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Not just the Elgin Marbles: Britain’s colonial legacy lives long in UK museums

Benin bronzes. © Global Look Press
RT | June 4, 2018

After Jeremy Corbyn promised to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece upon becoming PM on the basis that they were “looted” from the country, RT looks at other rare artifacts taken by colonial Britain that now reside in UK museums.

“As with anything stolen or taken from occupied or colonial possession – including artifacts looted from other countries in the past – we should be engaged in constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures,” Corbyn said in an interview with a Greek newspaper.

If Corbyn were to become PM, here are some of the other artifacts that might be returned to their country of origin.

Benin artefacts

The British Museum boasts the second-biggest collection of Benin’s art after the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

The Kingdom of Benin – now part of Nigeria – was stripped of its bronzes during what became known as Britain’s “punitive expedition,” a mission conducted against the natives after they defied imperial rule by imposing customs duties.

BBC Civilizations presenter David Olusoga, originally from Nigeria, said the UK has a “moral imperative” to return the art.

On the Benin looting, he said: “It’s just such a stark case of theft.”

He added during the Hay Festival this year: “A friend of mine, a TV producer, once came up with a brilliant solution: he said we should have a special version of Supermarket Sweep, where every country is given a huge shopping trolley and two minutes in the British Museum. Maybe he’s right, maybe that’s the way forward.”

Ethiopian treasures

Dozens of institutions up and down the country, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, are home to hundreds of northeast Africa’s finest treasures.

Beautiful and equally important manuscripts and artifacts were plundered after the British capture of Maqdala in 1868, the mountain capital of what was then Abyssinia under Emperor Tewodros II.

In 2017, Ethiopia lodged a formal restitution complaint. The offer was refused, but ahead of the Maqdala exhibition at the V&A at the beginning of April, its director suggested the case could be settled by granting the treasures to the east-African country on a long-term loan.

Sultanganj Buddha

The Sultaganj Buddha is a metallic sculpture that was extracted from an abandoned Buddhist monastery in northern India in 1861 by E B Harris, a British Raj railway engineer. The 1,500-year-old bronze Buddha was then shipped to Birmingham after being secured for a mere £200 ($265).

The item – the largest known Indian metal sculpture, which is known in the UK as the ‘Birmingham Buddha’ – is at the top of the list of thousands of alleged ‘stolen treasures’ that Indian authorities are trying to get back.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond

The Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the largest cut in the world, is currently part of the British crown jewels. It has been the subject of a bitter dispute between India and the UK ever since it was taken from the Punjab and presented to Queen Victoria in 1849.

The jewel, which belonged to the Punjab’s Sikh Empire, was handed by the East Indian Company to Queen Victoria after they emerged victorious in the 1840s Anglo-Sikh wars.

The diamond – known as the Mountain of Light – is thought to have been mined in the 1300s.

India has called for the stone to be returned ever since it gained independence in 1947, though the UK claims it has a legal basis for withholding it, as it was guaranteed under the Treaty of Lahore.

Former PM David Cameron commented on the dispute, stating: “If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I think I’m afraid to say, to disappoint all your viewers, it’s going to have to say put.”

June 4, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Enabling Armageddon

The Air Force’s Strange Love for the New B-21 Bomber

By William J. Astore | TomDispatch | June 3, 2018

Did you know the U.S. Air Force is working on a new stealth bomber? Don’t blame yourself if you didn’t, since the project is so secret that most members of Congress aren’t privy to the details. (Talk about stealthy!) Known as the B-21 Raider, after General Doolittle’s Raiders of World War II fame, it’s designed to carry thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles and bombs. In conceptual drawings, it looks much like its predecessor, the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, all wing and no fuselage, a shape that should help it to penetrate and survive the most hostile air defense systems on Earth for the purposes of a “global strike.” (Think: nuclear Armageddon.)

As the Air Force acquires those future B-21s, the B-2s will be retired along with the older B-1B bomber, although the venerable B-52 (of the Cold War era), much modified, will remain in service for the foreseeable future. At $550 million per plane (before the inevitable cost overruns even kick in), the Air Force plans to buy as many as 200 B-21s. That’s more than $100 billion in procurement costs alone, a boon for Northrop Grumman, the plane’s primary contractor.

If history is any judge, however, a boon for Northrop Grumman is likely to prove a bust for the American taxpayer. As a start, the United States has no real need for a new, stealthy, super-expensive, nuclear-capable, deep-penetrating strategic bomber for use against “peer” rivals China and Russia. But before tackling that issue, a little history is in order.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

A long time ago (1977, to be exact), in a country far, far away, President Jimmy Carter did a brave thing: he cancelled a major Pentagon weapons system just before it was due to start production. That was the B-1 bomber, a plane with sophisticated — that is, expensive — avionics designed to allow it to penetrate Soviet airspace in the event of a nuclear war and survive. Carter cancelled it for the most sensible of reasons: it wasn’t needed.

The Air Force had already developed air-launched cruise missiles that allowed bombers like the B-52 to strike enemy targets with precision from hundreds of miles away. It was also, like all modern weapons systems, outrageously expensive. Why spend vast sums on a new bomber, Carter reasoned, when the plane added little to the nation’s nuclear deterrent? In addition, that cancellation was meant to send a message to the military-industrial complex — that he would neither be beholden to nor intimidated by defense hawks who touted each and every new weapons system, no matter how expensive or redundant, as “essential.”

I was then a teenager with a yen for American warplanes. I’d even made a model of the B-1, complete with “variable geometry” wings that could be extended forward for low-speed flight and swept backward for high-speed, supersonic flight. In my mind’s eye, I can still see it, almost all white like the prototype that Rockwell International, its primary contractor, actually built. In a symbolic act of protest against Carter’s action, I took my model, taped a couple of firecrackers to it, and dropped it from the top floor of our house, blowing it up in a most satisfying way. So much for the B-1, I thought.

I was too young to know better. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, as part of a massive defense buildup (that Carter, ironically enough, had actually begun), he revived the B-1. The Air Force soon committed itself to buying 100 of them at a then-astronomical $280 million each. The B-1B Lancer (as it became known) has served in the Air Force for the last three decades, never (thankfully) fulfilling the purpose for which it was built: a nuclear attack. Plagued by accidents, high operating costs, and maintenance issues, the B-1 has been a disappointment to an Air Force now eager to replace it with an entirely new bomber, more or less guaranteed to have a similar history.

However much I loved the prospective plane as a teenager, I felt quite differently once I was myself in the Air Force. As a young lieutenant in 1986, I even wrote a paper for a contest within the service in which I argued that the concept of a manned, “penetrating,” strategic nuclear bomber was deeply flawed. In essence, I took the Carter position, suggesting that the other “legs” of America’s nuclear triad (ballistic missiles launched from silos and similar missiles on nuclear submarines) were more than enough to deter and defeat enemies (no less destroy the world), and that new “precision” technologies like cruise missiles rendered risky manned bombing missions deep into enemy airspace not just obsolete but antediluvian.

Not surprisingly, my paper didn’t win and the B-1B did. But it was an absurd addition, even by Air Force standards, given that the U.S. had an overwhelming arsenal of missiles at its command, together with a fleet of B-52s that, though lacking in speed and stealth, was aging rather well. In fact, B-52s are still flying today, which isn’t that surprising when you consider the development of highly accurate missiles that allow such a plane to “standoff” from targets and so limit its exposure to enemy air defenses.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, never a service to say no to expensive, high-tech weapons systems, no matter how redundant, was hard at work on a stealthy bomber that would achieve its vision of “global reach, global power, and global strike.” What emerged was the B-2 Spirit, a stealth bomber so expensive ($2.1 billion a pop) that only 21 were ever built. It was also pricier than the B-1 to operate and less reliable thanks to its fragile “stealth” coatings, which required lengthy, high-cost maintenance. In other words, both planes proved expensive disappointments that, fortunately, were never tested on the primary mission for which they were built: incinerating millions of people in a nuclear war.

Enter the B-21, whose very name is supposed to indicate its cutting-edge nature, as the first bomber of a new century. It’s already being readied to reprise the grim, predictable histories of its predecessors.

Will the Bomber Go the Way of the Dodo?

Old ideas and hallowed traditions die hard, especially when they’re so lucrative for the military-industrial-congressional complex. Just look at the staying power of the disastrously overpriced F-35 stealth fighter, projected to cost $1.45 trillion over the life of the program. Put bluntly, today’s future-driven Air Force still wants to be capable of taking the fight to the enemy in a manned bomber, just as in the past. It still wants its air crews to put bombs on target. At a time when remotely piloted drones like the Predators and Reapers are rendering redundant so many human fighter pilots sitting in real cockpits, the Air Force has no intention of allowing its strategic bombing force to go the way of the dodo. Its leaders will always fight for manned strategic bombers because it fits their image of themselves: dodging enemy fighters, missiles, and flak, and taking the fight to the enemy’s doorstep.

In fact, not only does the Air Force want the B-21 as its “fifth generation” bomber, it also wants a new fighter jet to escort it on deep penetrating missions into China, Russia, or other countries. Think here of the legendary P-51 Mustangs, which accompanied U.S. strategic bombers deep into Nazi Germany during World War II. In other words, the Air Force’s vision of future aerial war bears an eerie resemblance to the action scenes in the classic 1949 war movie Twelve O’Clock High, except instead of the B-17s and P-51s of World War II, fifth generation bombers will join with sixth-generation fighters to claw their way through enemy airspace.

Of course, Pentagon officials have an array of talking points to support their case for the B-21. These include: maintaining parity, if not supremacy, vis-à-vis China or Russia or some future, ill-defined enemy and the need of our heroic troops for the latest and best in weaponry. They emphasize that canceling a major weapons system like the B-21 is tantamount to unilateral disarmament, that it would betray weakness to rivals and foes, and that manned bombers provide maximum flexibility since, unlike missiles, they can be recalled or redirected after being launched.

In truth, however, Twelve O’Clock High scenarios look increasingly ridiculous and outmoded in the twenty-first century. But don’t tell that to the U.S. Air Force. When its strategists visualize bombers, all they see is potential, promise, and even fulfillment. But history shows us something else: the potential for widespread and indiscriminant destruction and massive casualties. If anything, since World War II, America’s arsenal of bombers has emboldened the U.S. to strike in places and in ways clearly counterproductive to just about any definition of national security, even as untold numbers of innocents have perished from the ordnance fired or dropped from those planes. The Vietnam War — during which the U.S. dropped seven million tons of bombs — is a perfect example of this.

Here’s the nightmarish reality of actually bringing such weapons systems online: when the U.S. military develops a capability, it seeks to use it, even in cases where it’s wildly inappropriate. (Again, think of the massive B-52 bombings in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in a counterinsurgency campaign classically meant to win “hearts and minds.”) Fielding a new strategic bomber for global strike, including potential thermonuclear attacks, will not so much enhance national security as potentially embolden future presidents to strike whenever and wherever they want in a fashion devastating to human life. The B-21 isn’t a force-multiplier. It’s an Armageddon-enabler.

Flying High in our B-21s

Having marketed himself as a savvy military critic, is there any possibility that Donald Trump will have the smarts of Jimmy Carter when it comes to the B-21 program? Will he save America at least $100 billion (and probably far more) while eliminating yet another redundant weapons system within the Department of Defense? Fat chance. Even if he wanted to, The Donald doesn’t stand a chance against the Pentagon these days.

Flush with billions and billions of new taxpayer dollars, including funds for those F-35s and for new nukes from a bipartisan coalition in an otherwise riven Congress, America’s military services will fight for any and all major weapons systems, the B-21 included. So, too, will Congress, especially if Northrop Grumman follows the production strategy first employed by Rockwell International with the B-1: spreading the plane’s subcontractors and parts suppliers to as many states and Congressional districts as possible. This would, of course, ensure that cuts to the B-21 program would impact jobs and so drive votes in Congress in its favor. After all, what congressional representative would be willing to vote against high-paying jobs in his or her own state or district in the name of American security?

So here’s my advice to young model-builders everywhere: don’t blow up your B-21s anytime soon. Rest assured that the real thing is coming. If the Air Force wants to ensure that it has a new bomber, in the name of blasting America’s enemies to oblivion, so be it. It worked (partially and at tremendous cost) in 1943 in the flak- and fighter-filled skies of Nazi Germany, so why shouldn’t it work in 2043 over the skies of who-knows-where-istan?

Why does “your” Air Force think this way? Not just because it loves big bombers, but also because its biggest rivals aren’t in Russia or China or some “rogue” state like Iran. They’re right here in “the homeland.” I’m talking, of course, about the other military services. Yes, interservice rivalries remain alive and well at the Pentagon. If the U.S. Navy can continue to build breathtakingly expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (like the much-troubled USS Gerald R. Ford) and submarines, and if the Army can have all its tanks, helicopters, and associated toys, then, dammit, the Air Force can have what truly makes it special and unique: a new stealthy strategic bomber escorted by an even newer long-range stealthy fighter.

And don’t just blame the Air Force for such retrograde thinking. Its leaders know what’s easiest to sell Congress: big, splashy projects that entail decades of funding and create tens of thousands of jobs. As congressional representatives line up to push for their pieces of the action, military contractors are only too happy to oblige. As the lead contractor for the B-21, Northrop Grumman of Falls Church, Virginia, has the most to gain, but other winners will include United Technologies of East Hartford, Connecticut; BAE Systems of Nashua, New Hampshire; Spirit Aerosystems of Wichita, Kansas; Orbital ATK of Clearfield, Utah, and Dayton, Ohio; Rockwell Collins of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; GKN Aerospace of St Louis, Missouri; and Janicki Industries of Sedro-Woolley, Washington. And these are just the major suppliers for that aircraft; dozens of other parts suppliers will be needed, and they’ll be carefully allocated to as many Congressional districts as possible. Final assembly of the plane will likely take place in Palmdale, California, integrating components supplied from sea to shining sea. Who says America’s coastal enclaves can’t join with the heartland to get things done?

Even if President Trump wanted to cancel the B-21 — and given his recent speech to graduates of the Naval Academy, the odds are that there isn’t a weapons system anywhere he doesn’t want to bring to fruition — chances are that in today’s climate of militarism he would face enormous push-back. As a colleague who’s still on active duty in the Air Force puts it, “What makes today worse than the Carter days is our flag-humping, military-slobbering culture. We can’t even have a discussion of what the country’s needs are for fear of ‘offending’ or ‘disrespecting’ the troops. Today, Carter would be painted as disloyal to those troops he was consigning to an early death because every procurement decision centers on a ‘grave’ or ‘existential’ threat to national security with immediate and deadly consequences.”

And so the Air Force and its flyboy generals will win the fight for the B-21 and take the American taxpayer along for the ride — unless, that is, we somehow have the courage to pry the control sticks from the cold, dead hands of hidebound military tradition and lobbying firepower. Until we do, it’s off we go (yet again), into the wild blue yonder, flying high in our B-21s.

A TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, William Astore taught history for 15 years at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and in Pennsylvania at a technical college.

Copyright 2018 William J. Astore

June 3, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Joe Rogan interview with Robert Schoch

The Joe Rogan Experience #1124

Robert Schoch is an associate professor of Natural Sciences at the College of General Studies, Boston University. He has been best known as a proponent of the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis.

Check out links to more of his work at http://robertschoch.com


ORACUL

The scientific debate surrounding the origins of human civilization is far from settled. Independent research by scholars and professionals in the hard sciences has begun to challenge the accepted narrative of civilization’s beginnings. Today, there is a large body of evidence from a myriad of fields which argues convincingly for a revision of that narrative – pushing back the timeline for advanced culture by thousands of years.

