The mask is off
By Sucheta Chatterjee | Online Journal | October 6, 2010
This note is an expression of the shock and disappointment that assailed large sections of Indians in the aftermath of the Ayodhya verdict. The judgment of the Honourable Allahabad High Court appears to be a clean break from the secular traditions of India, where a judicial body has openly intervened on behalf of the people of a particular religious faith and has failed to uphold its role as that of a rational, impartial arbiter.
The land suit in question appears to have been decided on the basis of faith rather than of fact. The judgment has erroneously concluded that Ayodhya was the birthplace of the Hindu mythological character, Ram, because Hindus believe so. The court has delved deep into the evidence placed forth about the fact that Hindus believe Ayodhya to be the birthplace of ‘Lord Ram’ and has concluded that thereby Lord Ram was born in Ayodhya, effectively converting mass belief into a fact, in defiance of logic. This conclusion appears to be all the more absurd in the absence of evidence to prove that Lord Ram was actually a historical character and not just a mythological one. The court appears to have flirted extensively with theology while choosing not to dwell upon the legal aspects of possession and adverse possession of the land concerned. If the judgment had been based exclusively on legal tenets, which is what one expects from the judiciary of a democratic nation, the judgment would have swung the other way because since the Mughal period, the so-called disputed land has housed a mosque.
The court has needlessly delved into the question of whether the said place of worship was used regularly or not, ignoring the fact that in 1949, Hindu fascist groups forcibly entered the mosque, placing Hindu idols in it and thereby creating a ‘dispute’ which prompted the government to lock the premises, declare the matter sub-judice and prevent Muslims from offering prayers therein. Besides, the act of placing idols within the precincts of the mosque was considered an act of desecration of their holy place by Muslims. Not once has the court condemned the act of illegality that took place in 1949. Instead, it set upon itself the task of correcting historical wrongs, dating back to the pre-Mughal period, based on a flawed ASI report that has been discredited by reputed historians the world over. Such flagrant interventionism on behalf of a powerful segment of the Hindu populace has ripped the mask of secularism off the judiciary’s face. We would also like to add that the principle of ‘superior fundamental right,’ as espoused by Justice Sharma to rule that Hindus have a superior right of worship at the concerned spot, appears to have been gravely misinterpreted in this case. The legal precedent set by this judgment has only given birth to a hornet’s nest and legitimised the ascendance of faith over reason, of politics over justice.
The grief and bewilderment caused by the political judgment will only foment a lingering sense of injustice among the minority community, which has been treated contemptuously and has been parcelled out a third of land, almost as if it were being given gratuitously. The most distressing part of the judgment is that while the court has taken upon itself the mission of setting right ill-documented and doubtful historical wrongs, not once has it condemned the criminal act of demolishing the Babri Masjid, perpetrated by right-wing Hindutva factions, under the guidance of leaders of national stature and reputation. It appears that truth and justice have been the chief casualties of a misguided attempt at reconciliation.
Sucheta Chatterjee is a lawyer by profession, currently based in Bombay and the author of ‘Impotent Ire.’
Iran War: United States Military Versus Israel Firsters
By James Petras | November 27, 2007
Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight and mount instead a diplomatic assault? – Leonard Fein, Forward
Introduction
As the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, opposing a new Middle East War. While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig, November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict, attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a more stringent and accurate assessment puts the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate.
There is a great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they concern the future of the United States.
Recent History of the Civilian Militarists versus Anti-War Movements
Over the past seven years, the civilian militarists in the executive branch and Congress have resoundingly defeated any and all efforts by Congressional critics and anti-war leaders to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, the peace movement has practically vanished from the streets – in large part a product of its own self-destruction. The great majority of anti-war leaders opted for Democratic Party-electoral politics, a strategy that led to the successful election of a pro-war Democratic majority. The retreat of the anti-war movement turned into a full-scale rout when the government moved toward a new war with Iran: the Zionist-influenced half of the peace movement refused to join forces to oppose the Iran war agenda – heavily influenced by their loyalty to Israel and its shrill cries of an ‘existential’ danger from non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons and dependent on ‘liberal’ Zionist donors.
Along with the capitulation of the anti-war leaders and absence of any street politics, liberal Democrats, or what passes for them, fell into line with the Israel First Democratic congress-people pushing for an increasingly bellicose political agenda toward Iran. The White House, especially the Vice President’s office were fully in tune with the Israel Firsters and the ZPC keeping the ‘military option’ on the table and priming the US forces in the Gulf for offensive action. Within the military and the intelligence services strong opposition emerged to an attack on Iran.
American Military Versus the ZPC Fight over Middle East Wars
The battle between the civilian militarists (Zion-Cons) in the Pentagon and the military brass took place, in large part, behind closed doors: From the beginning, the military was severely handicapped in so far as they could not engage in public debate. The military elite did not possess an army of lobbyists, activist ideologues and the entire mass media apparatus to promote their point of view. The ZPC-Israel Firsters’ Wars-For-Israel crowd did have all of these resources in abundance, and they used them to the maximum in a spiteful and arrogant fashion, when the occasion arose – such as when military officers testifying before Congress questioned the war-to-be in Iraq. Zion-militarists like Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz and their influential cohort baited the military for having “the most advanced arms and refusing to use them”, of being fearful of expending troops to defend US security interests in the Middle East, of being ultra-cautious when audacity and preemptive action was necessary.
The Israel-Firsters, who not only never risked a broken fingernail on any battlefield, deprecated the generals to increase their power to order them around through their servile operatives in the Rumsfeld Pentagon, Vice President’s Office and in Bush’s National Security Council. The Zion-Cons’ arm-chair military strategists have absolutely no qualms in sending US troops to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran to enhance Israeli regional power because 99.8% of the rank and file troops are not of their kin and kind. On the contrary they ridicule the US military precisely to prosecute wars and avoid the loss of Israeli-Jewish lives, resulting from an Israeli attack on Iran to enhance its power in the Middle East.
Israel-Firsters Win Round One
For all of the above-enumerated reasons, the Israel-Firsters overcame the doubts and questions on the war by the military in the run-up to and continuation of the Iraq War. The ZPC’s success in launching the war over military objections was largely due to their control over US civilian institutions and the primacy of these institutions over any and all military political dissent. However the ZPC was not content with repressing civilian dissent, they aggressively repressed and silenced any opposition from within the military:
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army saw his career destroyed when he questioned US policy on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Two years later, General Peter Pace was denied a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he rejected claims by the White House and the ZPC that Iran was supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgents.
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was retired following his call for the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, which he later described as “a nightmare with no end in sight”.
General John Abazaid followed. Captains and Colonels in the Pentagon who disagreed with the lies and fabrication of ‘intelligence’ by the Zion-Cons in the Pentagon leading to the Iraq invasion were marginalized and/or silenced.
CIA: Zion-Cons in the Pentagon marginalized CIA intelligence reports that didn’t fit in with their war propaganda – these studies were-written, cut and spliced to serve their ends. The Zion-Cons in the Pentagon established a parallel ‘intelligence’ office under their exclusive control (Office of Special Planning) and placed one of their own, Abraham Shumsky, in charge.
In the Zion-Con charge to push the US into a new war with Iran, they (along with Vice President Cheney) have successfully delayed and forced the rewrite of a collective report by various intelligence agencies, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, because it had to fit in with their war plans.
The humiliating defeats and gratuitous public insults which the victorious ZPC inflicted on the US military has had the effect of raising the back of senior officers in the run-up to a military attack on Iran. The military is going public and fighting back with biting open criticism of the White House and Zion-Con war planners. The underlying deep and widespread hostility of the high-ranking military officials has nothing to do with Zion-Con charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ and everything to do with the destruction, demoralization and discredit of the US military which has resulted from following Zion-Con war policies in Iraq.
The US armed forces have crumbled and decayed as the Iraq occupation and counter-insurgency progresses into its 6th year. Over half of the officers are refusing to re-enlist, recruiting quotas are not being reached except by drastically lowering standards, and morale of on-duty reservists is at it’s lowest because of extended tours of duty. Black enlistment has dropped precipitously. Despite the war being portrayed by President Bush and Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Olmert as for Israel’s national survival, American Jewish war-time enlistment is at its lowest in almost a century.
Public sentiment for the military has declined sharply since the war, exacerbated by Zionist (Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk) charges of incompetence against American military occupation forces. The loss of prestige, enlistment and the increasing over-stretch of the army and the abrasive and domineering way in which the Zion-Cons denigrate active US military commanders has raised their ire. At one point in an interview, General Tommy Franks referred to Zion-Con, ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith as ‘the dumbest bastard I ever knew’.
Round Two: American Military Versus Israel-Firsters: The Iran War
Recognizing how they were outgunned by the Zion-Con monopoly of public space for political discussion in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the military has gone public. Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM (Central Command) has launched a series of interviews designed to counter-Zion-Con war propaganda. He has formed an anti-War-With-Iran alliance with senior military officers, Secretary of Defense Gates and sectors of the intelligence services not under Zion-Con influence (Financial Times Nov. 12, 2007 p.1). The Secretary of Defense is not a reliable ally to the officers opposed to an Iran war, since he is notorious for caving in to ZPC pressure when his post in under threat.
Every major Israeli public spokes-person has at least raised the issue of a sneak attack (translation: ‘preventive war’ in Zion-speak) and many are in favor of an immediate attack. Reliable sources in Israel claim that war preparations are already advanced.
