By Glenn Greenwald | July 8, 2010
CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world’s most beloved religious figures: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah . . . . One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and other neocon precincts, and CNN quickly (and characteristically) capitulated to that pressure by firing her. The network — which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years — justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s “credibility” had been “compromised.” Within this episode lies several important lessons about media “objectivity” and how the scope of permissible views is enforced.
First, consider which viewpoints cause someone to be fired from The Liberal Media. Last month, Helen Thomas’ 60-year career as a journalist ended when she expressed the exact view about Jews which numerous public figures have expressed (with no consequence or even controversy) about Palestinians. Just weeks ago, The Washington Post accepted the “resignation” of Dave Weigel because of scorn he heaped on right-wing figures such as Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. CNN’s Chief News Executive, Eason Jordan, was previously forced to resign after he provoked a right-wing fit of fury over comments he made about the numerous — and obviously disturbing — incidents where the U.S. military had injured or killed journalists in war zones. NBC fired Peter Arnett for criticizing the U.S. war plan on Iraqi television, which prompted accusations of Treason from the Right. MSNBC demoted and then fired its rising star Ashleigh Banfield after she criticized American media war coverage for adhering to the Fox model of glorifying U.S. wars; the same network fired its top-rated host, Phil Donahue, due to its fear of being perceived as anti-war; and its former reporter, Jessica Yellin, confessed that journalists were “under enormous pressure from corporate executives” to present the news in a pro-war and pro-Bush manner.
What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right. Isn’t that a strange dynamic for the supposedly Liberal Media: the only viewpoint-based firings of journalists are ones where the journalist breaches neoconservative orthodoxy? Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall. I foolishly thought that when George Bush’s own Press Secretary mocked the American media for being “too deferential” to the Bush administration, that would at least put a dent in that most fictitious American myth: The Liberal Media. But it didn’t; nothing does, not even the endless spate of journalist firings for deviating from right-wing dogma.
Beyond journalism, speech codes concerning the Middle East are painfully biased and one-sided. Chas Freeman was barred from a government position — despite a long and accomplished record of public service — due to AIPAC-led anger over comments deemed insufficiently devoted to Israel. Juan Cole was denied a tenured position at Yale after a vicious neocon campaign based on his allegedly anti-Israel remarks, and Norman Finklestein suffered the same fate, despite a unanimous committee recommendation for tenure, after an Alan-Dershowitz-led demonization campaign based on his blasphemous scholarship about Israel. Does anyone ever suffer career-impeding injuries of this type — the way Nasr and Thomas also just have — for expressing anti-Muslim or anti-Arab views? No. The speech prohibitions and thought crimes on the Middle East all run in one direction: to enforce “pro-Israel” orthodoxies. Does this long list of examples leave room for doubt about that fact?
* * * * *
Then there’s the Nasr case itself. Look at how our discourse is completely distorted and dumbed-down by the same stunted, cartoonish neocon orthodoxies that have also destroyed our foreign policy. In our standard political discussions, the simplistic and false notion — obviously accepted by CNN — drives the discussion: Fadlallah is an Evil Hezbollah Terrorist!!, and Nasr probably is as well given the “respect” she expressed for him during his death. Thus: CNN got caught employing an Israel-hating Terrorist-lover, and once she revealed herself, she had to be fired immediately!!!! That really is the primitive level of agitprop churned out by neocon polemicists and then dutifully ingested and embraced by CNN.
The reality, though, is completely different. Fadlallah was a revered figure to a large chunk of the world, and was quite mainstream even in parts of the West. As the AP put it today, Fadlallah was “one of Shiite Islam’s highest and most revered religious authorities with a following that stretched beyond Lebanon’s borders to Iraq, the Gulf and as far away as central Asia.” Ironically, he was the religious guide for Iraq’s Dawa Party: the party of our close ally, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who took the very unusual step of leaving Iraq to attend Fadlallah’s funeral. As ThinkProgress’ Matt Duss put it:
So here’s the neocon logic: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over 4,000 of its own troops and over 100,000 Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.
Writing in Foreign Policy — not exactly a radical, Terrorist-loving outlet — David Kenner described how even moderate, U.S.-friendly officials such as Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri praised Fadlallah as “a voice of moderation and an advocate of unity,” and Kenner documents that even Fadlallah’s alleged ties to Hezbollah are dubious at best.