Opposed by many orthodox scholars (whose interests are served by maintaining the status quo), serious scientists and professionals who attempt to bring attention to this contrary evidence are often ignored and ridiculed. Handicapped by a lack of funding, publicity, and professional networking, breakthrough research related to ancient cultures continues to languish in relative obscurity.

ORACUL works to bring this existing research to the attention of both the academic community and the public, as well as conducting new investigations into ancient cultures. This pioneering research involves not only professionals in the hard sciences, but also serious, out-of-the-box thinking in other disciplines. ORACUL will accomplish this goal by focusing on three primary areas of activity: Research Advocacy, Publishing, and Educational Outreach.

June 3, 2018 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • June 3, 2018

Introduction

Just after midnight of June 6, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a backroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just been celebrating his victory at the California primaries, which made him the most likely Democratic nominee for the presidential election. His popularity was so great that Richard Nixon, on the Republican side, stood little chance. At the age of 43, Robert would have become the youngest American president ever, after being the youngest Attorney General in his brother’s government. His death opened the way for Nixon, who could finally become president eight years after having been defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960.

John had been assassinated four and a half years before Robert. Had he survived, he would certainly have been president until 1968. Instead, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson took over the White House in 1963, and became so unpopular that he retired in 1968. Interestingly, Johnson became president the very day of John’s death, and ended his term a few months after Robert’s death. He was in power at the time of both investigations.

And both investigations are widely regarded as cover-ups. In both cases, the official conclusion is rife with contradictions. We are going to sum them up here. But we will do more: we will show that the key to solving both cases resides in the link between them. And we will solve them beyond a reasonable doubt.

As Lance deHaven-Smith has remarked in Conspiracy Theory in America:

“It is seldom considered that the Kennedy assassinations might have been serial murders. In fact, in speaking about the murders, Americans rarely use the plural, ‘Kennedy assassinations’. […] Clearly, this quirk in the Kennedy assassination(s) lexicon reflects an unconscious effort by journalists, politicians, and millions of ordinary Americans to avoid thinking about the two assassinations together, despite the fact that the victims are connected in countless ways.”[1]

John and Robert were bound by an unshakable loyalty. Kennedy biographers have stressed the absolute dedication of Robert to his elder brother. Robert had successfully managed John’s campaign for the Senate in 1952, then his presidential campaign in 1960. John made him not only his Attorney General, but also his most trusted adviser, even on matters of Foreign or Military affairs. What John appreciated most in Robert was his sense of justice and the rectitude of his moral judgment. It is Robert, for example, who encouraged John to fully endorse the cause of the Blacks’ civil rights movement.[2]

Given this exceptional bond between the Kennedy brothers, what is the probability that the two Kennedy assassinations were unrelated? Rather, we should start with the assumption that they are related. Basic common sense suggests that the Kennedy brothers have been killed by the same force, and for the same motives. It is, at least, a logical working hypothesis that Robert was eliminated from the presidential race because he had to be prevented from reaching a position where he could reopen the case of his brother’s death. Both his loyalty to his brother’s memory, and his obsession with justice, made it predictable that, if he reached the White House, he would do just that. But was there, in 1968, any clear indication that he would?

Did Bobby plan to reopen the investigation on his brother’s assassination?

The question has been positively answered by David Talbot in his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by Simon & Schuster. Robert had never believed in the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of his brother. Knowing too well what to expect from Johnson, he had refused to testify before the Warren Commission. When its report came out, he had no choice but to publicly endorse it, but “privately he was dismissive of it,” as his son Robert Kennedy, Jr. remembers.[3] To close friends who wondered why he wouldn’t voice his doubt, he said: “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.” [4]

From 22 November 1963, Robert was alienated and monitored by Johnson and Hoover. Although still Attorney General, he knew he was powerless against the forces that had killed his brother. Yet he lost no time beginning his own investigation; he first asked CIA director John McCone, a Kennedy friend, to find out if the Agency had anything to do with the plot, and came out convinced that it hadn’t. In March 1964, he had a face-to-face conversation with mobster Jimmy Hoffa, his sworn enemy, whom he had battled for ten years, and whom he suspected of having taken revenge on his brother. Robert also asked his friend Daniel Moynihan to search for any complicity in the Secret Service, responsible for the President’s security[5]. And of course, Robert suspected Johnson, whom he had always mistrusted, as Jeff Shesol documents in Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997).

In fact, a mere week after JFK’s death, November 29, 1963, Bill Walton, a friend of the Kennedys, travelled to Moscow and passed to Nikita Khrushchev, via a trusted agent who had already carried secret communications between Khrushchev and John Kennedy, a message from Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy; according to the memo found in the Soviet archives in the 90s by Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali (One Hell of a Gamble, 1998), Robert and Jackie wanted to inform the Soviet Premier that they believed John Kennedy had been “the victim of a right-wing conspiracy,” and that “the cooling that might occur in U.S.-Soviet relations because of Johnson would not last forever.” [6]

Robert also contacted a former MI6 officer who had been a friend of his family when his father was Ambassador in London. This British retired officer in turn contacted some trusted friends in France, and arrangments were made for two French Intelligence operatives to conduct, over a three-year period, a quiet investigation that involved hundreds of interviews in the United States. Their report, replete with innuendo about Lyndon Johnson and right-wing Texas oil barons, was delivered to Bobby Kennedy only months before his own assassination in June of 1968. After Bobby’s death, the last surviving brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, showed no interest in the material. The investigators then hired a French writer by the name of Hervé Lamarr to fashion the material into a book, under the pseudonym of James Hepburn. The book was first published in French under the title L’Amérique brûle, and was translated under the title Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK. Its conclusion is worth quoting:

“President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared. […] the plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a ‘madman’ and negligence.”[7]

Robert had planned to run for the American Presidency in 1972, but the escalation of the Vietnam War precipitated his decision to run in 1968. Another factor may have been the opening of the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Garrison was allowed to view Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film, confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination. This film, despite evident tampering, shows that the fatal shot came from the “grassy knoll” well in front of the President, not from the School Book Depository located behind him, where Oswald was supposed to be shooting from.

When talk of the investigation began, Kennedy asked one of his closest advisors, Frank Mankievitch, to follow its developments, “so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” He confided to his friend William Attwood, then editor of Look magazine, that he, like Garrison, suspected a conspiracy, “but I can’t do anything until we get control of the White House.” [8] He refrained from openly supporting Garrison, believing that since the outcome of the investigation was uncertain, it could jeopardize his plans to reopen the case later, and even weaken his chances of election by construing his motivation as a family feud.

In conclusion, there can be little doubt that, had he been elected president, Robert Kennedy would have done everything possible to reopen the case of his brother’s assassination, in one way or another. This fact certainly did not escape John’s murderers. They had no other option but to stop him. This first conclusion is a sufficient reason to conduct a comparative analysis of both Kennedy assassinations, in search of some converging clues that might lead us to the trail of a common mastermind.We begin with Robert’s assassination.

Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian motivated by hatred of Israel?

Just hours after Robert’s assassination, the press was able to inform the American people, not only of the identity of the assassin, but also of his motive, and even of his detailed biography.[9] Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordania, and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan’s pocket, quoting favorable comments made by Robert regarding Israel and, in particular, what sounded like an electoral commitment: “The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been promised.” Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated and motivated by his hatred of Israel.

That became the story line of the mainstream media from day one. Jerry Cohen of the Los Angeles Times wrote a front page article, saying that Sirhan is “described by acquaintances as a ‘virulent’ anti-Israeli,” (Cohen changed that into “virulent anti-semite” in an article for the The Salt Lake Tribune), and that: “Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel.” Cohen infers that “Senator Kennedy […] became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements.” Cohen further revealed that:

“About three weeks ago the young Jordanian refugee accused of shooting Sen. Robert Kennedy wrote a memo to himself, […] The memo said: ‘Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968’—the first anniversary of the six-day war in which Israel humiliated three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.”[10]

After September 11, 2001, the tragedy of Robert’s assassination was installed into the Neocon mythology of the Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror the story. Sirhan became a precursor of Islamic terrorism on the American soil. In a book entitled The Forgotten Terrorist, Mel Ayton, who specializes in debunking conspiracy theories, claims to present “a wealth of evidence about [Sirhan’s] fanatical Palestinian nationalism,” and to demonstrate that “Sirhan was the lone assassin whose politically motivated act was a forerunner of present-day terrorism” (as written on the back cover).

In 2008, on the 40th anniversary of Robert’s death, Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was “a first taste of Mideast terror.” He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (best known as Jonathan Pollard’s lawyer), as saying:

“I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel and of anybody who supported Israel. […] It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn’t recognize it at the time.”[11]

The fact that Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz. The Jewish Forward took care to mention it on the same occasion, only to add that Islamic fanaticism ran in his veins anyway:

“But what he shared with his Muslim cousins — the perpetrators of September 11 — was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation.”

“Robert Kennedy was the first American victim of modern Arab terrorism,” the Forward journalist hammered; “Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel.” [12]

This leitmotiv of the public discourse begs the question: Was Bobby really a supporter of Israel? But before we answer that question, there is on more pressing one: Did Sirhan really kill Bobby?

Did Sirhan Bishara Sirhan really kill Robert Kennedy?

If we trust official statements and mainstream news, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is an open-and-shut case. The identity of the killer suffers no discussion, since he was arrested on the spot, with the smoking gun in his hand. In reality, ballistic and forensic evidence show that none of Sirhan’s bullets hit Kennedy.

According to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi, Robert Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the brain, fired from behind the right ear at point blank range, following an upward angle. Nogushi restated his conclusion in his 1983 memoirs, Coroner. Yet the sworn testimony of twelve shooting witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired.

Tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, it has been estimated that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan’s gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and his associate, Laurie Dusek, gathered all this evidence and more in a 58-page file submitted to the Court of California, asking that Sirhan’s case be reopened. They documented major irregularities in the 1968 trial, including the fact that the bullet tested in laboratory to be compared to the the one extracted from Robert’s brain had not been shot by Sirhan’s revolver, but by another gun, with a different serial number; thus, instead of incriminating Sirhan, the ballistic test in fact proved him innocent. Pepper has also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard.[13]

The presence of a second shooter was signaled by several witnesses and reported on the same day by a few news media. There are strong suspicions that the second shooter was Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired for the evening, who was stuck behind Kennedy at the moment of the shooting, and seen with his pistol drawn by several witnesses. One of them, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire. Cesar was never investigated, even though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys, who according to his recorded statement, had “sold the country down the road to the commies.” [14]

Even if we assume that Sirhan did kill Robert Kennedy, a second aspect of the case raises question: according to several witnesses, Sirhan seemed to be in a state of trance during the shooting. More importantly, Sirhan has always claimed, and continues to claim, that he has never had any recollection of his act:

“I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy.”

He also claims to have no memory of “many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up to the shooting.” [15] Some repetitive lines written of a notebook found in Sirhan’s bedroom, which Sirhan recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are reminiscent of automatic writing.[16]

Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, have confirmed that Sirhan’s amnesia is not faked. In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of 60 hours, and concluded that Sirhan, whom he classifies in the category of “high hypnotizables,” acted unvoluntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: “His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control.” [17]

We know that in the 1960s, American military agencies were experimenting on mental control. Dr Sidney Gottlieb, son of Hungarian Jews, directed the infamous CIA MKUltra project, which, among other things, were to answer questions such as: “Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?” according to a declassified document dated May 1951.[18] According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, author of Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018), in 1968, an Israeli military psychologist by the name of Benjamin Shalit had concocted a plan to take a Palestinian prisoner and “brainwash and hypnotize him into becoming a programmed killer” aimed at Yasser Arafat.[19]

If Sirhan was hypnotically programmed, the question is: Who had some interest in having a visceral anti-Zionist Palestinian blamed for the killing of Robert Kennedy? Israel, of course. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for why would Israel want to kill Robert Kennedy if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, as the mainstream narrative goes?

Was Robert Kennedy really a friend of Israel?

The dilemma rests on a misleading assumption, which is part of the deception. In fact, Robert Kennedy was definitely not pro-Israel. He was simply campaigning in 1968. As everyone knows, a few good wishes and empty promises to Israel are an inescapable ritual in such circumstances. And Robert’s statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan’s pocket, didn’t exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in an earlier article entitled “Paradoxical Bob,” underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: “Presidential candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies.”

All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the US, particularly Israel-friendly. The Kennedy family, proudly Irish and Catholic, was known for its hostility to Jewish influence in politics, a classic theme of anti-Kennedy literature, best represented by the 1996 book by Ronald Kessler with the highly suggestive title, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded.[20]

Robert had not been, in his brother’s government, a particularly pro-Israel Attorney General: He had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would had considerably hindered its efficiency (after 1963, the AZD escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC)[21].

In conclusion, it is only with outstanding hypocrisy that The Jewish Daily Forward could write, on the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s death:

“In remembering Bobby Kennedy, let us remember not just what he lived for, but also what he died for—namely, the precious nature of the American-Israeli relationship.”[22]

Robert Kennedy’s death had not been a bad thing for the precious “American-Israeli relationship.” Rather, it was a great loss for the Arab world, where Bobby was mourned just as had his brother John before him.

Of course, the fact that the Zionist media lied when granting Robert Kennedy some posthumous certificate of good will toward Israel, and thereby provided Israel with a fake alibi, is not a sufficient reason for concluding that Israel murdered Robert. Even the fact that the masterminds of the plot chose as their programmed instrument an anti-Zionist Palestinian, and thereby stirred a strong anti-Palestinian feeling among Americans at the same time as getting rid of Robert, does not prove that Israel was involved. What is still lacking for a serious presumption is a plausible motive.

The motive of Robert’s assassination must be found, not in what Robert publicly declared in an Oregon synagogue during his presidential campaign, but rather in what he confided only to his most close friends: his intention to reopen the investigation on his brother’s death. Our next question, therefore, is: What would an unbiased investigation, conducted under the supervision of Robert in the White House, have revealed?

Did the CIA assassinate Kennedy?

It is obvious to anybody just vaguely informed that a genuine investigation would first establish that Oswald was a mere “patsy”, as he said himself, a scapegoat prepared in advance to be blamed for the crime and then be slaughtered without a trial. We will not here review the evidence that contradicts the official thesis of the lone gunman. It can be found in numerous books and documentary films.

Just as notorious is the theory that the plot to kill Kennedy originated from a secret network within the CIA, in collusion with extremist elements in the Pentagon. That conspiracy theory looms the largest in books, articles and films that have been produced since John Kennedy died.

That CIA-Pentagon theory, as I will call it (add the military-industrial complex if you wish) has a major flaw in the motive ascribed to the killers: besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the aim was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something the CIA had always pushed for and Kennedy had refused to do (the Bay of Pigs fiasco). With Oswald groomed as a pro-Castro communist, the Dallas shooting was staged as a false flag attack to be blamed on Cuba. But then, why did no invasion of Cuba follow Kennedy’s assassination? Why was the pro-Castro Oswald abandoned by the Warren Commission in favor of the lone nut Oswald? Those who address the question, like James Douglass in his JFK and the Unspeakable, credit Johnson with preventing the invasion. Johnson, we are led to understand, had nothing to do with the assassination plot, and thwarted the plotters’ ultimate aim to start World War III. This is to ignore the tremendous amount of evidence accumulated against Johnson for fifty years, and documented in such groundbreaking books as Phillip Nelson’s LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination (2010) or Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (2013).