Fabricating ‘existential threats’ to Israeli existence, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has spoken forcefully even shrilly, about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ a much repeated, deliberate mistranslation of the Prime Minister’s reference to Israel (more reliable translations refer to ‘the regime currently occupying Jerusalem disappearing into history’).
While Israeli officials have placed war with Iran as their second most important priority on their foreign policy agenda, by far their highest priority is convincing and manipulating the US to carry out the war and save Israel the enormous economic cost and loss of Israeli lives. The Israeli state has made its war policy the central task for their agents and their apparatus in the US. The ZPC has taken up the Israeli line with a vengeance. Several hundred full-time functionaries from all the major Jewish organizations have visited and ‘advised’ Congress that bellicose support for a war against Iran is the primary way to demonstrate their unconditional defense of Israel’s ‘survival’ and guarantee campaign financing from their wealthy political donor base.
Over the past year, several major daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines from the New York Times through Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and the entire yellow press (NY Post, New York Sun, The Daily News) have published reams of propaganda articles fabricating an Iranian nuclear threat, demonizing Iran and its leaders and calling for the US to bomb Iran and eliminate Israel’s ‘existential’ (the most nauseating and overused cliche) threat.
Several thousand op-ed pieces have been written parroting the Israeli war-line by a small army of Zionist academics and think tank propagandists. Breathless and vitriolic, the Israel Firsters claim that ‘time is running out’, that Iran’s pursuit of diplomacy is a ploy for inaction, that Iran’s well-documented openness to negotiations is a trick. Venomous attacks are launched against Europeans for not pursuing the military option; Germany is slandered as following in the footsteps of the Nazis because its industries and banks still do business with Iran. US critics of the ZPC’s pursuit of an Iranian war for Israel are accused of being ‘soft on terrorism’, appeasers, and almost always labeled as overt or covert ‘anti-Semites’.
The massive, sustained and one-sided dominance by the ZPC of the Iranian war narrative has been successful. US public opinion surveys show over half (52% according to a Zogby Poll) of the US public is in favor of offensive bombing of Iran. Thus speaks the State of Israel via its overbearing politically dominant Fifth Column to the American People: The purpose of the USA is to serve and sacrifice for the greater good (and power and wealth and dominance) of Israel.
The clearest and most vicious Zion-Con counter-attack against the US military’s harsh reaction to their leading us into the Iraq War came from a predictable ultra-Zionist think-tank, the Foreign Policy Research Center (FPRC) run by Ilan Berman, a close collaborator with the Israeli extremist Likud leader Netanyahu. Speaking at a meeting co-sponsored by the FPRC and the Reserve Officers Association on October 15 2007 entitled Mind the Gap: Post-Iraq Civil-Military Relations in America, senior fellow Frank Hoffman attempted to turn senior military officers’ criticism of the disastrous Zion-Con authored Iraq War into a sinister military plot:
The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging ‘stab-in-the-back’ thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact (sic) and code of conduct (sic) that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy (the Zion-Cons) and the dedicated servants (the military) we ask to carry it out. (Dereliction of Duty Redux?).
Hoffman attempts to deflect military and public anger at the enormous damage in morale, recruitment and lives which the Zion-Con war policies have inflicted on the US Armed Forces by invoking an abstract entity: “Our collective failure (sic) to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security” (ibid)
Obfuscating Zionist control over war policy, Hoffman instead refers to ‘civilian’ control over the military as being “constitutionally, structurally (?) and historical well-grounded.” This is nonsense: there is no provision, article or clause in the American Constitution which states that the military should submit to civilian power subordinate to a foreign state.
After a vacuous general discussion of civilian-military relations in the lead-up to the Zion-Con designed Iraq War, Hoffman then tries to paint the military critics of Zion-Con Donald Rumsfeld as attacking an innovative defender of civilian supremacy over the military – even as he embraced wholesale torture techniques and violated every principle of the Geneva Convention of War and US Military Code of Conduct toward prisoners and civilians.
Hoffman turns up the Zion-Con venom against military officers who dared to question Rumsfeld’s application of Israel’s illegal and totalitarian technique of colonial warfare in Iraq. He then launches a diatribe against the professional competence of senior military advisers, “who failed to provide military counsel because they were intimidated ‘yes men’ or who failed to recognize the complexity of war” (ibid).
Berman’s prodigy, Hoffman, makes a case that the Zion-Con ‘masters of Iraq war policy’ were not responsible for the disastrous war – it was the military officers “who failed to provide candid advice, who fail in their duty to their immediate superiors and stay in their posts (who) are guilty of dereliction of duty to the President, the Congress and their subordinates.” (ibid) The same Zion-Cons who drove out and forced the resignation of American generals who had dissented with Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Rumsfeld are now judged and condemned for dereliction of duty by the same Zion-Cons.
The Zion-Cons follow the Goebbels principle
“The Big Lie repeated often enough can convince the stupid masses.”
The Berman-Hoffman FPRC counter-attack against American military officers speaking truth to power is a limp effort to deflect attention from the Zion-Con policymakers’ treasonous behavior and their role in degrading the US military. The FPRC document blaming the military and unnamed civilians (exclusively non-Zionist) for the Iraq debacle is one of the numerous variants on the same theme by Zionist academic militarists justifying the power of the ZPC in the name of civilian supremacy, without spelling out the national loyalties of the ‘civilian’ masters of career military officers.
According to a detailed report published in the Financial Times (November 12, 2007), the US military is not buying the Zion-Con line:
“Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said that while dealing with Iran was a ‘challenge’ a military strike was not in the offing.” (Page 1 and 9)
Backed by many active senior officers and numerous retired generals, Fallon has dismissed the Zion-Con intellectuals and propagandists as ignorant war-mongers. In his own words: “It astounds me that so many pundits and other s are spending so much time yakking about this topic (of a military attack on Iran)” (FT: November 12, 2007 p.9).
In direct repudiation of the ZPC’s frenetic campaigning for economic sanctions leading to a military attack, top US military officials and even Secretary of Defense Gates have for the time being blocked the military option. Addressing the Zionist strategy of sequential wars against Israel’s enemies (Iran, Syria, Lebanon), Fallon stated: “It seems to me that we don’t need more problems”. His remarks are understood to reflect the views of the majority of senior officers in the Middle East combat zone but not Bush’s politically ambitious General Petraeus, who worked with his Israeli-Mossad partners (in Northern Iraq) in training and arming the Kurdish militia death squads – Peshmerga.
Retired Generals Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar, both former heads of CENTCOM, have pointed their fingers at the menace of the Zion-Cons and Israel-Firsters in the government. According to Gen. Hoar,
“There is no doubt that an element in the government wants to strike Iran. But the good news is that the Secretary of Defense and senior military are against it” (FT November 12, 2007).
The forced and voluntary retirement, including the indictment and jailing of some highly placed Zion-Cons in the Pentagon, White House, Treasury and State Departments have weakened their stranglehold over US policy in the White House. The top Zion-Con policymakers who have left or are in jail include Rumsfeld (Gentile Zionist), Wolfowitz, Feith, Franklin, Shumsky, Perle – in the Pentagon; Irving Libby, Wurmser, Ari Fleicher, Frum in the White House and many others too numerous to name.
While the Zion-Cons retain power in the higher circles of government, at this moment, they are not able to run roughshod over their military critics and opponents as they did in the run-up to the Iraq war. In part this is because of the horrendous situation resulting from their war in Iraq, which has undermined their credibility and turned the vast majority of the US public against their war. Equally the Zion-Cons’ war and the disastrous impact of a prolonged (5 year) urban guerrilla resistance on the US Armed Forces, in terms of loss of personnel, morale, junior and senior officers and the over-extension of the US military to the detriment of the defense of the US Empire’s interests around the world has served as a wake-up call for senior military command.
Drawing on their experience from the invasion of Iraq, few if any accept the Israeli-Zion-Con evaluations of the outcome and response to a military attack. They remember too well the optimistic propaganda put out by Zionist academic ideologues like Kagan and Cohen that the Iraqis will celebrate and welcome American forces into Baghdad as liberators.
According to a report in the Financial Times, retired General Zinni speaking for the many active senior officers says:
“… even a limited American attack could push Teheran to retaliate in a number of ways such as firing missiles at Israel, Saudi oilfields and US bases in Iraq, mining the Straits (sic) of Hormuz and activating sleeper terrorist cells around the world.” (FT op cit).
He concluded by pointing out, “It is not a matter of a one-strike option.” A more circumspect criticism of the Iran war reasoning has been voiced by Admiral Mike Muller. He objected to the US-Israeli agents “putting the military option on the table”. Admiral Muller added,
“We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now. We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.”(FT Op Cit).
Israeli Sneak Air Attack
One of the biggest dangers in forcing the US into a war with Iran is an Israeli sneak air attack, in which it destroys Iranian military installations causing Iran to retaliate against the US, Israel’s ally, main financier and armaments supplier. An Israeli air strike is not the only war provocation – the Mossad is deeply in involved in training Kurdish commandos to carry out terrorist cross-border attacks from Iraq, killing Iranian civilians and soldiers, bombing military installations and collecting intelligence, hoping to provoke a large-scale Iranian military response against ‘Kurdistan’. Iranian retaliation against Mossad trained Kurdish terrorists could then be twisted by Zion-Con ideologues and their political elements in Washington (to quote Admiral Fallon) into a major invasion of Iraq, with the hope of convincing the Bush White House to “counter-attack in defense of our troops in Iraq”.