Most striking, the British Ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, heaped praise on Fadlallah far more gushing than anything Nasr said. In a piece she entitled “The Passing of Decent Men,” Ambassador Guy wrote that he was one of the people whom she enjoyed meeting most and with whom she was most impressed; that he was “a true man of religion, leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith”; that “Lebanon is a lesser place the day after his absence”; and that “the world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths.”
And Nasr herself wrote a moving explanation after the controversy over her tweet erupted, explaining that the respect she expressed for Fadlallah had nothing to do with some of his uglier views about the justifiability of civilian attacks on Israel or Holocaust disparagement, but was rather driven by his important and virtuous call for greater rights and respect for Muslim women, his desire for greater religious tolerance in Muslim nations, and the fact that he “spread what many considered a more moderate voice of Shia Islam than what was coming out of Iran.” She recounted the respect he showed her when she interviewed him 20 years ago. And she explained that “it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission — resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon — that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.” By all accounts, Fadlallah became particularly radicalized in his hostility toward the U.S. when the Reagan administration — working in concert with Saudi Arabia — attempted to assassinate him with a car bomb in Beirut, missed, and slaughtered 80 innocent civilians instead.
In other words, like many people involved in protracted and religiously-motivated violent conflicts, Fadlallah was a profoundly complex figure, with some legitimate grievances, some entrenched hatreds and ugly viewpoints, and a substantial capacity for good. Nasr was expressing a very mild and restrained form of sadness and respect for someone who had just died: sentiments shared in much stronger form by hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and even Western world. The sentiment she expressed, while infuriating neocons, is widespread and completely unnotable for large parts of the world.
What makes Nasr’s summary firing even more astonishing is that Nasr herself was an unremarkable journalist who rarely if ever provoked controversy, had no history of anti-Israel or pro-Terrorist sentiments, and blended perfectly into the American corporate media woodwork. Indeed, Middle East expert and neocon critic Nir Rosen ironically noted yesterday that — as almost happened to Michael Steele — “Octavia Nasr got fired for the one smart thing she ever said.”
This was a banal and very cautious establishment journalist who survived and advanced at Time Warner, Inc. for 20 years by adhering to all the prevailing codes.
But no matter: as we’ve seen repeatedly, in American media and political culture, Middle East orthodoxies are the most sacred and inviolable. Thus, her 2o-year loyal service is brushed to the side because of a 140-character blip of blasphemy. As the Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah put it: she “wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. That’s the point. EVEN someone usually so cautious cannot survive.” He added: “More than ever, [CNN, NPR, The New York Times] are purveyors of official, accepted opinion. Their job is to police what/who we can hear.” That’s what Nicholas Kristof meant when, writing today from Jerusalem, he observed that Israel “tolerates a far greater range of opinions than America”: it’s even more acceptable to utter blasphemy about Israel in Israel than it is in the U.S., as Octavia Nasr was but the latest to discover.
* * * * *
With the Nasr firing, here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. And as Jonathan Schwarz wrote of the Nasr firing:
William Barr is on the board of directors of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. Barr was a senior adviser in the Reagan administration, which attempted to assassinate Fadlallah, missing him and killing more than eighty bystanders.
Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. And having a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel (just watch Blitzer in this 5-minute clip if you have doubts about that) is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”
All of this would be so much more tolerable if CNN would simply admit that it permits its journalists to hold and express some controversial opinions (ones in accord with official U.S. policy and orthodox viewpoints) but prohibits others (ones which the neocon Right dislikes). Instead, we are subjected to this patently false pretense of opinion-free objectivity.
The reality is that “pro-Israel” is not considered a viewpoint at all; it’s considered “objective.” That’s why there’s no expression of it too extreme to result in the sort of punishment which Nasr just suffered (preceded by so many others before her). Conversely, while Hezbollah is seen by much of the world as an important defense against Israeli aggression in Lebanon, the U.S. Government has declared it a Terrorist organization, and therefore “independent” U.S. media outlets such as CNN dutifully follow along by firing anyone who expresses any positive feelings about anyone who, in turn, has any connection to that group. That’s how tenuous and distant the thought crime can be and still end someone’s career. It’s true that much of the world sees some of Hezbollah’s actions as Terrorism; much of the world sees Israel’s that way as well. CNN requires the former view while prohibiting the latter. As usual, our brave journalistic outlets not only acquiesce to these suffocating and extremely subjective restrictions on what our political discourse allows; they lead the way in enforcing them.
Blogger Philip Weiss has them, and they’re not pretty
By Mehdi Hasan – New Statesman – 05 July 2010
I’ve written the cover story for this week’s New Statesman, on the rise and rise of David Petraeus and America’s “cult of the generals”.