Another weakness in the CIA-Pentagon theory is the lack of agreement about the mastermind of the plot. In fact, one of the names that comes up most often is James Jesus Angleton, the head of Counter-Intelligence within the CIA, about whom Professor John Newman writes in Oswald and the CIA :

“In my view, whoever Oswald’s direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot.”[23]

But there is plenty of evidence that Angleton, who was also the head of the CIA “Israel Office,” was a Mossad mole. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, “Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas […] came from the Mossad and […] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.” [24] No less that two monuments were dedicated to him at memorial services in Israel during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli Intelligence and even a future Prime Minister.[25]

Another aspect must be taken into account: if the trail of the CIA is such a well-trodden path among Kennedy researchers, it is because it has been cut and marked by the mainstream media themselves, as well as by Hollywood. And that began even before the assassination, on October 3, 1963, with an article by the New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent Arthur Krock. The article denounced the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” and quotidian unnamed “very high official” who claimed that the White House could not control the CIA, and that:

“If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”[26]

In such a way, The New York Times was planting a sign, a month and a half before the Dallas killing, pointing to the CIA as the most likely instigator of the upcoming coup. The sign said: “The President is going to fall victim of a coup, and it will come from the CIA.”

One month after Kennedy’s assassination, it was the turn of the Washington Post to use a very similar trick, by publishing an op-ed signed by Harry Truman, in which the former president said he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment.” “I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” at the point of becoming across the globe “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue […] there are now some searching questions that need to be answered.” [27] Truman was hinting at the CIA’s role in toppling foreign governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad. But given the timing of his article, one month to the day after Dallas, it could only be understood by anyone with ears to hear, and at least subliminally by the rest, as an indictment of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. This article, widely reprinted in the 1970s after the creation of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is regarded as Truman’s whistleblowing. Yet its mea culpa style is quite unlike Truman; that is because it was not written by Truman, but by his longtime assistant and ghostwriter, a Russian born Jew named David Noyes, whom Sidney Krasnoff calls “Truman’s alter ego” in his book, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President’s Alter Ego (1997). Truman probably never saw the article prior to its publication in the Washington Post morning edition, but he may be responsible for its deletion from the afternoon print runs.[28]

So the two most influential American newspapers, while ostensibly defending the official theory of the lone gunman, have planted directional signs pointing to the CIA. Most Kennedy truthers have followed the signs with enthusiasm.

In the 70s, the mainstream media and publishing industry played again a major role in steering conspiracy theorists toward the CIA, while avoiding any hint of Israeli involvement. One major contributor to that effort was A. J. Weberman, with his 1975 book Coup d’État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, co-authored by Michael Canfield. According to the New York Jewish Daily Forward (December 28, 2012), Weberman had “immigrated to Israel in 1959 and has dual American-Israeli citizenship,” and is “a close associate of Jewish Defense Organization founder Mordechai Levy, whose fringe group is a spin-off of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s militant right-wing Jewish Defense League.” Weberman acknowledged Neocon Richard Perle’s assistance in his investigation.[29] The Weberman-Canfield book contributed to the momentum that led the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate in 1976 the murders of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King.

It is also in this context that Newsweek journalist Edward Jay Epstein published an interview of George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian geologist and consultant for Texan oilmen who had befriended Oswald and his Russian wife in Dallas in 1962. In this interview, De Mohrenschildt admitted that Oswald had been introduced to him at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore.[30] That piece of information is dubious for several reasons: First, Moore was officially FBI rather than CIA. Second, De Mohrenschildt was in no position to confirm or deny the words that Epstein ascribed to him: he was found dead a few hours after giving the interview. In fact, De Mohrenschildt’s interview published by Epstein contradicts De Mohrenschildt’s own manuscript account of his relationship to Oswald, revealed after his death.[31] De Mohrenschildt’s death was ruled a suicide. The Sheriff’s report mentions that in his last months he complained that “the Jews” and “the Jewish mafia” were out to get him.[32] Needless to say, Epstein didn’t mention anything about this. More suspicions arise from the fact that Epstein’s main source for his 1978 book, Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, was James Jesus Angleton, who was actively spreading disinformation at the time of the HSCA, defending the theory that Oswald was a KGB agent with CIA connections.

That Israeli agents have been instrumental in spreading conspiracy theories targeting the CIA is also evidenced by Oliver Stone’s film JFK released in 1991, starring Kevin Costner in the role of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. This film, which shook public opinion to the point of motivating the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, was produced by Arnon Milchan, described in a 2011 biography as being from his youth “one of the most important covert agents that Israeli intelligence has ever fielded,” involved in arms smuggling from the US to Israel.[33] In 2013 Milchan publicly revealed his extended activity as a secret agent of Israel, working in particular to boost Israel’s nuclear program.[34] It is therefore no wonder that Stone’s film gives no hint of the Mossad connection that Garrison stumbled upon.

Who killed JFK?

By a strange paradox, the authors who stand for the consensual conspiracy theory of a CIA plot against Kennedy build their case on the biography of Oswald, while at the same time claiming that Oswald had almost nothing to do with the killing. If Oswald was “just a patsy,” as he publicly claimed, the quest for the real culprits must logically begin by investigating the man who silenced Oswald.

Oswald’s assassin is known as Jack Ruby, but few people know that his real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, and that he was the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. Ruby was a member of the Jewish underworld. He was a friend of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, whom he had known and admired since 1946. Cohen was the successor of the famed Benjamin Siegelbaum, aka Bugsy Siegel, one of the bosses of Murder Incorporated. Cohen was infatuated with the Zionist cause, as he explained in his memoirs: “Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war”.[35] Mickey Cohen was in contact with Menachem Begin, the former Irgun chief, with whom he even “spent a lot of time,” according to Gary Wean, former detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department. So there is a direct line connecting Jack Ruby, via Mickey Cohen, to the Israeli terrorist ring, and in particular to Menachem Begin, a specialist in false flag terror. We also know that Ruby phoned Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate, just after Oswald’s arrest; no doubt he received then “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” as they say in the underworld.[36] Ruby’s defense lawyer William Kunstler wrote in his memoirs that Ruby told him he had killed Oswald “for the Jews,” and Ruby’s rabbi Hillel Silverman received the same confession when visiting Ruby in jail.[37]

That is not all. At every level of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, we also find the fingerprints of the Israeli deep state. JFK’s trip to Dallas, being officially “non political,” was sponsored by a powerful business group known as the Dallas Citizens Council, dominated by Julius Schepps, “a wholesale liquor distributor, member of every synagogue in town, and de facto leader of the Jewish community,” as described by Bryan Edward Stone in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas.[38] Kennedy was on his way to the reception organized in his honor when he was shot.

The “host committee” inviting Kennedy was chaired by another influential figure of the wealthy Jewish community in Dallas: advertising executive and PR man Sam Bloom. According to former British Intelligence Officer Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, it was Bloom who suggested to the Police “that they move the alleged assassin [Oswald] from the Dallas police station to the Dallas County Jail in order to give the newsmen a good story and pictures. ”Oswald was shot by Ruby during this transfert. Hughes-Wilson adds that,“when the police later searched Ruby’s home, they found a slip of paper with Bloom’s name, address and telephone number on it.” [39]

After the Dallas tragedy, Israel’s sayanim were also busy fabricating the official lie. Apart from its chairman Earl Warren, chosen for his figurative role as Chief Justice, all key people in the investigative Commission were either personal enemies of Kennedy—like Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by Kennedy in 1961—or ardent Zionists. The man who played the key role in fabricating the government lie purveyed by the Warren Commission was Arlen Specter, the inventor of what came to be called the “magic bullet” theory: a single bullet supposed to have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and John Connally sitting before him in the limousine, and later found in pristine condition on a gurney in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Specter, who with an ironic touch of chutzpah titled his autobiography Passion for Truth, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and, at his death in 2012, was mourned by the Israeli government as “an unswerving defender of the Jewish State,” and by AIPAC, as “a leading architect of the congressional bond between our country and Israel.” [40]

So, at all stages of the plot, we find a Zionist cabal including business men, politicians and Irgun-connected gangsters, not forgetting media executives, all devoted to Israel.

The most plausible motive for Israel to kill Kennedy has been revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option in 1991, then Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb in 1998, and the lead has been followed up in 2007 by Michael Karpin in The Bomb in the Basement. What these investigators reveal is that Kennedy, informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, was firmly determined to force Israel to renounce it. With that purpose in mind, he replaced CIA Director Allen Dulles by John McCone, who had, as Eisenhower’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), leaked to The New York Times the truth about Israel’s Dimona project; the story was printed on December 19, 1960, weeks before Kennedy was to take office. As Alan Hart writes, “there can be no doubt that Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb was the prime factor in his decision to appoint McCone.”[41] Then Kennedy urged Ben-Gurion to allow regular inspections of Dimona, first verbally in New York in 1961, and later through more and more insistent letters. In the last one, cabled June 15, 1963 to the Israeli ambassador with instruction to hand it personally to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy demanded Ben-Gurion’s agreement for an immediate visit followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise “this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized.” [42] The result was unexpected: Ben-Gurion avoided official reception of the letter by announcing his resignation on June 16. As soon as the new Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963, to no avail. Did Ben-Gurion resign in order to deal with Kennedy from another level?

Five months later, Kennedy’s death relieved Israel of all pressure (diplomatic or otherwise) to stop its nuclear program. Faced with Johnson’s complete lack of interest in that issue, John McCone resigned from the CIA in 1965, declaring: “When I cannot get the President to read my reports, then it’s time to go.”

Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel’s Dimona project was only part of the “Kennedy problem”. During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:

“Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser’s missiles and his Soviet MIGs. […] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.’”[43]

Kennedy behaved warmly toward Nasser, Israel’s worst enemy. Historian Philip Muehlenbeck writes:

“While the Eisenhower administration had sought to isolate Nasser and reduce his influence through building up Saudi Arabia’s King Saud as a conservative rival to the Egyptian president, the Kennedy administration pursued the exact opposite strategy.”[44]

After Kennedy’s death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined.

For 50 years, the Israeli trail in the Kennedy assassination has been smothered, and anyone who mentioned it was immediately ostracized. American congressman Paul Findley nevertheless dared write in March 1992 in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: “It is interesting to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned.” One single author has seriously investigated that trail: Michael Collins Piper, in his 1995 book Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy. Piper was largely ignored by the mainstream of the Kennedy truth movement. But his work has made its way nevertheless. In 2013, Martin Sandler wrote about Piper’s work in his edition of letters by Kennedy, which included those addressed to Ben-Gurion about Dimona: “Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing.” It is, in fact, a theory widespread in Arab countries.[45]

The case against Lyndon Johnson

Several investigators have identified Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president, as the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination. It is, at least, beyond doubt that the plotters acted with the foreknowledge that Johnson, who automatically stepped in as head of State after Kennedy’s death, would cover them. The context of national crisis enabled him to bully both Justice and the press while achieving his life’s ambition. Johnson not only benefitted from the plot; he participated in its elaboration. As a former senator from Texas, he could mobilize high-ranked accomplices in Dallas to prepare the ambush. Johnson also had his men in the Navy. In 1961, Texan senator John Connally had been appointed as Navy Secretary at the request of Johnson. When Connally resigned eleven months later to run for governor of Texas, Johnson convinced Kennedy to name another of his Texan friends, Fred Korth.

Johnson’s privileged control over the Navy is an important aspect of the case because the Navy was critical in the setting up and in the cover-up of the plot. First, contrary to a widespread but erroneous belief, Lee Harvey Oswald had been recruited by the Navy and not by the CIA. He was a Marine, and as a Marine he had worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Secondly, it is at the Naval Hospital in Washington, under the control of Navy officers, that Kennedy’s autopsy was performed, after his body had been literally stolen at gunpoint from Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The report of this autopsy stated that the fatal bullet had entered the back of Kennedy’s skull, which contradicted the testimonies of twenty-one members of the Dallas hospital staff who saw two entry bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy’s body. This was critical because Oswald was presumably shooting from behind Kennedy, and could not possibly have caused these bullet wounds.

It is noteworthy that Johnson had actually taken advantage of his connections in the Navy to participate in the greatest corruption case ever recorded at that time. His accomplice Fred Korth was forced to resign as Navy Secretary in November 1963, only weeks before the Dallas coup, after the Justice Department headed by Robert Kennedy had implicated him in a fraud involving a $7 billion contract for the construction of 1,700 TFX military aircraft by General Dynamics, a Texas company. Johnson’s personal secretary, Bobby Baker, was charged in the same case.

Because of this mounting scandal and other suspicions of corruption, Kennedy was determined to change Vice-President for his upcoming reelection campaign.[46] While in Dallas the day before the President’s visit, Nixon publicized the rumor of Johnson’s removal, and the Dallas Morning News was reporting on November 22nd: “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.” Instead, Johnson became president that very day.

Many Americans immediately suspected Johnson’s involvement in the Dallas coup, especially after the publication in 1964 of a book by James Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which portrayed Johnson as deeply corrupt. According to his biographer Robert Caro, Johnson was a man thirsting “for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will.” [47]

The evidence incriminating Johnson does not conflict with the evidence against Israel, quite the contrary. First, both trails converge in the person of Jack Ruby, whom Nixon identified a one of “Johnson’s boys,” according to former Nixon operative Roger Stone.[48] The hypothesis that Ruby acted on Johnson’s orders is a likely explanation for some of his odd statements to the Warren Commission:

“If you don’t take me back to Washington tonight to give me a chance to prove to the President that I am not guilty, then you will see the most tragic thing that will ever happen.” “There will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don’t take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don’t suffer because of what I have done.”

He said that he feared that his act would be used “to create some falsehood about some of the Jewish faith,” but added that “maybe something can be saved […], if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me.” [49] With such words, Ruby seems to be trying to send a message to Johnson through the Commission, or rather a warning that he might spill the beans about Israel’s involvement if Johnson did not intervene in his favor. We get the impression that Ruby expected Johnson to pardon him.

Yet Johnson did nothing to get Ruby out of jail. Ruby’s sense of betrayal would explain why in 1965, after having been sentenced to life imprisonment, Ruby implicitly accused Johnson of Kennedy’s murder in a press conference: “If [Adlai Stevenson] was Vice-President there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.” [50]

Ruby died from a mysterious disease in his prison in 1967.

A Crypto-Zionist president?

Ruby is not the only link between Johnson and Israel, far from it. In truth, Johnson had always been Israel’s man. His electoral campaigns had been funded since 1948 by Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg, who happened to be president of the Americans for Haganah Incorporated, which raised money for the Jewish militia. It is the same Feinberg who, after the Democratic primaries in 1960, made the following proposal to Kennedy, as Kennedy himself later reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Bartlett recalls that Kennedy was deeply upset and swore that, “if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it.” [51]

It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger (A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House, 1965), that the two men who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson as his running mate, were Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of the Washington Post, and strong supporters of Israel.[52] Schlesinger doesn’t reveal Graham and Alsop’s arguments, and states that Kennedy’s final decision “defies historical reconstruction”—a curious statement for a historian so well informed on the topic. But Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary for twelve years, had her own idea about it. She believed that Kennedy was blackmailed with proofs of his many infidelities to his wife: “Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing.” Whatever the details of the blackmail, Kennedy once confided to his assistant Hyman Raskin, as an apology for taking Johnson, “I was left with no choice […] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems.” [53]

In 2013, Associated Press reported about newly released tapes from Johnson’s White House office showing LBJ’s “personal and often emotional connection to Israel,” and pointed out that under Johnson, “the United States became Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and primary arms supplier.” An article from the 5 Towns Jewish Times “Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?” recalls Johnson’s continuous support of Jews and Israel in the 1940s and 50s, and concludes: “President Johnson firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel direction.” The article also mentions that, “research into Johnson’s personal history indicates that he inherited his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was a member of the Zionist Organization of America.” And, in an additional note: “The line of Jewish mothers can be traced back three generations in Lyndon Johnson’s family tree. There is little doubt that he was Jewish.” [54]

Whatever was the reason of Johnson’s loyalty to Israel, it is a fact that, thanks to Johnson, Israel could continue its military nuclear program undisturbed, and acquire its first atomic bomb around 1965. Historian Stephen Green writes: “Lyndon Johnson’s White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964.” [55]

Thanks to JFK’s death, Israel was also able to carry out its plan to annex Palestinian territories beyond the boundaries imposed by the United Nations Partition plan. By leaning on Pentagon and CIA hawks, Johnson intensified the Cold War and created the climate of tension which Israel needed in order to demonize Egyptian president Nasser and reinforce its own stature as indispensable ally in the Middle East.