The Israeli regime and its Fifth Column in the United States have been pressing for unilateral intervention against Iran, preferably military, ever since 2003. The Daily Alert, mouthpiece of the 52 biggest Jewish organizations (The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations) has published scores of articles each week, characterizing the Europeans as ‘foot draggers’, ‘weak on Iran’, ‘playing down’ or ‘failing’ to take serious the ‘existential threat to Israel’. The US Zion-Cons have their own State Department and overseas missions, with their own foreign policy-makers and spokespeople. They meet with European, Asian and Latin American heads of State in the US or during visits overseas, mobilizing advising, organizing and strengthening Zion-Con outposts throughout Europe and beyond.
Their international reach has succeeded in a number of important decisions and appointments, most notably in Brussels and in Sarkozy’s appointment of Zionist fanatic Bernard Kouchner as France’s Minister of Foreign Relations. In a rather crude and undiplomatic show of Zionist loyalty immediately upon taking office, Kouchner declared France to be in favor of a military option against Iran. He was later pressured to retract, but Sarkozy, who himself is no minor league Israel supporter, has echoed Kouchner’s line. One of Kouchner’s first acts was to travel to American-occupied Iraq to express his personal support for the occupation. As a result of Israeli and Zion-Con pressure on the White House, France, Germany and England have all supported the escalation of sanctions against Iran – the Zionist strategy of ‘strangle the economy now and bomb later’.
The Zion-Cons’ weakness is relative: Although they no longer can purge (or retire) or silence senior military officers opposed to their Mid East Wars for Israel, they are extremely effective in discrediting any and all impartial international bodies and reports which fail to support the Israeli line that Iran represents an ‘existential threat’ to its survival (code language for ‘challenges or resists Israel’s drive to dominate the region’).
Zion-Cons vs. The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Predictably taking their cue from the Israeli foreign office’s dismissal of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency’s report (November 15, 2007) which documented that Iran had no nuclear arms program and no capacity to construct a nuclear weapon at least for the next five years, the ZPC unleashed a mass media propaganda campaign attacking the IAEA chairman as a ‘pro-Iranian’ agent (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007). At the same time the news ‘reports’ used potted quotes from the Report, mentioning only the IAEA ‘reservations’ and the ‘questions unanswered’ and ‘issues not addressed’. US Senator from Tel Aviv, Joseph Lieberman combined both a distorted (or blatantly falsified) version of the IAEA Report and a vicious attack on its Chief, El Baradei, claiming that the Report “made it clear (sic) that Iran was still hiding (sic) large parts of its nuclear program” (Jerusalem Post November 16, 2007).
A careful or even casual reading of the IAEA Report shows not a single paragraph, line or word stating that Iran was ‘hiding large parts of its nuclear program’ as Lieberman accused. Ever mendacious, Lieberman, who had publicly called for an immediate military attack on Iran, Iraq and Syria just days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, viciously attacked El Baradei for “writing in the report that Iran was cooperating and for not recommending a new round of sanctions”.
In other words, the Zion-Cons with their mediocre academic mouth-pieces can save the UN, the IAEA and El Baradei’s time and money in site visits and delicate radiologic and satellite monitoring by handing over the Israeli Foreign Office’s pre-packaged press handouts or sexed-up intelligence reports. The Zion-Cons make up in zeal what they lack in fact: Cooking up threats and telling the eager world that Iran is not cooperative and should be heavily sanctioned, starved or bombed into submission. The Zion-Cons follow the guidelines of the Jewish state’s agenda, to turn Iran into a Gaza Strip of deprivation and desperation.
The Israeli dismissal of the UN report on Iran, and the Zion-Con falsification of its contest and attack on its chief negotiator, El Baradei, was echoed by the White House and the Zion-colonized Congress. With a lack of originality characteristic of US Middle East policy-makers, they also cited the potted quotes from the IAEA Report to justify harsher sanctions and a greater degree of confrontation. The purpose is to provoke a breakup of the dialog long established between the IAEA and Iran.
The Zion-Con-White House strategy is to implicate the IAEA in their savage attacks on Iran, and via harsher economic sanctions end Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA. Having forced the IAEA out they would then accuse Iran of rejecting dialog and cooperation with the United Nations. This contrived scenario (like the earlier phony claims that ‘Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors’) would set the stage for a US-British led military attack under the pretext that all diplomatic approaches failed to deter Iran’s nuclear program which the IAEA denied had any military component.
It ill behooves anyone to actually consult the IAEA website and read the reports’ favorable account of Iran’s willing cooperation in providing site visits, documents and responses in answer to many of the key issues raised by the IAEA, the US and the EU. The report ultimately refutes the major accusations cooked up by the Zion-Cons and their political assets in the White House, State Department and Congress. The most important information contained in the IAEA Report is that its inspectors found no evidence of any Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons.
US Military-Israel-Firsters: Fundamental Issues in Dispute
There are at least 4 fundamental issues in dispute between senior American military officials and ZPC. These include:
- The nature of the Iranian threat: The ZPC argues that Iran represents an immediate deadly threat to the US, Israel, Iraq and the Gulf States. The American officers do not see the Iranians as a threat because they have engaged the Iranians in stopping the flow of arms and fighters to the Iraqi resistance; they recognize Iranian positive diplomatic overtures to all the Gulf States including Saudi Arabia; the US armada in the Persian Gulf is confident they can act as a deterrent to any Iranian attack; and finally the US Central Command know they are in the Persian Gulf facing Iran because of the White House’s provocative offensive strategy – and that Iran has not demonstrated anything but a defensive capability. Senior American officers view favorably Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer “to discuss with Arab nations a plan to enrich uranium outside the region in a neutral country such as Switzerland.” (Dow Jones News Service in Saudia Arabia, quoted in BBC News November 18, 2007). Not a single major television or print media in the US ran the Iranian president’s offer – as would be predictable in our Zionized media.
- Uranium Program: The Israelis, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, and among the top five nuclear powers, argue that Iran, which does not have a single nuclear weapon or even a weapons program, is an ‘existential (sic) threat’ to Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. This is one argument that the ZPC have used to convince the Democratic Party majority in Congress, the White House and the pro-Israel wing of the US Peace Movement to escalate economic sanctions and keep the ‘military option’ on the table.The only problem is that most European, Asian, African and Latin American diplomats, experts, the majority of world public opinion and most senior American officers don’t buy Israel’s shrill disinformation. All legal experts who have given a perfunctory look at the non-proliferation agreement (NPA) insist that there is absolutely no clause or article prohibiting uranium enrichment. The job of the ZPC, pursued at full speed, is to bury the NPA under mountains of fabrications, arguing that enriching uranium itself is a violation of ‘international law’. The purpose of this attempt to concoct a full state of belligerency is to escalate US and Israeli attacks on Iran and hasten the timing of a surprise, offensive onslaught. This is exactly the reason why American intelligence briefings and IAEA reports have aroused the fury of Israel and its operatives in the US and their calling for El Baradei’s dismissal.
- Iranian Arms to Iraq: The US Military and CENTCOM have repeatedly denied, especially in light of another ZPC onslaught to the contrary, that the Iranian government is supplying arms, especially roadside mines or IEDs to Iraqi ‘terrorists’ and its allied militia forces. Contrary to the assertion of the leading Israeli spokes-people in the US Senate, the US military categorically denies that the IEDs are made in Iran, having discovered bomb-making factories in Iraq and from interrogation and actually studying the construction and contents of the IEDs. Zionist-colonized Senators led by Hillary Clinton have followed the lead of Israeli Senatorial Spokesman Joseph Leiberman, rather than consulting with the American military, and are mouthing the rhetoric of Iranian arms killing American soldiers (FT November 12, 2007 p.9). Following the Lieberman-Israeli-ZPC propaganda blitz, the US Senate voted in favor of the Liberman-Kyle resolution naming Iran’s principle border defense force, the Republican Guard, a “terrorist organization”, moving one step closer to an attack. The hollowness of this resolution is reflected in the fact that not one of any of the US’s servile allies chose to follow its lead in denouncing the Republican Guard. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the Israeli-ZPC colonization of the US congress than on questions of war and peace, when the legislature is more likely to follow the dictates of Israeli propagandists than to consult its own senior military officials.
- Consequences of an attack on Iran: The main concern of the ZPC and its political clients in the White House and Congress is that an attack on Iran will secure the safety of Israel, eliminating a ‘mortal enemy’, preventing ‘another Holocaust’ and stopping a ‘new Hitler’. In pursuit of this policy, Israel’s US agents have repeatedly blocked every open-ended Iranian effort to cooperate with the US against the Taliban, Al Queda and other ‘terrorists groups’ as is profusely documented by two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration’s National Security Council, Hiliary Mann and Flynt Leverett,. (see The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know, Esquire Magazine, November 2007).
Every Iranian offer of unconditional negotiation and cooperation with the US to fight terrorism, as the US defines it, was rejected by key extremist Zion-Cons in the Pentagon (Feith), the Vice President’s office (Irving Libby), the National Security Council (Elliott Abrams and the President’s National Security Adviser (Stephen Hadley, a zealous Gentile Zion-Con among the brotherhood).