Here’s an extract:
Twelve of the 43 men who have served as US president have been former generals – including the very first occupant of the Oval Office, George Washington. Nonetheless, there has not been a general in the White House since Dwight D Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in the Second World War and architect of the D-Day landings, left office in 1961 (excoriating the “military-industrial complex” on his way out). But the rise of the generals in recent years, exemplified by the hallowed status of Petraeus, has altered the dynamic. If a general is elected to the White House in 2012 or 2016, the grip of this cult on the US polity will once again have been demonstrated.
Interestingly, in an unrelated story on the supposedly declining power of the Israel lobby in today’s Guardian, the paper’s Washington correspondent Chris McGreal writes:
Senior figures in the American military, including General David Petraeus who has commanded US forces in both wars, have identified Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land as an obstacle to resolving those conflicts.
McGreal is referring to the general’s official “posture” statement on US Central Command – which Petraeus was in charge of, before being redeployed by President Obama to Afghanistan a fortnight ago – in which it says:
The [Israel-Palestine] conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [Centcom’s Area of Responsibility] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Petraeus’s prepared statement caused uproar in pro-Israeli circles back in March, when it was published, and some on the right and the left automatically assumed he must be a private supporter of the Palestinians and that he had suddenly and bravely decided to stand up to to the Israel lobby inside the United States.
But guess what? In a gaffe which hasn’t yet attracted the same amount of press as Stanley McChrystal’s bizarre interview with Rolling Stone, Petraeus accidentally leaked an email exchange of his – with the belligerent, neoconservative, pro-Israeli columnist Max Boot – to an activist named James Morris, who then passed it onto blogger Philip Weiss:
Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a rightwing writer to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.
The emails show Petraeus encouraging Max Boot of Commentary to write a story– and offering the neoconservative writer choice details about his views on the Holocaust:
“Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…”
Petraeus passed the emails along himself through carelessness last March. He pasted a Boot column from Commentary’s blog into in an “FYI” email he sent to an activist who is highly critical of the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel. Some of the general’s emails to Boot were attached to the bottom of the story. The activist, James Morris, shared the emails with me.
You can read the full details here.
Meanwhile, here’s a taster of Clayton Swisher’s amusing response on the Al Jazeera blog:
It’s not clear what miracles Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel can work for General Petraeus now that he’s the top officer in Kabul.
Based on these emails Petraeus apparently authored, subsequently leaked to blogger Philip Weiss, it seems the former Central Commander thought a private dinner with Weisel and a Holocaust Museum stint might boost his pro-Israel bonafides (“some of my best friends are Jewish!”).
I guess the good general is keener on being the next US president, and not upsetting the Israel lobby in the meantime, than some had assumed.
By BINOY KAMPMARK | CounterPunch | July 2, 2010
‘I was the child of the survivors of the Holocaust.’ With that, Roz Rothstein of the activist group Stand With Us that hopes to transform the image of Israel on US campuses sets the moral authority before a small audience at an office on Howard Street, San Francisco. One can, she explains, disagree with Israel, but there are ‘limits’ to such doubting behavior. Exceeding those limits constitutes the gravest sort of anti-Semitism. As people devour the food and drink put on by the associates of Blumberg Capital, serious politics is being discussed. ‘We are being demonized,’ she insists. Whether she means Israel, Jews or Jews in the US is hard to tell. Presumably, no true distinction is intended.
The gathering teams with Republicans, many of them competing with each other for various posts in upcoming elections. Candidates who are going to be competing for House positions are also there including John Dennis who hopes to undermine Nancy Pelosi. The room smells of political hustling and over-eager libidos.
All are, however, there for one reason: defending Israel. Israel is besieged, the David in a sea of overly keen Goliaths. A good deal of agitprop is necessary to convince the audience, and perhaps the speakers, of this bizarre scenario. Pro-Palestinian groups are swarming across American campuses attacking Jews and pro-Israeli students alike. The UN is ‘obsessed’ with Israel and prefers, we are told, not to look at the stain of character on other states. One must be on the look out for the ‘Three Ds’ suggested by Natan Sharansky. (The speakers intone this in irritating fashion – we are in a kindergarten of ideological instruction. Remember ‘demonization’, ‘double standards’ and ‘delegitimization’, for one.)
The language merchants are busy attempting to find the right good to sell. ‘We must be out there to counter our enemies.’ Evidently, the Gaza dead, with their galvanic properties must be astonishingly good at public relations – they are, it would seem, the ignoble savages who dare speak from their status as the deceased.