During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel managed to triple its territory, while creating the illusion of acting in legitimate defense. The lie could not deceive American Intelligence agencies, but Johnson had given a green light to Israel’s attack, and even authorized James Angleton of the CIA to give Israel the precise positions of the Egyptian air bases, which enabled Israel to destroy them in just a few hours.

Four days after the start of the Israeli attack, Nasser accepted the ceasefire request from the UN Security Council. It was too soon for Israel, which had not yet achieved all its territorial objectives. On June 8, 1967, the USS Liberty, a NSA spy ship stationed in international waters off Sinai, was bombed, strafed and torpedoed during 75 minutes by Israeli Mirage jets and three torpedo boats, with the obvious intention of sinking it without leaving any survivors. (Even the rescue channels were machine-gunned.) Meanwhile, Johnson, from the White House, intervened personally to prohibit the nearby Sixth Fleet from rescuing the USS Liberty after the crew, despite the initial destruction of its transmitters, had managed to send off an SOS.

The attack would have been blamed on Egypt if it had succeeded, that is, if the ship had sunk and its crew had all died. The operation would then have given Johnson a pretext for intervening on the side of Israel against Egypt.

But it failed. The USS Liberty affair was suppressed by a commission of inquiry headed by Admiral John Sidney McCain II, Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (and Father of Arizona Senator John McCain III). Johnson accepted Israel’s spurious “targeting error” explanation. In January 1968 he invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington, and warmly welcomed him to his Texas ranch. What’s more, Johnson rewarded Israel by lifting the embargo on offensive military equipment: US-made tanks and aircraft immediately flowed to Tel Aviv.

This failed false flag attack is evidence of the secret complicity of Johnson and Israel, implying high treason on the part of Johnson.

Conclusion

Let’s now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.

First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson’s presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations, such as Martin-Luther King’s. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert’s murders.

Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel’s deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert’s assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.

Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.

The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could—and would—reopen the investigation on his brother’s death.

What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.

At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.

John John had long been portrayed as a superficial, spoiled and harmless young man. But that image was as misleading as young Hamlet’s in Shakespeare’s play. John had serious interests in mind, and, at age 39, he was just entering politics. In 1995 he founded George magazine, which seemed harmless until it began to take an interest in political assassinations. In March 1997, George published a 13-page article by the mother of Yigal Amir, the convicted assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The article was supporting the thesis of a conspiracy by the Israeli far-right. So JFK Jr. was eliminated while following in the footsteps of his father, entering politics through the door of journalism and taking an interest in the crimes of the Israeli deep state. Canadian-Israeli journalist Barry Chamish believes John Kennedy Jr. was assassinated precisely for that.[56]

The nonsensical notion of a mysterious curse on the Kennedy family is an obvious smoke screen. The unsolved murders of JFK and his two legitimate heirs—his younger brother and his only son—require a more rational explanation. The sense that the official stories about their deaths amount to a huge cover-up is obsessing the American psyche, a bit like a repressed family secret affecting the whole personality from a subconscious level.

President John Kennedy and his brother are heroic, almost Christ-like figures, in the heart of a growing community of citizens who have become aware of the disastrous longtime effect of their assassinations. Only when the American public at large come to grips with the truth of their deaths and honor their legacy and sacrifice will America have a chance to be redeemed and be great again.

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. ($30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

Footnotes

[1] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America, University of Texas Press, 2013,kindle 284-292.

[2] John Lewis’ testimony is in the PBS documentary American Experience Robert F. Kennedy.

[3] Associated Press, “RFK children speak about JFK assassination,” January 12, 2013, on http://www.usatoday.com

[4] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 278-280, 305.

[5] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., 2007, p. 21-22.

[6] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 25-7.

[7] James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.

[8] David Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 312-314.

[9] Extract of TV news in the documentary film Evidence of Revision: Part 4: The RFK assassination as never seen before, 01:11:42

[10] Jerry Cohen, “Yorty Reveals That Suspect’s Memo Set Deadline for Death,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1968, pages 1 and 12, on latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/06/june-6-1968.html. Jerry Cohen, “Jerusalem-Born Suspect Called An Anti-Semite,” The Salt Lake Tribune, June 6, 1968, on http://www.newspapers.com. See also Harry Rosenthal, “Senator Kennedy’s support for Israel promoted decision declares Sirhan,” The Telegraph, March 5, 1969, on news.google.com

[11] Sasha Issenberg, “Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror,”Boston Globe, June 5, 2008, on http://www.boston.com

[12] Jeffrey Salkin, “Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For,” Forward.com, June 5, 2008. Also Michael Fischbach, “First Shot in Terror War Killed RFK,” Los Angeles Times, June 02, 2003, on articles.latimes.com

[13] Frank Morales, “The Assassination of RFK: A Time for Justice!” June 16, 2012, on http://www.globalresearch.ca; watch on YouTube, “RFK Assassination 40th Anniversary (2008) Paul Schrade on CNN.”

[14] Philip Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On the Conspiracy And Cover-Up, S.P.I. Books, 1994, p. 25. For a full overview, watch Shane O’Sullivan’s 2007 investigative documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy. For more detail, read his book Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Union Square Press, 2008. See also Don Schulman’s testimony in The Second Gun (1973), from 42 min 40.

[15] In a parole hearing in 2011, failing to convince the judges for the fourteenth time. Watch on YouTube, “Sirhan Sirhan Denied Parole”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsm1hKPI9EU

[16] Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Union Square Press, 2008, p. 5, 44, 103.

[17] Jacqui Goddard, “Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F.Kennedy, launches new campaign for freedom 42 years later,” The Telegraph, December 3, 2011, on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/

[18] Colin Ross, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, Manitou Communications, 2000,summary on http://www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg

[19] David B. Green, “Brainwashing and Cross-dressing: Israel’s Assassination Program Laid Bare in Shocking Detail,” Haaretz, February 5, 2018.

[20] Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.

[21] The Israel Lobby Archive, http://www.irmep.org/ila/forrel/

[22] Jeffrey Salkin, “Remember What Bobby Kennedy Died For,” op. cit..

[23] Michael Collins Piper, False Flag, op. cit., p. 78.

[24] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 318.

[25] Michael Howard Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of COunterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p. 153.

[26] “Assassination studies Kennedy knew a coup was coming,” on Youtube. Image of Arthur Krock’s article is shown on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snE161QnL1U at 1:36.

[27] “Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” Washington Post, December 22, 1963, quoted in Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, Skyhorse Publishing, 2011, p. 246.

[28] Thomas Troy, “Truman on CIA,” September 22, 1993, on http://www.cia.gov ; Sidney Krasnoff, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President’s Alter Ego, Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997.

[29] Michael Collins Piper, False Flags: Template for Terror, American Free Press, 2013, p. 67.

[30] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008, p. 46.

[31] George de Mohrenschilldt, I am a Patsy! on jfkassassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk12/hscapatsy.htm

[32] Read the Sheriff’s Office report on mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt

[33] Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan, Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi.

[34] Stuart Winer, “Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan reveals past as secret agent,” The Times of Israel, November 25, 2013, on http://www.timesofisrael.com ; Meir Doron, Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon – Arnon Milchan, Gefen Books, 2011, p. xi

[35] Mickey Cohen, In My Own Words, Prentice-Hall, 1975, p. 91-92.

[36] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., ebook 2005, p. 133-155, 226.

[37] William Kunstler, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, Carol Publishing, 1994, p. 158; Steve North, “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” The Forward, November 17, 2013, on forward.com

[38] Bryan Edward Stone, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010, p. 200.

[39] John Hughes-Wilson, JFK-An American Coup d’État: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination, John Blake, 2014.

[40] Natasha Mozgovaya, “Prominent Jewish-American politician Arlan Specter dies at 82,” Haaretz, October 14, 2012, on http://www.haaretz.com.

[41] Alan Hart,Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 273.

[42] Warren Bass, Support any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance, 2003, p. 219.

[43] Quoted in George and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992, p. 51.

[44] Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012.

[45] Listen to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on the topic on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV4kvhs8I8E

[46] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination, XLibris, 2010, p. 372.

[47] Quoted in Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op. cit., p. 17.

[48] Patrick Howley, “Why Jack Ruby was probably part of the Kennedy conspiracy,” The Daily Caller, March 14, 2014, on dailycaller.com

[49] Read Ruby’s deposition on jfkmurdersolved.com/ruby.htm

[50] See on YouTube, “Jack Ruby Talks.”

[51] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 94-97.

[52] Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 56; Alan Hart, Zionism, vol. 2, op. cit., p. 257.

[53] Phillip Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind, op; cit., p. 320.

[54] Morris Smith, “Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson? – an update!!,” 5 Towns Jewish Times, April 11, 2013, on 5tjt.com.

[55] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, William Morrow & Co., 1984, p. 166.

[56] Barry Chamish, “The Murder of JFK Jr – Ten Years Later,” www.barrychamish.com (also on: www.rense.com/general87/tenyrs.htm).

June 3, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Nation That Doesn’t Know War: America Celebrates Memorial Day

By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 31.05.2018

Wednesday, May 30th, was Memorial Day in the United States. The commemoration began in 1868 shortly after the American Civil War, when townsmen in several communities came together to decorate the graves of the fallen on the last Monday in May. The practice began in the northern states but soon spread to the south and the annual remembrance ceremony soon took on the name Decoration Day. As wars proliferated in the twentieth century the commemoration eventually lost its association with the Civil War and was increasingly referred to nationally as Memorial Day, eventually becoming a federal holiday.

The American Civil war killed 655,000 soldiers, more than all other U.S. wars before or since combined. It was the first modern war in that it relied on railroads and steamships. The North also destroyed the livelihoods of and deliberately starved civilian populations to reduce the South’s will to resist. It was a war fought on U.S. soil and experienced first hand by the American people.

Today Memorial Day has largely lost its connection with dead soldiers and is instead best noted for being regarded as the first day of summer for recreational purposes. Beaches open up, the lifeguards come out and the smell of barbecued meat fills the air. The declining number of veterans of World War 2, Korea and Vietnam work hard to remember the dead but there is little interest from a public that has become increasingly detached from its non-conscripted professional army.

There is a certain irony in how a holiday commemorating a war fought 150 years ago that had devastating impact, a memento mori to honor the dead and warn the living about the reality of war, is now little more than a bump in the road on the way to the beach as the United States government is openly contemplating new military initiatives in Asia and possibly even in Europe.

The truth is that Americans have forgotten about the War Between the States and, protected by two broad oceans, have no idea whatsoever about the horrible reality that war represents. They have become addicted to war pari passu without any perception of what that might mean if an adversary were to develop the capability to strike the homeland. For most Americans war is little more than a video game, seen in snippets on the nightly news. It is a peculiar form of cultural blindness, an exercise that involves foreign people in faraway places and is not to be taken seriously. The rest of the world, which has experienced far too much of war’s devastation first hand has quite a different viewpoint, however.

For the past three weeks I have been traveling in Asia and Europe, to include stops in America’s two enemies du jour Iran and Russia. World War 2, ended 73 years ago, is still clearly visible in the ruins and shattered lives. St Petersburg in Russia is still restoring palaces vandalized and burnt by the Germans. In Germany, the historic Medieval Hanseatic port of Rostock was 80% reduced to rubble by U.S. and British bombers. It was a war in which cities burned and 80 million soldiers and civilians died, only one half of one per cent of which were Americans. Russia lost 27 million alone. The continental United States alone among major belligerents was untouched by the fighting.

Iran too bears the scars of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, in which Washington supported Baghdad. Half a million Iranians and Iraqis died. In the deliberately never-ending War on Terror 8,000 Americans have lost their lives in places few would be able to find on a map but, by some estimates, so have nearly 4 million Muslims directly and as collateral damage. Three foreign governments have been overthrown and Washington is seeking to add Damascus to that toll, with suggestions that even Moscow is being targeted for change.

All of which led on my recent travels to discussions in which many non-Americans wondered openly “What has happened to the United States?” Most went so far as to opine that Washington is the world’s greatest threat to peace, not China, Russia or Iran. Sadly, I had to agree.

So it behooves all Americans of good will to band together to end the madness. When Memorial Day comes around next year let it again be a commemoration of the horror of war, the death and destruction. With that in mind, all thoughts of confrontation should vanish to be replaced by demands for negotiation and accommodation. And as for the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, give them a Memorial Day gift and bring them home. Every one of them.

June 2, 2018 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy

By Jim Kavanagh | The Polemicist | June 2, 2018

The Great March of Return is a startling, powerful expression of Palestinian identity and resistance. Thousands of Palestinians have come out, bravely and unapologetically, to say: “We refuse to remain invisible. We reject any attempt to assign us to the discard pile of history. We will exercise our fundamental right to go home.” They have done this unarmed, in the face of Israel’s use of deadly armed force against targets (children, press, medics) deliberately chosen to demonstrate the Jewish state’s unapologetic determination to force them back into submissive exile by any means necessary. By doing this repeatedly over the last few weeks, these incredibly brave men, women, and children have done more than decades of essays and books to strip the aura of virtue from Zionism that’s befogged Western liberals’ eyes for 70 years.

What the Israelis have done over the past few weeks—killing at least 112 and wounding over 13,000 people (332 with life-threatening injuries and 27 requiring amputation)—is a historical crime that stands alongside the Sharpeville Massacre (69 killed), Bloody Sunday (14 killed), and the Birmingham Fire Hoses and Police Dog Repression as a defining moment in an ongoing struggle for justice and freedom. Like those events, this month’s slaughter may become a turning point for what John Pilger correctly calls “the longest occupation and resistance in modern times”—the continuing, unfinished subjugation of the Palestinian people, which, like apartheid and Jim Crow, requires constant armed repression and at least occasional episodes of extermination.

The American government, political parties, and media, which support and make possible this crime are disgraceful, criminal accomplices. American politicians, media, and people, who feel all aglow about professing their back-in-the-day support (actual, for some; retrospectively-imagined, for most) of the Civil-Rights movement in the American South and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa but continue to ignore the Palestinian struggle for justice against Zionism, because saying peep one about it might cost them some discomfort, are disgraceful, cowardly hypocrites.

You know, the millions of anti-racist #Resistors who are waiting for a quorum of Natalie Portmans and cool elite, preferably Jewish, personalities to make criticism of Israel acceptable before finding the courage to express the solidarity with the Palestinian people they’ve always had in their hearts. Back in the day, they’d be waiting for Elvis to denounce Jim Crow before deciding that it’s the right time to side with MLK, Malcolm, and Fred Hampton against Bull Connor, George Wallace, and William F. Buckley.