The Zion-cons paint a picture of an air attack which would simultaneously blow up all Iranian nuclear research facilities, infrastructure, airfields, military bases and ports – preventing any and all Iranian counter attacks against US strategic interests in the region. They further embellish their totalitarian vision by arguing that the Islamic republic would be overthrown by a populace grateful to the Americans for bombing their country, destroying its infrastructure and killing thousands. The Neo-Cons’ infantile delusions then lead them to project the emergence of a pro-Western Iranian secular state favorable to American occupation of the Middle East and, of course, wholeheartedly renouncing any ‘existential’ threats to the survival of its new ally, Israel.
On the issue of the consequences of an attack on Iran, the US military is totally at odds with the Israeli-ZPC propaganda. Senior military officials based on real estimates on the ground and from hard data from intelligence experts, estimate that Iran will be in a position to retaliate and cause enormous immediate and long-term damage to strategic US and global interests:
First, CENTCOM estimates that Iran will set-off air to sea missiles aimed at the US fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf and land-to-land missiles destroying oil production sites in the Gulf States, creating a major world oil shortage, doubling oil prices and provoking a world recession as energy scarcities paralyze production.
Second, the Iranians will send several tens of thousands of its elite forces across the border into Iraq, joining with its Iraqi Shia allies to overrun US bases and endanger the lives of the 160,000 US troops currently in Iraq. This would undermine the entire Iraq war effort, inflicting a strategic defeat and further undermine US military capacity in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Third, the Iranians will be able to easily block the Strait of Hormuz so that one third of the Middle East’s oil shipments will be paralyzed.
Fourth, military intelligence estimates that Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ in Asia, Africa, Europe and perhaps in North America will be activated and engage in ‘big impact’ terrorist missions. Whatever the likelihood of this scenario, it is clear that the US military anticipates major protests and perhaps even the violent overthrow of its clients in the Middle East, if not elsewhere.
Zion-Cons have neither countered military intelligence estimates with any credible counter-facts, nor even seriously considered the likely disastrous consequences affecting the US, Europe and Asia: They only consider Israel’s ‘security’ and its regional ambitions.
No Zionophile or Zion-Con has considered the enormous costs in terms of US lives and damage to the fragile economy and society of a full scale third prolonged war. In effect, the Zion-cons will kill their own US goose, which has laid golden eggs for Israel for almost 6 decades. It is an example of the Zion-Cons’ supreme arrogance and sense of their own power that they feel they can plunge the US into a third Asian war which will devastate the US economy and cause world-wide energy scarcity, and still secure their yearly tribute of $3 Billion Dollars foreign aid for Israel as well as guaranteeing oil for Israel by diverting it from the needs of American consumers and industries. It is clear that in doing a cost-benefit analysis on a US attack on Iran, Israeli and ZPC operatives have approvingly figured that the costs are on the US side of the ledger and the benefits are for the Israelis. Were it known, American public opinion might disapprove.
The main difference is that the US does not have a comparable Washington Power Configuration in Tel Aviv to influence Israeli policy to match the Jewish state’s Zionist Power Configuration which shapes and influences US Middle East policy.
Military-Zioncon: Punch and Counter-Punch
By the end of 2007 it is clear that the US military, led by CENTCOM Commander, Admiral William Fallon and Security of Defense Gates, have successfully, if temporarily contained the strenuous Israeli-Zion-Con military thrust to war. Though Gates backtracked under ZPC pressure and later denied that he had taken the military option off the table. In response, the Zion-Cons launched an end-around tactic by intensifying their efforts to impose a global economic blockade to strangle the Iranian economy. The Zionized White House has pressured and secured the whole-hearted support of Gordon Brown of Great Britain, and Sarkozy of France for a set of economic sanctions that will in effect rupture all dialog with the IAEA.
This is the strategic goal of the Zion-Cons: no dialog, no diplomacy, and blockaded economy, ripe for Anglo-French-American bombing. The Zion-cons have shrewdly avoided a head on confrontation with Fallon and his allies. They recognize that a bruising battle in which they might expose their Fifth Column credentials and in which their ‘anti-Semitic’ slanders against a popular patriotic American general might backfire by finally arousing a silent, latent anti-Zionist majority to speak out. Since the military would be called upon to carry out the military option which it strongly opposes, the Zion-Cons turn to their automatic, rubber-stamp majority in the US Congress and especially their most zealous Zionists in the federal bureaucracy. Treasury Department functionary Levey has devoted all of his working time browbeating, banning and blacklisting any and all businesses and banks dealing directly or indirectly with Iran or its trading partners.
Judeo-Centrism: From Ghetto Defense to Imperial Ambitions
One of the driving forces of the ZPC’s accumulation of political power is their ability to totally displace pre-existing non-Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations from influence in the Jewish community over the past 60 years. Secondly the formation of the ZPC resulted from the unification and centralization of a vast array of disparate groups and local community organizations around a single dominant political issue: unconditional and total support for a foreign power, Israel, with a kind of intolerant religious fervor which in the past burnt dissenters in public displays of piety and today hounds them from public office. In the past and in the recent period, there was a popular Yiddish saying in evaluating public policy: “Is it good for the Jews?” This narrow, parochial viewpoint had special meaning at a time when Jews were a persecuted minority trying to maximize their security and minimize risks in relatively closed societies. In recent times, in certain New York intellectual circles, it was part of a jocular repertoire designed at one and the same time to recall an earlier identity and to mock some of the overweening pretensions of new rich upstarts, especially real estate billionaires who displace and exploit low-income and minority tenants while making generous contributions to Israel.
But what was defensive and perhaps justified in an earlier era has become a deadly practice in the context of affluence, political power and organizational cohesion. A Judeocentric view of the world, which sees the embodiment of ‘what’s good for the Jews’ in providing unconditional support to an aggressive colonial state (Israel), has become a formula for disaster. In the new context where Jews represent almost a quarter of US billionaires and occupy high positions of government decision-making, the dominant Zionist discourse and practice has resulted not in defensive measures protecting a persecuted minority but offensive actions prejudicing the American majority.
In the case of Iraq, this has led to the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians and the displacement of many millions more. In the US it has resulted in milking the US taxpayers annually for well-over $3 billion dollars to subsidize an Israeli-Jewish population with an annual per capita income of $30,000 and universal health care. The Judeo-centric view as interpreted by the Israel-Firsters has led to the sacrifice of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq. In the US, Judeocentric narrative has led to the denial of our democratic rights, our freedom to debate our Zionist problem, and the ZPC’s support for Israel’s pursuit of Middle East dominance through American military power.
Judeocentrism and US Jews: Judeocentrism is not the ideology or practice of the great majority of US Jews, even less a rising number of young, better-educated Jews with no deep ideological ties to Israel. But Judeocentrism is the perspective which guides the organized, active minority driving the major Zionist organizations and their billionaire camp followers. And it is always the organized, zealous and well-financed minority, which assumes ‘legitimate’ claim to speak ‘for the community’ – despite the protests of numerous un-organized Jewish intellectual critics.
CONCLUSION
The deepening and all-important conflict between the pro-Israel warmongers and the anti-war American senior officers is reaching a bitter climax. As the US military disintegrates under prolonged colonial warfare, the ZPC intensifies its campaign for a third war for Israel and against Iran, a war which will totally shatter the US military forces.
The fundamental question emerging for most senior officers, in private gatherings and informal discussions is “Who commands our Commander in Chief?” The deep animosity of US senior active military officers frequently erupts at the ZPC’s careless and callous disregard for American lives. They disdainfully refer to the Zion-Con policymakers as ‘arm-chair military strategists’ who never fought a war, never shot or been shot. At one level, the senior military officers are appalled by the ignorance of the Zion-Con military ‘experts’ and policy-makers featured by the Zion-Con controlled mass media.
Exit Strategies
One of the most frequent military criticisms is that the Zion-Con policy-makers don’t have an exit strategy – attributing it to their lack of knowledge or strategic thinking. In reality, the lack of Zion-Con concern for a realistic exit strategy is because the Zion-Cons are concerned (in light of Israel’s priorities) only with an entry policy, namely degrading the invaded countries’ military and economic potential. Secondly the Zion-Cons do not have an exit strategy because they believe the US should stay, colonize, build bases and engage in a prolonged war for a chimerical total victory.
The question of ‘who commands the Commander in Chief’ goes to the entire core of our constitutional order, because it raises the deeper question of ‘who defines the national interests’ for which the military are fighting? If as we have documented, the ZPC has effectively colonized the White House and Legislative Branches (and the Justice Department and the appointment of an ultra-Zionist Attorney General Michael Mulkasey and Israel-First Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff), to serve the interests of a foreign power (Israel) – in what sense does a colonized political system serve the interests of a democratic public? Does there exist a primary condition that makes it possible to speak of a democracy, namely national self-determination, de-colonization necessary for the re-democratization of American political institutions?
So far the only effective resistance to colonization has comes from the US military. The military is a non-democratic, hierarchical institution but an institution representative of the public’s opposition to colonial encroachments.
What would normally be considered the prime movers challenging Zion-Con colonization, namely the President, Congress, the political parties or even the antiwar movements have abdicated their responsibilities — they have been in part or whole colonized and neutralized.