The campaign being waged is yet another indication of how the Israeli lobby, so peevishly dismissed by Israeli supporters as non-existent, arises with effective force when fear is packaged and retailed in this faux salon manner. These are the first people who would insist that such a thing is anathema, only to then gather their forces and funds to effectively provide assistance to a foreign power. Young, well-groomed men listening intently will be doing service at some point with the Israeli Army, a problematic situation given mixed allegiances. The framers of the US constitution would have had something to say about that.
What is most striking in this display is the rehearsed language of doom. (We are ‘besieged’, a ‘well planned tsunami’ is being put into place, argues Rothstein.) The Palestinians do not exist except in the negative, a dark eminence with Satanic overtones. Hamas, a body once supported by Israel for Machiavellian purposes, is not a force that can or should be dealt with other than through force. Beware their Charter.
It all comes down to ‘information’. ‘They do not know the information,’ explains Dr. Michael Harris, who was a founder of San Francisco Voice for Israel before it became the San Francisco chapter for Stand With Us. So, with this in mind, a packet is distributed, bulging with fascinating ‘facts’ rendered on glossy paper. How far it will go is not something these agitprop peddlers make clear.
A brief summary of what is on show then. A booklet entitled ‘Middle East: Apartheid Today’ is designed to focus on Arab and Muslim prejudice (murderous ‘gender apartheid’ is practiced amongst the Palestinians). ‘We don’t do apartheid in the Holy Land’. South African apartheid is also singled out as spectacular, singular and totally different from Israeli policies. And besides, many want to leave Islam – they want to assimilate, to become like ‘us’.
There are pictures of hanged men from Iran reproduced in distributed booklets showing homosexuality to be a capital offence in that benighted part of the world. (Would Orthodox Jews disagree with such treatment, one wonders.) In short, the apartheid fiends, the promoters of segregation, sexually motivated crimes, honor killings and institutionalized racism, lie outside Israel’s sacred, threatened borders. Instead, focus is directed on such things as ‘Israel’s gift to the world’ on a card that speaks about its ‘Intel laptops’ and ‘mobile phone technology’ amongst other things.
On the coattails of doom is that of self-praise. No one would hate us if they knew how humanitarian we really were. An example is adduced: the hospital in Haiti, emphasized in the publication ‘Israeli Heroes in Haiti’. This gesture, it seems, rinses guilt and cheers the consciences. Far better to build hospitals in Haiti than Gaza, where a humanitarian crisis is all too real. The mantras are almost hypnotic, and said with repeated, mechanical hollowness: ‘We are the glowing light in the Middle East’. This is the Winthrop covenant of the Holy Land, Americans who have confused Israel with the ‘light on the hill’ and a puritan assertion of exceptionality, and would prefer to be there than in San Francisco. (Dare one ask?)
The questions posed by the anesthetized audience are variously comical and absurd in their businesslike approach. A political candidate for the twelfth district in San Francisco suggests a screenwriter for an appropriate film to display Israel on American campuses in a good light. Another suggests ‘feel good’ images that re-enforce notions of the genteel Jew. ‘Cuddly, yes, cuddly and warm.’ Things are getting rather slippery here, and the hold on reality, if it was ever there, is now being lost. Another suggests that Israel is ‘the canary in the coal mine.’ An announcement of thanks is made to the speakers: an anonymous donor has just penned a cheque for an undisclosed sum running into the thousands. Money for jam. This place, presumably a refuge from the coalmine, is an asylum of unreality. And one is simply happy to leave it.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently in San Francisco. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
By Bob Nichols | Online Journal | July 2, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO — Israel has “found” at least 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Mediterranean, a good portion of which “belongs” to Gaza and Lebanon.
Israel says, in effect, “Screw that.”
“The gas and oil is ours to take and sell. We are the strongest militarily in the area and have global thermonuclear weapons – lots of them. Get used to it.” [1]
Israel, with the Israel Defense Forces as enforcers and guards will suck the gas and oil out of the ground and sell it as fast as they can, from the edges, to steal it away from their neighbors — the Lebanese and the Palestinians.
That will depress world natural gas prices worldwide and kill the plans of the major oil companies, who are buying up natural gas companies.
The major oil companies are very anxious to raise prices a little bit on natural gas so they can also raise prices on gasoline. The two fuels have always been closely tied to each other.