Dis/Ingenuity

The bankruptcy of purportedly anti-racist and humanitarian liberal-Zionist ideology and ideological institutions reached an apogee with the eruption of various apologia for Israel in the wake of this crime, not-so-subtly embedded in mealy-mouthed “regret the tragic loss of life” bleats across the mediascape. All the usual rhetorical subjects were rounded up and thrown into ideological battle: “Israel has every right to defend its borders” (NYT Editorial Board);  the “misogynists and homophobes of Hamas” orchestrated the whole thing (Bret Stephens); the protestors are either Hamas “terrorists” or Hamas-manipulated robots, to be considered “nominal civilians” (WaPo ). And, of course, the recurring pièce de résistance: Human Shields!

Somewhere in his or her discourse, virtually every American pundit is dutifully echoing the Israeli talking point laid down by Benjamin Netanyahu during the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014: that Hamas uses the “telegenically dead” to further “their cause.” The whole March of Return action is “reckless endangerment, bottomlessly cynical” (Stephens). Women and children were “dispatched” to “lead the charges” although they had been “amply forewarned…of the mortal risk.” It’s a “politics of human sacrifice” (Jonathan S. Tobin and Tom Friedman), staged by Hamas, “the terrorist group that controls [Gazans’] lives,” to “get people killed on camera.” (Matt Friedman, NYT Op-Ed). The White House, via spokesman, Raj Shah, adopts this line as its official response “The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas,” which “intentionally and cynically provoke[ed] this response” in “a gruesome… propaganda attempt.”

Shmuel Rosner takes this “human shields” trope to its ultimate “no apologies” conclusion in his notorious op-ed in the NYT, “Israel Needs to Protect Its Borders. By Whatever Means Necessary.” Feeling “no need to engage in ingénue mourning,” Rosner forthrightly asserts that “Guarding the border [or whatever it is] was more important than avoiding killing.” They want human sacrifice, we’ll give ‘em human sacrifice!

He acknowledges that Gazans “marched because they are desperate and frustrated. Because living in Gaza is not much better than living in hell,” and that “the people of Gaza … deserve sympathy and pity.” But the Palestinians were seeking “to violate [Israel’s] territorial integrity,” so “Israel had no choice” but to “draw a line that cannot be crossed,” and kill people trying to leave that hell. It was “the only way to ultimately persuade the Palestinians to abandon the futile battle for things they cannot get (“return,” control of Jerusalem, the elimination of Israel).” The alternative is “more demonstrations — and therefore more bloodshed, mostly Palestinian.”

Though he acknowledges that “the interests of Palestinians are [not] at the top of the list of my priorities,” Shmuel nonetheless feels comfortable speaking on their behalf. He sincerely “believe[s] Israel’s current policy toward Gaza ultimately benefits not only Israel but also the Palestinians.” Following the wisdom of “the Jewish sages” (featuring Nick Lowe?) he opines: “Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.”

Fear not, Shmuel, for the pitiable people of Gaza: Knesset member Avi Dichter reassures us that the Israeli army “has enough bullets for everyone. If every man, woman and child in Gaza gathers at the gate, in other words, there is a bullet for every one of them. They can all be killed, no problem.” For their ultimate benefit. Zionist tough love.

There is nothing new here. Israel has always understood the ghetto it created in Gaza. In 2004, Arnon Soffer, a Haifa University demographer and advisor to Ariel Sharon, said: “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. … The pressure at the border will be awful. … So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist.” And when challenged again in 2007 about “Israel’s willingness to do what he prescribes… — i.e., put a bullet in the head of anyone who tries to climb over the security fence,” Soffer replied with a shrug: “If we don’t, we’ll cease to exist.”

Soffer’s only plaint: “The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.” A reprise of Golda Meir’s “shooting and crying” lament; “We can never forgive [the Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children.” Ingénue mourning, anyone?

We can point out the factual errors and concrete cruelties that all these apologias rely on.

We can point out that Hamas did not “orchestrate” these demonstrations, and that the thousands of Gazans who are risking their lives are not instruments. “You people always looked down at us,” one Gazan told Amira Hass, “so it’s hard for you to understand that no one demonstrates in anyone else’s name.”

We can point out that the fence the Israelis are defending is not a “border” (What country are the Gazans in?), but the boundary of a ghetto, what Conservative British PM David Cameron called a giant “prison camp” and Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling called “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” It’s a camp that tens of thousands of Palestinians were forced into by the Zionist army. The right of those families (80% of Gaza’s population) to leave that confinement and go home is a basic human right and black-letter international law.

We can point out that Gazans aren’t just trying to cross a line in the sand, they are trying to break a siege, and that: “The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through armed violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side. …There is no difference in civil law between murdering a man by slow strangulation or killing him by a shot in the head.” Those were, after all, the words of Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, when he was justifying Israel’s attack on Egypt in 1967. And they are confirmed today by New York judge Mary McGowan Davis, who says: “The blockade of Gaza has to be lifted immediately and unconditionally.”

We can point out that there can be no excuse in terms of modern international law or human rights principles for Israel’s weeks-long “calculated, unlawful” (HRW) mass killing and crippling or unarmed protestors who were standing quietly, kneeling and praying, walking away, and tending to the wounded hundreds of meters from any “fence”—shootings carried out not in any “fog of war” confusion, but with precise, targeted sniper fire (which, per standard military practice, would be from two-man teams).

As the IDF bragged, in a quickly deleted tweet:  “Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.” Indeed, as Human Rights Watch reports, senior Israeli officials ordered snipers to shoot demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life, and many demonstrators were shot hundreds of meters, and walking away, from the fence.

We can point out that the IDF’s quick deletion of that tweet indicates its consciousness of guilt awareness, in the face of proliferating images of gruesome, unsupportable casualties, of how bad a Rosner-like “no apology, no regrets” discourse sounds. After all, it’s hard, since they “know where every bullet landed,” not to conclude the Israelis deliberately targeted journalists and medical personnel, who were never threatening to “violate [Israel’s] territorial integrity.” There have been at least 66 journalists wounded and 2 killed wearing clearly marked blue “PRESS” flak jackets. And everyone should see the powerful interview with Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, who was shot in the leg, describing how, after six weeks with no paramedic casualties, suddenly:

in one day, 19 paramedics—18 wounded plus one killed—and myself were all injured, so—or were all shot with live ammunition. We were all… away during a lull, without smoke, without any chaos at all, and we were targeted…So, it’s very, very hard to believe that the Israelis who shot me and the Israelis who shot my other colleagues… It’s very hard to believe that they didn’t know who we were, they didn’t know what we were doing, and that they were aiming at anything else.

It was on another day that this 21-year-old “nominal civilian” nurse, Razan al-Najjar, was killed by an Israeli sniper while tending to the wounded:

Of course, pointing all this out won’t mean anything to these apologists or to those who give them a platform. Everybody knows the ethico-political double standard at work here. No other country in the world would get away with such blatant crimes against humanity without suffering a torrent of criticism from Western politicians and media pundits, including every liberal and conservative Zionist apologist cited above. Razan’s face would be shining from every page and screen of every Western media outlet, day after day, for weeks. Even an “allied” nation would get at least a public statement or diplomatic protest; any disfavored countries would face calls for punishment ranging from economic sanctions to “humanitarian intervention.” Israel gets unconditional praise from America’s UN Ambassador.

Indeed, if the American government “defended” its own actual international border in this way, liberal Zionists would be on the highest of moral saddles excoriating the Trump administration for its crime against humanity. And—forgetting, as is obligatory, the thousands of heavily-armed Jewish Zionists who regularly force their way across actual international borders with impunity—if  some Arab country’s snipers killed hundreds and wounded tens of thousands of similarly unarmed Jewish Zionist men, women, children, and paraplegics who were demonstrating at an actual international border for the right to return to their biblical homeland, we all know the howling and gnashing of morally outraged teeth that would ensue from every corner of the Western political and media universe. No “Guarding the border was more important than avoiding killing” would be published in the NYT, or tolerated in polite company, for that scenario.

Nathan J. Robinson got to the bottom line in his wonderful shredding of Rosner’s argument, it comes down to: “Any amount of Palestinian death, however large, was justified to prevent any amount of risk to Israelis, however small.” Western governments and media have fashioned, and are doing their utmost to sustain, an ethico-political universe where Israel can “lay siege to a million people, ‘bomb them occasionally,’ and then kill them when they show up at the wall to throw rocks.”

Is there a way anymore of not seeing the racism of Zionism? Can we just say, once and for all, that the interests of Palestinians—not as pitiable creatures but as active, fully, enfranchised human beings—are not anywhere on the list of Soffer’s or Dichter’s or Rosner’s (or the Western media’s or governments’) priorities, and refuse any of their pitifully disingenuous expressions of concern for the Palestinians’ benefit? Nobody gets to put “For your own benefit,” in front of “Surrender or I’ll put a bullet in your head.” The only concern any of these commentators have for the people of Gaza is that they submissively accept their forced displacement and imprisonment in “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.”

Does the vulgarity of it shock you?

The “human shields, human sacrifice” trope, which all these apologias hang on, is particularly mendacious and hypocritical as used by Zionists. It’s also a classic example of projection.

This is a “human shield”:

It is Israel which has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as “human shields” to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, Israel is guilty of the “continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants.” Besides this namby-pamby UN Committee that no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to, the High Court of Justice in Israel identified and denounced the “human shield” procedures the IDF acknowledged and defended using 1,200 times. These include “the ‘neighbor procedure,’ whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man’s house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped,” and Israeli “soldiers forcibly position[ing] members of [a] family, including the children, at the windows of [a] home and proceed[ing] to fire from behind them.”

So, when Zionists use a “human shields” argument as a moral cudgel against unarmed civilian protestors, and a moral justification for a powerful army, which brazenly uses children to shield its own soldiers, killing scores of those protestors by the day—well, it’s not a stretch to see this charge is a projection of Zionists’ own pattern of thought and behavior.

Besides being an ongoing tactic of today’s Israeli army, “human shields” and the “human sacrifice” they imply were an integral element of the Zionist narrative—expressly articulated and embraced, with no apology, as a necessity for the establishment of a Jewish State.

Take a look at what Edward Said in 2001 called: “the main narrative model that [still] dominates American thinking” about Israel, and David Ben-Gurion called “as a piece of propaganda, the best thing ever written about Israel.” It’s the  “’Zionist epic’…identified by many commentators as having been enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States.” In this piece of iconic American culture, an American cultural icon—more sympathetically liberal than whom there is not—explains why he, as a Zionist, is not bluffing in his threat to blow up his ship and its 600 Jewish refugees if they are not allowed to enter the territory they want:

–You mean you’d still set it [200 lbs. of dynamite] off, knowing you’ve lost?… Without any regard for the lives you’d be destroying?…

Every person on this ship is a soldier. The only weapon we have to fight with is our willingness to die.

–But for what purpose?”

Call it publicity.

–Publicity?

Yes, publicity. A stunt to attract attention… Does the vulgarity of it shock you?

More Zionist tough love.

In the face of the scurrilous “human shield” accusation against Palestinians now being used to denigrate the killed, maimed, and still-fighting protestors in Gaza, we would do well to recall Paul Newman’s Zionist-warrior, “no apology,” argument for 600 telegenically dead Jewish men, women, and children as a publicity stunt to gain the sympathy of the world.

Lest we dismiss this as a fiction, remember that Paul Newman’s fictional boat, Exodus, is based on a real ship, the SS Patria. In 1940, the Patria was carrying 1800 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe whom the British authorities refused entry into Palestine. While the Patria was in the port of Haifa, it was blown up and sunk by Munya Mardor on the orders of the Haganah, which did not want Jewish refugees going anywhere but Palestine. At least 267 people were killed. The Haganah put out the story that the passengers had blown up the ship themselves – a story that lasted 17 years, nourishing the imagination of Leon Uris, author of the Exodus fiction. This wasn’t a commander or leading organization urging people to knowingly take a deadly risk in confronting a powerful enemy; it was “their” self-proclaimed army blowing its people up with no warning—and then falsely claiming they did it to themselves! Nobody who wouldn’t use “bottomlessly cynical” to denigrate the Haganah should be using it to denigrate Gazans.

At a crucial moment in history, it was Zionists who practiced a foundational “human shield” strategy, holding the victims of Nazism “hostage” to the Zionist “statehood” project – as none other than the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, recognized and criticized:

I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the unfortunate Jews of Europe’s D. P. [Displaced Persons] camps are helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only ransom. …[W]hy in God’s name should the fate of all these unhappy people be subordinated to the single cry of Statehood?

The Exodus/Patria/Paul Newman/Haganah willingness to blow up hundreds of Jewish refugees in order to force their way into a desired territory was an attitude endemic to the Zionist movement, and enunciated quite clearly by its leader, David Ben-Gurion, as early as 1938: “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter.” You want human sacrifice?…

(Sulzberger, by the way, “opposed political Zionism not solely because of the fate of Jewish refugees because he disliked the ‘coercive methods’ of Zionists in this country who use economic means to silence those with differing views.” Yes, the NYT ! So change is possible.)

What’s Right Is Wrong

And here’s the thing: You want to call what the Gazans did—coming out unarmed by the thousands, knowing many of them would be killed by a heavily-armed adversary determined to put them down by whatever means necessary—a “politics of human sacrifice”? You are right.

Just as you’d be right to say that of the Zionist movement, when it was weak and faced with much stronger adversaries. And just as you’d be right to say it of the unarmed, non-violent Civil Rights Movement, when it faced the rageful determination of the immensely more powerful American South, to preserve the century-old Jim Crow apartheid that was its identity, by whatever means necessary.

Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. nailed it when, to the visible discomfort of his MSNBC co-panelists, he responded to the invocation of the White House line that it’s “all Hamas’ fault and that they’re using them as tools for propaganda,” with: “That’s like saying to the children in the Children’s March of Birmingham it was their fault that Bull Connor attacked them.”

Civil-rights activists did put children on the front lines, and put their own and those children’s lives in danger to fight and defeat Jim Crow. They knew there were a lot of people armed and willing to kill them. And children, as well as activists, were killed. And those actions were supported (but by no means “orchestrated”) by “extremist” organizations—i.e., the Communist Party. At the time, conservatives attacked Freedom Riders with the same arguments that Zionists are now using to attack Gaza Return Marchers.

All unarmed, non-violent but disruptive, Gandhian strategies to eliminate entrenched systems of colonial-apartheid rule will knowingly sacrifice many lives to attain their victory. Call it a politics of human sacrifice if you want. I won’t make any ingénue objections. But it’s not a sign of the subjugated people’s cynicism; it’s a result of their predicament.

“Human sacrifice” defines the kind of choices a desperate and subjugated people are forced to make in the face of armed power they cannot yet overcome. A militarily-weak insurgent/liberation movement must use an effectively self-sacrificing strategy of moral suasion. That is now a standard and powerful weapon in political struggle. (Though moral suasion alone will not win their rights. Never has. Never will.)

For Gazans, it’s the choice between living in a hell of frustration, misery, insult, confinement, and slow death, or resisting and taking the high risk of instant death. It’s the choice faced by people whose “dreams are killed” by Israel’s siege and forced expulsion, and who are willing to risk their lives  “for the world’s attention.” Young men like Saber al-Gerim, for whom, “It doesn’t matter to me if they shoot me or not. Death or life — it’s the same thing.” Or the one who told Amira Hass: “We die anyway, so let it be in front of the cameras.” Or 21-year-old Fathi Harb, who burned himself to death last Sunday. Or Jihadi al-Najjar, who had to make the choice between continuing to care for his blind father (“He was my sight. He helped me in everything, from going to the bathroom to taking a shower to providing for me… I saw life through Jihadi’s eyes.”) or being killed by an Israeli sniper while, as his mother Tahani says “defending the rights of his family and his people.”