By default, it has fallen to senior military commanders who reject being commanded by the ZPC at the service of Israel
Paradoxically, it is the military, which has taken over the struggle against an offensive war with Iran, a struggle where the American peace movement has failed. It is the military, which has challenged the Zion-Con agenda, where the Congress has been corrupted and capitulated for reasons of campaign financing, political blackmail and double loyalty.
Where does that leave us, as democrats and anti-colonists?
We should be able to have both an independent de-colonized and democratic America, governed by patriotic Americans. But suppose we have to choose between de-colonization led by the military or a corrupt colonized electoral system – what should be done?
The ideal solution would be a revitalized civil society including secularist citizens, non-fundamentalist Muslims and Christians, and non-Zionist Jews, organized in an anti-war, anti-colonial movement and political parties allied with patriotic officers to ‘re-found the republic’. The purpose would be to establish a republic to ‘defend the heartland’ from fires, floods, economic pillage, terrorists, ecological predators and foreign agents acting on behalf of alien regimes. Can it happen? We shall see. What is becoming clear however is that the anti-colonial imperative is growing stronger by the day, if it doesn’t come from below, it may have to come from above.
Invention of the Jewish People – Book Review
This is the book if you’re looking for a fresh approach to Israel’s history
By George Polley | Palestine Chronicle | September 27, 2010
(The Invention of the Jewish People. Shlomo Sand. Verso, New York, 2009.)
Myths are powerful because they tell the story of origins – the origins of tribes and the origins of a people and nations. Myths tell us who we are and where and how we began. Incorporating folktales and legends, myths tell us what truth is and how it makes us different from others. Groups of people use myths in the creation of histories of themselves as people who are different from others. National myths, involving politics and patriotism use myths and myth-making to construct the national identity: what makes our country and people different from every other? Israeli historian and Professor of History at Israel’s Tel Aviv University calls this process “mythistory”. “From this surgically improved past emerge[s] the proud and handsome portrait of the nation.”
“Every history” writes Professor Sand “contains myths, but those that lurk within national historiography are especially brazen. The histories of peoples and nations have been designed like the statues in city squares – they must be grand, towering, heroic… ‘Us’ and ‘All the Others’ was the usual, almost the natural division. For more than a century, the production of Us was the life’s work of the national historians and archaeologists, the authoritative priesthood of memory.”
In this fashion, a group of Jewish writers, political activists and others began in the second half of the nineteenth century to shape the history (mythistory) of the Jewish people. All Jews, they said, come from a single stock originating from the loins of the founding patriarch, Abraham. In the ancient past, they were citizens of a powerful Jewish state called Israel, were exiled after the destruction of the second temple in AD 70, and since that time have lived as exiles in nations where they have suffered persecution. It is time, they said, to recreate the Nation of Israel so that its people can return to it and live there.
Using the Biblical narrative as a history text, they began to construct the history of the Jewish people as a People Set Apart from all others. Their history, so the story line goes, “rests on firm and precise truths.” The problem with this is, none of it can be shown to be scientifically verified truth. Instead, it is what Professor Sand calls “mythistory”… Using what we now know was pseudoscience, early Zionist thinkers turned to physical anthropology, social Darwinism and, later to eugenics to build their case for identifying the Jewish people as being biologically different from all others. “The purpose of Jewish biology,” Professor Sand writes “was to promote separation from others… It sought to serve the project of ethnic nationalist consolidation in the taking over of an imaginary ancient homeland.”
The next step was to find a homeland to which all Jewish people could be invited. Though it wasn’t the first choice, the most logical choice was Palestine. The goal became immigrating to Palestine with the aim of taking it over and recreating the ancient and very mythical Nation of Israel. The obvious problem was that Palestine was already inhabited by a mostly Arab population that had lived there for over a thousand years.
What to do? Simple: build alliances with those who can and will help you. The golden opportunity arrived with Hitler’s massive annihilation of Europe’s Jewish population in the 1930s and 40s. Jewish immigration into Palestine, almost overnight, turned into a tsunami. Granted nationhood by the United Nations, Israel was “reborn”. “The land of Israel” reads the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel “was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identify was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.”
Out of the mists of ancient myth came the modern Nation of Israel and its armies. Built on the racially exclusionary ideological foundation of Zionism, this new Nation of Israel quickly began expelling the non-Jewish people who lived there. Beginning in 1948, almost overnight more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed of their homes and lands and became refugees, a process that continues as I write. It is deeply cynical, racist and destined, so Professor Sand believes, to fail. It is still possible to close one’s eyes to the truth. Many voices will continue to maintain that the ‘Jewish people’ has existed for four thousand years, and that ‘Eretz Israel’ has always belonged to it. And yet the historical myths that were once, with the aid of a good deal of imagination, able to create Israeli society are now powerful forces helping to raise the possibility of its destruction.”
To say that Professor Sand’s thesis and his research is not well-received in official Israeli circles is perhaps a bit too mild. Protective of their past and paranoid about their future, most of Israel’s political and religious leaders seem bent on maintaining the course they have pursued for the past sixty-two years and more. Only time will tell us the final outcome. My hope is that good sense will win the day and that Israel will become a new land that belongs to and serves all its citizens, not just its Jewish ones.
If you’re looking for a fresh approach to Israel’s history, Professor Sand’s book is one that I heartily recommend.
Census Data: America Got Poorer in 2009
By Max Fraad-Wolff | t r u t h o u t | 28 September 2010
2009 was a year of accelerating economic pain and loss, according to US Census data released today. Although the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) tells us that the “Great Recession” officially ended in December of 2009, the labor force of the US shrank by more than 130,000 from 2008 to 2009. The median family income – a better measure than average income because it reflects the exact middle of income distribution – decreased by $2,254 or 3.5 percent. The median income for all workers in the US fell from $29,868 in 2008 to $28,365 in 2009 – a 5 percent decline.
A staggering 48 percent of households earned less than $50,000 per year in 2008, but in 2009, 49.8 percent of households earned less than $50,000. What’s more, income per person in the US declined from $27,589 in 2008 to $26,409 in 2009.
Are you still surprised by anger at the polls? Might these numbers explain the seeming willingness of voters to try anything that looks different? Rising inequality, falling incomes and increasing poverty are very pronounced. When the data comes in next year for 2010, it is likely to show us that the period from 2008 through 2010 witnessed a historic increase in poverty and inequality in the US. Our massive budget deficits have been directed in ways that lower poverty, increase employment or reduce inequality. Surely, these numbers would have been worse absent many programs. That is true and valid. However, it is way too hard out there to be smug about how much worse it could have been. Yes, it could be worse. Yes, it is getting worse.
Below follows a sketch of just how bad it is- from a poverty perspective. All graphs in this article are based on the recently released census data.
It is clear that the younger you are in America, the more likely you are to live in poverty. Young Americans are nearly twice as likely to be poor as older Americans. The bar graph demonstrates this trend for African-Americans.
Being American gives you a one in seven chance of being poor. Being young raises this chance to one in four. Further, being black in America means a one in four chance of being poor. Being young and black raises your chance of being poor up to one in 2.5.
Education played a role in 2009 poverty rates, as indicated in the graph below. Dropping out of high school puts you on a path to a one in four chance of poverty. Finishing college drops your chance of poverty in 2009 to one in 25.
2009 American Consumer Survey: Selected Economic Characteristics. US Census Bureau.
Urban populations were particularly hard hit. More than 18 percent (18.7 percent) of Americans living in major cities spent 2009 living in poverty, while 27.8 percent of Americans living in major cities and under 18 years of age spent 2009 living in poverty. That means that nearly one in three young, urban Americans were poor last year.
Female-headed households fared especially badly: more than one in three lived in poverty in 2009. More than 17 percent (17.3 percent) of these female-headed households lived in extreme poverty – earning less than 50 percent of the federal poverty level.
Eight US universities say yes to apartheid
By Lawrence Davidson | Redress | 27 September 2010
The Islamic University of Gaza – Click for more photos
A letter from Gaza appeared on the web dated 24 September 2010. It was from a group of Gaza academics and students and sought to publicize the fact that eight American universities have recently signed agreements with various Israeli universities to offer US students free semester-long programmes in Israel. Among the American universities participating in this venture are Harvard, Columbia and Michigan.
Unspoken strategy of cultural genocide
The Gaza academics and students expressed shock at this turn of events. And so they might, given the fact that they are sitting in an outdoor prison of Israeli making and have seen their educational institutions both starved of resources by an Israeli blockade and literally bombed to rubble by Israeli warplanes. The situation in Gaza is but the worst of a bad situation for all Palestinians, including those in the West Bank and Israel proper. When it comes to education in all of these locales apartheid policies are in place to interfere with Palestinian students and teachers and minimize the educational experience. Actually, this is part of an unspoken strategy of cultural genocide. Such policies are directly or indirectly supported by the Israeli academic institutions to which the participating American universities now want to send their students.
How can these US universities do this? This is certainly a legitimate question in an age when discrimination and racism are, supposedly, no longer socially or politically acceptable. After all Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, etc. are institutions of higher learning housed in a country that prides itself on broad civil rights laws and all of them adhere to social equity rules. Yet here they are climbing into academic bed, so to speak, with a state that practises apartheid against its non-Jewish minority and is attempting to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population of the occupied territories. Well, there are any number of scenarios that might lead them to this sort of hellish arrangement and here I offer only one possibility. It assumes an “Adolf Eichmann context.”