The US government is easily pushed around by Israeli hardball politics; but, the majors are not, not at all.
The majors will want to restrict production of natural gas to raise prices.
Israel will want to dump 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over a period of a few years on the world natural gas market as fast as they can to keep it from their enemies, the Lebanese and the Palestinians. Both cannot happen at the same time.
My bet is that Israel will win against the major oil companies and natural gas prices will be depressed for several years.
Why? Simple. Israel, its intelligence agency, the Mossad, and their bank cronies have more money to buy politicians and US government “policy” than the major oil companies do.
The US government will do as they are paid and told to do.
Reference
1. Landau: We will defend gas fields,” The Jerusalem Post, 06/24/2010.
Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winner, a correspondent for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and a frequent contributor to various online publications. He reports on war, politics and the two nuclear weapons labs in the Bay Area. Nichols is writing a book based on 20 years of nuclear war in Central Asia. He is a former employee of an Army Ammunition Plant. You are encouraged to write Nichols at duweapons@gmail.com.
By Philip Weiss on June 29, 2010
Elena Kagan, the nominee to the Supreme Court, was dean of Harvard Law School in 2006 when she introduced Aharon Barak, chief judge of Israel’s High Court of Justice, during an award ceremony as “my judicial hero.” She explained (per the New York Times):
He is the judge or justice in my lifetime whom, I think, best represents and has best advanced the values of democracy and human rights, of the rule of law and of justice.
Turns out that Kagan (who testified today that “Israel means a lot to me”) is not alone. In The Case for Israel (2003), Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz writes:
This book is respectfully dedicated to my dear friend of nearly forty years, Professor Aharon Barak, the president of Israel’s Supreme Court, whose judicial decisions make a better case for Israel and for the rule of law than any book could possibly do.
Who is Barak? In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein says that Aharon Barak was “a leading proponent” of guidelines allowing torture– making Israel the “only country in the world where torture was legally sanctioned,” according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. He also gave a green light to administrative detentions, even as the judge conceded, “there is probably no State in the Western world that permits an administrative detention of someone who does not himself pose any danger to State security.”
And he approved the barrier wall that crosses through occupied territory, of which Finkelstein says:
If all branches of Israeli government and society bear responsibility for this impending catastrophe [the end of the two-state solution], the share of the HCJ and especially its liberal chief justice, Aharon Barak, is relatively larger. Due to its moral authority the HCJ was in a unique position to sensitize the Israeli public. Beyond helping fend off external criticism of Israel’s annexationist policies, the HCJ chose to mute the collective Israeli conscience.
Of course Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul not long after he published that book.
Martha Minow replaced Kagan as dean of Harvard Law School. In 2006, she co-authored an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe with an Israeli army lawyer; the piece is titled, “The Israeli model for detainee rights,” and touts Israeli measures developed “during a long and difficult experience with terrorism.”
P.S. Andrew Sullivan has recently asked whether there are any vocal anti-Zionists on any Op-Ed pages in the U.S. Good question; the answer is No. You can’t be.
Today I was reading Geoffrey Wawro’s book Quicksand when I came across this passage that resonates with the above examples.
“There was no Iraqi who was not in the [Baathist] party,” an ex-factory manager in Baghdad told an American reporter in April 2003. He meant Iraqis who were “highly educated and technical.” Among that cohort, “if you weren’t a Baathist, you wouldn’t be able to rise in the hierarchy.”
Where is leadership?
By Sinan | Aletho News | July 1, 2010
Istanbul: Our Prime Minister and the chief of the Military together visited a border military station between Iraq and Turkey where a few soldiers got killed by the PKK the previous week.
What is wrong with this picture? Everything.
Both of them were kneeling down in the photos which emerged. Well, that’s something that they should have never done. A leader should stand up and show courage to the soldiers who stay and fight there everyday.
The Turkish public found the photo appalling. A few days later both the PM and the military chief were forced to make press announcements that it is normal to kneel down in such situations. Of course nobody bought the explanation.
Is it dangerous there? Yes. Snipers around? Maybe. Could you get killed or injured? Remote chance but possibly yes. But all of the risk doesn’t mean that you kneel down. They should have been brave enough to stand up as a leader would.
Another example, take a look at a picture of Gordon Brown during a visit to Afghanistan. He looks very silly. Look at his stressed face. Note that the general next to him doesn’t wear any protective gear. There are countles examples like this.
Cowardliness and paranoia are common problems among todays so called leaders. It’s the same all around the world. Nearly all of them are not real leaders like we have seen in world history.
