistence that AIPAC pay him $20 million from its coffers for what appears to be an illegal attempt to unlawfully influence US policy toward Iran through purloined classified US national defense information. AIPAC’s grassroots donors probably wouldn’t have knowingly relinquished their funds to pay AIPAC’s legislative director Ester Kurz to mishandle and improperly dispose of classified US trade secrets either — legitimate American charitable organizations simply don’t behave this way.
Obama must also permanently end all US taxpayer support to the Jewish Agency. By quietly funding an entity with such a long history of arms smuggling, illicit US lobbying, propagandizing, and illegal settlement expansion, the Jewish Agency and its US lobby have compromised Congress and turned every American taxpayer into an unwitting accomplice.
Read more by Grant Smith:
- Israel’s Lobby Imposes Crippling Sanctions on America — Again – March 11th, 2010
China Denies Backing Iran Sanctions
US Claims of Consensus Denied by Russia, China
By Jason Ditz | April 01, 2010
Yesterday’s claims that the Chinese government had, after months of US cajoling, finally agreed to support sanctions against Iran appear to be premature, and China has reiterated its past position that diplomacy, not sanctions, should resolve the issue.
“We will strengthen communication with other parties and engage all parties to promote a proper resolution by diplomatic means,” insisted Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.
Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi insisted that China’s position had not changed at all, and he met today with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili about the issue.
Russian officials also issued a statement saying that they supported “focused and selective” sanctions, which is largely in keeping with their previous statements in opposition to the broader package of “crippling” economic sanctions sought by the US.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed earlier this week that there was a “consensus” on the need for sanctions and claimed specifically that China had a “growing awareness” of the importance of the move.
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How Ukraine Tortured and Slaughtered Donbass
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Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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