The realm of the bureaucrat
The people in control of American universities (and perhaps all universities) are mostly bureaucrats. Some of them are trained in the specialty field of higher education administration, some are professors who have crossed over to an administrative career line, and some are just folks hired from the general population pool to run sub-departments such as public relations and accounting. They are all trained to pay lip service to various sorts of mission statements and assessment markers; however, their lives are really very insular and their goals narrow and short term. For instance, even at the highest level, say the office of the university president, there are usually but a few major goals, and the main one in this case is to raise money.
Somewhere in the organizational chart is an office of overseas programmes (or some similar title). It is usually a small operation with a director and a secretary. Their job is to set up exchange programmes. What they are looking for are programmes at overseas schools that are roughly similar in quality to the courses their own institution offers. That way the credits can be legitimately transferred back home and stand in for some of their student’s degree requirements. The people who are arranging these exchanges usually know little or nothing of the social or political situation in the overseas institution’s country. And, they are not likely to educate themselves on these subjects beyond some assurance that the place is relatively safe for the students that will be participating in the exchange. It may be hard for those of us who are so focused on Israeli apartheid to accept this, but for most of the folks in these little offices, Israel has about the same cachet as the Czech Republic or maybe Ireland. There is a lot of ignorance at his level.
What else is going on?
Of course, that is not the end of the story. There are other folks out there, most of whom are indirectly associated with the university in question. These people know that there is a war going on against apartheid Israel, and they are not on our side. They want to counter the increasingly effective process of “chipping away at Israel’s legitimacy”. They also have deep pockets and lots of influence. These folks may be big donors to these universities and some of them may well sit on the institution’s board of governors/regents.
When the president or his representative goes out to raise money these donors have what appears to be innocuous conditions for their gifts. So they say to president x or y, “sure we will give you half a million dollars for that new sports complex you so covet, but in return we want you to create this exchange programme with Hebrew and Haifa universities”. The president thinks that this is little enough to ask for such a generous gift, and his friend on the board of governors/regents seconds the motion. A telephone call is made to the director of overseas programmes who is given a contact name and number at the Israeli embassy to get things rolling. And that is how it happens.
What comes next?
Soon enough this arrangement becomes public. You have to figure if they know about it in Gaza, they know about in Cambridge, Ann Arbor and upper Manhattan. Given the times there will probably be some sort of public protest, but the ensuing struggle will not be easy for the following reasons:
a) The university position will almost certainly be that to shun Israel is a violation of academic freedom, free inquiry and the essential non-political status of learning. This sort of argument is age old. The US universities were making it when they were asked to divest from apartheid South Africa and stop research funded by the “Defence” Department during the Vietnam war. One can never lay this argument to rest in any final way because it represents a cherished, if somewhat unreal, ideal.
So you point out for the one-thousandth time that there is an inherent contradiction when you take this position relative to Israeli universities just because they do not promote these academic ideals. They are destroyers of free thought and free inquiry as far as Palestinian rights (and particularly the right of education) are concerned. And so if the ideal of a non-political status for learning exists anywhere in the real world, it ain’t in Israel. The whole Zionist academic setup has been criticized by international as well as Israeli human rights organizations for these anti-educational activities. Finally, you try to tell the university decision makers that there is precedent for universities taking a stand against apartheid practices. At this point you notice that they have, figuratively, clicked on their iPods and are no longer listening.
b) Next you go to the professors of the institution and try to explain the same thing. That is when you come to the stomach wrenching realization that most of them do not care. Most academics are as specialized as the bureaucrats, and live their lives in just as insular a world. They know a lot about their sub-field and very little beyond it. They are dedicated to their families and their local communities and are, on the whole, decent people, but they are not interested, nor are they going to hit the street, for oppressed people far away. This is particularly true when their local news sources have been systematically libeling those people for 60-plus years. They too will hide behind the idea of academic freedom.
It should be noted that this is not quite the same thing as Julien Benda’s “treason of the intellectuals”. There is very little spouting of national chauvinism or the racism of Islamophobia (except for the Zionists professors among them). No, it is just co-optation into the system. It is just natural localism – I really just want to live my life and work in my laboratory or library cubicle, etc. I am reluctant to get too annoyed at my fellow academics for this attitude, because theirs is the immemorial stance of all ordinary folks everywhere.
c) So that leaves the students, and here there is a much better chance to gather a crowd and take a stand. There is always a socially conscious group among the youth who are willing to fight for a good cause and risk defying the powers that be. This is because they have yet to become ensconced in the system, bogged down with career, family, mortgage and the like. In other words, some of them have not yet shrunk into an insular world of very local interests and goals. Those are the people who will protest, if anyone will, at the ivy towers of Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and the five other schools which have willed their own corruption.
What are the odds of victory?
Whether anyone will listen to the protesters depends on how many there are, how loud they protest and how far they are willing to go with it. Are they willing to go into the dormitories and spread the word? Are they willing to picket not only the ordinary centres of power on campus, but also the admissions office when prospective students come to visit, or demonstrate on home-coming day and at all the football games? Are they willing to hunt for donors who might say they will not give if their institution partners with Israel? Are they willing to occupy the president’s office and thereby risk arrest? Are they willing to keep all of this up for weeks on end? It might take all of these sorts of activities to even have a chance at winning this contest.
Even so, the odds are not good. Essentially, you have to create such a cost to the institution in trouble and bad publicity that it outweighs that donor’s half a million dollars and/or the anger of the fellow on the board/regents. If in the end you do not win, you have to understand that it is not wholly a defeat. After all, you have certainly raised consciousness. In other words, you have set the stage for the next battle and made that one a little easier to win. So you have to have the energy to fight again and again. It is a scenario wherein youth is a definite plus.
There is another way in which mounting a serious protest at any of these schools must constitute a victory. That is the fact that such a protest will demonstrate to the academics and students in Gaza and the rest of Palestine that the world has not abandoned them, that they have allies and their struggle is now a worldwide one. In the short run, that might be the most important victory of all.
In conclusion
Here is a quote from the American academic Richard Hofstadter: “A university’s essential character is that of being a centre of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.” If this so (and all the leaders of the institutions involved in these exchanges will undoubtedly agree), then why are these eight universities sending their students off to Israeli schools that cooperate with state policies that deny just these sacrosanct pursuits to persecuted Palestinians? Why are they sending their students to a country that seeks to silence, at all levels of society, any free inquiry and criticism of its racist and oppressive national ideology? Why are they cooperating with institutions that have state-dictated policies (for instance, admissions policies) that would be illegal in the United States? Do they condone such behaviours? If they go through with these exchange programmes, then the answer is, for all intents and purposes, yes, they do. Essentially, they now lend themselves to the destruction of the very educational virtues they claim to cherish.
Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.
Bibi & Barney: Spring Pollard for 3-month freeze extension
By Ira Glunts | Mondoweiss | September 24, 2010
Rep. Barney Frank is attempting to get House members to sign a letter to President Obama which requests the release of Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. In exchange for Pollard, the US would get a three-month extension on the temporary and partial Israeli freeze on settlement construction on the West Bank. This deal is the brainchild of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu according to the Hebrew language version of Ha’aretz.
Frank is peddling Netanyahu’s deal as a US gesture of good intentions toward Israel. Gee, hasn’t the Obama administration made enough such gestures already? Frank’s office released the following statement which
…notes the positive impact that a grant of clemency would have in Israel, as a strong indication of the goodwill of our nation towards Israel and the Israeli people…. This would be particularly helpful at a time when the Israeli nation faces difficult decisions in its long-standing effort to secure peace with its neighbors…
Frank, who is supported by JStreet, the “moderate” Jewish lobby, surely knows how humiliating the terms of his proposed agreement would be for our government. A three-month extension on a freeze agreement which would only be selectively enforced is a ridiculously small price to pay for the return of a spy who many people believe did more damage to US security than any other. It is widely believed that then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir sold much of Pollard’s stolen information to the Soviet’s in the 80s.
The terms of the deal are so one-sided it is difficult to not dismiss it as anything but political grandstanding. If Frank and Netanyahu were serious about this exchange they would have used a less public forum for communicating it to the White House. But the Israelis and their supporters in the US can never get enough of seeing a powerful US politician make that “I love Israel” gesture. Frank probably owes a favor to someone at AIPAC or he is planning a big Bar Mitzvah at the Wailing Wall for his nephew and wants to make sure that he and his family get the ultimate in VIP treatment.
Frank’s House letter is not the first time the Pollard clemency issue has arisen. Israel has periodically attempted to negotiate for Pollard, who is considered to be a hero and legendary spy there. President Clinton purportedly agreed to release him during the negotiations with Netanyahu which led to the Wye Agreement. However, when CIA head George Tenet threatened to resign, Clinton nixed the deal.
For years, contrary to all evidence and logic, Israel claimed that Pollard participated in a “rogue” intelligence operation. Finally, they admitted that Pollard was part of a Mossad spying operation in the US which was government-sanctioned. Israel gives so many different fanciful explanations about so many different illegal operations it is difficult for even government officials to keep up with the most current versions. Recently, Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the US, contradicted the new official government line by declaring that Pollard was not an official Israeli spy. Oren went on to claim that Israel does not spy on the United States. Right….