They surround themselves with hundreds of body guards, Kevlar vests, bulletproof cars, houses like fortresses. When they travel from one place to another, the whole area is cordoned off, streets are closed to traffic. There are policemen every few meters etc… Most of these measures are unnecessary.
Why do they behave like that?
To give an answer we must look at the democratic system we live in today. We go to the polling stations every few years and choose the party (candidate) we think best suited to our beliefs. But the real question is who brought those political parties/leaders before us.
Are they there because the people want them? No, they were carefully handpicked and groomed by the IMF, World Bank, Bilderbergers, CFR etc. Then the controlled media tell us how good they are day and night continuously. After a short time you have a new leader!
We only chose from the candidates that were presented to us. They are all same. Only their names and appearances are different. They are one party with two (or more) heads.
To give you an idea, our present prime minister was presented with a “Courage to Care Award” by Abraham Foxman of ADL in 2004.
For what?
After the Mavi Marmara incident why didn’t he send the award back to the ADL?
Also two of our ministers were graduated from Exeter University in England which is a well known place for recruiting and training foreign agents for MI5 & MI6. One of these guys is a deputy PM.
What a coincidence!
Look at the meetings of Bilderbergers, G-20, G-8. Every year they step up the security measures. In the last G-20 meeting in Canada the security costs were reported to be nearly 1 billion dollars. They have shut down the whole city. If our elites are so thoroughly secured from the public, and are never exposed to risks from the decisions they take, there will be endless expansion of corruption, poverty and wars.
By Glenn Greenwald – June 30, 2010
A newly released study from students at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as “torture” — until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way:
Similarly, American newspapers are highly inclined to refer to waterboarding as “torture” when practiced by other nations, but will suddenly refuse to use the term when it’s the U.S. employing that technique:
As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the U.S. Government (which is why it’s the “establishment media”): the U.S. itself long condemned waterboarding as “torture” and even prosecuted it as such, only to suddenly turn around and declare it not to be so once it began using the tactic. That’s exactly when there occurred, as the study puts it, “a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboading.” As the U.S. Government goes, so goes our establishment media.
None of this is a surprise, of course. I and others many times have anecdotally documented that the U.S. media completely changes how it talks about something (or how often) based on who is doing it (“torture” when the Bad Countries do it but some soothing euphemism when the U.S. does it; continuous focus when something bad is done to Americans but a virtual news blackout when done by the U.S., etc.). Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate: media outlets such as the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word “torture” for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government officials announced it should not be called “torture.”
We don’t need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary. In his proposed Preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell noted how completely the British Government during World War II was able to control media content without formal or official censorship:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. . . .
So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. . . . At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.
In 2007, Rudy Giuliani was widely mocked for explaining that whether a particular technique constitutes torture “depends on who does it” — rarely does one find such an unapologetically nationalistic theory of morality and even language — but that’s exactly the same standard not only our government but also our establishment media has adopted.
The real issue here is the same one raised by the malleable, manipulative use of the term “Terrorism.” It’s to be expected that governments will try to propagandize their citizenry by applying completely different standards — even completely different language — to their own conduct as opposed to when other countries engage in exactly the same conduct. But when the media copies that behavior (as ours does), they’re amplifying and bolstering government propaganda rather than critically scrutinizing and debunking it. Isn’t that a fairly serious problem?
The behavior is even more egregious when government dictates (as of now, this is no longer torture) lead directly to the change in media behavior. And the ultimate effect of this joint government/media obfuscation is to further entrench the destructive notion that we’re different, exceptional, better, and therefore we deserve even a different language to describe what it is that we do. This Harvard study documents the exact process by which the political class convinces itself and others that bad and illegal things are, by definition, only what those Bad, Other Foreign Countries do, but never ourselves.
by Khalil Bendib
Al Manar – 28/06/2010
The Israeli Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Sunday rejected a bill aimed at preventing discrimination against students enrolled in the official state education system.
In their bill, MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) and Kadima Mks Shlomo Molla and Shai Hermesh, proposed that the education minister be obligated to enforce within a specific timeline the cessation of discrimination found in any particular school.
According to the proposal, the Israeli education ministry would have the right to revoke state funding should the offending school not heed the warning by the mentioned date. The proposal would also allow the state to implement economic sanctions against the school.
Despite the Israeli cabinet’s disapproval, MK Horowitz still intends to bring the bill forward for a preliminary reading in the Knesset.
“If the MKs vote against the bill in the Knesset, like the ministers did today, it will be proof of the ideological and moral hole within the current government and its leader,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz added that the rejection of the bill demonstrated “the continuation of [Education Minister] Gideon Sa’ar and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s silence and disregard regarding the affair in Immanuel.”
The bill had been submitted before the Ashkenazi parents in the ultra-Orthodox community of Immanuel were given a two-week jail term for refusing a court order to send their daughters to school with girls of Sephardi, or Middle Eastern, origin. On Sunday, the court ordered the parents released from jail immediately, after a deal was reached to see the girls integrated in classes for the remaining three days of the school year.
MK Molla said after the vote that “precisely toady, as the Immanuel affair hovers above us like a black could, the government should have approved the bill to clarify in a distinct voice that it opposes discrimination and racism in all forms and in all sectors.”
Press TV – June 28, 2010
The head of Jordan’s Atomic Energy Commission says that it is not ready to surrender its peaceful nuclear rights in negotiations with the United States.
The US wanted Jordan to sign a nuclear agreement similar to a deal they reached with the United Arab Emirates, Khaled Tukan told AFP on Monday.
The UAE “has relinquished its rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),” he said, adding, “Why should we give up our rights?”
The nuclear chief also said Article 4 of the NPT stipulates that “all countries have the right to full utilization of peaceful nuclear energy, research and development.”
“We are sticking and adhering to the NPT, and (we want) full rights and privileges under the NPT,” he said.
Tukan noted that Jordan was in ongoing negotiations with the United States and the latest round of talks was held in Washington last week.
“But I think we still don’t have common ground. They started to understand our viewpoint, but still (there is) no common ground.”
Jordan has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with several countries in a bid to produce atomic energy for power generation and water desalination.
DAN OAKES | Sydney Morning Herald | June 29, 2010
A former Australian ambassador to Israel has accused the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, of being silent on the ”excesses” of Israel and questioned why her partner has been given a job by a prominent Israel lobbyist.
In a letter to the Herald, Ross Burns, who served as an ambassador between 2001 and 2003, said Ms Gillard has been ”remarkably taciturn on the excesses of Israeli actions in the past two years”.
Ms Gillard has been part of the Australian delegation to the last two meetings of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum, founded by the Melbourne property developer Albert Dadon.
Mr Dadon employs Ms Gillard’s partner, Tim Mathieson, as a real estate salesman, at Ubertas. Mr Burns said yesterday that Ms Gillard was at the forum’s inaugural meeting in Israel last June, six months after the Israeli army invaded the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1000 Palestinians.
She was also the acting prime minister when the invasion took place, and issued a statement at the time criticising the Palestinian group Hamas for firing rockets into southern Israel. It did not condemn Israel for causing civilian casualties.
The former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and the Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, have since expressed unease at the subsequent blockade of Gaza by Israel.
”It looks a bit funny when you go on this tour to promote bilateral relations, but you don’t seem to have any reservations about the issue that was number one on the horizon,” Mr Burns said.
Another former Australian ambassador to Tel Aviv, Peter Rodgers, who served in the Israeli capital from 1994 to 1997, also criticised the government’s attitude towards Israel.
He said last night that under successive governments, Australia’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had become increasingly unbalanced, and that this was unlikely to change under Ms Gillard’s stewardship.
”There’s been a marked swing away from the old attempt to be even-handed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to a much more determined pro-Israeli position, and I think Gillard is part of that,” Mr Rodgers said.
The Herald sought comments from Ms Gillard, Michael Danby, a prominent Jewish federal MP – and a supporter of Ms Gillard in last week’s leadership coup – and Mr Dadon for this article, but received no response.
Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media
By Richard Silverstein | June 17, 2010
Amos Horev, the retired IDF general, former Technion president, and chief booster of the Israeli defense industry, has a rather sordid past that many might find akin to being a terrorist, Israel-style.
He is one of three panel members of the Gaza flotilla investigation and this incident, described by the inimitable Tom Segev in a 2002 Haaretz article, should shed light on the type of justice he might mete out in this inquiry:
`We castrated you, Mohammed!’