Tough choices, to get the world’s attention. This is the kind of choice imposed on the untermenschen of colonial-apartheid regimes. The only weapon they have is their willingness to die. But Gazans won’t get the sympathetically-anguished Paul Newman treatment. Just “bottomlessly cynical.”

Paul’s choice, Sophie’s choice, is now Saber’s and Jihad’s and Fathi’s, and it’s all bad. Maybe some people—comrades and allies in their struggle—have a right to say something about how to deal with that choice. But the one who doesn’t, the one who has no place to say or judge anything about that choice, is the one who is forcing it. Those who are trying to fight their way out of a living hell are not to be lectured to by the devil and his minions.

So, yes, in a very real sense, for the Palestinians, it is a politics of human sacrifice—to American liberals, the gods who control their fate.

By choosing unarmed, death-defying resistance, Palestinians are sacrificing their lives to assuage the faux-pacifist conscience of Americans and Europeans (particularly, I think, liberals), who have decreed from their Olympian moral heights that any other kind of resistance by these people will be struck down with devastating lightning and thunder.

Funny, that these are the same gods the Zionists appealed to to seize their desired homeland, and the same gods the civil-rights activists appealed to to wrest their freedom from local demons of lesser strength. Because, in their need to feel “sympathy and pity,” the sacrifice of human lives seems the only offering to which these gods might respond.

The Nakba Is Now

The Israelis and their defenders are right about something else: They cannot allow a single Gazan to cross the boundary. They know it would be a fatal blow to their colonial-supremacist hubris, and the beginning of the end of Zionism—just as Southern segregationists knew that allowing a single black child into the school was going to be the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. Palestinians gaining their basic human rights means Israeli Jews losing their special colonial privileges.

As Ali Abunimah points out, Arnon Soffer was right, when he said: “If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist,” and Rosner, when he said the Gazans threatened the “elimination of Israel.” To continue to exist as the colonial-apartheid polity it is, Israel must maintain strict exclusionist, “no right of return,” policies. Per Abunimah: “the price of a ‘Jewish state’ is the permanent and irrevocable violation of Palestinians’ rights… If you support Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state” in a country whose indigenous Palestinian people today form half the population, then you… must come to terms with the inevitability of massacres.”

What’s happening in Gaza is not only, as Abunimah says, a “reminder… of the original sin of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of a so-called Jewish state,” it is a continuation of that unfinished work of the devil. The Nakba is now.

I’m all for everybody on both sides of the issue to be aware of the stakes and risks in this struggle, without any disingenuous denials.

Whether you sympathize with, or denigrate, the choices of people who put their own, their comrades’, and even their children’s, lives at risk is not determined by whether some tactical choices can be characterized as “human shields, human sacrifice”; it’s determined by what they’re fighting for, and what and whom they are fighting against, and where your solidarity lies.

Stage Left

Here’s the core of the disagreement about Gaza (and Palestine in general): There are those—they call themselves Zionists—who think the Palestinians deserve to have been put in that concentration camp, and who stand in solidarity with the soldiers who, by whatever means necessary, are forcing them to stay there. And there are those—the growing numbers who reject Zionism—who stand in solidarity with every human being trying to get out of that camp by whatever means necessary.

There’s a fight—between those breaking out of the prison and those keeping them in; between those seeking equality and those enforcing ethno-religious supremacism; between the colonized and the colonizer. Pick a side. Bret Stephens, Shmuel Rosner, and Tom Friedman have. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Breitbart have. ABC, CBS, (MS)NBC, and Fox have. The Democrats and Republicans and the Congress and the White House have. And they are not shy about it.

It’s past time for American progressives to clearly and unequivocally decide and declare which side they are on. It’s time for professedly humanitarian, egalitarian, pro-human rights, anti-racist, and free-speech progressives to express their support of the Palestinian struggle—on social media, in real-life conversation, and on the street.

It’s time to firmly reject the hypocritical discourse of those who would have been belittling any expression of sorrow and outrage over Emmet Till, Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, and the four black schoolgirls killed in Birmingham, while “ingénue mourning” the terrible moral quandary in which those disrupters had put Bull Connor’s boys. Don’t shrink from it, talk back to it—every time. Make them ashamed to be defending colonialism and apartheid with such patently phony arguments.

Politically? At a minimum, demand of any politician who seeks your vote: End the blockade of Gaza, immediately and unconditionally. Support BDS. Refuse any attempt to criminalize BDS and anti-Zionism. Stop blocking UN and ICC actions against Israeli crimes. Restrict arms sales to Israel. Reject the hypocritical Zionist apologetics. Refuse any attempt to censor or restrict the internet. (This last is very important. Nothing has threatened Zionist impunity more than the information available on the internet, and nothing is driving the demand to censor the internet more than the Zionists’ need to shut that off.)

This is a real, concrete, important resistance. What’ll it cost? Some social discomfort? It’s not sniper fire. Not human sacrifice. Not Saber’s choice.

Are we at a turning point? Some people think this year’s massacre in Gaza will finally attract a sympathetic gaze from the gods and goddesses of the Imperial City. Deliberately and methodically killing, maiming, and wounding thousands of unarmed people over weeks—well, the cruelty, the injustice, the colonialism is just too obvious to ignore any longer. And I hope that turns out to be so. And I know, Natalie Portman and Roger Waters and Shakira, and—the most serious and hopeful—the young American Jews in groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and IfNotNow. There are harbingers of change, and we must try.

I also know there is nothing new here. Thirty years ago, a doctor in Gaza said: “We will sacrifice one or two kids to the struggle — every family. What can we do? This is a generation of struggle.” It was obvious thirty years ago, and forty years before that. The Nakba was then. The Nakba is now. Was it ever not too obvious to ignore?

My mother was an actress on Broadway, who once came to Princeton University to share the stage, and her professional skills, with Jimmy Stewart and other amateur thespians. She played the ingénue. Me, I’m not so good at that.

By all means, regarding Palestine-Israel and the sacrifices and solidarity demanded: No more ingénue politics.

June 2, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Massacres were indispensable to creation of the Israeli state

Palestinian refugees, 1948
By Richard Becker | Liberation School | May 29, 2018

As Israeli leaders and the Trump regime grotesquely celebrated the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence, May 14, just 40 miles away Israeli troops were massacring unarmed Palestinians trapped inside Gaza. At least 61 Palestinians were killed, and more than 2,700 wounded, over a thousand shot by snipers firing military grade ammunition against unarmed protestors who were demanding an end to their isolation and the right to return to their homeland.

There was a bitter historical irony in the juxtaposition of these events

Most of the two million residents of Gaza are refugees and their descendants (who also have refugee status), driven from other parts of Palestine in 1948. Altogether, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948-49 to make way for the creation of the Israeli state. Another 300,000 were driven out after the Six Day War in 1967. Today, there are seven million registered Palestinians refugees, many still living in 59 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza. None have ever been allowed to return to their stolen homes, farms and shops, in blatant violation of their rights.

For many decades, Israeli leaders and their American apologists maintained the fiction that the Palestinians who left did so at the urging of their leaders. Even if that had been the case, it would have in no way invalidated their right of return, an inalienable right under international law.

But it was not the case. As has been irrefutably documented by numerous Israeli as well as Palestinian historians, mass ethnic cleansing was carried out by means of massacre and other forms of terror. It could not have been accomplished otherwise.

The Israeli colonial state was not, of course, the only one that employed terror and massacre to subjugate the indigenous population. All of the colonizers utilized such tactics, including the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, Netherlands, Italy, etc., to establish their empires.

“Transfer” – Zionist leaders’ intention from the start

The leaders of the Zionist movement that manifested itself as the Israeli state in 1948 had often been quite open about their intention to conquer all of Palestine and to force the indigenous population out. Their code word for ethnic cleansing was “transfer.” In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, a reputed “moderate” in the Zionist leadership who would later become Israel’s first prime minister wrote:

“Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…Jewish power which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

In 1940, another key Zionist leader, Josef Weiiz, director of the Jewish National Fund charged with acquiring as much land as possible, wrote: “Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country . . . and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer them all, except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.”

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British colony of Palestine: 55% for a Jewish state, 44% for an Arab state, and 1% for an international zone. In true colonialist fashion, there was no consultation with the Palestinians before the vote. Widespread fighting broke out immediately.

A month after the vote, Ben-Gurion, said in a speech:

“In the area allocated to the Jewish state there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350, 000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment will be about one million, including almost 40 percent non-Jews. Such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state. This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a composition, there cannot event be absolute certainty that the control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority . . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”

Ben-Gurion hailed ethnic cleansing

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began almost immediately after the fateful UN vote delighted Ben-Gurion. In a February 8, 1948 speech to the governing council of his Labor Party, he gloated:

“From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [an East Jerusalem neighborhood] … there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single Arab. I do not assume that this will change … What has happened in Jerusalem … is likely to happen in many parts of the country … in the six, eight to ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country.”

But what so heartened Ben-Gurion in early 1948 was not yet reflected in most of the country. The much better armed and financed Zionist militias prevailed in most, though not all, battles. But in most areas, the objective of driving out the Palestinian population was not being achieved. Palestinian villagers would retreat during active combat, but only to nearby villages or towns, waiting for the fighting to stop so they could return to their homes and farms.

At the time, the majority of Palestinians were peasant farmers who could not leave their land and livestock for any extended period of time without disastrous consequences. The contention that they would have voluntarily abandoned their farms based on the call of some far-off “leader” is simply ludicrous.

By March 1, 1948, less than 5% of the Palestinian population had been driven out, which was viewed by the Zionist leaders as serious threat to their plan.

Two additional factors made this a crisis-in-the-making for Ben-Gurion and his cohorts. One was a shift in Washington. While the Truman administration had played a key role in ramming the partition plan through the UN, it was now evidencing second thoughts. The partition plan had not brought peace — just the opposite, and much of the anger in the Arab world and beyond was directed at the U.S.

The State Department was floating a proposal to scrap partition and replace it with a five-year trusteeship. The Zionist leaders rejected it outright, but were acutely conscious of the importance of maintaining support from the United States.

And, the approach of May 15, 1948, the date the British colonizers had set for withdrawing their troops from Palestine was fast approaching.

An Israeli soldier stops Palestinians in Nazareth, 1948, for traveling after the imposed curfew

Plan Dalet – terrorist violence on a mass scale

Confronted with what they viewed as multi-front crisis, Ben-Gurion and his commanders began to implement a new military doctrine under the name Plan Dalet, or Plan D. Under the plan, the official Zionist army, the Haganah, along with its supposed rival militias, Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang), both of the latter self-proclaimed terrorist organizations, began attacking “quiet” Palestinian villages, those not involved in fighting.
The progressive Israeli historian Ilan Pappe asserts in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that Ben-Gurion actually viewed the “quiet” villages as a bigger problem than those that resisted, as the latter provided a pretext for carrying out harsh repression and removal.

Among the directives of Plan Dalet were:

“Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

“Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Plan Dalet escalated the level of violence directed against the Palestinian civilian population to an extreme. A typical operation carried out by Zionist military units would involve planting explosives around Palestinian houses in the middle of the night, drenching them with gasoline and then opening fire. The point was to terrorize and expel the population. Arbitrary executions became routine, particularly targeting men and boys simply deemed to be of “fighting age,” regardless of whether they were actually engaged in combat.

Deir Yassin massacre – a turning point

Deir Yassin, on the outskirts of Jerusalem was on of the “quiet” villages. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun led by Menachem Begin, wiped out nearly its entire population The Irgun blew up houses with the inhabitants inside, executed others in their homes. Many of the women in the village were raped before being killed. The Irgun paraded the few survivors in a truck through Jerusalem where they were jeered and spit on.

Deir Yassin raised Plan Dalet to a new level of brutality, The Jewish Agency, which a few weeks later would become the Israeli government, officially condemned the massacre but on the same day brought Irgun into the Joint Command with the Haganah, and Lehi, led by another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir.

The massacres in Deir Yassin, Tantura and other villages were widely publicized by the Zionists themselves, for maximum effect. Pappe has documented at least 29 additional massacres by Zionist forces between December 1947 and January 1949.

Twelve days after the Deir Yassin massacre, on April 21, 1948, the British commander in Haifa, a major city in the north with a mixed population, advised the Jewish Agency that he would immediately begin withdrawing his forces. He did not inform the Palestinians. The same day, Hagahah forces launched a major attack on the Palestinian neighborhoods of the city, rolling barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down narrow alleys in the heavily populated city while shelling the same areas with mortars.

Haganah army loudspeakers and sound cars broadcast “horror recordings” of shrieks and screams of Arab women, mixed with calls of, “flee for your lives, the Jews are using poison gas and nuclear weapons. By early May, only 4,000 Palestinians of 65,000 remained in Haifa.

Irgun commander Menachem Begin, provided most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin was instrumental in the expulsion of the Palestinians from Haifa and other cities, towns and villages. In his book The Revolt, Begin wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel [sic]. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces … The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa … All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

Three decades later, in an article for The American Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.”

(Much of the historical material in this article can be found in the book, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, by Richard Becker. PSL Publications, 2009)

June 2, 2018 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Nikki Haley: The Smirking Face of the American Dream and A Nightmare for The Real World

By Adam Garrie | EurasiaFuture | 2018-06-02

During the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger became emblematic of a US foreign policy establishment that was conniving, cunning and content with its own penchant for lawlessness. By the late 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski became the face of the next generation of the US establishment – a man who could easily provide the pseudo-intellectual justification to back every fringe, extremist group in the world, so long as “the enemy” would ultimately suffer as a result.

From the Reagan era up to the Bush era there was no single figure who encapsulated the views, desires and methods of the establishment and in the Obama era, Hillary Clinton became a familiar face whose overall lust for political control just happened to be placed in the State Department.

Today, the US once again has a single figure who represents everything that the current generation of US foreign policy elite want and much to the horror of the wider world,  this person is Nikki Haley. While the position of Ambassador to the UN is often one that is hardly visible to the domestic US audience, Haley has taken it upon herself to be incredibly visible. During the tenure of Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, Haley was vastly more visible than the soft spoken putative foreign policy chief who was humiliatingly ousted by Donald Trump via Twitter. Even today with the more boisterous Mike Pompeo “in charge” Haley remains the go-to person for interviews on US foreign policy, all the while using the UN as a bully pulpit for personal grandstanding rather than for anything remotely representing traditional diplomacy.

In this sense, in spite of her titular status, Haley is not a diplomat at all but rather an irrepressible spokeswoman for what the American foreign policy elites want in the 21st century. Haley is thus the perfect representative of US foreign policy because in a single individual, she represents everything wrong with the United States in an objective sense, while perversely representing everything the ruling elite of the US actually want.

Haley’s manner of speech is casual to the point of being nauseating, yet it is unambiguous in its platitudes regarding America’s self-proclaimed superiority over international law, the institutions of the United Nations and every other country of the world, both US allies and especially US enemies. Of course, the only country that Haley awards a status as important if not more important to that of the US is “Israel”, while she reserves for Russia, Iran, the DPRK, China and members of the Arab world a particularly personal ire. This is in keeping with a modern US establishment that views even the act of going through the motions and attempting to look balanced on the Palestine crisis as somehow “un-American”. In this sense, the interests of Tel Aviv are not only bound-up with the interests of the US but are in fact one of the very reasons the US continues to participate in UN Security Council meetings.

Just yesterday, when the US stood alone in the entire Security Council in voting down a resolution calling for a probe into “Israeli” war crimes in Gaza, she proudly vetoed the measure before stating,

“Further proof was not needed, but it is now completely clear that the UN is hopelessly biased against ‘Israel’. Further proof was not needed, but it is now completely clear that the UN is hopelessly biased against ‘Israel”.