Democracy in Arab Eyes
By BOUTHAINA SHAABAN – Counterpunch – September 21, 2010
On International Democracy Day last week, satellite TV channels across our region focused on the type of democracy imported, together with details of the bloodbaths, disasters, wars and American invasions driven by hatred for Muslims. Democracy was invoked as an ideal, regardless of people’s living standards, the disasters befalling them and the gutters they are thrown into under the pretext of raising the standard of political action to the level of ‘democracy’.
In Iraq, a fifth of the population has become illiterate after ‘democratic’ invaders have killed a million people, including thousands of scientists and intellectuals. Mesopotamian memory is full of millions of tragic stories about widows, orphans, poverty, killing and violence brought about by Americans. No one in the Western media writes about the life of these people or tries to assess the actual destruction of the quality of these people’s lives. The same applies to Afghanistan and Pakistan which have been torn by violence and war and daily killing by American drones. American talk about ‘democracy’ is completely divorced from issues such as provision of water, electricity, schools, work, security and dignity. So, what is this democracy, and what are its objectives if it does not aim at improving people’s lives?
No one tried to link this International Day of Democracy to what has happened in Turkey, where an Islamic democracy is growing, based on an unprecedented popular mandate. The constitution has been amended in accordance with the results of a referendum based on national needs not the narrow private interests, as the custom is in Western democracies.
Media coverage of 9/11, International Democracy Day and the referendum in Turkey mostly consisted of spreading hatred against Islam, spreading fanatic concepts against Islam and linking Islam to increasing violence in the world, while ignoring all forms of violence, oppression, killing and wars which Muslims are subjected to at the hands of non-Muslims.
What happened in Turkey is an expression of the essence of Islamic democracy based on the power of ideas and logic, not on coup d’etats encouraged by the West in Turkey and other countries in South America, Asia and the Middle East.
The problem today is that our language, values and ideas have become a tool used by the other to speak for us and about the crimes it is committing against us in our countries, while we sit and watch our own news from the other’s perspective and its coverage of our suffering through its racist lens.
A number of countries, particularly in Asia, have realized the danger of what is going on. So, Asia has become a pioneer of scientific and technological advance; its share of published articles increased from 13 per cent in 1980 to over 30 per cent in 2009 according to Thomson Reuters indicators. Turkey is rising, as did Malaysia and Iran, in terms of scientific research and university education which is the foundation of every industrial, agricultural or even political achievement.
What is worrying about this is conditions in the Arab world whose status is reflected in all scientific and research indicators, including those on reading and publishing. The Arabic language has seen a frightening retreat under the aegis of Arab ministries of education as a result of the concept promoted by our enemies that their language is the language of science and knowledge, and that the language of the Koran cannot assimilate modern sciences. I know of no other nation whose children are taught in private schools and universities in a language not their own. Here the problem starts when we become passive recipients of knowledge and scientific production. It follows that we become passive in the political, cultural and human arenas. Some of us even become parrots repeating Western phrases of hatred against Arabs.
Recent studies have shown that the mother tongue shapes people’s attitudes because it determines people’s intellectual habits and directs their experience and their positions in life. That is why we see most countries today insisting on using their mother language, except Arab countries, where the Arabic language is suffering unprecedented official neglect. Most private schools and universities now use English or French; and those who want to study Arabic find it difficult to find an Arab university that teaches different sciences in Arabic.
I am trying to connect the complete political absence of Arab countries on the international scene – except when they are called upon by necessities of American public relations – with the deliberate neglect of language, heritage and culture. If people are not the product of their language, culture and the different components of their civilization, what are they? If democracy does not aim at improving the living standards of people, making them happy and improving the different aspects of their lives, what else should it be?
The more serious problem is that, we, Arabs, have become recipients of Western systems when it comes to our causes and interests. Malaysia has provided a good model for democracy as a Muslim country. So has Turkey. When an Arab or Muslim country provides an illuminating experience to the world, it is usually talked about aside from its Muslim identity, and without any link between it and the civilization of Islam or the region.
But this does not have any impact on Western media which insist on promoting Islamophobia.
Bouthaina Shaaban is Political and Media Advisor at the Syrian Presidency, and former Minister of Expatriates. She is also a writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985. She has been the spokesperson for Syria.
Israel blasts call for denuclearization
Press TV – September 21, 2010
The Israeli nuclear agency has once again criticized efforts by Arab countries to push Tel Aviv into becoming a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
In a speech delivered on Tuesday, Israeli Atomic Energy Organization Director General Shaul Chorev blasted what he called “continuous ill-motivated efforts to single out and to condemn” Israel.
The Israeli official’s reaction came in response to a non-binding resolution, which urges Israel to join a global anti-nuclear arms treaty.
Arab states introduced the resolution at this week’s annual assembly of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The “proposed resolution is incompatible with basic principles and norms of international law,” Reuters quoted Chorev as saying in his address to the IAEA gathering.
As a staunch supporter of Tel Aviv, Washington has warned Arab countries to withdraw the draft resolution, saying it will jeopardize direct talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
The UN nuclear watchdog has so far refused to ratify any resolutions to condemn Israel’s nuclear activities. This is while Israel is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano recently reported to the agency’s Board of Governors about the Israeli nuclear program, saying that Tel Aviv was restricting the agency from examining its nuclear potentials.
The report called on Israel to join the NPT and “place all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards,” with no enforcement measure.
The progressive dilemma
By Nick Egnatz | Online Journal | September 20, 2010
A self-described representative democracy in which the only two political parties are both funded and controlled by elite corporate interests is a contradiction in terms. Control of the population through government propaganda and a monopoly corporate media have made the domination of the American working class and poor by the wealthy corporate elite consensual. The enormity of the crime against true democratic values is so complete that substantive reform of the present system is an impossibility.
A dilemma is a situation in which one is forced to choose between equally distasteful options. That has always been our consignment as Americans when we venture to the polls (either vote for a wishy-washy Democrat or let the even worse Republican win). Every two years we are told that the fate of our democracy rests on our decision. Well it doesn’t because we don’t have a democracy, representative or otherwise. We have a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy). Our two political parties answer out of necessity to the corporate world. No one represents the people and the monopoly corporate media will not allow for a discussion of democratic alternatives.
The chickens have come home to roost from the last 30 years of economic neoliberal globalization policies championed by both political parties. Supply side economics of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of the very modest checks on American capitalism necessitated by the Great Depression have made us the most unequal industrial democracy on earth. Imperial wars of aggression and massive bailouts of the very speculators who engineered the financial collapse leading to the Great Recession have allowed both corporate parties to take the stance that there is no money left for the people’s needs. This is poppycock. How can a consumer driven economy recover if the working class and poor have no jobs or money?
To cut spending on social programs with political cover, Obama came up with the brilliant idea of a budget deficit commission (National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) made up of bipartisan hacks from both our two corporate parties, representatives from the corporate world of greed and a single union president. Green Party and socialists need not apply and in fact there are no even mildly progressive Democrats (an oxymoron if there ever was one) on the commission. The commission is not a result of legislation from our Congress. It was formed by Executive Order. This is the way dictators govern, but that’s another issue. The commission is charged to cut the Budget Deficit by cutting social programs only and leaving the military spending intact. If and when 14 of the commission’s 18 members agree on policy it will go straight to Congress for a vote with no amendments allowed.
Co-chairman of the commission Alan Simpson, former Republican Senator from Wyoming received some notoriety recently by referring to seniors on Social Security as “lesser people,” calling Social Security a “cow with 310 million tits” and asking the question of Vietnam veterans “what have they done for us lately?’ None of this bothered our President enough to ask for Simpson’s resignation. Their recommendation is due in December, after the midterm election.
We are expected to accept the government propaganda that the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, when that figure does not include those no longer receiving or who never received unemployment compensation, part time workers desiring full time work or workers disdainfully referred to as having given up looking for work. Including all these would bring the unemployment figure to 22 percent. But that still doesn’t count those working for less than a livable wage, this would easily bring the figure well beyond the 30 percent range. This assault on the working class has been the goal of the neoliberal globalization policy accepted as gospel by both corporate political parties since Ronald Reagan started selling it in the 70’s and 80’s when he set out to save the country from the scourge of a prosperous working class. The Great Communicator pushed his dogma of bad government/good corporations with the same smile he used to push Twenty Mule Team Borax soap to TV viewers years earlier.
More than 3 million families have already been foreclosed and torn from their homes. Another 11 million families are “underwater” (owing more that the home is worth). Research firm First American Core Logic reports that Nevada with 65 percent of home mortgages underwater, Arizona with 48 percent, Florida with 45 percent, Michigan with 37 percent and California with 35 percent lead the nation in this foreboding statistic.
The Republicans propose fiscal austerity for the poor and working class and continued tax cuts for the wealthy corporate class to find our way our of the Great Recession. Obama and the Democrats say that economic growth will do the trick. Both so called solutions are illogical. We are expected to believe that if the big bad bankers would just pretty please start loaning money to businesses, the economy will start humming and everything will be hunky dory?
I’m not an economist, but I have been a small businessman and I have been told on more than one occasion that I have half a brain. The road to recovery is both simple and difficult. For businesses to thrive, for the economy to hum, the business owners simply need customers with money in their pockets. The first step is to put our citizens back to work at a livable wage and the economy will flourish. It will be difficult, to the point of impossibility, for corporate politicians to consider the people at the bottom first, but that is what needs to be done.