In the mid-1940s, a popular song [by Haim Hefer] among the members of the Palmach was entitled “We castrated you, we castrated you, Mohammed!” [Serasnucha ya Muhammad–the Hebrew lyrics censor the word for “castration” and substitute the meaningless Saragosa in order to permit Israeli youth groups to sing and dance to the song without having to explain the true meaning to such tender ears] That song is remembered even today. During the 60 years that have passed since that time, various theories have surfaced about the song’s origin. However, it was commonly assumed that members of the Palmach had tracked down and then castrated an Arab who had raped a Jewish woman. This was not an isolated case. In his biography of Yitzhak Sadeh, Zvika Dror writes that the commander of the Palmach even sent some of his men to a special course that was given at the Mendele clinic of the Kupat Holim Clalit health maintenance organization. “We would go there at 8:30 P.M. when the clinic was empty,” Dror quotes his source. “A physician and a nurse taught us anatomy and afterward we practiced a castration procedure.”
Now it is official: A book by Gamliel Cohen, “Undercover: The Untold Story of the Palmach’s Undercover Arab Unit,” published by the Ministry of Defense and the Galili Center for Defense Studies, reveals, with amazing precision, who the mythological “Mohammed” was, whom he raped, who authorized the rapist’s castration, who performed the castration and how precisely the “surgical operation” was carried out. Cohen eventually joined the Mossad. He describes how the Palmach’s undercover agents performed their liquidations; the same procedure is being used today in the territories.
The rapist…is identified in Cohen’s book as Araf Ahmed Shatawi, a broad-shouldered, muscular man who lived in the village of Bissan, where the town of Beit She’an is presently located. Shatawi was suspected of having attempted to rape a young woman from Kibbutz Messilot. According to Cohen, the suspicions were based on intelligence data. Shatawi was alleged to have spotted the woman as she descended from a bus and to have dragged her into the bushes. She struggled and managed to thwart the rape attempt. Since the atmosphere in the kibbutz was already highly charged and since this was not the first attempted rape, the supreme command of the Haganah decided that it would provide an effective response to the incident. At first it was proposed that Shatawi be assassinated; however, because of the fear that an assassination might set off a chain of blood vendettas, it was decided, as Cohen puts it, “to deal with him in accordance with the biblical principle that calls for the chopping off of a thief’s hand and which, in this case, would call for attacking the organ he used to perform the crime, namely, for castrating him.”
The plan was submitted to Shaul Avigur for approval. He was somewhat hesitant, in view of the cruel nature of the proposed action; however, Yehoshua Palmon, who later became the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, persuaded him, and Avigur gave the plan the green light. According to Cohen, who quotes documents preserved in the IDF archives, the two individuals who carried out the castration procedure were Yohai Bin-Nun, who later became a major general and the commander-in-chief of the Israel Navy, and Amos Horev, who also later became a major general, the chief scientist of the defense establishment and the president of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. There was a third man, named Yaakuba Cohen; however, according to the Ministry of Defense version of the incident, he did not actually participate in the castration but instead stood guard over the rapist’s family, while Bin-Nun and Horev dragged him from his home into an open field, where they castrated him. Before they set off for this mission, they were briefed by the chief physician of the communities of Tel Yosef and Ein Harod. Cohen does not name him. The book then goes on to provide a detailed surgical description of the castration, which sounds almost like a “do-it-yourself” manual. In the final analysis, according to the Ministry of Defense version, the “operation, it was pointed out, proved highly valuable because it had an immense impact on the entire Beit She’an Valley and horrified the Arab population.”
No doubt, Amos Horev feels like the Israeli bus driver who decorated his bus with a banner that read:
Flotilla 13 [the navy unit that attacked the Mavi Marmara], be ashamed. Why did you kill so few?
Yes, there are those who will say this incident happened nearly 70 years ago and times have changed and that people change. I’m not even going to argue with this proposition though I disagree with it. The fact is that Horev should not have been appointed because his past taints his participation in the present inquiry. Surely, not even a reasonable supporter of the Gaza attack can argue that Horev has the type of past that would instill confidence that he can judge the facts dispassionately.
As an aside, if Israel embraces the type of Biblical justice meted out by the Palmach to the alleged Palestinian rapist, then should we expect, in the unlikely event the Israeli commission finds Flotilla 13 guilty of criminal acts against the Mavi Marmara passengers, that Horev will advocate cutting off the trigger fingers of the shooters? Or perhaps Turkey should take that mission on itself in the event the commission absolves the team of any culpability?
And the next time any supporter of Israel’s draconian policies rants about Arab terror, let them consider for a moment the rather sordid past of some of Israel’s current elite. If those who engaged in acts of terror like Horev can play major roles in their nation’s subsequent history, there is no reason why those Israel currently labels dangerous, murderous terrorists cannot do the same in Palestine.
or go to
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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