In other words, that which for the rest of the world, including America’s EU allies is an overly biased obstructionist technique, is for Haley a kind of crusade to prevent the UN Security Council from ever standing up for Palestine through the disproportional wielding of the US veto.

Unlike Trump who is the establishment’s anti-establishment playboy rogue, Haley is the face of the front-line establishment. This is the reason why so many in Washington will be pushing for an early Trump retirement and a Haley run for the Presidency. Haley fulfils all the crucial criteria for the establishment in ways that are even more all-encompassing than foreign policy “specialists” of previous generations like Kissinger and Brzezinski whose mannerisms remained all too “foreign” to even attempt a run for the Presidency, even if the US constitution allowed naturalised citizens such a right.

Haley is the perfect mix of foreign and domestic both in terms of the policies she brazenly advocates for and her personal background. While Haley was born in the US and has adopted most of the colloquial mannerisms of the typical white anglo-saxon protestant, she nevertheless was born to two Indian Sikh academics. In this sense, Haley’s willingness to transform herself from into the archetypal “ugly American” while not even having the traditional ‘WASP’ background that is typically obligatory for such ugly Americans, is considered an achievement rather than a personal act of shame and betrayal in the eyes of the existing elite.

The progress of Haley’s political career furthermore appears to be more the product of unbridled ambition  than actual talent and this too is fitting with an increasingly vacuous culture that tends to value malignant persistence over anything resembling quality, craftsmanship or genuine intellect. To this end, Haley must certainly be ‘hard-working’ but not so much that she isn’t apt to complain about having to work too much – all while blaming foreign powers for her work load as if there was some conspiracy to create global conflict so as to remove Haley from her bed. This also is clearly a means of appealing to the notion that Haley is “every man and every woman’s diplomat” even though in most cultures, the qualities needed to be an actual diplomat are necessarily extraordinary. Thus, Haley revels in mediocrity while disguising it as a means of climbing the ladder of meritocracy.

Haley’s brazen disregard for normal diplomatic protocol is in the eyes of the establishment not a vice which is a sign of childish inexperience and a personal penchant for contrived hysteria, but rather a sign that the US is “too good” to play by the rules which everyone else (except “Israel”) is bound by. Here too, universal vices are in the context of the American establishment, turned instantly into perverse virtues.

Because of this, Haley is far more dangerous than either Kissinger or Brzezinski because while the ideas of Kissinger and Brzezinski represented the signposts of the direction in which the American foreign policy establishment were heading, Haley represents a one-woman encapsulation of the establishment itself: calculating in its capriciousness, dignified by its own supreme arrogance, proud of its own intellectual and ethical shortcomings, filled with grandiose grievances over petty personal minutiae and an ignominious arrogance that brings disgrace upon the institution most representative of international law.

Nikki Haley is the penultimate embodiment of the American dream in the 21st century. She is a woman who stubbornly refuses to wake up to the reality of the contemporary world as if in a daze. To put it another way, Haley’s version of the “American dream” is a living nightmare for the rest of the world.

June 2, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Roiling the Assassination Waters

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 1, 2018

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is roiling the assassination waters with the publication of his new book American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, where he sets forth his skepticism regarding the official explanations of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

As much as it might like to, the mainstream media is finding it hard to ignore conspiracy allegations by the son and nephew of the assassination victims. Consider, for example, these recent articles in the mainstream press:

People magazine: RFK Jr. Reveals the Omens Before His Father’s and President Kennedy’s Assassinations
CBS: RFK Jr. Seeks Investigation into Father’s Assassination
Los Angeles Times: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Joins Chorus of Second-Gunman Theorists Over His Father’s Assassination
Newsweek: Robert F. Kennedy Thinks Sirhan Did Not Fire Shots That Killed Father
Washington Post: Who Killed Bobby Kennedy? His Son RFK Jr. Doesn’t Believe It Was Sirhan Sirhan

Some people continue to hold that it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment would commit these political assassinations.

It certainly wasn’t inconceivable to John Kennedy or to his brother Bobby.

In fact, immediately after FBI head J. Edgar Hoover telephoned Bobby to advise him that his brother had been shot in Dallas, Bobby suspected the CIA and even said as much to CIA Director John McCone.

Now, why would Bobby have immediately suspected the CIA in the murder of his brother, the president? Isn’t the CIA supposed to be the nation’s protector of “national security”? Wouldn’t Bobby, as U.S. attorney general, have known that? What in the world would cause him to immediately suspect that the CIA had assassinated the president of the United States?

The reason is because Bobby, unlike most Americans at the time and unlike many Americans today, knew that there had been a vicious war taking place between President Kennedy and the national-security establishment throughout his administration and especially in the months leading up to the president’s assassination. It was a war for the future direction of the United States, one in which there could be only one winner — either the president or the national-security establishment.

In January 2017, Congressman Chuck Schumer weighed in on the fight between President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment with the following observation: “He’s really dumb to do this. Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Fifty years earlier, John Kennedy was well aware of what Schumer would be talking about.

For one thing, Kennedy had listened to the warning of his predecessor President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address just as Kennedy was coming into office. Ike pointed out that the U.S. military-industrial complex, which was new to the American way of life, posed a grave threat to the freedoms and democratic processes of the American people.

Eisenhower was echoing the sentiments of America’s Founding Fathers, who were ardently opposed to big military establishments for the same reason — the grave threat they posed to freedom.

Kennedy himself was well aware of the dangers involved in taking on the military establishment and the CIA. Early in his administration, he read a novel called Seven Days in May, which posited a military coup against a president whose policies conflicted with those of the national-security establishment. He persuaded friends in Hollywood to turn the novel into a movie, to serve as warning to the American people of the danger about which Eisenhower and America’s Founding Fathers had warned.

A family friend once asked Kennedy about the possibility of a domestic regime-change operation. He responded that a young president might be given one, possibly two, chances to make serious mistakes, but that if he made a third one, there was a good possibility that a regime-change operation would be initiated against him, as a way to “save” the country from a naïve, incompetent president.

That is what’s important to keep in mind in all this. Once the federal government was converted to a national-security state after World War II to fight the Cold War against America’s WWII partner and ally, the Soviet Union, protecting national-security from all threats, foreign and domestic, became the overarching mission of the national-security establishment.

Kennedy took on the national-security establishment. After the CIA’s disastrous defeat at the hands of the communists at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy initiated a war against the CIA, which prided itself on its independence, by firing the much-revered CIA Director Allen Dulles, reining in the CIA’s powers, putting his brother in charge of supervising the CIA, and privately vowing to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. For its part, the CIA considered Kennedy to have shown weakness, cowardice, and betrayal by refusing to come to the CIA’s assistance by ordering U.S. air support for the invaders.

After that, Kennedy rejected the Pentagon’s plan for initiating a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which would have been much like Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. Kennedy left that meeting, indignantly muttering, “And we call ourselves the human race.” He also rejected the Pentagon’s Operation Northwoods, which called for a false and fraudulent false-flag operation to serve as a justification for invading Cuba, a nation that had never attacked the United States.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, he refused Pentagon demands to bomb Cuba and invade the island. It was during that crisis that Bobby Kennedy told a Russian official with whom he was negotiating that his brother, the president, was facing the possibility of a coup from U.S. military officials who vehemently disagreed with how he was handling the crisis.

When Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis by vowing that the United States would not invade Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were livid. They considered him weak, an appeaser, just like Chamberlain at Munich. They believed that the settlement was among the worst defeats in U.S. history, especially since it left a communist regime permanently in power in Cuba — a communist dagger pointed at America’s neck from only 90 miles away .

That’s when Kennedy really threw down the gauntlet. Without consulting or advising his national-security establishment with what he was about to do, Kennedy delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, where he announced an end to the Cold War and his intention to establish friendly and normal relations with the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world. It was a slap in the face of the U.S. national-security establishment and a grave threat to its existence, given that Kennedy was removing the original justification for turning the federal government into a national-security in the first place.

That was, needless to say, the last straw for the U.S. national-security establishment. In their eyes — indeed, in the eyes of many conservatives today, peaceful coexistence with the communist world, including the Soviet Union (and Russia), Red China, North Vietnam, and North Korea was the pipedream of a naïve, incompetent president, one who was leading the United States to disaster.

Kennedy was not naïve. Like Schumer 50 years later, he was fully aware of the danger into which he was placing himself. He was threatening the existence of a gigantic racket that was set to put the national-security establishment in high cotton with ever-increasing money, power, and influence into perpetuity.

Soon after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy used a family friend to send a message to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, with whom her husband had been secretly negotiating just prior to his assassination. The message commended and thanked Khrushchev, the leader of the communist world, for the moves toward peace that he and her husband had jointly made prior to the assassination.

Despite public announcements purporting to support the Warren Report’s lone-nut theory of the assassination, many people were convinced that Bobby Kennedy never bought it. But everyone also knew that given the power of the U.S. national-security establishment, the only way that Bobby could get to the truth was by becoming president. That’s why he needed to be eliminated as a threat as soon as he won the California primary.

In 1953, the CIA published an in-house assassination manual, which remained secret for almost 50 years. The manual reveals that ten years before JFK’s assassination, the CIA was specializing in the art of political assassination and, equally important, in the art of covering up any evidence of the CIA’s complicity in such assassinations. It is also worth noting that during the Kennedy administration, the CIA, in a top-secret operation that lacked the approval or consent of the president, entered into an assassination partnership with the Mafia, which, like the CIA, had long specialized in assassination, cover-up, and silence.

One of the most revealing parts of all this occurred in 1970, when the people of Chile elected a socialist named Salvador Allende to be their president. Allende, like Kennedy seven years before, began reaching out to the Soviet Union and Cuba in a spirit of peace and friendship. Perceiving Allende to be a grave threat to U.S. national security, the U.S. national-security establishment went on the offensive to initiate a regime-change operation.

The Chilean national-security establishment, however, balked. The position of the commander of the Chilean armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, was that the Chilean constitution didn’t provide for a coup as a way to remove a democratically elected president.

The U.S. national-security establishment was livid, believing that a nation’s constitution is not a suicide pact. Its position was that the Chilean national-security establishment had a moral duty to save its country by violently removing Allende from power. The CIA facilitated the process with a kidnapping-murder scheme that left Schneider dead on the streets of Santiago. Three years later, Allende himself would be dead in another successful U.S. national-security state regime-change operation.

For more information, see:

The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger
JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne
Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger
The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger
CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by Jefferson Morley
“The National Security State and JFK,” a FFF conference featuring Oliver Stone and ten other speakers
“Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence,” a five-part video by Douglas P. Horne

June 2, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The West & Gulf Couldn’t Sway These Lebanese Elections

By As`ad AbuKhalil | Consortium News | May 31, 2018

The recent Lebanese parliamentary election generated a lot of publicity in Western media. To be sure, free elections are rare in the Middle East, and Western media get excited over the prospects of success for what they dub as “pro-Western” candidates or coalitions anywhere. Also because foes of Israel and the U.S. were in the running, Western media become automatically invested in the outcome. This time, Western media decided that Hizbullah won “a majority of seats” in the election—as the headline of The Financial Times had it. The results were certainly a blow to Western and Gulf regimes who invest—politically and financially–heavily in Lebanese elections.

We can’t really talk about free elections in the Middle East—or anywhere else in the developing world for that matter. Not because people there don’t want them but essentially because Western governments and Gulf regimes won’t allow it. To be fair, the U.S. is clearly in favor of free elections, but only when the results guarantee a victory for its puppets. Thus, when Hamas won the legislative elections of 2006 (which the U.S. had been insisting on), the U.S. not only refused to recognize the free expressions of the Palestinian people but the U.S. worked on a covert operation to undermine the results and to overthrow Hamas in Gaza.

Historically, the U.S. (among other outside parties, chiefly Gulf regimes) intervened heavily in Lebanese elections through the provision of cash payments to its favored right-wing, anti-communist candidates. For instance, the 1947 election lives on as one of the most corrupt in Lebanese history, and former CIA agent, Wilbur Eveland, wrote about his adventures of driving to the residence of then president, Kamil Sham`un, with a load of cash to ensure that the right-candidates win. But the cash wasn’t really necessary because Sham`un forged the election anyway and arranged for the defeat of his opponents.

In 1968, the U.S. was most likely behind the rise of the far-right coalition of “the tripartite alliance,” which included the Phalanges, who swept through the election and, in few years, would—with U.S. help—trigger the Lebanese civil war. (New U.S. archival materials show the extremely close relations between those parties and U.S. and Israel).

But the U.S. and Saudi Arabia surpassed all previous foreign intervention in Lebanon in the 2009 election, when they threw close to a $1 billion to sway the vote on the side of the March 14 coalition, which included the Muslim Brotherhood and right-wing groups—all dubbed “pro-Western” by U.S. media. The victor was arranged although the election was very close: no one side was able to rule without veto power by the other side.

In this election, the Saudis didn’t spend as much as previously probably because they thought it wouldn’t make much difference since a new electoral system had changed the rules. But Western and Gulf governments convened a special economic conference in Paris to prop up the leadership of Sa`d Hariri, who claimed in the wake of the conference that he would be create no less than 900,000 jobs.

Elections in ‘Democracies’

Elections in democratic political systems are merely some of the people selecting representatives who speak on behalf of “all the people.” The propaganda about the virtue of elections is highly exaggerated in order to provide the political system with much more political legitimacy than warranted.

In the U.S., there is still a clear agenda to suppress wide political participation. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world which holds the vote on a working day—and in the winter where much of the East coast is buried under rain and snow. Furthermore, the U.S. requires voter registration, when most democracies don’t. The low voter turnout in the U.S. is by design, and not by default. If the U.S. were to adopt a proportional representation system—which both parties won’t allow because they enjoy holding the exclusive monopoly over political representation—voter turnout would increase. Most world democracies have—at least partially or at some level—adopted proportional representation.

The leftist coalition during the Lebanese civil war years, the Lebanese National Movement, proposed political reforms in 1975. They included—among other things—the adoption of proportional representation at the national level, with Lebanon designated as one electoral district. The political class rejected that because they preferred the single-member district (at a small local level) since it facilitates the utilization of cash in swaying voters. Also, Lebanese national proportional representation wouldn’t fit well with regional sectarian leaderships.

The May 6 Lebanese election took place nine years after the previous one. Regional conflicts and Lebanese internal turmoil gave sectarian leaders the excuse to postpone the elections repeatedly. Sectarian leaders also had a hard time agreeing on a new electoral law. But the election of Gen. Michel Aoun to the presidency in 2016 expedited the process of finally holding a ballot. His parliamentary bloc had been vociferous in calling for new elections. After long months of acrimonious negotiations, the sectarian leaders agreed on a new electoral law.

Aoun: Pressed hard for a vote.

Hizbullah and the progressives in Lebanon called for a proportional representation system, while Hariri and his allies fought against it. Hizbullah was willing to risk losing a few seats in return for the election of some of its allies from different sects, while Hariri knew that his broad coalition in parliament would lose substantially because most of his Christian MPs were elected in specially-designed districts where the majority Muslims vote for Christian and Muslim MPs.

The design of electoral districts is not a simple matter in Lebanon because the system has to balance different political interests with a sectarian arithmetic formulae (which is incorporated into the political system of the country). For example, the top posts of government (presidency, speakership, and prime ministership) are distributed among Maronites, Shi`ites, and Sunnis respectively.