We are told that the fall elections are for the control of our country. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are told that we cannot allow the Republican Party of No to win Congress, yet the Democrats have controlled Congress for four years, the White House for two and there has been no challenge to the draconian policies of social spending cuts, endless imperial war and progressively greater and greater inequality. All now completely part and parcel of the fabric of a nation once founded on the single statement that “all men are created equal.” Regardless of which party wins and controls Congress, elite domination of the poor and working class will continue.
Understand that the system is beyond redemption. Recognize that we have exported the cancer of elite domination through globalization across the globe and that the struggle belongs to all the poor and working people of the world. Boycott elections that give credibility to this monstrous system of inequality and class domination. Organize on the basis of class and struggle for the equality that was promised in 1776.
Or you can support the Democratic Party and continue to see more of the same; continued wars, huge military budgets, depressed home prices, foreclosures, abandoned underwater mortgages, progressively greater and greater inequality and Depression Era unemployment. All done while the Democrats complain that they would like to change things, but that they just don’t have the votes or the heart or the balls. The last two they won’t admit to, but we all know better.
I’m not painting a pretty picture, because it isn’t pretty and wishing it was better won’t make it so. Voting for third party candidates, independents or so called progressive Democrats only serves to give legitimacy to an undemocratic system. The first step toward a true participatory democracy is to vocally and publicly boycott elections and renounce the American system of money controlled policies and politics through the two corporate political parties.
Right-wingers and liberal Democrats both love to say that I advocate for some kind of nebulous utopian dream. If you want nebulous from the right tune in to Glen Beck and Sarah Palin’s call for restoring America’s honor. If you want the equivalent from the Democratic Party listen to Obama’s calls for hope and change. Both appeals are long on rhetoric and bereft of specific steps to alleviate the misery corporate America and their two lackey political parties have trickled down on the poor and working class.
This socialist utopian will instead give specific plans for a new birth of democracy in America:
- 100 percent federal funding for all national elections. Under the proposal below this figure will become minuscule.
- No election commercials allowed. This just allows money to pollute politics. Instead require all media outlets to publish and broadcast periodic side by side statements of all the candidates positions on the various issues. Mandate debates in which all the candidates get a chance to state their positions on the issues.
- Require run-off elections if no candidate polls more than 50 percent of vote. This will facilitate the growth of alternative parties.
- Either eliminate the anti democratic U.S. Senate or require it to do away with the filibuster rule which allows 41 Senators from the smallest states, representing only 11 percent of the U.S. population to halt all legislation with the exception of certain budget votes.
- Return U.S. income tax rate on the most wealthy Americans to 90 percent for their excess income over $1 million. For 45 years (1935-1980) the top tax rate was between 70-94 percent. It is now 35 percent and the ever widening gap between rich and poor has made the U.S. the equivalent of a banana republic.
- Institute a financial transaction tax on all financial transactions such as stock sales.
- Cancel all free trade agreements and renegotiate into fair trade agreements in which tariffs are re-instituted to even the playing field when dealing with nations with substandard wages and environmental regulations. This is in line with the policy instituted by the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, done at the behest of George Washington and carried forward for almost two centuries. That is until the neo-liberal globalization crowd made their first appearance after WWII and in the last three decades especially have managed to lower tariffs to an average of 2 percent. The rationale behind tariffs is to level the playing field for our workers. If country A has the same wage rate and basic environmental safeguards as we do, a free trade agreement with them is in order. But if country B has a wage rate much lower than ours and pays little attention to environmental safeguards, then we should have tariffs reflecting these differences. Free trade is fine with equal trading partners, but not with countries paying slave wages and polluting the environment like China.
- Give workers a seat at the table on all corporate boards with veto privileges as a protection for the American people from corporate dominance.
- Do away with the minimum wage and institute a living wage guaranteeing all workers a wage allowing for basic necessities. This will vary with the cost of living in different areas and individual family commitments, but for a single worker with no other dependents in an average area it would presently be about $15/hour.
- Institute a massive program similar to the WPA to put all the unemployed to work at a living wage. There is much work to do, let us do it. Our cities need rebuilding, seniors need care, single parents need parenting help, homes need to be made energy efficient, infrastructure needs repair.
- For small businesses that show through their tax returns an inability to pay their workers the living wage, have the federal government make up the difference until such time as the small business can support its workers on its own.
- Abolish the Federal Reserve Bank and institute a national bank with the power to create money presently given to the Federal Reserve. As the population and economy grows there is a need to create money. If this is not done, it causes deflation and things get progressively cheaper. While that might sound nice at first glance, not creating money would be every bit the disaster that high inflation can be. Imagine buying a home with a mortgage and watching the price drop every year. That’s deflation. We now have that with home prices, but for other reasons. Anyway, the new national bank will have the power to create money and the profit from creating this money will benefit all the people instead of the present banking class.
- The mortgage crisis must be addressed. The megabanks and Wall Street brought it on and should be required to adjust all mortgage balances down by the local percentage that home prices have dropped. The federal government might then consider not prosecuting those responsible for the crisis.
- Capitalism requires continual growth. This is at odds with the earth’s environment. We need to create a sustainable economy which does not wreak havoc with the earth’s delicate ecosystems. Economic growth is good only when it is environmentally sustainable.
- Just as the poor and working class are required to pay social security tax on all their income, require the wealthy to do the same.
- Recognize that healthcare is a human right and immediately institute either 100 percent government single payer healthcare for all or have government take over the healthcare apparatus and be both the employer and the payer of all healthcare bills.
- End the wars for U.S. Empire overseas. Close our 700 overseas military bases. Cut the total military budget (now in excess of $1 trillion) in half and then half again.
- Disband the Central Intelligence Agency and apologize to the people of all the countries in which our CIA engineered coups to overthrow democratically elected governments. A partial list would include Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Greece, Congo and Iran.
- End military aid to Israel and break off diplomatic relations with them until such time as they agree to abandon all the illegal settlements in the West Bank, tear down the apartheid wall, end the criminal blockade of Gaza and finally allow the Palestinian people a free and independent state based on the 1967 borders that are recognized by the international community of nations.
- The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Democratic Minority Report in 2005 declared that there was a prima facie case that the Bush Administration broke at least seven federal and international laws in taking us into war in Iraq. If we are to be a country of laws, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell etc. must be investigated and prosecuted.
- Those responsible at the highest level for our policy of torture must be prosecuted.
- Equal diligence should be given to investigating and prosecuting the financial machinations behind the mortgage derivative bundling and trading scams. If they agree to reduce all mortgages by the local percentage drop in value, rework terms for those facing foreclosure, put already foreclosed families back in their homes and donate the rest of their ill gotten gain to charity, we might want to consider not prosecuting.
- The 9/11 Commission Investigation and Report was a complete whitewash. How can there be independence in the investigation when the President is allowed to appoint all the members of the commission? The American people are owed the truth and an independent investigation is absolutely necessary if we are to call ourselves a nation of laws.
- A democracy cannot exist without an informed citizenry. Media purveyors must be required to present the full spectrum of news and opinion.
Politicians from both political parties will avoid these issues like the plague. The question is, should you? Or are you content to support politicians who use soaring rhetoric in describing the plight of our people and then line up in support of corporate friendly legislation that continues the race to the bottom for the poor and working class of America? Will your vote for Congress and the U.S. Senate go to a Democratic candidate who supports not a single one of the above proposals? If the answer is yes and you consider yourself a progressive or liberal, what exactly does that mean?
We can’t fix this system by voting, petitioning, marching or lobbying. We have to change the system. The first step is to call the system what it is; monstrous, criminal and undemocratic. The next step is to refuse to participate in elections and to not be bashful in telling others why. This won’t save the world now, but it’s the only hope for the future.
Non-Aligned Movement: IAEA could die saving Israel
Press TV – September 16, 2010
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) warns that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should not protect nuclear-armed Israel at the organization’s own cost.
The movement, which dissociates itself from major superpowers, used the final day of an IAEA meeting in Vienna to highlight Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, a Press TV’s correspondent reported on Thursday.
The 118-member movement expressed its “grave concern over the selective approach of the IAEA towards the issue of the Israeli nuclear capabilities.”
This attitude “puts at stake the viability of the IAEA as an independent technical body,” NAM said.
Tel Aviv is believed to have manufactured scores of nuclear warheads since 1958, a year after IAEA’s inception.
The organization, however, has so far refused to ratify a resolution against Israel’s nuclear activities and has simply sufficed to call on Tel Aviv to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to “place all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards.”
Former US President Jimmy Carter has attested to the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal, which he said includes between 200 to 300 warheads. Decades of recurrent reporting and aerial footage have also confirmed the possession.
NAM also underlined that “stability and security cannot be achieved in a region, where a massive imbalance of military capabilities is maintained systematically.”
The disproportionate distribution of armed power “allows one party in the region…to threaten” others, it added, referring to Israel.
Nam referred to the situation as “unacceptable” and urged that it be addressed “very seriously” so an end can be put to it.
Israel maintains a policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” in line with which it neither confirms nor denies having nuclear armaments.
Israel, backed by the US, has also so far evaded punitive measures.
Efforts by Arab states and other countries caused an NPT review conference in May to issue a statement, highlighting the importance of Tel Aviv’s acceding to the treaty and its allowing the IAEA to fully inspect its nuclear sites.
In the closing chapters of the IAEA meeting, the European Union staged support for Washington’s stance and asked the Arab countries not to table any further such resolutions.
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