Elections to the 128-seat Lebanese parliament must split seats evenly between Christians and Muslims though Muslims surpassed Christians demographically long before the 1975 civil war. It is estimated that Christians are now no more than a third of the population. There is a quota for Christians in the Lebanese parliament that keeps up the pretense that they are half the population no matter how different the demographic reality. In fact, the Lebanese state refuses to conduct a census for fear of upsetting Christians. The last census was conducted in 1932.

So Lebanese leaders agreed on a new electoral law that would mix the proportional representation system with the single-member district. They arrived at a law which divided Lebanese governorates as electoral districts but then gave the voter the choice to rank one candidate on the electoral list as his/her “favored” candidate, which basically prioritized sectarian preferences of voters. The whole purpose of proportional representation was defeated.

The law was quite complicated and the low voter turnout (around 49 %, less than the 2009 election) seems to confirm that many voters and even Interior Ministry experts did not fully understand the rules. The low turnout can also be explained by the low level of enthusiasm among voters and the diminished sense of expectations for change. Furthermore, sectarian leaders in Lebanon suppress the vote by not allowing 18-year-olds to vote. If they did it’s estimated that it would substantially increase the Muslim voters—especially Shi`ites.

Part Two will look closely at the election’s winners and losers and what it means.


As’ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam & America’s New ‘War on Terrorism’ (2002), and The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004). He also runs the popular blog The Angry Arab News Service. 

June 1, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On the Liberation of The Yarmouk Refugee Camp from ISIS. Syrian and Palestinian Struggles Indivisible

By Ken Stone | Global Research | May 30, 2018

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), allied Palestinian militias, and the government of Syria deserve high praise for the recent liberation of Yarmouk refugee camp from ISIS.

Anti-war activists took a lot of flak from some people in North America and Europe, describing themselves as Palestine solidarity activists and “leftists”, when, in 2012, Yarmouk was invaded and occupied by proxy armies of western powers and Arab monarchs. Because we condemned the US-led attack on Syria and defended the Syrian government’s resistance to the terrorist occupation of Yarmouk, we were among the activists denounced by the misguided persons above as being “Assad apologists.”

This would be a good time to set the record straight and reaffirm our position that Palestinians and Syrians have strong common national aspirations. The aspiration of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Palestine is recognized as part of the common struggle of all Syrians. And both nations seek to reclaim from the State of Israel all the territories in Syria and Palestine which it currently occupies.

Background

Yarmouk was originally a refugee camp for Palestinians who had been displaced by the “Nakba”, the catastrophe of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of historic Palestine which accompanied the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. It was a .81 hectare of land which, in 1957, was outside the boundaries of Damascus but which, by 2011, had turned into a lively suburb of the city housing about one million people of whom about 160,000 people were Palestinians. It was the largest and most prosperous settlement of Palestinians anywhere in Syria.

It is important to note that the government of Syria treated its hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees better than most Arab countries and as equals to Syrian citizens themselves. Palestinians in Syria received the same levels of free health care and education as Syrians and were allowed to rise in all areas of employment as high as their abilities carried them. There was only one formal legal distinction between Syrians and Palestinians. Palestinians were not given Syrian citizenship – in order to maintain their internationally-recognized right of return to their homes in Palestine – and therefore were not allowed to participate in Syrian elections.

Finally, the Syrian government, along with Iran and Hezbollah, was part of the Coalition of Resistance against Israel for many years. It was no accident therefore that, before the US-led aggression against Syria in 2011, the Palestinian factions chose to locate their headquarters in Damascus.

In short, the Assad government was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause.

The proxy war on Syria

In 2011, a group of western countries and Arab monarchies, led by the USA, unleashed scores of proxy armies of terrorist mercenaries on Syria with the purpose of achieving regime change, a scheme clearly illegal under international law. Importantly, the State of Israel participated heavily in this regime change operation, supporting terrorist mercenaries using the illegally-occupied Golan Heights as their base to fight against the Syrian government inside of Syria. Israel also used its air force to bomb Syria more than one hundred times during the course of the seven-year long war and supplied aid and weapons to separatist Kurdish elements in eastern Syria with a view to aid the USA in trying to partition that country.

In this context, negotiations took place for the Palestinians in Syria to remain neutral in the war. The Syrian government supported this view but the terrorists didn’t.

In 2012, the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) invaded and occupied Yarmouk. Some Palestinian factions facilitated their entry. The FSA was soon joined by al Qaeda and other militant factions. In 2015, ISIS entered the camp and, after some internecine warfare, drove out the other terrorist factions.

As they did in many other pockets of Syria, the terrorists evicted many Palestinians from their homes, looted and plundered everything of value, arrested anyone with known sympathies for the government and/or religious beliefs different from theirs and proceeded to torture and execute them, sexually assaulted and/or kidnapped women and girls, turned Yarmouk into a fortified camp, and hoarded all the foodstuffs for themselves. As in every other terrorist enclave, the vast majority of the inhabitants promptly fled to government-held areas.

The Syrian government did not directly attack Yarmouk until just a few weeks ago. Instead, it patiently armed and supported the courageous fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) who, for many years, led the unremitting struggle against the terrorists inside the camp. In other words, the Syrian government respected the neutrality requested by the Palestinian organizations.

The Syria Solidarity Movement notes,

“the patience of the Syrian hosts in allowing the Palestinian refugee population to try to reconcile its differences and take the lead in expelling ISIS and al-Qaeda and their affiliates from Yarmouk since early in the conflict is especially remarkable. In the end, the SAA took over responsibility for eliminating these terrorist groups from neighbouring Hajar al-Aswad, which allowed the Palestinian militias and their Syrian allies to remove the remainder from Yarmouk, the last remaining source of terror attacks on the civilian population in Damascus. We send our sincerest congratulations to all the people of Damascus and the surrounding metropolitan area for their liberation from fear of such attacks, which they endured for seven long years.” 1

Lies and distortions about Yarmouk

In 2012, certain self-styled Palestine solidarity activists and western “leftists” sought to twist the facts about the second displacement of the Palestinians – this time from their homes in Yarmouk. They sought specifically to lay the blame for this second victimization of the Palestinians in Yarmouk on the Syrian government and effectively gave left cover and support to the western regime-change operation. According to the nay-sayers, the Syrian government was simply to cave in to the armed militants and ignore its duty to protect its citizens and the Palestinian refugees, who lived under its protection, from foreign aggression.

From personal experience in Canada, we can attest to the fact that the Left cover provided by these misguided people for the attempted US regime-change operation in Syria was poisonous to the Canadian anti-war movement. It made it hard to organize people against the illegal war. In fact, it became difficult, thanks to threats by anarchists and other intervenors, even to find a venue to hold a public meeting in Canada for outspoken and courageous opponents of the war on Syria, such as Mother Agnes Mariam and Eva Karene Bartlett. In a few short years, because some of these misguided people, specifically members of the International Socialists (IS), were in positions of authority within the pan-Canadian anti-war movement, the movement dried up and died.

We note that many people got it wrong at the time. It’s heartening that some of them, such as journalists, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, and Ben Norton have publicly acknowledged that their earlier analysis and criticisms were wrong.2 Others, such as UK professor Gilbert Achcar, who travelled to the World Social Forum in Montreal in 2016 to villify the Syrian government, will probably dance to empire’s tune until they die. It has taken seven years but the recent string of victories of the Syrian government over the terrorists have forced many honest people on the left to open their eyes wide and realize that what has transpired in Syria is not a popular uprising and or a “revolution”, but a deadly plan by the US, its western allies, and regional clients criminally to interfere in the domestic affairs of Syria and to target Iran and the Coalition of Resistance.

Thankfully, with the help of its international allies – Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and several Palestinian popular militias – the Syrian Arab Army and government, after much sacrifice, has finally gained the upper hand and has driven the terrorists out of many of the enclaves they seized and occupied, including Yarmouk, thus defeating the US regime change plan.

In response to the failure of that plan, the USA moved to its Plan B: direct attacks on, and the occupation of, a large swath of Syria with a view to partition the country. On April 13, 2018, in response to a fraudulent “chemical attack” staged by the White Helmets3, the USA, UK, and France launched 100+ missiles against Syria. Interestingly, the Palestinian peak organizations immediately condemned the missile attack, and came out strongly in support of the government in Damascus, thereby abandoning any pretence at neutrality.

Fatah (the majority faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]) declared that it

“stood unreservedly with the unity of Syrian territory and rejected efforts at destroying it or harming its unity and sovereignty.”

Palestinian Islamic Jihad “condemned the Western aggression against Syria” and “expressed solidarity (to) stand by Syria and its people and with all Arab and Islamic peoples in the face of all threats and challenges to their security, stability and unity.” The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) “considered the aggression of America and its allies on the Syrian territory as a blatant aggression against the nation, aimed at confiscating its lands and destroying its capabilities in order to preserve the existence of the Israeli entity and (to advance) its schemes.” The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “strongly condemned the American-British-French aggression, which targeted Syria with their missiles.” The Front added that

“the aggression and its objectives will be destroyed on the rock of the steadfastness of the Syrian people and the Syrian state” for whom it expressed its support and solidarity.4

Syrian and Palestinian struggles indivisible

The liberation of Yarmouk and the angry Palestinian reactions to the April 13 missile attacks put a satisfying end to a chapter of disunity in Palestinian and Syrian history. They show that the Palestinian and Syrian struggles are one and the same. There can be no ultimate victory for Palestine if Syria is destroyed. There can be no ultimate victory for the Syrian people without also freeing the Palestinians from the tyranny of occupation in Palestine.

The moral of the Yarmouk story can be summed up thus: if you are for Palestine, you must also be for Syria!

Those self-styled Palestinian solidarity activists and “leftists” in Europe and North America who slammed the Syrian government for resisting the terrorist proxy armies of the West need to reflect on the consequences of their de facto support of the US empire’s meddling in Syria: half a million deaths, millions of injured people (both physically and emotionally), enormous destruction of civilian infrastructure (including housing, schools, and hospitals), the transformation of 12 million Syrians into displaced persons and into a wave of refugees that swept over Europe, the descent of thousands of Syrian women and girls into the international human trafficking trade, and much much more… Will there ever be a day of reckoning for these apologists of empire?

Conclusion

The liberation of Yarmouk refugee camp is a significant milestone in Syria’s struggle to regain its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Eventually, all of Syria will be liberated from the terrorists and from the direct occupations of the USA (east of the Euphrates), of Turkey (in the north), and Israel (in the south). In the meantime, the Palestinian residents of Yarmouk will soon be able to return to their homes in southern Damascus. And, when Syria is completely liberated, they will be able to organize once again – with the help of the Syrian government – for the Day of Return to Palestine.

*

Ken Stone is a veteran antiwar activist, a former Steering Committee Member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, an executive member of the SyriaSolidarityMovement.org, and treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War [hcsw.ca]. Ken is author of “Defiant Syria”, an e-booklet available at Amazon, iTunes, and Kobo. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 “Statement… on the liberation of Yarmouk”, Syria Solidarity Movement, May 27, 2018, syriasolidritymovement.org;

2 Blumenthal and Khalek recant their previously held views on Syria:

https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebelsradio/syria-rania-khalek-episode-17

https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebelsradio/syria-palestine-salafism-wahhabism-islamophobia-rania-khalek-episode-18

Ben Norton recants: http://bennorton.com/syria-war-views/

3 Vanessa Beeley on the Douma incident: http://21stcenturywire.com/2018/05/11/syria-vanessa-beeley-speaks-to-uk-column-about-eastern-ghouta/

4 Palestinian News & Info Agency (WAFA), April 16, 2018

June 1, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Summary executions & unacceptable brutality’: The Gaza flotilla massacre 8 years on

RT | May 31, 2018

On May 31, 2010, Israeli forces ambushed an aid flotilla heading to Gaza, killing 10 activists in a siege that drew international condemnation and sparked damning investigations, despite Israel’s efforts to control the narrative.

Six ships – three carrying international aid – were on their way to Gaza to break the blockade imposed by Israel in 2007 when Israeli forces raided the vessels in international waters, about 64 nautical miles from the blockade zone.

The flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement umbrella organization and the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Aid (IHH). Nine Turkish people were killed during the ambush, while a 10th died in 2014, after spending four years in a coma as a result of his injuries.

A UN Human Rights Council report said at least six of the killings were “consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution.” At least 50 other people were injured and Israel arrested more than 600, including 60 journalists, politicians and other passengers.

‘No satisfactory explanation for deaths’

On May 30, the flotilla gathered off the coast of Cyprus to make its way to Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces and Navy told the ships to go to the Israeli port of Ashdod, which the flotilla ignored and Israel claimed the move was a “provocation.” At 4am, Israel signal-jammed communications, and half an hour later, launched its attack.

When Israeli forces attempted to board the largest boat, Mavi Marmara, they were met with resistance. Passengers sprayed water hoses and threw things, including chairs. The first of three helicopters arrived and stun grenades were thrown at the boat, while at the same time, forces took over the other, smaller boats in the flotilla.

The Turkish-owned boat experienced the harshest response in the raid. Nine men were killed on board after being shot some 30 times between them, with five receiving gunshots to the head, Turkey’s autopsies revealed. A 19 year old, who also had US citizenship, was shot five times at close range.

According to Israel’s account, a number of the Mavi Marmara passengers were “hardcore” and bore bars and knives. Activists, however, claim the soldiers began shooting as soon as they entered. “After 20 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, there were three dead bodies,” Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi recounted.

A 2011 Report of the UN Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry found Israel gave “no satisfactory explanation” for any of the deaths. It also said that “such substantial force at a great distance from the blockade zone and with no final warning immediately prior to the boarding was excessive and unreasonable.”

While there were no fatalities on the other boats, those on board say they too suffered violence from the raiding Israeli forces. “They treated all of the boats on the flotilla with violence, they didn’t treat any of us peacefully and when they say that, it’s an absolute lie,” Alex Harrison, who was on board another of the vessels, told a Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting in June, 2010. “Two of the women were hooded, Guantanamo-style.”

Suppressing footage

The flotilla raid drew international outrage, despite Israel getting ahead of the story whilst the activists were detained. Protests over the incident erupted around the world and tensions between Israel and Turkey deteriorated. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the raid was to “prevent the infiltration of thousands of rockets, missiles and other arms that could hit our cities, communities or people.”

Israel sought to play down the events of the raid, releasing radio recordings it claimed showed the boat’s passengers were anti-Semitic and threatening but which it later had to admit had been edited and couldn’t be confirmed as from the Mavi Marmara, as originally claimed.

Officials also released select footage, allegedly showing the activists being violent. This included clips from the footage they had seized, which was condemned by the Foreign Press Association and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Efforts were also made to frame the IHH as a terrorist organization and some of the passengers as members of Al-Qaeda.

A UN Human Rights Council panel accused Israel of suppressing footage of the raid. The IDF attempted to confiscate images and footage, taking phones and laptops from them, including those belonging to journalists on board. Despite this, an hour of footage from Mari Marmara was released by filmmaker Iara Lee, who was on board.

Israel’s inquiry into the events found its actions were legal under international law and noted the “regrettable consequences of the loss of human life.” The UN General Assembly’s 2010 fact-finding mission found Israeli forces were guilty of a series of violations of international law, and its disproportionate response “betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality.” Israel said this was biased.

In November 2017, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it would not prosecute Israel, but that there is “reasonable basis to believe that war crimes were committed by some members of the Israel Defence Forces.”

Eight years on from the flotilla deaths, Gaza remains under blockade and with two wars waged on Gaza since then, the situation on the ground is more bleak than before. A new flotilla is currently making its way to Gaza, due to arrive in July.

May 31, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment