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PLO submits applications to join 15 international bodies

Ma’an – 02/04/2014

RAMALLAH – Letters of accession for 15 international multilateral treaties and conventions were handed to the relevant parties on Wednesday after being signed by President Mahmoud Abbas a day earlier, Palestinian officials said.

“I presented the letters signed by Abbas this morning to UN special envoy Robert Serry, as well as to the representatives of the Netherlands and Switzerland,” Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said.

He said the Palestinians had begun the “technical process” required to obtain membership of some 15 international conventions and covenants, including the Fourth Geneva Convention.

“This action does not detract from the importance of negotiations. We are still committed to these talks,” he said.

In July, the PLO agreed to postpone accession to international bodies in exchange for the release of 104 Palestinians prisoners jailed before the Oslo Accords.

“Since Israel failed to release the last group of prisoners, the State of Palestine is no longer obliged to postpone its rights to accede to multilateral treaties and conventions,” the PLO said in a statement Wednesday.

“Despite the escalation of oppressive Israeli policies such as the killing of Palestinian civilians, settlement construction, raids on vulnerable communities, arbitrary arrests and detentions, home demolitions and the removal of residency rights, we remained committed to the negotiations process and supported US efforts,” it added.

Earlier, Israeli Tourism Minster Uzi Landau warned of punitive action if the PLO pursued efforts to join UN agencies and threatened that Israel could annex territory in the occupied West Bank in response.

Israel could also hurt the Palestinians economically by acting “to block financial aid to them,” the minister added.

Abbas signed letters of accession for the following treaties and conventions:

1. The Four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the First Additional Protocol
2. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
3. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations
4. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in armed conflict
5. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
6. The Hague Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land
7. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
8. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
9. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
10. The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
11. The United Nations Convention against Corruption
12. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
13. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
14. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
15. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Hope for continued peace efforts

Meanwhile, a senior official said Wednesday that the PLO wants US efforts to salvage the peace process to continue.

“We hope (US Secretary of State John) Kerry’s efforts will be renewed in the coming days,” Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, told reporters in Ramallah.

“Kerry knows the reality. We don’t want these efforts to finish.”

Abbas’ announcement that the PLO had taken steps to join UN agencies angered Israel and prompted Kerry to cancel a trip to Ramallah on Wednesday.

The announcement was a blow to Kerry’s frenetic efforts to resolve a dispute over Palestinian prisoners and find a way to extend the fragile peace talks beyond a looming April 29 deadline.

Abed Rabbo said the Palestinian move was “a response to Israel’s flagrant violation of the agreement” under which it would release prisoners if the Palestinians refrained from seeking further UN recognition.

“The government of Israel did not release the prisoners, without any reason or even any excuse for not doing so,” Abed Rabbo said.

The senior Palestinian official suggested that they would not be quitting talks before the deadline.

“The Palestinian leadership respects its commitments and wants the political process to continue, but we want a real political process, without tricks,” he said.

“We will continue our efforts with the US administration, and will do everything we can to remove all obstacles.”

The negotiations have faltered over several issues, notably Israel’s settlement expansion in occupied Palestinian territory, with the PLO demanding a freeze on settlement construction, including in East Jerusalem.

AFP contributed to this report.

April 2, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Future of Transnistria in context of the Ukrainian crisis

Ari Rusila’s Balkan Blog | April 2, 2014

“Transnistrian claim for independence is being met with a certain degree of sympathy and understanding by some of the western experts. As an example, a Finnish political analyst and blogger Ari Rusila can be named; he usually presents the Transnistrian de facto statehood in quite a positive light, admitting, in particular, that “Transnistria called my attention first because of its quite ready statehood elements without outside recognition, second because of changed circumstances in respect for international law after Kosovo unilateral declaration of independence and thirdly because I predicted that Trandnistria could be the next tinderbox of separatism between Georgian conflict and coming troubles in Ukraine”. He believes that Transnistria, if compared with Kosovo, has had in fact much more reasons to be recognised internationally.”

The quote above is from a paper Transnistrian Conflict: State of Affairs and Prospects of Settlement  prepared for the International conference “Frozen Conflicts” in Europe (1st September 2012, Bled, Slovenia) by Natalia Belitser and the сitation is based on my articles published in 2008.

Transnistria as next Crimea?

moldova_map_v2As the crisis in Ukraine continues to simmer, tensions in the country’s western neighbor Moldova are beginning to rise. Seeking to capitalize on President Putin’s eagerness to use the protection of Russian speaking populations in the region as a pretext to expand his territorial claims, members of two separate enclaves in Moldova are looking toward Moscow for protection.

Now after the uprising and coup in Ukraine and reunification of Crimea with Russia, tensions have grown to encompass Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova, which like Ukraine has been making efforts to integrate further with the West. Moldova has signed the EU association and free trade agreements at the November 2013 Vilnius summit, during which former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich rejected the deals. The Moldovan government has also supported the Western-backed uprising in Ukraine. Western experts worry that the next “Crimea” could be the breakaway region of Transnistria. Many locals there don’t share that fear, and if the last referendum holds, a large majority would welcome a Russian annexation.

Transnistria (aka Transdniestria aka Pridnestrovie) – is a new and emerging country in South Eastern Europe, sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine.

news-graphics-2007-_635463a-300x273The official language of Transnistria is Russian, not Moldovan, while the vast majority of schools teach the Cyrillic alphabet instead of the Roman alphabet used in the rest of the country. Recently Transnistria adopted Russian legislation, a clear signal of the region’s preference for joining Moscow’s Customs Union.

Most recently, Russian military exercises held on March 25 in Moldova’s breakaway territory of Transdniestria have stoked these tensions. From its side the parliament of Transdniestria has sent a proposal to the Russian State Duma asking for Russian legislation to join the breakaway Republic to Russia. The document originated as a feedback to a new draft law in Russia facilitating the accession of the new subjects to the Russian Federation. The talks within the 5+2 format (Russia, Moldova, Transdniestria, Ukraine, the OSCE and observers from the EU and the US) are scheduled for 10-11 April 2014.

Transnistria – and Gagauzia – are joining to the same club with Abkhazia and South Ossetia as de facto states, namely political entities that have achieved enduring ‘internal sovereignty’ – but lack ‘external sovereignty’ in the international system. As Crimea is annexed to Russia and these other “states” can follow to join Russia or continue as de facto states, this development is creating a Northern Black Sea corridor, front-line or buffer zone.

Good Moldavia-Transdniestria cooperation since 2009 and 2011 elections

New prospects for conflict settlement have appeared after parliamentary elections of 2009 in the Republic of Moldova. The new pro-Western team – the Alliance for European Integration (AEI) – that substituted the Communist Party ruling the country from 2001, proved much more pragmatic and willing to deal with its breakaway region than their predecessors pursuing rather an isolationist policy. In 2011 presidential elections President Igor Smirnov, who had been in power since Transnistria declared independence in 1990, failed to be re-elected, and was replaced by opposition MP, younger leader of the ‘Revival’ movement and former speaker of the Supreme Council Yevgeny Shevchuk. These political changes engendered hopes for the settlement process to acquire a positive momentum.

The power changes in Transnistria give a positive boost to the peace process: the official negotiation process re-started after six years interruption in November 2011 in Vilnius, Lithuania, to be followed by a meeting on February 2012 in Dublin, Ireland and on April 2012. Finally the Document of principles and procedures and agenda of negotiations were agreed in Vienna, whereas on July 2012 this Document was signed. It included such issues as freedom of movement of passengers and cargo, traffic of trains, education issues, etc. Also a new approach (joint initiative of Russia and Germany, Meseburg, 2010) by the EU and Russia to resolve the conflict was the setting up of a joint Political and Security Committee (EU-R-PSC) at minister level. Related to security issues it was stated that the EU and Russia will cooperate in particular towards a resolution of the Transnistria conflict with a view to achieve tangible progress within the established 5 + 2 format (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Transnistria, OSCE, EU, US). This cooperation could include a joint EU-Russia engagement, which would guarantee a smooth transition of the present situation to a final stage.

The main approach of the resumed negotiations and to the settlement process in general focuses on Confidence Building Measures (CBMs). This means that political aspects of the settlement, for example a mutually accepted status of Transnistria, are not yet touched. Instead status there has been attempts to make concrete steps of issues that both sides of the conflict are interested in. These kinds of initiatives have already been following:

  • Engaging the sides into direct dialogue;
  • Establishing joint Working/Expert Groups on confidence building measures;
  • Conducting meetings at a higher level (for example, between Prime-minister of the RM Vlad Filat and leader of Transnistria Yevgeny Shevchuk, also between the heads of foreign ministries Eugen Carpov and Nina Stanski);
  • Elaborating and implementing national and international social and economic development projects etc.

The direct dialogue at a higher level has been clear contrast to previous lack of any kind of dialogue lasting for years. There has been a dozen WGs e.g. on economy, agriculture and environment, transport, railways, civil status acts, social and humanitarian aid, health, education, combating organised crimes and emergencies, telecommunications, and customs, whereas the WG on demilitarisation and security is not yet operating.

Growing dispute between parties started by unilateral actions by both parties during Spring 2013. First Moldova established migration control of citizens in six checkpoints, second Transnistria started to mark a border in the Security Zone or line of demarcation after the Transnistrian war (1992).

Tools against Transnistria by Chisinau and Kiev

Arsenal of tools, on that, with the support of Western “ideological-political sponsors” can count in Chisinau and the Kiev could be as following:

  • further tightening of border crossing for the residents of Transnistria, the introduction of a total ban on border crossings by social groups and citizens (It is noteworthy in this regard that, that the admission of foreign citizens on the territory of Moldova is liberalized; Ukrainian officials should examine stats for financial gains and losses of the Moldovan side of Ukrainian companies, eg, air carriers);
  • blocking of export-import operations of the Transnistrian side, transit of Transnistrian goods, that is well within the common “European” subjects as a way to European integration, with a demand for the full functioning of the Transnistrian Moldovan business rules;
  • ban on border crossings by vehicles with Transnistrian number;
  • refusal to issue permits for the Transnistrian passenger transport;
  • Moldovan law on the placement of the Ukrainian checkpoints with full access to all databases and law carry out administrative functions, etc..

Russia ready if needed

NATO warns that a pro-Russian enclave of Moldova could be Moscow’s next target after Crimea. NATO’s top military Commander Europe Philip Breedlove said on 23rd March 2014 that Russia has a large force on Ukraine’s eastern border and is worried it could pose a threat to Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region.Russia launched a new military exercise, involving 8,500 artillery men, near Ukraine’s border 10 days ago. Breedlove said the Russian tactic should lead the 28-nation Western military alliance to rethink the positioning and readiness of its forces in eastern Europe so that they were ready to counter Moscow’s moves.

How the Russian forces would get there. Transnistria is landlocked and to go there by land would require Russian troops to travel through much of western Ukraine. However, Russian forces based in the Eastern side of the Black Sea and Crimea could conceivably stage an airlift. Since it fought a brief separatist war to breakaway from Moldova in 1991, Transnistria has been home to “peacekeeping” garrison of around 1,000 Russian troops. One option is also that Russia includes Odessa in a “security belt” that would presumably stretch from Crimea to Transnistria.

In Moldova the appetite for European integration among Moldova’s 3.5 million people had weakened even before the crisis in Ukraine and a parliamentary election later this year may bring a return of the pro-Russian Communist Party that was forced from power in 2009. Moldova falls under the EU’s Neighborhood Policy, which contains no explicit similar promise of membership like the countries of the Western Balkans .

Gagauzia had a referendum too

moldova_v3Following a 1991 declaration of independence, Comrat (Gagauzia’s capital) agreed to remain a part of Moldova, after Chisinau agreed to grant the region the legal status of a “special autonomous zone”. Chisinau’s control was challenged in February 2014 when Gagauzia held a referendum to join the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union. The referendum followed Chisinau’s decision to enter a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union in November 2013–the same agreement former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich snubbed when he opted for the customs union with Moscow. Gagauzia has a population of about 155,000 people, mostly ethnically Gagauz, Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians. Many locals fear that Chisinau’s EU-integration agenda masks an intention to unite Moldova with neighboring Romania.

An overwhelming majority of voters in a referendum – with turnout more than 70 % – held in the autonomous Moldovan region of Gagauzia have voted for integration with a Russia-led Customs Union: 98.4 percent of voters chose closer relations with it. In a separate question, 97.2 percent were against closer EU integration. In addition, 98.9 percent of voters supported Gagauzia’s right to declare independence should Moldova lose or surrender its own independence. Moldova’s government claims that referendum in Gagauzia is unconstitutional and had no legal legitimacy.

Although the security situation in Gagauzia remains calm, on 26 March, the executive committee in Comrat announced its decision to establish independent police stations in Comrat, as well as in its northern and southern cities of Briceni and Cahul. Moscow has demonstrated support for Gagauzia following the referendum. The regions governor, Mihail Formuzal visited Moscow in March 2014 and got the impression that Russia was prepared to expand partnerships with Gagauzia and “provide the necessary support”. Despite an embargo against wine produced in Moldova, Russia began importing it from Gagauzia, likely as an attempt to encourage additional good will toward its benefactor.

Bottom line

It easy to say that incorporating Transnistria – as well Gagauzia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea – into Russia (and Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia) is against international law (whatever it is) or some international agreements. Although Russia moving into eastern Ukraine could be–as the West says–invasion-occupation-annexation. However in my opinion these actions are more legitimate or justified than U.S.expansionism, secret wars and interventions around the globe.

The other possible scenarios than unification with Russia for Transnistria are e.g:

  •  Status quo maintained aka “frozen conflict” continues;
  • Re-integration of the Republic of Moldova with condition of establishing a confederation including Moldova, Transnistria and Gaugazia as entities, this could be a pragmatic option for Ukraine too;
  • Transnistria gaining its independence and state sovereignty recognized internationally;
  • Joining Ukraine, which option after coup in Kiev seems most unlikely option to me.

In my opinion even without international recognizion Transnistria meets the requirements for sovereign statehood under international law, as it has a defined territory, a population, effective elected authority, and the capability to enter into international relations. It is currently seeking international recognition of its de facto independence and statehood. As long as Transnistria’s status is unresolved, it will be a serious political obstacle to Moldova’s joining the EU, which does not want another “divided state” like Cyprus on its hands.

April 2, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LA Times’ Tony Barboza gets caught fear mongering the IPCC report

Facts that don’t agree with claims

By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | April 1, 2014

This sentence…

“One of the panel’s most striking new conclusions is that rising temperatures are already depressing crop yields, including those of corn and wheat.”

… is in this LA Times story by babout the latest IPCC report which has so much gloom and doom in it, one of the lead authors, Dr. Richard Tol, asked his name to be taken off of it for that very reason.

Problem is, the agricultural data doesn’t match the LATimes/IPCC claim, see for yourself:

wheat-corn-soybeans-yield-trend

Source: USDA data at http://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/ plotted by Dr. Roy Spencer.

World-wheat-corn-rice_trends

Not only is the LATimes/IPCC claim about agriculture false for the world, but also the USA:

US_ag-trends

Source: USDA Data here compiled by Dr. Mark J. Perry at the Carpe Diem blog.

In fact, U.S. Corn Yields Have Increased Six Times Since the 1930s and Are Estimated to Double By 2030 according to Perry.

Note that temperatures in the US Corn belt aren’t rising, but models are, and as we know, the IPCC prefers model output over reality.USHCN_corn_belt_temperatures

Source: USHCN data from NOAA, CMIP5 model data plotted by Dr. Roy Spencer

Why is it that checking such simple facts are left to bloggers and independent thinkers like Roy Spencer, instead of “professional” journalists like ?

Maybe he’s just too lazy to check facts like this? Or, is it belief mixed with incompetence?

April 1, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The False Intelligence Behind the “Manufactured Crisis” over Iran’s Nuclear Activities

By Gareth Porter | Going to Tehran | March 31, 2014

The world’s news media have long accepted without question the charge that Iran had for many years used its civilian nuclear program as a cover for a nuclear weapons program. That narrative has rested on intelligence documents and reports that were accepted as credible by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA in turn has been treated in the news media as a non-political authority without any axe to grind.

But, as I document in detail in Manufactured Crisis, the intelligence documents at the heart of this narrative were fabrications created by the state with most obvious interest in promoting such a narrative—Israel. The origin of the false intelligence was the ambition of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their Israeli ally to carry out regime change in Iran, which they believed would require the use of force, though not with large-scale ground troop as in Iraq. They also believed that the only way to justify such a war would be to build a case that Iran was threatening to obtain nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Against the backdrop of a political strategy for Iran, on which Undersecretary of State John Bolton was coordinating with Israel in 2003-04, a large cache of documents from a Iranian nuclear weapons research program came into the possession of Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, late in the summer of 2004. They included computer modeling of a series of efforts to integrate what appeared to be a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3 Iranian missile, and experiments with high explosives that could be used to detonate a nuclear weapon. Someone leaked to David Sanger of the New York Times that those documents had come from the laptop computer of an Iranian scientist involved in the alleged program who later feared that he had been discovered and managed to get the computer out through his wife.  U.S. officials told senior IAEA officials that they feared the “third party” that had brought out the documents was now dead, according to former Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei.

But that was a crudely constructed cover story to hide the real source of the documents.  In fact, the German intelligence agency, BND got those documents from a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian terrorist organization that had become a client of Israel. The MEK member was a sometime source for the agency, but senior BND officials regarded the source as “doubtful,” according to former senior German official Karsten Voigt, who told me the whole story of his November 2004 conversation with his BND contacts on the record a year ago.

The senior BND officials had contacted Voigt, who was then coordinator of North-American relations for the foreign office, immediately after Secretary of State Colin Powell had made comments to reporters about “information” that Iran was “working hard” to combine a ballistic missile with “a weapon.” The BND officials were alarmed that the Bush administration was intending to make a case for war against Iran based on those doubtful documents.

The sequence of events presented a remarkable series of parallels with the Bush administration’s exploitation of the BND source codenamed “Curveball” to make the case for war against Iraq less than two years earlier. That Iraqi refugee in Germany—who turned out to be the brother of a senior official of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Council—had told tales of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs to the BND, which had passed them on to the CIA. But BND officers had eventually begun to doubt his stories. When George Tenet had asked BND chief August Hanning in December 2002 whether the United States could use the information publicly, Hanning had written a personal note to warn him that the United States should not rely on the information without further confirmation. Colin Powell had nevertheless used the very information about which Hanning had warned as the centerpiece of the case for war in Iraq.  Now Powell was going public with another claim about WMD intelligence from another dubious source to make what sounded like the beginning of a case for war against another adversary of the United States.

Voigt believed the senior BND officials wanted him to issue another warning to the United States not to rely on these documents, and a few days later, he did give such a warning in public, in a coded fashion. In an article in the Wall Street Journal Voigt was reported to have said the information to which Powell had referred had come from “an Iranian dissident group” and that the United States and Europe should not “let their Iran policy be influenced by single-source headlines.”

The BND officials were not the only ones who had questions about those documents. Some U.S. intelligence analysts wondered why the purported nuclear weapons research project documents only included material about alleged high explosives experiments, a missile reentry vehicle and the design of another uranium conversion facility totally different from the one Iran had adopted after years of research, development and testing. Why, they wondered was there nothing about weapons design? And why was the work on the missile reentry vehicle amateurish – or, as David Albright put it to this writer in a September 2008 interview, “so primitive”?  Why was the design for a bench-scale conversion process marred by such fundamental flaws that the IAEA’s Olli Heinonen had to acknowledge in a February 2008 briefing that it had “technical inconsistencies.”

The documents also exhibited anomalies that were direct indicators of fraud. The most dramatic was the fact that the studies modeling the missile reentry vehicle were based on the initial Shahab-3 missile, which the Iranian missile program is known to have begun to replace with an improved model as early as 2000 – two years before those modeling studies were said to have been started in mid-2002. The redesign of the reentry vehicle, which was a key to improved design, would have been far advanced by then, according to Michael Elleman of International Institute for Strategic Studies, who was the main author of an authoritative study of the Iranian ballistic missile program. The shape of the new reentry vehicle, first revealed to the world when the new missile was flight tested in August 2004, bore no resemblance to the old one portrayed in the documents. The authors of the documents had obviously been unaware of that complete redesign of the reentry vehicle, meaning that they could not have part of an Iranian Defense Ministry-sponsored program.

The creators of the collection of documents were clever enough to build them around an authentic document that could be verified as real and thereby lend credibility to a collection that otherwise lacked any evidence of authenticity. But the document was not from inside the Iranian government but a letter from a high tech company to an Iranian engineering firm. It would have been relatively easy for Mossad, which carries out constant surveillance of high tech companies, to acquire that document. The document was then used to provide evidence of connections between different parts of the alleged project that was otherwise absent: anonymous handwriting on it referred to the reentry vehicle study. Those touches reveal creators who were eager to maximize the political effect of the document and apparently not worried that they would be too obvious.

The daring of the venture as well as the fact that the actual document around which it was built would have been a routine discovery for Mossad leave little room for doubt about the Israeli origins of the collection.

The plan had been to have the IAEA focus entirely on what ElBaradei was calling the “alleged studies” once the “Work Program” negotiated with Iran on the various other issues the Agency had raised since 2004 was completed. But then came the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which concluded that Iran had stopped the work on nuclear weapons that the intelligence community had been certain it had been doing for years in 2003. That estimate all but eliminated the case for the use of force, so it created a serious problem for Israel.

The Israelis responded quickly, however, coming up with an entirely new series of intelligence documents and reports in 2008 and 2009 showing that Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program was far more advanced than previously believed. Those documents were transmitted to the IAEA directly by Israel, according to ElBaradei’s memoirs, but the IAEA never disclosed that highly salient fact.

The first document arrived as early as April 2008, and the IAEA’s Safeguards Department immediately mentioned it in the May 2008 IAEA report. It was a Farsi-language report on experiments with high explosives that was obviously intended to suggest the initiation of a hemispherical charge for an implosion nuclear weapon.

The very next IAEA report in September 2008 announced that the experiment “may have involved the assistance of foreign expertise.” That was obviously a reference to a scholarly paper on a methodology for measuring intervals between explosions using fiber optic cables co-authored in 1992 by Ukrainian scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, who had worked in Iran from 1999 to 2005.  The IAEA thus swallowed the implausible Israeli claim that a spy had obtained a top secret Iranian document on nuclear weapon-related experiments that just happened to involve the same methodology about which Danilenko had published.

The far more plausible sequence of events was that Mossad had discovered Danilenko’s work in Iran in a routine investigation of foreign personnel in the country and soon found out that he had worked at the Soviet nuclear weapons complex at Chelyabinsk and had published on a method for measuring explosive internals. Those discoveries would have inspired the idea of secret Iran document describing high explosives experiments that would include a measurement technique that would implicate Danilenko—who would be portrayed as a Soviet nuclear weapons specialist—in the alleged Iran nuclear weapons program.

Further supporting that explanation for the appearance of the document is the fact that the most sensational intelligence claim in the November 2011 IAEA report involves yet another Danilenko publication.  The IAEA said it had “information” that Iran had built a high explosives containment chamber in 2000 “in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments”, which it defines as tests to “simulate the first stages of a nuclear explosion”, at its Parchin military facility. And it cited a publication by the same “foreign expert”—i.e., Danilenko—as allowing it to “confirm the date of construction of the cylinder and some of its design features (such as its dimensions).”

That Danilenko publication, however, was actually on the design of an explosives chamber for the production of nanodiamonds. The drawing of the chamber accompanying the article, moreover, displays features, such as air and water systems for cooling the tank immediately before and after the explosion, that would have made it unusable for the purpose of testing nuclear weapons designs. Despite having worked in a Soviet nuclear weapons complex for many years, Danilenko had worked from the beginning of his career on explosive synthesis of nanodiamonds, which involved no knowledge of nuclear weapons or of methods for testing them. (The first American to discover nanodiamonds synthesis, Dr. Ray Grenier, who had also worked for many years in Los Alamos National Laboratory, the top U.S. nuclear weapons complex, told me that he himself had never worked on anything directly connected with nuclear weapons, and that all of his work on nanodiamonds synthesis had been unclassified.)

The IAEA never produced any confirming evidence for the tale of the bomb test chamber at Parchin provided by Israel.  Former IAEA chief inspector in Iraq Robert Kelley, who had also been project leader for nuclear intelligence at Los Alamos national laboratory and head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, immediately pointed out that the IAEA description of the alleged explosive containment chamber and its intended purpose made no sense technically.  Kelley observed that the capacity of the alleged chamber to contain 70 kilograms of high explosives reported by the IAEA would have been as “far too small” for the kind of hydrodynamic nuclear tests the report claimed as its purpose. Kelley and three other intelligence experts on photo interpretation also pointed out that the satellite photos of the site at Parchin indicate that it displays none of the characteristics that would be associated with a high explosives testing site.

And Iran’s behavior in regard to the site in Parchin contradicts the notion that it needed to hide evidence of nuclear testing there.  Iran allowed the IAEA to pick any five sites in one of the four quadrants of Parchin to visit and take environmental samples in February 2005 and then did the same thing again in November 2005. And the IAEA reported in February 2012 that it had obtained the complete run of satellite photos of the site from February 2005 to February 2012 and found that there was no evidence of any significant activity at the site for the entire seven years.

The tainted intelligence underlying the charges of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is now one of the major issues in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. The introduction of the demand that Iran must satisfy the IAEA indicates either that the Obama administration believes completely in the official nuclear narrative and is dangerously overconfident about its bargaining position or that the administration has been assured by IAEA director general Yukiya Amano that he will do what is necessary to reach agreement with Iran on the issue of “possible military dimensions” of the nuclear program. In either case, the fate of the false intelligence and the fate of the nuclear talks are now deeply intertwined.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who writes on U.S. national security issues.  His latest book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February by Just World Books. 

April 1, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lies and Truths

Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web

“Palestine was a land without a people for a People without a land” and “Palestinians do not exist” are not just statements made decades ago by Zionist leaders but are made still today (even a US presidential candidate in 2012). The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “… giving his audience (Likud leaders) a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers (Bejamin Netanyahu said): ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.'”

We are all familiar with the incredible PR repeated ad nauseum about Israel. From “security” to “terrorism” to “wanting peace”, we are inundated in corporate media with these images that are divorced from reality. With effort of Zionists, Wikipedia and other internet sites are full of this nonsense. It is not innocuous. Mythologies and lies are used to justify everything from ethnic cleansing to use of white phosphorous on civilians. They are the tools used to keep Jews and people around the world in a state of apathy and to confuse them with things like: Well: these “Arabs” and “Jews” have been fighting and it is almost genetic and nothing can be done to stop it. For an example to the callousness of these lies, see this video and then read the articles and data below that debunks these lies.

This year will mark 64 years since the founding of the state of Israel on the ruins of 540 Palestinian villages and towns. As 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians in the world remain refugees or displaced people denied basic human rights it is more important to debunk myths and lies. I updated this list to now include 64 lies/myths (one for each year). For those who want to further deepen their understanding, I suggest a list of books and documents in my syllabus on human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Please send me your contributions/additions whether in other lies not mentioned here or in further quotes and data on the listed lies. Email contributions to mazin@qumsiyeh.org. Suggested use for the data as it accumulates is a handy place for finding information to develop your knowledge in a way that can be used in meaningful discussions and for sending to chat rooms, list-serves, editors, politicians and others.

As Nathan Chofshi wrote in the Jewish Newsletter: “We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we have to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed… we  justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.”(New York, 9 February 1959, cited in Erskine Childers, ‘The Other Exodus’ in Spectator, London, 12 May 1961)

  • 1. Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land
    – Palestine was not empty and inhabited by nomadic people
    – Zionism at 100: The Myth of Palestine as “A Land Without People”  By Allan C. Brownfeld
    – Palestine photos of the 1930s
    – The Legal Status of Land in Palestine
    -Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Pluto Press 2004. – Chapter 2“People and the Land”
  • 2. Israel made the desert bloom/Palestine was destitute
    – Statistical data on Palestine before the Nakba
    – Who made the desert bloom?
  • 3. The myths of national origins, chosenness, collective rights for a religion etc
    – Archaeology refutes the Bible’s claim to history By Daniel Lazare
    – Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?
    – King David Was a Nebbish: ROCKING ISRAEL TO ITS BIBLICAL CORE
    – Shattering a ‘national mythology’ By Ofri Ilani
    –Israeli Icon under fire
    –The Origins of the Jews By Yossi Schwartz
    –A mosaic of people: …the DNA evidence by Ellen Levy-Coffman
    –Who is a Jew
    –Palestine in Wikipedia
    –Was there a place called Palestine
    Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999
    –more here
    -Silberman, Neil Asher and Israel Finkelstein. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Touchstone, 2002.
    -Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History. Sourcebooks, 2002.
    Whitelam, Keith W. The invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. New York, Routledge. 1997
    -Raed, Basem. Hidden Histories: Palestine and The Eastern Mediterranean. Pluto Press. 2010.
    -Sand, Shlomo (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator). The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2009.
  • 4. Innocent Jews wanting to “return home” were rejected from the start by local Arabs for no good reason
    – Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg) wrote the following in 1891:  “In all things it is our custom to learn nothing from the past for the future. There is certainly one thing we could have learned from our past and present history: how careful we must be not to arouse the anger of other people against ourselves by reprehensible conduct. How much more, then, should we be careful, in our conduct toward a foreign people among whom we live once again, to walk together in love and respect, and needless to say in justice and righteousness. And what do our brethren in Eretz Israel do? Quite the opposite! They were slaves in their land of exile, and they suddenly find themselves with unlimited freedom, the kind of wild freedom to be found only in a country like Turkey. This sudden change has engendered in them an impulse to despotism, as always happens when ‘a slave becomes a king,’ (Proverbs 30:22) and behold they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty, unjustly encroaching on them, shamefully beating them for no good reason, and even bragging about what they do, and there is no one to stand in the breach and call a halt to this dangerous and despicable impulse. To be sure our people are correct in saying that the Arab respects only those who demonstrate strength and courage, but this is relevant only when he feels that his rival is acting justly; it is not the case if there is reason to think his rival’s actions are oppressive and unjust. Then, even if he restrains himself and remains silent forever, the rage will remain in his heart and he is unrivaled in ‘taking vengeance and bearing a grudge.’ (Leviticus 19:18)” “Emet Me-Eretz Yisrael” (Truth from the Land of Israel),  29 May 1891, 21 Iyyar 5651 Translated by Alan Dowty.
    -Mandel, Neville J. The Arabs and Zionism before World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
    -Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment. Pluto Press 2010. Chapter 5 on “Popular Resistance During the Ottoman Rule”
  • 5. Ben Gurion (who became Israel’s first Prime Minister) and Zionist leadership before 1948 war had no intention to drive the native Palestinians out.
    As early as 1917 (when Palestine was 96% Christian/Muslim and 3% Jewish), Ben Gurion stated “Within the the next twenty years, we must have a Jewish majority in Palestine.” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 43). In 1936 he stated that the future Israel must “become a force, and the Arabs respect force..these days it is not right but might which prevails. It is more important to have force than justice on one’s side” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 191). In 1937 he said “The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had…MORE than a state, government and sovereignty-this is national consolidation in a free homeland.” (Righteous Victims, p. 142). in 1938, he wrote “With compulsory transfer we have vast areas …. I support compulsory  transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it. But compulsory transfer could only be carried out by England …. Had its implementation been dependent merely on our proposal I would have proposed; but this would be dangerous to propose when the British government has disassociated itself from compulsory transfer. …. But this question should not be removed from the agenda because it is central question. There are two issues here : 1) sovereignty and 2) the removal of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 117). In Feb 1948 “The war will GIVE us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are ONLY CONCEPTS for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning.” (Benny Morris, p. 170 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180). And in early May 1948, Ben-Gurion approved establishing the “Transfer Committee” to oversee “the cleaning up (nikui in Hebrew) of the Arab settlements, cultivation of fields and their settlement, and the creation of labor battalion to carry out this work.” (Benny Morris, p. 137). Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his diary soon after Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on 10th-11th of July 1948: “After attacking Lydda (later called Lod) and then Ramla, …. What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities … What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out!. ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring, …. Psychologically, this was on of the most difficult actions we undertook”. (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207) .David Ben Gurion also recognized that “The (upcoming) war will give us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning”. In his diaries he said regarding Palestinian refugees “We must do everything to ensure they never do return” and to the Sunday Times “The old will die and the young will forget”. Under Ben Gurion’s direction, Transfer Committee was officially set up to effect ethnic cleansing.  I don’t understand your optimism. “Why should the Arabs make Peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.” Ben Gurion in 1956 Quoted by Nahum Goldman, former President of World Zionist Congress, in “The Jewish Paradox” Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978, p99.
  • 6. Palestinians want/ed to drive Jews and Israel into the sea
    (variant: Israel was willing to share)
    –Israel Pushed Palestinians into the Sea
    -Today 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians around the world are refugees or displaced people. Those who remain in Palestine are in shrinking areas that as of 2011 consisted of 8.3% of our historic homeland (they include areas in the Galilee, the triangle, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, teh Negev, and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli population according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics is 7,510,000 of which 5,984,500 are “Jews and others” (presumably the others are Druze, Russian non-Jews, and similar categories) and 1,525,500 Palestinian Arabs (1).  The population of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is 4 million allowed to live on areas A & B, small parts of the 22% of Palestine occupied since 1967 (2).  The total area allowed for Palestinian use is 2.5% of the area of pre-1967 Israel (3) plus areas A & B of the West Bank .  In total this comes to 2.5% of 78% and 29% of the 22% that is the West Bank and Gaza (4). The total geographic access to all remaining Palestinians(5.525 million) is thus 1.95%+6.38%=8.33% while the Jewish and other population (Zionist preferred) consists of 5.5 million with access to the remaining lands comprising 91.67% of historic Palestine.  What this means is that the Jewish population (most of it new immigrants) has access to about 9 times more land per person than the remaining native Palestinians.  If we add the Palestinian refugees outside the country (total Palestinian population per PCBS is 10.9 million), the disparity only gets more pronounced. When you consider that before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, 93% of the land was used by Palestinian natives and now only 8.3%, you can see the colossal level of land theft.
    References
    1) http://www.cbs.gov.il/www/yarhon/b1_e.htm
    2) http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=3&id=1746
    3) see http://www.indypendent.org/2007/12/09/israeli-democracy-arabs-need-not-apply
    4) http://www.poica.org/pal-in-a-century/pal-in-century.php
  • 7. Tiny Israel fended off large Arab armies in 1948
    –Click here for detailed answer
  • 8. Land was purchased, Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed
    -See this chapter on refugees in my book which analysis all aspects of this including myths about origins of the refugee catastrophe
    – Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York, 1987, p. 223, citing Record of the Knesset, vol. 1, 1949, session 43
    – Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland. London/Boston: 1987, p. 145.
    – See also “How refugee land ended up as Jewish National Fund lands” (and it is not “abandoned” it was confiscated illegally and refugees are being prevented from returning to their lands by an illegal and racist apartheid system).
    –With all due respect for the ‘blue box’ by Meron Benvenisty in Haaretz. In Hebrew
    – THE MYTH that the Arab refugees fled because the Arab radios urged them to do so was analyzed by Erskine B. Childers in the London Spectator May 12, 1961. An examination of British and US radio monitoring records turned up no such appeals; on the contrary there were appeals and “even orders to the civilians of Palestine, to stay put…”
    -see also these books
    Abu-Sitta, Salman. Google for writings available on the internet
    Benvenisti, Meron.  Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948.  Translated by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta.  Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000.
    Sami Hadawi. Bitter Harvest: A modern history of Palestine. Olive Branch Press, New York. 1998.
    Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
    Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
    Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
    Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
    Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
    Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
    Segev, Tom. 1949, The First Israelis. New York: Owl Books by Henry Holt, 1998.
  • 9. There was an Exchange of population, Jews came from Arab Countries to Israel in exchange Arabs left Israel
    Variant: Jews of Iraq and Arab Countries were persecuted and expelled
    -See Jews of Iraq
    –and this
    –and this dedicated website
    (see for example an articulation of this by an AIPAC introduced bill in Congress that demands that “any explicit reference to the required resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue is matched by a similar explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.” (http://www.standwithus.com/website/news_post.asp?NPI=50)
    – Detailed answers are in resources listed under myth 8 above.  In brief, when Israel was founded, there were 600,000 Jews and 1.6 million Christians and Muslims in Palestine.n 700-800,000 Palestinians were made refugees by a deliberate process. It had nothing to do with the subsequent events in Poland, Morocco or any other country. Israel upon its foundi9ng of course was interested in bringing Jewish immigrants from many countries (these are not called refugees er international law).  To achieve this, the Zionist movement and the nascent state of Israel used all sorts of tactics from propaganda to incitement to even violence to scare Jews to leave their countries and come to occupied Palestine (the new state of Israel).  See for example what happened in Iraq articulated by Iraqi Jew Naeim Gilad in his book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals” (Mossad put bombs in front of Jewish community centers and even a synagogue to scare Iraqi Jews to leave). Also it was the Zionist movement that lobbied the US congress and other Western governments not to increase quoatas for European Jewish migration to those countries so as to leave only one door open: migration to Palestine.
  • 10. The UN Partitioned Palestine creating a Jewish state, Arabs rejected this and Zionists Accepted
    – See The myth of the UN Creation of Israel Detailed analysis
    -In 1947, Private land in Palestine was 93% owned by Christian and Muslim Palestinians and only 7% by Jews (and half of those wee not Zionists but native Palestinians).  Today many people like to cite one (but only this one) resolution of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 181) which included a RECOMMENDATION of partition. This resolution is not a binding resolution and was never implemented but let us deal with it (there were many others that also were not implemented including the one about the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands).
    -The partition resolution was pushed through by the US in violation of the UN Charter and its mandate to allow self-determination of local people.  A referendum was suggested but rejected.  The nascent Arab states also suggested a form of one state with equality and protection of all minorities but this was also rejected by the Zionists and the Truman administration. Truman reversed Roosevelt’s policies on this issue because he wanted to win election (favors wth the Zionist lobby, see Myth 39 below for details and sources). But in any case, the Zionist leadership did not accept most of the points in UNGA 181 (they rejected the borders, they rejected internationalization of Jerusalem, they rejected the admonition not to remove Palestinians from the Jewish state, they rejected economic union etc).  Since there was no leadership of the Palestinian people (decimated by the British by the end of 1939), it is meaningless to speak of rejecting this UNGA resolution by Palestinians.  It is true that the newly independent Arab countries (many of them puppets of Britain and France at the time) rejected it.  There was good reason to reject it by all people of good conscience (it divided a country against the wishes of its inhabitants). We must also recall that the recommendation was to give 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state and 45% to an aRAB STATE
    -The Conciliation Commission got the agreement of both Israel and Arab states on an identical document May 12, 1949 called the Lausanne Protocol. It stated:
    “The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, anxious to achieve as quickly as possible the objectives of the General Assembly resolution of 11 December 1948 (UNGA 194), regarding refugees, the respect for their rights and preservation of their property, as well as territorial and other questions, has proposed to the delegation of Israel and to the delegations of the Arab States that the working document attached hereto (UNGA Partition resolution 181 of 1947) be taken as a basis for discussions with the Commission. The interested delegations have accepted this proposal with the understanding that the exchanges of views which will be carried on by the Commission with the two parties will bear upon the territorial adjustments necessary to the above-indicated objectives.” For full link click here Lausanne, 12 May 1949)
    -Israel then rejected the partition boundaries and proposed to take over all of Palestine (but leaving the issue of the West Bank for “discussion”).  It also rejected implementing its obligations on the issue of Palestinian refugees .
    – In his guidelines to the delegation in Lausanne with respect to negotiating peace, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moshe Sharett, pointed out that “it behooves us to do so not with haste and trepidation but by revealing strength and the ability to exist even without official peace”. According to Sharett, since official peace was not a vital necessity, Israel had nothing to lose from procrastination. (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: 1987, p. 215)
    -In 1970 and 1971, Anwar Sadat approached Israel through the US for terms of peace that were more generous than what Israel accepted a few years later. Israel turned it down and it took a war (October 1973) to jolt them into understanding the limits of military power.
  • 11. Israel respects holy sites of other religions
    -See history erased by Haaretz
  • 12. Jerusalem “reunification” let people be treated equal regardless of religion
    variant: Israel is not Judaizing Jerusalem/Freedom of religion
    -See Former Military Jerusalem Governor confirms: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians Began Right After the Occupation Arnon Regular, Kol Ha’ir Weekly Magazine, July 26, 2001, Western Jerusalem
    -See this detail on status of Jerusalem
  • 13. The US is an “honest broker”
    -see Book by Naseer Aruri: Dishonest Broker for history of us involvement
    -“Israel’s dependence on the United States is far Greater than suggested by the sum of $3 billion. Israel’s physical existence depends on the Americans in both military and political terms.  Without the US, we would not be equipped with the latest fighter planes and all other advanced weapons. Without the American veto, we would long have been expelled from every international organization not to speak of the UN, which would have imposed sanctions on us that would have paralysed Israel’s International trade, since we cannot exist without importing raw materials.  For the same reason, it is wrong to divide the American money up into military aid of $1.8 billion and civilian aid of $1.2 billion. What we are getting is really unmarked dollar bills…” Nehemia Stressler, Haaretz, May 12, 1989
  • 14. Islam is intent on taking over the world
    A good summary of this Zionist pedaled discourse is in the book “Islamic Imperialism” by Efraim Karsh (2007, Yale University Press, New Haven and London) of which thousands were printed and distributed free to clergy and opinion makers around the US (the Zionist group cryptically named “Institute on Religion and Democracy”, Washington, D.C. was distributing it free). Muslims have been victimized by colonial powers for hundreds of years and have no coherent political or military power.  Most of the countries with Muslim majority are ruled by puppets of the US which are now being toppled by popular demand. US forces are in over 140 countries (at least two dozen Muslim majority). A lot of the fundamentalist groups that are now used as evidence of this pan-ISlamic desire to take on the world were created or supported by the West.  A religion that is the faith and inspiration of 1.6 billion people is like Christianity (2 billion people). Such a large number of people means by nature that some are bad people who use their religion for bad purposes. But in actually, the big wars in the world had nothing to do with religion (WWI and WWII). People use religion occasionally such as happened during the the Crusades and now with Zionist colonization of Palestine.
  • 15. “Israel’s centrality in Jewish life” manifest by the creed developed and advocated by Zionists “Am Yisrael Chai” meaning People of Israel (=Jews) live.
    – For this deep psychological pathos that puts Jews above any other humans, see these books
    Ellis, Marc, Out of the Ashes.
    Braverman, Mark. Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land.  Austin: Synergy Books, 2010.
    Kimmerling, Baruch. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: Society, Society and the Military. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
    Meyer, Hajo G.  The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.  G.MeyerBooks, 2007
    Nathan, Susan. The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
    Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories, 2002.
    – also see My one and only Love
    – and Response to Rosenfeld
  • 16. Zionism had a positive influence on world affairs
    -Bishara Bahbah and Linda Butler, Israel and Latin America: The military Connection, ST Martin’s Press, NY, 1986
    Milton Jamail, Margo Gutierrez, It’s no secret: Israel’s military involvement in central America,
    Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1986
    –Zionist Terrorists Arrested Inside Mexican Congress
    Israel hand seen in Ivorian clash (and other strives around the world)
    -“BERN, Switzerland – The Swiss government said today it had caught Israel’s spy agency trying to bug telephones on the outskirts of the Swiss capital. It was the second highly publicized Mossad bungle to embarrass the Israeli government in recent months. The espionage effort was aimed at foreigners living in Switzerland, federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte said, without elaborating. Del Ponte denied Israeli media reports that Iranian diplomats were  the target of the alleged spying. She said the targets were not diplomats.  Switzerland has demanded an apology from Israel, the Foreign Minstry said. It said it had had no immediate response from Israel. … At a news conference in Bern, del Ponte said five Israeli agents were  detained as they tried to plant the bugs a week ago. All but one were released and are believed to have left the country.  In Jerusalem today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that an Israeli citizen had been arrested in Switzerland, but declined to comment further. ” Another mess for Mossad: Israeli spy agency accused of bugging Swiss phones. The Associated Press  26 February 1998. by Irene Harnischberg
    -“A senior Israeli intelligence officer says that the hit team arrested in Switzerland were on the trail of two businessmen with Hezbollah sympathies. As contacts continued between Israel and Switzerland yesterday to free a Mossad agent detained in Berne last month, a senior Mossad officer said the true purpose of the bungled operation had been assassination and not bugging as claimed. ” March 3 1998. Times of London
    – There is some evidence that World War One was expanded instead of ending in peace because Zionists pushed Brits and French to continue promising to get US to enter the war IF THEY gave them Palestine after the war. Samuel Landman, a noted British Zionist, carefully articulated in 1936 the machination of the leading Zionists on this front (http://desip.igc.org/1939sLandman.htm Samuel Landman Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine , 1936 New Zionist Press)
    Michael Berkowitz, 2003. Nationalism, Zionism and ethnic mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and beyond. Brill Academic Publishers
    Balfour was a reward for the Zionists getting the US to enter the war entry The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note By John Cornelius, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 1997, pages 18-20 http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0897/9708018.html
    Lord Sydenham of the British House of Deputies replied prophetically to Balfour: “… the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country – Arab all around in the hinterland – may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of Palestine Problem, section IV)
    -see also The origin of the Balfour Declaration
    -Israel’s industrial and military espionage in the US
  • 17. The 1967 war was a defensive war by Israel against enemies who wanted to destroy it
    –Alan Hart on the 1967 propaganda and myth
    –http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/06/04/six_day_war/
    -Moshe Dayan described kibbutz residents who pressed Israel to take Syria’s Golan Heights in a 1997 New York Times interview: “They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land … We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was … The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”
    -From POLITICIDE, Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, by Baruch Kimmerling, Verso, 2003, pages 57-59):
    “In May 1967, Gamal Abd al-Nasser made his biggest political miscalculation. After a long and bloody intervention in the Yemeni civil war, he had lost prestige in the Arab world. In order to regain that prestige and affirm Egyptian sovereignty, he made two spectacular moves: he ordered Egyptian military forces to cross the Suez Canal and, at the same time, demanded the withdrawal of UN forces deployed along the 1957 ceasefire lines. After the Yemeni debacle, the Egyptian army was certainly not ready for a war with Israel, but the Israeli General Staff had planned for many years to destroy the Egyptian military, which had been re-equipped and restructured by the Soviet Union after the 1956 War. Nasser’s move was exploited by the Israeli Government, which depicted it as a causus belli and a real threat to Israel’s security. The Israeli armed forces mobilized their full reserve system. While the two armies were positioned face-to-face, the Israeli Government, headed by Levy Eshkol, hesitated, doubting both the reality of the Egyptian threat and the necessity of resolving it militarily rather than diplomatically. Another consideration was the severe economic hardship and social strain that would result from the prolonged mobilization of almost the entire male labor force. While the government weighed its options, military officers (including Sharon) seized the opportunity to convince the public that Israel faced a genuine threat to its existence. Demonstrations called on Eshkol to quit. The increasing public pressure in addition to the hidden pressure from many on the general staff led to the establishment of a new war-oriented Cabinet that included the hawkish Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense and, for the first time, members of the ultra-nationalist party Herut, headed by Menachem Begin. The war was so well planned and prepared that at dawn, on June 5, the Israeli military intelligence and air force knew the precise location of every Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian aircraft and destroyed most of them on the ground in several hours. Sharon, in his autobiography, briefly mentioned that “on the morning of June 5, Israel’s air force was to launch a pre-preemptive attack on Egypt’s airfields.” When Israeli infantry and tank brigades attacked Egyptian military concentrations, fortifications, and bases, they already had almost absolute air superiority. One of the most significant myths rooted in the collective memory of both the Israeli and Western public is that during the 1967 War (or as the Israelis arrogantly called it, “the Six Day War”), Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, a belief that is used to justify the legitimacy of the occupation to this day.
    -Both Yitzhak Rabin and Ezer Weizman clearly allude in their autobiographies to the fact that, prior to the attack of June 1967, the Israeli general staff organized a putsch, and barred any and all political solutions to the crisis. Rabin, Chief of Staff, admitted that: “Nasser didn’t want war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war He knew it and we knew it.” (Le Monde, February 28, 1968).
    Levy Eshkol himself admitted that “the Egyptian layout in Sinai and the general build up there testified to a militarily defensive Egyptian set-up, south of Israel” (Yediot Ahronot, October 16, 1967).
    -On August 8, 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, defending the invasion of Lebanon, said: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”(New York Times, August 21, 1982).”
  • 18. The International Solidarity Movement supports violence
    – see Wikepedia, a bit biased but has links
    -See The ISM Website
  • 19. The Road map is an international effort for peace in the Middle East and Palestinians reject it
    -The road map is 2218 words and lacks four key words: International Law and Human Rights. It was drafted in the State Department supposedly based on the speech Bush gave in 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html ).  Bush’s speech writers at the time were both Zionists: Michael Gerson and David Frum.
    -The writings of Karen Kwiatkowski who retired from the Pentagon clearly documents the stranglehold of Zionist “group think” on US policy. It is claimed by official US sources that the State Department wrote the Road Map.  If that is the case, this would fall under the purview of then under secretary for Political Affairs (from 2001 to 2005) Marc Grossman who is also Zionist.  Other Zionists who were likely involved or at least had to give their blessings include Elliott Abrams (National Security Council Advisor) and Richard Haass (Director of Policy Planning at the State Department).
    -Despite this bias, Arafat and the PNC accepted the road map and the Palestinian Authority obeys it (getting back in line under threat of withholding their tax money occasionally). Sharon said he would accept it with 14 reservations that basically make it meaningless. The Israeli government violated it regularly most conspicuously on the issue of expanding settlements and refusing to keep the territorial integrity of the WB and Gaza: restrictions on movement etc increased even started to build a wall which is contrary to this document.
  • 20. Palestinians militants use human shields and send their kids to be killed for propaganda
    -such offensive and racist statements are beneath contempt as no mother or father or human being sacrifices their children or their relatives for public relations
    –The reality
  • 21. Arabs only understand the language of force
    –Check this
  • 22. Zionists teach peace and democracy, Palestinian Society teaches hate
    – Anti-Arab racism and incitement in Israel
    – Nathan Brown of George Washington University investigated Palestinian textbooks, his full report is posted here
    – see also related Report by Dr. Fouad Moughrabi
    – See Education and hate  Assay on who teaches what to whom, July 2004.  Also published in French as Education et haine
    -A study by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs concluded Israeli textbooks and children’s literature promote racism and hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs. (See http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0999/9909019.html.)
    Jewish Settlers’ on the record: racism and bigotry funded by US taxpayers
    – see http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/ speeches and articles
    – Former Chief Rabbi advocates genocide (this is not an average Israeli Rabbi, this person carries lots of weight and the position was created based on Israeli state laws)
    http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6987.shtml
    – The myth of incitement in Palestinian schools (this is an oft repeated smear by Zionists trying to distract world attention from continued colonization activities and ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians)
    http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=911
    http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/47093.pdf
    http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/pal_children.pdf
    http://www.geocities.com/nathanbrown1/CAJE.htm
    – http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
    – Israel is as a Theocratic state whee there is no separation between state and religion, see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/relig.html
    – Yesha Rabbinical Council: “During time of war, enemy has no innocents Ma’ariv 30 July 2006 “The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that “according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as ‘innocents’ of the enemy.” All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians,” the statement said. (Efrat Weiss) ” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-3283720,00.html (Yesha is the name given to the council that oversees the 450,000 settlers in the West Bank)
    – See also “Israel’s house of horrors” By Ali Abunimah http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6975.shtml
    – Harvard Lawyer Alan Dershowitz’ calls for War crimes
    Martin Sherman calls for ending Palestinian rights by giving them money and relocating them all
    -“Israel should have exploited the  repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention  focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the  Arabs of the territories.”Benjamin Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University in 1989
    – “In the old city of Jerusalem they (Palestinians) are swarming like ants. They should go to hell — and the Messiah will speed them on their way,” Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, leader of the influential Shas party in a weekly sermon broadcast on army radio (Reuters, July 27, 2001).
    Ovadia Yosef: “The role of the Gentiles – is to serve the Jews”
    -Another investigation by Le Monde Diplomatique concluded the textbooks’ real error was to refute Israel’s version of Palestinian history. (Log onto http://mondediplo.com /2001/07/11textbook.)
    -While many Israelis and supporters terrorize Palestinians, they demonize all Palestinians as terrorists. While they teach intolerance and hate, they claim Palestinians teach their kids hate. Human Rights Watch documented the discrimination against Palestinian-Arab children in Israel’s schools. (Log onto http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/).
    -An article by Dr. Peled-Elhanan of the Hebrew University put it this way: “Palestinians, both the lawful citizens of the state and the ones living under occupation, are presented stereotypically, in racist vocabulary and racist visuals, as a demographic threat . . . their discrimination is represented as a national necessity. . . occupied
    territories are depicted as part of the state of Israel but their Palestinian inhabitants, cities and cultural sites are missing from maps, photographs and graphs. The books promote the ideal of an Arab-free land as a condition for the existence of the Jewish state.”
    – Israel’s education system http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2507
    -Israeli company fires 21 Arab employees at once and gets away with its racism http://972mag.com/israeli-supermarket-fires-21-arab-employees-at-once/
  • 23. Palestinians don’t use nonviolent resistance but instead blow themselves up with innocent civilians
    See the detailed in my book Popular Resistance in Palestine
    Statement to Israeli public on non-violence
  • 24. Israel takes great care not to harm civilians and never targets civilians; Israeli army most ethical army
    – See Targeting Civilians
    – “As a young soldier serving in the Israeli army, I was ordered to commit grave human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My platoon meted out collective punishment on Palestinian communities, shot and killed unarmed Palestinian civilians, and enforced prolonged curfews on Palestinian villages. I witnessed the arbitrary destruction of Palestinian houses, property and agricultural land. These acts were not rare occurrences, nor were they the result of overly cruel soldiers. It was part of the norm; a habit that an Occupation soldier gets used to doing. These daily occurrences constituted, as I later understood, war crimes.” http://alawda.rso.wisc.edu/why.htm
    – “I participated in the fighting on Temple Mount. I was and also shot at the demonstrations in Umm Al Fahm. But the worst event was the riots in Tiberias. Hundreds of violent Jews closed a main road and also threw firebombs at us. They almost set our car on fire, but luckily we put the fire out on time. There was stone throwing, firecrackers, and glass bottles were thrown and broke between our feet. They crossed all the red lines, my people attacked me with enormous force, and it hurts. The violence there was just like in Umm Al Fahm. According to the open-fire regulations, when firebombs are thrown, there is authorization to shoot. But we handle Jewish riots differently. To a demo like this we know in advance that we come without weapons. These are the orders from above, and we used only gas”. Tal Etlinger, a border police soldier, Yediot Aharonot, 17/11/2000 (translated by Irit Katriel, iritka@internet-zahav.net.il)
    – “The Israeli soldiers who volunteers to serve in the occupied territories are considered heroes, while in truth their volunteering can be compared to that of German volunteers who served in the SS” Moshe Zimmerman, at the time Chair of Department of Germanic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, interview Yerushalayim, 4/28/1995. From the “Founding Myths of Modern Israel by Roger Garaudy
    – We killed (Palestinian) police for revenge, Israeli soldiers confess By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem, The Independent
    Maariv in Hebrew published admissions of Israeli soldiers to committing war crimes
    – Palestinians Continue to be used as human shields (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tomdEkOgdKU
    – Use of Palestinians as human shields
    – Amnesty International 2006 report on Israeli violations of Human Rights
    – Article by Jonathan Cook on Targeting Civilians http://mostlywater.org/node/8568
    – Israeli army forces women to strip at checkpoints http://www.imemc.org/article/49215
    – Israel hits center of Red Cross http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/ambulancehit.jpg
    – American NLG Lawyers Findings that Israel Violated International Law, US Domestic Law in Gaza
    – Statistics on number of people killed
    – Israeli who revealed “medieval-style” torture of Palestinians faces virulent backlash
  • 25. Israel attacks infrastructure only if it is linked to terrorists
    – Lebanon war
    – Amnesty Report
    – Wanton Destruction of Infrastructure and homes
  • 26. The Deir Yassin Massacre (one of hundreds committed during the ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949) was committed by rogue elements and not mainstream Zionists
    – What happened in Deir Yassin
    – When the Haganah command learned of the plan of the Irgun and Lehi to conquer Deir Yassin, David Shaltiel, Haganah Commander in Jerusalem, asked them to coordinate the timing of the operation with the scheduled renewed assault on Kastel. He dispatched identical letters to Mordechai Raanan (Irgun Commander in Jerusalem) and Yehoshua Zetler (Lehi Commander in Jerusalem), in which he gave their operation his approval:
    To: Shapira (code-name of Zetler)
    From: District Commander
    I have learned that you intend to carry out an operation against Deir Yassin. I would like to call your attention to the fact that the conquest and continued occupation of Deir Yassin is one of the stages in our overall plan. I have no objection to your carrying out the operation on condition that you are capable of holding on to it. If you are incapable of doing so, I caution you against blowing up the village, since this will lead to the flight of the inhabitants and subsequent occupation of the ruins and the abandoned homes by enemy forces. This will make things difficult rather than contributing to the general campaign, and reoccupation of the site will entail heavy casualties for our men. An additional argument I would like to cite is that if enemy forces are drawn to the place, this will disrupt the plan to establish an aerodrome there.
    Ezel website
  • 27. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Lebanon was not the responsibility of the Israelis
    – Details on website indict Sharon
    – Robert Fisk explains
    – Qumsiyeh Review of book on subject
  • 28. The lies and distortions about the Lavon affair
    – From Mideastweb files
    – Israel’s second Prime Minister Sharret had interesting admissions in his diary including about the Lavon affair, in which Israeli provocateurs exploded bombs in U.S. cultural centers and diplomatic establishments in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954 after being told “to break the West’s confidence in the existing (Nasser) regime… The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origins should be totally covered.” The idea was to provoke mayhem, increase Jewish immigration and with other acts eventually provoke a war to acquire more territory (which happened in 1967). As retired US foreign service officer Richard Curtis wrote in the WRMEA (March 18, 1985): “When the provocateurs (young Egyptian-born Jews trained in Israel and returned to their homeland) were caught and tried, Sharett publicly denied Israeli complicity and accused the Egyptians of ‘vicious hostility to… the Jewish people.'” But in his diaries Sharett not only admitted the affair but lamented Israel’s “unleashing of the basest instincts of hate and revenge…” In another part of the diary we see this interesting tidbit: “Ben Gurion reported to the cabinet … how our four youngsters (Israeli paratrooper reservists) captured the Beduin boys one by one, how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one after the other… When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer… came to tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion.”
  • 29. Martin Luther King Jr supported Israel and Zionism and equated criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism
    See Martin Luther King
  • 30. Israel was trying to save Arab Jews
    – Details on Arab Jews
    See also the Lavon Affair (up)
  • 31. Palestinians and other Arabs largely rejoiced after 9/11 attacks/Variant is that Muslims do not denounce terrorism
    – See Arabs and Palestinians on September 11]
    – 9/11 statements
  • 32. Barak Made a generous offer at Camp David, Arafat rejected it and went back and started a bloody intifada
    – See Robert Malley’s Fictions About the Failure at Camp David
    – Uri Avnery on 12 conventional lies [http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story658.html]
    – Gush Shalom data
    – EI myth 5
    – Electronic Intifada
    – Cactus 1948
    – IAP
    – Mideast Facts
    – Gush Shalom
    – Pal Remembered
    – Ottawa summary
    – Aaron David Miller, a senior negotiator on the Clinton team at Camp David and an Orthodox Jew revealed that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations, successive U.S. administrations including Clinton’s have acted as “Israel’s attorney.” Kathleen Christison, “Anatomy of A Frame-Up: Camp David Redux, Counterpunch, August 15, 2005. On line here
    – Press release showing that the sides were really close to hammering out an agreement at Taba which was a continuation of the negotiations until Israel withdrew (not Palestinians)
    – “The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine. There were just a few hundred settlers in the West Bank and Gaza when I became president, but the Likud government expanded settlement activity after I left office. President Ronald Reagan condemned this policy, and reaffirmed that Resolution 242 remained “the foundation stone of America’s Middle East peace effort.” President George H.W. Bush even threatened to reduce American aid to Israel. Although President Bill Clinton made strong efforts to promote peace, a massive increase of settlers occurred during his administration, to 225,000, mostly while Ehud Barak was prime minister. Their best official offer to the Palestinians was to withdraw 20 percent of them, leaving 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 5 percent of the occupied land.” President Jimmy Carter
    -“The narrative blaming Yasser Arafat now joins a whole string of myths: the Tel Hai myth, the myth of the runaway refugees in 1948, the myth of the War of Independence as a defensive war that broke out because of an invasion by Arab armies, the myth of the few against the many, and the myth of the liberation of the homeland from the British boot – just to mention a few of the many myths that have been created here to deal with the reality that gave birth to many crises and second thoughts about the situation.” Challenging the Camp David myth, By Meron Benvenisti. Ha’aretz, Thursday, August 02, 2001
  • 33. Christians, Jews and others should support Israel because of the Promised land/Bible issues.
    -See Web site on Christian Zionism
    – Hagee preaches support for Israel
    – see also these   Links of Palestinian Christian and others who truly follow Christ’s teachings
  • 34. The people of the West Bank benefited from Israeli rule
    – In September 1967 Moshe Dayan told senior staff in the Israeli Occupation Army in the West Bank that some 200,000 Palestinian Arabs had left the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “we must understand the motives and causes of the continued emigration of the Arabs, from both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not to undermine these cause after all, we want to create a new map.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 338).
    -“The guideline of our policy has always been the idea that a permanent situation of no peace and a latent war is the best situation for us, and that it must be maintained at all costs. … we are becoming stronger year by year in a situation of impending conflict where it is possible that actual fighting may break out from time to time. Such wars will usually be short and the results guaranteed in advance, since the gap between us and the Arabs is increasing. In this way we shall move on from occupation to further occupation. … this criminally mischievous policy has led us into the crisis we are living through today…We have not been seeking peace for twenty-five years — all declarations to that effect have been no more than coloured statements or deliberate lies. There is of course no assurance that we could have made peace with the Arabs if we had wanted to. However, it has to be heavily emphasized that we have not only made no attempts to seek peace, but have deliberately and with premeditation, sabotaged every possibility of doing so.” (Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)
    -From former Israel Attorney General Michael Ben Yair who wrote on 3/3/2002: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupie territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
  • 35. Christians are leaving Palestine because of persecution by Muslims not because of Zionist occupation and colonization
    – See links and resources from all main Palestinian Christian denominations and other Christians around the world.
    – The Christian presence in Palestine under Israeli military rule. A short clip from the award-winning film from Occupation 101 titled Voices of the Silenced Majority.
    – Palestinian Christians make action against construction of Israel’s separation barrier on Palestinian Christian lands in Wadi Nis village (South of Bethlehem area,) marking Good Friday
    -Christians and Muslims join hands to march on Palm Sunday insisting on right of freedom of movement. Many were arrested.
    Example here
    and here
    and here
    – In Arabic,  report about Christianity in the Middle East
  • 36. The 1967 Occupation follows International law
    -Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel over Palestine, 2nd ed. Belmont, MA: AAUG Press, 1989.
    -Benvenisti,  Eyal “The Applicability of Human Rights Conventions to Israel and to the Occupied Territories”, Israel Law Review, Vol. 26, 1992, pp. 24-35
    -Convention relative to the Protection of Civilians Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949.
    -Also see General Assembly Resolution 64/92, Applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the other occupied Arab territories, 19 January 2010
    -International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004
    -Nasrallah, Rami and Rassem Khamaisi (ed.)  The Jerusalem Urban Fabric.  Jerusalem: A publication of the International Peace and Cooperation Center, 2003
    -Playfair, Emma, ed. International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Oxford, UK: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
    -Qafisheh, Mutaz M. The International Law Foundations of Palestinian Nationality (Boston and the Hague: Brill, 2008).
    -Segal, Rafael and Eyal Weizman (editors). A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Babel (Tel Aviv) and Verso (London). 2003.
    -Shehadeh, Raja. From Occupation to Interim Accords: Israel and the Palestinian Territories. London; Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1997
  • 37. Iran’s President is a Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist who stated he will “wipe Israel off the map”
    -The actual quote from Ahmedinujad: Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
    An article explaining the effort to put words in his mouth
    and this
    and another analysis
  • 38. Zionists did not push for the war on Iraq and the conflict with Iran is also about US security not Zionist perceived self-interest.
    –Letter by leading Zionists and neoconservatives asking US to attack Iraq and change its regime January 26, 1998
    -See Book by Mearsheimer and Walt “Israel Lobby”
    -“Groups Push For Sanctions, Fear US Will Falter on Iran,” By Ori Nir, Forward – Sep 1, 2006 issue
    -“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat and actually has been since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel.. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t  want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.” Pentagon -Defense Intelligence Board Member Philip Zeikow, 10 September 2002
    –Declassified Documents show early manipulation of US media and attempts to shape public opinion
    –Contrary to Chomsky, the US has no interest in supporting Israel
    -Challenging the power of the Israeli lobby: what should be done
    -VIDEO: from Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The power of AIPAC and what they pushed for
    -Lengthy but important analysis of Israeli power
  • 39. Israel is beneficial to US interests in the Middle East
    – Cost of Israel to the US
    – Declassified: Massive Israeli Manipulation of US Media Exposed
    – “Israel secretly maintains a large and active intelligence-gathering operation in the United States that has long attempted to recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified documents, U.S. government officials said.” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2004
    – see  target=new>[The Lobby]
    – [Michael Lind] Article on the Lobby’s negative influence
    – Jewish Groups To Challenge Ethics Reform, By Nathan Guttman, Forward [http://www.forward.com/articles/jewish-groups-to-challenge-ethics-reform/]
    Does the Israeli Tail Wag the American Dog?
    – If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. By Kathleen and Bill Christison (ex CIA Analysts) [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17217.htm]
    – Is Americans’ support of Israel unshakeable? By Linda S. Heard, Online Journal
    – Israel and US interests aren’t identical By Antony Loewenstein [http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4387]
    – [http://www.muckrakerreport.com/]
    – Excerpt from the secret CIA assessment released November 28, 1947 on the eve of the UN “vote” and titled “The Consequences of the Partition of Palestine” (Declassified document)
    “Armed hostilities between Jews and Arabs will break out if the UN General Assembly accepts the plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states…. The Jews are expected to be able to mobilize some 200,000 fighters in Palestine.. The Jewish armed groups in Palestine are well equipped and well trained in commando tactics.  Initially they will achieve marked success over the Arabs because of superior organization and equipment… The US by supporting partition has already lost much of its prestige in the Near East In the event that partition is imposed on Palestine, the resulting conflict will seriously disturb the social, economic, and political stability of the Arab world, and US commercial and strategic interests will be dangerously jeopardized. … The poverty, unrest, and hopelessness upon which Communist propaganda thrives will increase throughout the Arab world. (and later in the document, p. 6) US prestige on the other hand has steadily decreased with each new indication that the US supports the Zionists. The good will enjoyed by the US at the time of the Rosevelt-Ibn Saud Conference and following backing of Lebanese and Syrian claims for independence was short lived as a result of President Truman’s support of Jewish immigration to Palestine and of the Anglo-American Committee report. Because of the long standing cultural ties between the US and the Arab world, the friendly role that the US played in the achievement of Syrian and Lebanese independence, the partial dependence of certain Arab states on oil royalties from US companies, and the promise of increased royalties in the future, the Arab states would like to maintain friendly relations with the US. … Little of this (positive) development will be possible, if the US supports a Jewish state in Palestine.”
    [http://tinyurl.com/2c4kh3]
    Or original here
    – Truman helped establish Israel (actually was the critical element in arm-twisting countries to vote for partition which was contrary to the UN Charter of self determination). Zionist propaganda has it that this support was because of deeply held beliefs in that cause (Jews were persecuted so need a country of their own).  But facts are otherwise.  Truman himself admitted in a private cabinet meeting that he is doing it for money and votes. – “when the election was coming up in 1946 in New York, the group of New York Jews called upon Mr. Truman. [Alan Taylor, op. cit. p.93] Emmanuel Cellar was the head of this committee. Rabbi Steven Wise and several others were in it. They called upon Mr. Truman and said, “We have just been talking with Mr. Thomas Dewey. He is willing to come out and declare for a Jewish state, and we are going to turn our money and urge the Jews to vote for him unless you beat him to it.” Then Emmanuel Cellar pounded upon Mr. Truman’s desk and said, “And if you don’t come out for a Jewish state we’ll run you out of town.” This, I’m sure, is the threat that Mr. Truman refers to in his book, saying, “The extreme Zionists threatened me.” They were Emmanuel Cellar, Rabbi Steven Wise, etc. These are not the extreme Zionists, these are just the run of the mill Zionists. What Mr. Truman did was to cave in to these threats that they would support Mr. Dewey. In that way he got the Jewish money and the Jewish vote. His decision was not made from the point of view of what was going to result in the Middle East, but what was going on in the United States.” Edwin M. Wright at the time of the State Department (source [http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm] )
    – See also [http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/26309.html] and Truman diaries which show how he really thought:
    [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40678-2003Jul10]
    -Israel stole US nuclear technology [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/washington/29nixon.html]
    – “How the Israel Lobby Took Control of the U.S. Congress” (most people have no idea how methodically AIPAC & Co. went about this):
    http://criminalstate.com/2009/07/how-the-israel-lobby-took-control-of-us-foreign-policy/
    – A longer analysis appears in the introduction to Guilt By Association which appears on the Criminal State website (just above Chomsky’s blurb):
    http://criminalstate.com/guilt-by-association/
    – Prof. Wm. Robinson stood up to the ADL Thought Police at UC Santa Barbara when he refused to fold his hand (he’s Jewish): http://criminalstate.com/2009/07/treason-in-plain-sight/
    Note the background role of UC President Mark Yudof and his wife. In an Information Age, if the conduct described is not treason, what is?
  • 40. Israel accidentally attacked the USS Liberty in International waters because it was mistaken for an Egyptian ship
    – CIA Director Richard Helms said: “The board of inquiry (concluded) that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing …”
    See [http://ussliberty.org] for lots of other data including testimony of survivors.
    – Alison Wier on USA Today and USS Liberty [http://counterpunch.org/weir06232007.html]
    – WHY SHOULD MY FAMILY STILL LOVE ME?
    [http://ussliberty.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/why-should-my-family-still-love-me/]
  • 41. Zionist in America are loyal to the US Constitution and have no Tribal allegiances to contradict US interests
    – Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge: A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being “hog-tied” by the US constitution. Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had ‘over-invested’ in them…”
    [http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Ftheaustralian.news.com.au%2Fstory%2F0%2C20867%2C21986986-2702%2C00.html%3F]
    – The New Israel Lobby in Action (David Noble)
    http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2005/11/01/209/
    – See this cartoon by Bendib on the clamour of presidential candidates to suck up to the Zionist lobby.
    http://www.bendib.com/newones/2007/june/small/6-9-The-Race.jpg
  • 42. Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed while protecting the house of terrorist
    [http://www.rachelcorrie.org/]
    [http://www.criticalconcern.com/rachelcorrie.html]
    [http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/309199_corrierebut28.html]
    [http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=DF899DD539B2344385256CEC007008D5]
  • 43. Israel did not deliberately attack a UN Compound in Qana, Lebanon.  “We want it to be clear it was not a deliberate attack because Israel would never target a UN force. It is not part of our policies; it is not part of our values”  Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
    – From Robert Fisk’s April 19, 1996 article “Massacre in Sanctuary” in The Independent (UK): “Qana, southern Lebanon – It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world’s protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong. In front of a burning building of the UN’s Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: “My father, my father.” A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child. “The Israelis have just told us they’ll stop shelling the area”, a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. “…
    [http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/robert_fisk_qana.html]
  • 44. The “security barrier” Israel is building is not a land grab and is about Security
    Facts about “the wall”
    -After most of the residents were ethnically cleansed, a wall of fences was built around remaining 3500 Palestinians in Al-Majdal to starve them until they agreed to leave “voluntarily” in 1951 (long after the end of the 1948 war). The city was renamed Ashqelon
    -The wall around Gaza was completed before even the first Palestinian suicide bombing
    -The wall was less than 25% complete when Hamas made a political decision to stop bombings and run for elections in 2006. Hamas held on to its end of this even though they were not allowed to govern.
    -International court of justice ruled it illegal regardless of any consideration since it is built in the occupied areas (just like the colonies illegal and subject to 4th Geneva convention)
    -Even today in 2013, the wall is actually less than 70% complete; nearly 10,000 Palestinians cross to the Israeli side without Israeli permission to work DAILY and so any person interested in doing violence could do it
    -The wall zig zags in ways clearly intended to capture maximum agricultural lands and natural resources instead of being more secure straighter lines in most of its currently built course.
    -There are Palestinians on both sides of the wall (hundreds of thousands on the so called “Israeli side”)
    -There are Israelis on both sides of it so it cannot be a security issue.
    – See Stop the wall resources and fact sheets
    – Video
    – see also this discussion in electronic intifada on the naming issue
  • 45. Israel Demolishes Homes for security
    – [http://www.icahd.org/eng/faq.asp?menu=9&submenu=1]
    – Rafah Aerial maps before and after
    [http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Rafah-16-10-03/Gaza%20segregation%20wall.jpg]
    [http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Rafah-16-10-03/Rafah.jpg]
  • 46. Israel only imprisons those responsible for terrorism
    – Over 11,000 political prisoners are held by Israel today.  Over the past 40 years, Israel imprisoned nearly 40% of male population of the occupied areas. One third are/were held in administrative detention without charge or trial. Hundreds of minors are also held at any one time.
    – See “A regrettable indifference” By Amira Hass Haaretz  [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/797419.html]
  • 47. Israel does not make or use weapons of mass destruction
    – Dai Williams’ report on the use of uranium weapons by Israel in Lebanon last summer is at: UN priorities for investigating uranium and other suspected illegal weapons in the Israel/Lebanon conflict. – by Dai Williams – 2006-09-01  [http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060901&articleId=3123]. The weapons were flown by the US to Israel.  The airplane was supposed to land for refueling at Ireland’s shannon Internation Airport, but the Irish government refused permission for it to land on Irish soil, so the plane landed at Prestwick, a small airport in Scotland, south of Glasgow. This subsequently caused some difficulties for the Blair Government. At that time, Dai Williams, an internation expert on DU, advised the Scots that if the plane crashed on landing or take-off, all of southern Scotland would be contaminated by the radioactive weapons on board. This incident was not known in the US.  If you need more information on it, look at
    [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/campanas/stopwar/uranium_weapons/index.html].
    – William Broad, “The Hidden Travels of The Bomb,” NY Times, 12/9/08: “Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Liverpool weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and – most important – the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states… It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel’s nuclear arms… A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” the French program of weapons design. The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.  Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.”
  • 48. Israel complies with International law and International obligations
    – [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/un.html]
    – [http://www.muckrakerreport.com/id396.html]
  • 49. Arabs in Israel are treated equal.  Variant, Israel is a Democracy
    – See detailed analysis of some Israeli laws here: [http://www.mediamonitors.net/mazin6.html] and her [http://qumsiyeh.org/chapter7/]
    –Database of Discriminatory Israeli laws compiled by Adalah
    – Amnesty International reported: “In Israel several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during the Second World War, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel’s laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations. Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return, for instance, provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in education, public housing, health, and employment.” ‘Racism and the Administration of Justice’, Amnesty International (2001), also found at [http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf]
    – Human Rights Watch on an aspect of Israel racist structures
    “The state controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, and a government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), manages and allocates this land. The ILA lacks any mandate to disburse land in a fair and just fashion, and members of the Jewish National Fund, which has an explicit mandate to develop land for Jewish use only, constitute almost half of the ILA’s governing council, occupying all the seats not held by Israeli government ministries.” [http://hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/]
    – To quote Israeli Arab writer and Knesset Member, Ahmed Tibi: “…dutifully defining the state [of Israel] as ‘Jewish and democratic,’ ignores the fact that in practice ‘democratic’ refers to Jews, and the Arabs are nothing more than citizens without citizenship.” (Ma’ariv, 1.6.2005)
    – Jewishness versus democracy – By Azmi Bishara
    – Is Israel a democracy
    – U.S. State Department report on International Religious Freedom: “Arabs in Israel…are subject to various forms of discrimination.. (the government)  does not provide Israeli Arabs…with the same quality of education, housing,  employment opportunities as Jews.”
    – Ronnie Kasrils, minister for intelligence in the South African government and of the Jewish faith: “The Palestinian minority in Israel has for decades been denied basic equality in health, education, housing and land possession, solely because it is not Jewish. The fact that this minority is allowed to vote hardly redresses the rampant injustice in all other basic human rights. They are excluded from the very definition of the ‘Jewish state’, and have virtually no influence on the laws, or political, social and economic policies.  Hence, their similarity to the black South Africans [under apartheid].” (The Guardian, 25 May 2005)
    – “The Committee [UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] notes with grave concern that the Status Law of 1952 authorizes the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency and its subsidiaries, including the Jewish National Fund, to control most of the land in Israel, since these institutions are chartered to benefit Jews exclusively. Despite the fact that the institutions are chartered under private law, the State of Israel nevertheless has a decisive influence on their policies and thus remains responsible for their activities. A State party cannot divest itself of its obligations under the Covenant by privatizing governmental functions. The Committee takes the view that large-scale and systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and property by the State and the transfer of that property to these agencies constitute an institutionalized form of discrimination because these agencies by definition would deny the use of these properties to non-Jews. Thus, these practices constitute a breach of Israel’s obligations under the Covenant. [http://www.unhchr.ch:80/tbs/doc.nsf/Symbol/df35bf5b5ee94d01802566d5003dd6cd?Opendocument]
    – “The Israeli-Arab sector suffers from discrimination with regards to government services”, outgoing Israeli Northern Police District chief, Commissioner Ya’akov Borovsky to Maariv newspaper, 8/31/04 [http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=printArticle&articleID=10778]
    – Israel’s Strategic Threat by NEVE GORDON (on the persecution of anyone trying to change Israel to a democratic state for its citizens), The Nation, 4/30/07
    [http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/gordon]
    – “Unrecognized Palestinians” (on the racism and oppression of Palestinians within the “Green line”/Palestine 1948) [http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6719]
    – Israel: Multiple patterns of internal displacement affect several ethnic and religious groups.  Summary report in PDF: [http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/179CDBD849DB9626C125734700336ADC/$file/Israel_Overview_Aug 07.pdf]
    Full report in PDF: http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/19DE321CE3CA6F50C125734700346BA5/$file/Israel+-August+2007.pdf
    – Click here for very interesting program (four videos) about Palestinians in ’48. It’s called Blue ID and is a 5 part program being shown on an Israeli TV channel. In Artabic and Hebrew
    – Palestinians in Israel: You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet By Anton Shammas
    [http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol3no1/palest.html]
    – “The following lists may not run in the elections: A list which acts directly or indirectly against the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people ….”
    [http://www.knesset.gov.il/deSCRIPTion/eng/eng_mimshal_beh.htm#6]
    In other words, if you oppose Israel being “the state of the Jewish people” (ie. advocate that it be a state of its citizens) you cannot run.
    – Ehud Olmert, then Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, commented in April 2004 that; “More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”[29] Olmert made a similar remark in November 2007: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.”[30][31][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analogy]
    -¨Hazem Jamjoum: Not an Analogy: Israel and the Crime of Apartheid.¨http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10440.shtml
  • 50. Israel does not torture Palestinian Prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions
    -[http://www.stoptorture.org.il/eng/]
    –Israeli torture specialist telling lies
    –Truth on Torture by Amnesty International
  • 51. Zionists believe in and allow free speech
    – [The case is closed]: How human rights activists are targeted
    –Zionism’s first political assassination: When Dutch poet and journalist Jacob Israel de Haan became too vocal with his anti-Zionist writing in Mandatory Palestine, the Haganah silenced him
  • 52. Zionism was a response to anti-Semitism (corollary Palestinians are anti-Semites)
    – I urge everyone top read Lenni Brenner’s book “51 Documents: History of Nazi-Zionist Collaboration”. Click here for a take. Here is an example of a message to Nazi Germany asking for alliance by a group led by a future Prime Minister of Israel (Menachem Begin) and a leader of Likud (Sharon’s party).
    -Who broke the boycott of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (yes, it was the Zionists), see Edwin Black, the Transfer agreement.
    – FDR, Ruth Gruber and me: Zionists stymie WWII rescue plan, by Ronald Bleier October 2006
    – See also this from Kasztner
    – Bauer, Yehuda, Jews for sale?: Nazi-Jewish negotiations, 1933-1945, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1994.
    – There are lots more data.  A summary is in Chapter 6 of my book.
    – “Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting” by Ruth Linn, Cornell U. Press, 2004. It’s about Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and gave detailed information to the Jewish Council of Slovakia that could have saved a large proportion of the Hungarian Jews who had not yet been deported. But the Jewish Council suppressed the information in order to get a trainload of their own (Zionist) people out and aided in the death of 437,000 Hungarian Jews.
    -Holocaust survivors speak out on Israel (videos): Hajo Meyer (author of The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.  G. MeyerBooks, 2007) and Hedy Epstein (strip searched at Ben Gurion’s airport)
    -This note from Hajo G. Meyer, 85 y.o. survivor of the concentration camps: “Are you aware that besides the Ha’avarah agreement the terrorist and murderer Avraham Stern had written to the Nazis on January 11th 1941 to fight with his Irgun forces together with the Nazis against the British! That is, I think, still stronger stuff.  Cordial regards. Hajo “
  • 53. Zionists do not deny other peoples sufferings (other than Palestinians)
    The long term denial and lobby against recognition of the Armenian Genocide remains the classic example.
  • 54. Israel is not an apartheid regime
    – Read the study:  Apartheid; Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft fur Phenomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition, [http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf]
    – “Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria,” By Chris McGreal,  The Guardian, February 7, 2006
    [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel]
    -In March 2002, former attorney-general, Michael Ben-Yair even admitted Israel’s apartheid essence: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one “progressive, liberal” in Israel; and the other “cruel, injurious” in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
    -The architect of apartheid in South Africa — Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd  — wrote in 1961: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hendrik_Verwoerd]
    – Israeli laws is an apartheid state [http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2008/summer/articles02.htm]
    -The collaboration between apartheid Israel and the apartheid regime of South Africa. “During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1704037,00.html]
    – [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1703245,00.html]
    -“Disengagement in Gaza, Consolidation in the West Bank”.. Ariel Sharon and his right hand man Dov Weisglass
    -“Us here, them there” Ehaud Barak
    –Arnon Sofer calls for an explicit policy of “geographic separation and ethnic separation” to solve the “demographic problem”
    -From former Israel Attorney General Michael Ben Yair who wrote on 3/3/2002: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupie territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.
    -Desmond Tutu on israeli apartheid [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1957644.stm]
    Apartheid Israel: A Beacon of Hope? By Prof. VIRGINIA TILLEY Counterpunch, 5 December 2006 [http://counterpunch.org/tilley12052006.html]
    – Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education in Israel, confirms, in an article in the Israeli daily, the aparheid nature of Israeli policies: “The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. … Indeed Apartheid does exist here. …” { Yediot Acharonot, Jan. 5, 2007}
    – Derek Tozer, an Israeli thinker, stated: “The official policy of the government (of Israel) is unequivocal. Arabs, like the Jews in Nazi Germany, are officially “class B citizens, a fact which is recorded on their identity cards.”
    – The late Professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, summed it up accurately in his statement: “It is my considered opinion that the state of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term. In this state, people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist discrimination began in Zionism and is carried today mainly in co-operation with the institutions of the Zionist movement.” (Quote taken from “The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel”, an article published in Pi-Ha’aton, the weekly newspaper of the students of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1975.)
    – the architect of apartheid in South Africa — Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd  — wrote in 1961:  “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state”. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hendrik_Verwoerd
    – http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2008/summer/articles02.htm
    Recommended Books
    – Settler Colonialism in South Africa and the Middle East, George Jabbour, 1970;
    – Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a Relationship, Richard Stevens and Abdelwahhab Elmessiri, 1976;
    – Undercutting Sanctions: Israel, the U.S. and South Africa, Jane Hunter, 1986;
    – Besieged Bedfellows: Israel and the Land of Apartheid, Benjamin Joseph, 1988
  • 55. Israel won the confrontation with Hizballah in summer 2006
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ12Ak01.html
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ14Ak01.html
  • 56. Muslims cannot assimilate in Western countries
    On Muslims in America: “Assimilation is Not a Disappearing Act”
  • 57. Jihad and Mujahideen refers to violence against infidels/non-muslims
    – Partial Translation of Sunan Abu-Dawud, Book 37: Book 37, Number 4330: Narrated AbuSa’id al-Khudri:
    The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: The best jihad in the path of Allah is (to speak) a word of justice to an oppressive ruler.
    http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsunnah/abudawud/037.sat.html#037.4330
  • 58. Israeli academics are generally liberals who support human rights
    Silence means a boycott is justified: Israeli academics are not standing up for their Palestinian counterparts, and a boycott is the best way forward, says Amjad Barham May 24, 2007
    http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/catindex28
    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1003-05.htm
    http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/2011/education%20book.pdf
  • 59. Israel seeks peace with Syria
    Operation peace for the winery: Israel does not want peace with Syria by Gideon Levy [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/769339.html]
    CCR client Maher Arar was changing planes at JFK on his way home to Canada from a family vacation when he was detained by the U.S. authorities (themselves collaborating with Israel) and ‘rendered’ to Syria, where he was tortured and held for nearly a year video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ufVGy]
  • 60. The mainstream media is biased against Israel
    The reverse is true. There are lots of objective and documented evidence to the bias against Palestinians.
    Great analysis with statistical data  is found at [http://ifamericansknew.org]
    Buying the War on Palestinians: The US Media, The New York Times and Israel by Patrick O’Connor [http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=12742]
    Video [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/goldberg.html]
    American Media Miss the boat: For USA Today Freedom of the Press Means the Right to Report It Wrong” [http://ifamericansknew.org/media/misslib.html]
    [http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=262&aid=530&pg=1]
    Article on Israel-centric media folks pushing teh war on Iraq with an appendix compiled by Jewish American writer on list of Zionist Jews in the media [http://desip.igc.org/ConvergingAgendas.html]
  • 61. Boycotts and Divestment are immoral and anti-Semitic
    – Visit [Boycotts and Divestment] for compilations of websites and information
  • 62. Zionism represent Jews or at least mainstream Judaism
    – There are literally hundreds of books on the subject of Jewish Anti-Zionism. A Statement to the 1919 Peace Conference by prominent U.S. Jews (including one Congressman): “We raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. This demand not only misrepresents the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic project of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” … As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a “promised land” for the Jews may become a “land of promise” for all races and creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations which, it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace Conference to whose deliberations the world now looks forward so anxiously and so full of hope. We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent, and with adequate power to protect the country against oppression of any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State
    Quoted in Roselle Tekiner, Samir Abed-Rabbo and Norton Mezvinsky, eds., Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, (New York: Amana Books, 1988). [http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/ziondark/zionopp01.html]
  • 63. Arabs oppress women
    – The forgotten “-ism”: An Arab American Women’s perspective on Zionism, Racism, and Sexism [http://www.awsa.net/forgottenism.pdf]
  • 64. Zionsits have been honest (Many more lies uncovered)
    – Israel’s surprising best seller contradicts founding ideology, Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 8 October 2008
    [http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9884.shtml]
    – Book refuting Jewish taboo on Israel’s bestseller list[http://thenational.ae/article/20081006/FOREIGN/279853798]
    – 12 Conventional lies by Uri Avnery [http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story658.html]
    – The fake Lebanese
    – Zionist Rabbi fakes his own stabbing
    – Delusional fabrication: Propaganda tools of Israel and American Zionists By Paul J. Balles
    -The many false flag operations from the Lavon Affairs to assasinations of faction leaders blaming it on other leaders.
    -‘Undercover Israeli combatants threw stones at IDF soldiers in West Bank’: Testimony by commander of the Israeli Prison Service’s elite ‘Masada’ unit sheds light on IDF methods in countering demonstrations against barrier. By Chaim Levinson
    – French women sentenced for faking anti-Semitic attack
    “The IDF acknowledged Friday that Israeli gunfire was responsible for the wounding of the American photographer shot last week in Bethlehem. Yola Monakhov, 26, was on assignment for The Associated Press last Saturday when she was shot in the abdomen. She suffered extensive internal injuries and fractures to the pelvis … Previously, the army said it had no evidence of a journalist being shot that afternoon. An army spokesman, Yarden Vatikay, had said a soldier fired only one live round very accurately at the leg of a Palestinian man. The army also had suggested that Monakhov may have been shot by a Palestinian bullet.” Associated Press November 17, 2000
    – “The (Israeli military psychological warfare) unit’s activities have been controversial for years. In October 1999, Aluf Benn revealed in Haaretz that members of the unit used the Israeli media to emphasize reports initiated by the unit that it managed to place in the Arab press. He reported that the news reports focused on Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in terror activity. Psychological warfare officers were in touch with Israeli journalists covering the Arab world, gave them translated articles from Arab papers (which were planted by the IDF) and pressed the Israeli reporters to publish the same news here.” IDF reviving psychological warfare unit, Haaretz 1/25/05 [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/531712.html]
    – Mossad Exposed in Phony Palestinian Al-Qaeda’ Caper
    – Israeli torture specialist telling lies
    – In an article in USA Today titled “Let our kids alone, Arafat told,” Matthew Kalman reported (December 8, 2000) that “In a rare letter of protest sent this week to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian women’s group demanded that the Palestinian Authority stop using children as cannon fodder.”  He goes on to state that this group is a Women Union in Tulkarem.” I took the liberty to investigate this outrageous claim and the messages I got so far from Women Associations in the West Bank in general and Tulkarm in specific showed no evidence for his claim.(contacts Suheir Azzouni watcorg@palnet.com  and gupw@palnet.com (letter of Dec 19, 2000)
    – “The Secretary-General has reviewed the report by the Investigation Team from the Secretariat which has inquired into the Israeli allegations against UNRWA personnel. The Secretary-General takes note of the Team’s conclusion that the allegation that a rocket was loaded into an UNRWA ambulance was unjustified as the object, in fact, was a folding stretcher of the type carried as normal equipment in UNRWA ambulances. He also takes note that, following the Team’s visit, the Government of Israel has admitted that it wrongly identified the stretcher as a Qassam Rocket and has publicly withdrawn the allegations.” SECRETARY-GENERAL NOTES ISRAEL’S WITHDRAWAL OF ROCKET ALLEGATION AGAINST UNRWA Report, UN News, 27 October 2004
    – Darfur used for Israeli PR efforts [http://ww4report.com/node/2582]
    – Israel use of “targeted killing” is defended by Israeli spokesperson but is extrajudicial executions that are illegal under international law (see reposrts by Human rights organizations like Amnesty, Human Righst Watch etc)65. Palestinian law implements a death penalty on anyone who sells lands to Jews.We are a people under occupation and remain so.  The Palestinian authority does not legislate anything that is contrary to Israeli wishes because they do not have that kind of authority (read Oslo I and Oslo II accords).  The Palestinian authority does recognize Jordanian laws operating in this area before and after 1967.  This is because International law says that laws cannot be changed by an occupier (in this case Israel) and Israel indeed could not change any of the operating Jordanian laws. Of course they did selective enforcement of these laws.  There happens to be a Jordanian law of 1973 which proscribes selling lands to the enemy as treason because such lands would be used as bases for infiltration.  The enemy is Israel not Jews.  For example native Samaritans bought and sold lands in Nablus area in the West Bank from/to fellow Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) before and after 1967 and before and after this law of 1973.  Selling to Jews is not the same as selling to the enemy. Imagine what would happen in the US if a US citizen sold a track of land in 1942 to non US citizens who are citizens and supporters of the Third Reich.  Treason is treason. The Jordanian law that proscribes selling land to the enemy (Being Israel is an enemy) is posted here http://www.lob.gov.jo/ui/laws/search_no.jsp?no=30&year=1973
    And it does not mention death penalty but does mention treason (which I guess can carry death penalties in most countries depending on severity of treason)I myself am against the death penalty but the US has death penalty including for for severe acts of treason and it was carried out fairly frequently.  Nearly half the countries on earth still do. To my knowledge no Palestinian was executed under this Jordanian law (one from Hebron who was buying lands from fellow Palestinians and selling it systematically to Zionists was convicted under the law but to my knowledge he was not executed). Now you have to realize that Israel is a colonial state built by theft from Palestinians.  Only a very tiny fraction of the 93% of the land of Palestine (less than 2%) was actually purchased from Palestinians (and no they were not executed).  Most of the land now under control by the Jewish National Fund and Israel Land Authority and most of the private lands controlled by Jewish Israelis was acquired via the usual colonial methods (there are about 101 such ways other than a willing commercial transaction). Finally, International law says the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza are occupied territories subject to the fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to the occupied lands.  Such violations of International law are considered crimes against humanity.  So even if a Palestinian was willing to sell knowingly to a colonial occupier, both the buyer and the seller are engaged in crimes against humanity. BTW, colonized people in the past all behaved the same in that most of them condemned treason and some of them did engage in treason (Algerians, South Africans, Vietnamese, Native Americans etc).As for “Sharia law” (and most common law), I do not know what this person is talking about or its relevance here.  If you injure someone you should compensate them for the injury.  When you kill someone, you do not only pay money.  If you steal something and still have it, restitution means return of stolen property (plus punishment per common law). In the case of Palestinian property taken from them, there is basic International law (applicable to inhabitants and their descendants of the 534 Palestinian towns and villages that were destroyed and ethnically cleansed in the process of creating a “Jewish state” in Palestine).For the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands (a totally unrelated subject), see
    http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-qumsiyeh.html
    http://qumsiyeh.org/chapter4/-For other issues on lands etc, see http://qumsiyeh.org/liesandtruths/

    Finally I do feel these issues are mostly distractions from the core issues such as role of Zionism among Jews, tribalism, racism, colonialism etc. Those are the issues that should be discussed. I suggest that Ron read books like those by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis and Jewish intellectual Mark Braverman instead of trying to reiterate typical (and long discredited) Zionist talking points… We are 12 million Palestinians, 7 million of us are refugees or displaced people. Trying to vilify the victims with red herrings just does not work in the 21st century (unfortunately it partially worked in 16-18th century North America).

    66. We left Gaza only to continue to be attacked
    “The Gaza Bombshell”, by David Rose in “Vanity Fair”, APRIL 2008
    SYNOPSIS: “After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever”
    [http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804]

    ———————–
    U.S. Army Officers Say: ‘Mossad May Blame Arabs

    No more heroes? Digging deeper into the Masada myth
    50 years after the first archaeological digs, mystery remains: Did any battle happen there at all?
    http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-1.563888

    “In what may be part of a systematic effort by Israeli internal security forces to use journalism as a cover for intelligence-gathering, agents from Israel’s General Security Services, also known as the Shin Bet, impersonated a veteran Israeli television news correspondent.”
    Committee for the Protection of Journalists, 1997

    Statement by prominent American Jews to the Paris peace conference 1919 stating their opposition to a Jewish state

    CRITICISM OF ISRAEL ANTI-SEMITIC? Shooting the messengers [http://MondeDiplo.com/2007/09/06carter]

    Whose arming Israel? (a concise report that could be made into a flyer)

    “I have always said that if the deepest and profoundest hope symbolizing redemption is the re-building of the Jewish Temple . . . then it is obvious that those mosques (al-Haram al-Sharif and al-Aqsa) will have, one way or another, to disappear one of these days . . . Had it not been for Deir Yasin – half a million Arabs would be living in the state of lsrael. The state of Israel would not have existed. We must not disregard this, with full awareness of the responsibility involved. All wars are cruel. There is no way out of that. This country will either be Eretz Israel with an absolute Jewish majority and a small Arab minority, or Eretz Ishmael, and Jewish emigration will begin again if we do not expel the Arabs one way or another”. (Israel Eldad (Scheib), leader of LEHI terror group with Shamir. ‘On the Spirit That Was Revealed in the People’, De’ot, Winter 1968; as quoted in Davis and Mezvinsky (eds.) Documents from Israel (1967-1973, pp.l86-7).

    Besides the lies, there is what is not permitted to be told.  Facts long suppressed
    Huntleigh USA that oversaw security at Newark and Boston airports during 9/11/01 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of an Israeli company called International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS) International N.V., a Netherlands-based aviation and transportation security firm headed by Israelis.

    Other lies (we will collect documents on these in due time)

    Mavi Marmara report (challenges the Israeli lies about their murders) http://coldtype.net/Assets.11/pdfs/0311.Mavi.hr.pdf

    The Checkpoint: Terror, Power, and Cruelty by Oded Na’aman (an insight into the thinking of the Israeli occupation soldiers) http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php

    Palestinians (e.g. the Mufti of Jerusalem) supported Hitler because they hated Jews.
    Which was more important: Mufti-Nazi or Zionist-Nazi collaboration?
    http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56434.shtml

    Israel attacked Lebanon in the summer of 2006 because Arabs were holding Israeli soldiers captive.  These soldiers had never strayed onto Lebanese territory.

    There is no partner for peace
    Arab League proposal)

    Israel accepted partition plan
    Israel didn’t accept the partition plan/ they violated it immediately)

    Palestinian Muslims are responsible for any measurable decrease in the Christian population of the occupied areas

    ============
    In follow-up to the issues of organ trading in Israel and by Israel-linked individuals, I compiled a few relevant links:
    Translation of the Swiss Article:
    http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
    And other relevant stories/articles that illustrate that there is more to this subject than meets the eye:
    AlisonWier’s examination of Israeli organ theft and trafficking has just been published by CounterPunch:¨http://www.counterpunch.org/weir08282009.html
    Gilad Atzmon – Organ Donation and Theft in Contemporary Jewish Folklore
    http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/08/30/gilad-atzmon-organ-donation-and-theft-in-contemporary-jewish-folklore/
    Khalid Amayrah analyzes the Israeli frenzied attack on the newspaper
    http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/962/re53.htm
    The Hidden Truth About Israel Kidney Theft Ring (Tying in the New Jersey arrests)
    http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2009/07/butchers-hidden-truth-about-israels.html
    Israeli suspected of organ trafficking
    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1178020745802
    Suspect in international organ trafficking ring testifies Israeli government financed transplants
    http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0YUG/is_2_14/ai_n17208591/
    Portrait of Gaddy Tauber: Organs Trafficker, Holocaust Survivor

    Click to access CLASFall2006-ScheperHughes-small.pdf

    International organ trafficking scheme has transplant community scrambling.
    http://www.thefreelibrary.com/International+organ+trafficking+scheme+has+transplant+community…-a0129565045
    http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=129565045     (same as above link)

    There are maps at (see Geopolitical Map of Jerusalem)
    http://www.arij.org/eye-on-palestine/maps.html

    For a report on Silwan, see
    http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1053
    For a report on Sheikh Jarrah, see
    http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1472

    For additional information, visit:
    Silwan Information Center http://silwanic.net/
    Civil Coalition for Defending the Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem http://www.ccdprj.ps
    Jerusalem Legal Aid & Human Rights Center  http://www.mosaada.org/

    13 Israelis on world’s billionaires list
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4200001,00.html

    Who are the world’s richest Jews?
    http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/who-are-the-world-s-richest-jews-1.284252

    Example of World billionaires and their political views on Israel
    Bill Gates Microsoft invested heavily in apartheid Israel and Gates think Israel is part of Silicon Valley
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3159576,00.html
    Warren Buffett Thinks Israel best place to invest
    http://www.takeapen.org/Takeapen/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=84&FID=733
    Bernard Arnault: Jewish and supporter of Apartheid Israel (numerous statements and investments)
    Larry Ellison (of Oracle): Jewish and strong supporter of Zionism http://jn1.tv/video/israel?media_id=18408
    Stefen Persson (H&M) findis Israel vogue
    http://mondoweiss.net/2010/03/pressure-mounts-on-swedish-clothing-chain-that-finds-israel-vogue.html
    Karl Albrecht gave numerous seminars in Israel and considers Israeli businessmen (most of tehm ex-military officials) to be ethnical leaders
    Charles Koch funds islamophobia to help Israel
    http://alexbkane.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/koch-brothers-also-funding-islamophobia/

    Ben-Yehuda, Nachman, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Myth-
    making in Israel (U of Wisconsin, 1995)
    Fox, Edward, Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr. Albert Glock and the
    Archaeology of the Holy Land (Harper Collins, 2001)
    Gottwald, Norman, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, 1979)

    A review of the film by Yotam Feldman “The Lab” which discusses how Israel tests weapons on us the Palestinians so that they can make billions selling these weapons to other oppressors. Palestinians as Laboratory Guinea Pigs

    Israelis Turning Blood into Money: The Lab Review

    Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Jimmy Carter concerned about possible breach of international law by Washington

MEMO | March 31, 2014

Former American President Jimmy Carter has warned the US Secretary of State John Kerry of violating international law in his potential peace framework agreement between the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation.

He also expressed his concerns about the remarks of Kerry’s senior aides Martin Indyk, which were delivered before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other Jewish groups.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s official news agency Wafa said Carter had shown the letter he sent to Kerry to the PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The letter included efforts to save the peace process and stressed on reaching an agreement to be accepted by the two sides.

According to Wafa, Carter warned of formulating an agreement which “in any form, breaches international law and the reinforced international precedents regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which have been accepted since 1967.”

Carter reiterated the necessity to abide by UN resolution 242, which was accepted by the former Israeli PM Menachem Begin as part of the Camp David peace accords and supported by the Quartet, Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

The sponsor of the first peace treaty between Israel and the Arabs said: “Official US proposal to cancel or breach international law will make it impossible for the Palestinians in the Holy Lands, or outside, to accept the framework agreement as a new basis for peace talks.”

March 31, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Weight of Tradition: Why Judaism is Not Like Other Religions

By Mark Weber  | July, 2009

Many critics of Israel and its policies make a sharp distinction between Israel and its state ideology, Zionism, on the one hand, and Judaism, or the Jewish religious tradition and outlook, on the other.

Anti-Zionist groups, with names such as “Jewish Voice for Peace” or “Jews for Justice for Palestinians,” and anti-Zionist periodicals such as The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, emphasize humanistic aspects of the Jewish tradition. They urge Jews to reject Zionism and instead embrace humanistic features of Judaism. Such groups, while critical of Israel and its policies, take the view that the Jewish community has played a basically positive role in society, but that sometime in the twentieth century most Jews somehow jumped the track by embracing Zionism and its aggressive ethnic nationalism.

In fact, the often cruel and arrogant policies of Israel, and the often arrogant attitudes of what is called the “Israel Lobby,” the Jewish lobby, or the organized Jewish community, are not an aberration, but rather are deeply rooted in Jewish religious writings and in centuries of Jewish tradition.

Most people prefer pleasant myths to unpleasant truths, and prefer to believe what is most comfortable and agreeable. That’s one reason why so many of us like to think that all religions share common humanistic core values, and are all striving, each in its own way, toward the same ultimate truth.

But Judaism is not just “another religion.” It’s unique among the world’s major religions. The core values and ethos of Judaism are markedly unlike those of Christianity, Islam, and the other great faiths.

Christians believe that Jesus suffered and died for all people, and Christians are called upon to spread the Christian message to humanity. In the same way, Muslims believe that the message of the Koran is meant for all humanity, and they are called upon to bring everyone to Islam.

But that’s not the message of Judaism. Its teachings are not meant for all people. Its morality is not universal. Judaism is a religion for one particular people. The Jewish religion is based not on a relationship between God and humanity, but rather on a “covenant,” or contract, between God and a “chosen” people — the community known as the Jews, the Jewish People, the Israelites, the Hebrews, or the “People of Israel.”

One major reason why the role of the organized Jewish community is a problem in our society is because most American Jews manifest a strong loyalty to a foreign country, Israel, that since its founding in 1948 has been embroiled in seemingly endless crises and conflicts with its neighbors. But there is another reason.

The role of the Jewish community is also a harmful one because Jews are encouraged to regard themselves as separate from the rest of humanity, and as members of a community with interests quite distinct from those of everyone else. This “Us vs. Them” attitude — this mindset that sees Jews as dis­tinct from the rest of humanity, and which views non-Jews with distrust — is rooted in the Jewish religion, and in centuries of tradition.

Christians are supposed to live their lives in accord with the Bible, and especially the teachings of Jesus as laid out in the four Gospels of the New Testament, just as Muslims are called upon to live their lives in accord with the Koran. Similarly, Jews are supposed to live their lives in accord with the principles laid out in the Hebrew scriptures, the “Tanakh,” which is also known as the Old Testament. These writings tell how Jews should think of themselves, and how they should interact with non-Jews.

A core message of the Hebrew scriptures is that Jews are a divinely “chosen” people — a unique community distinct from the rest of humanity. In the book of Deuteronomy, for example, we read: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.” /1

The Jewish scriptures also refer to Jews or Hebrews as a “People that Shall Dwell Alone,” or, in another translation, as “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations.” In the book of Exodus, we read of the Jews as a people “distinct … from all other people that are upon the face of the earth.” / 2

The scriptures also explain that if Jews uphold the “covenant,” and maintain their separateness from all others, they will be rewarded with great wealth and power over other peoples. In the book of Deuteronomy, Jews are promised that God “will set you high above all the nations of the earth,” and that “All the people of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you.” In another passage God tells the Jews: “For the Lord your God will bless you, as he promised you, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow; and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.” / 3

In the book of Genesis, we read: “May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you.” In another passage in the book of Deuteronomy, God promises to Jews “to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant…” / 4

In the book of Isaiah, we read: “Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you … For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish … The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet … Aliens shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers … you shall eat the wealth of the nations, and in their riches you shall glory.” / 5

In the book of Joshua, we read: “I will give you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and olive yards which you did not plant.” And in the book of Psalms, God says to the Jews: “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s wheel.” / 6

In the book of Deuteronomy, Jews are promised: “Then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourselves. Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours … No man shall be able to stand against you. The Lord your God will lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that you shall tread, as he promised you.” In another passage, we are told that God says to his chosen people: “This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the peoples that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear the report of you and shall tremble and be in anguish because of you.” / 7

The moral code laid out in the Hebrew scriptures commands one standard for the “chosen people,” and another for non-Jews. In keeping with this ethno-centric morality, Jews are told that they must discriminate against non-Jews. In the book of Deuteronomy, God commands the Jews: “You shall not lend upon interest to your brother, interest on money, interest on victuals, interest on anything that is lent for interest. To a foreigner [that is, a non-Jew] you may lend upon interest, but to your brother you shall not lend upon interest.” / 8

Many portions of the Hebrew scriptures — especially the books of Joshua, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — tell of genocidal mass killings of non-Jews. The Jewish God repeatedly calls on his chosen people to exterminate non-Jews. The Jewish scriptures are perhaps the oldest historical record anywhere of systematic genocide.

In the seventh chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, we read: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites — seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them … And you shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your god will give over to you, your eye shall not pity them.” / 9

In the book of Esther, we read: “So the Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them. In the citadel of Susa the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred people … Now the other Jews who were in the king’s provinces also gathered to defend their lives, and gained relief from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of those who hated them…” In another passage in Deuteronomy, we read: “And we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed every city, men, women and children; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took as spoil for ourselves, with the booty of the cites which we captured.” / 10

In the twentieth chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, we read: “When you draw near a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if the answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you … But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God give you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them…” / 11

In the book of Joshua, we read this harrowing account:

“When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and when all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and attacked it with the edge of the sword. The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand — all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the sword, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the Lord that he had issued to Joshua. So Joshua burned Ai, and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.” / 12

In another chapter of the book of Joshua, we read: / 13

“And Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining. And he did to the king of Makkedah, as he had done to the king of Jericho.

“Then Joshua passed on from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, to Libnah, and fought against Libnah. The Lord gave it also and its king into the hand of Israel; and he struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it; and he did to its king as he had done to the king of Jericho …

“So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded. And Joshua defeated them from Kadesh-barnea to Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, as far as Gibeon.”

Over the centuries there have, of course, been important changes in Jewish community attitudes and behavior. Jews today do not observe all the rules and commands laid down in their religious writings. For example, they do not put to death women caught in adultery, or kill anyone who works on the Sabbath, or put to death anyone who curses his father or mother. /14

All the same, the weight of tradition is a heavy one, especially when based on writings that are held to be sacred. Something of the attitude of separateness, chosenness and superiority laid out in the Hebrew scriptures persists to the present, and is manifest in policies of Israel, and of the organized Jewish community. /15

For some orthodox Jewish leaders, the “chosen people” is not just a superior or privileged group. They regard Jews and non-Jews as practically different species.

Rabbi Menachen Schneerson, the “Lubovitcher Rebbe” who headed the Chabad orthodox Jewish movement, and wielded great influence in Israel as well as in the US, explained: / 16

“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression, `Let us differentiate.’ Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of `let us differentiate’ between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, `And the strangers shall guard and feed your flocks’ (Isaiah 61:5). The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews …”

Rabbi Kook the Elder, another influential and much revered Jewish leader, expressed a similar view: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” / 17

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, one of Israel’s most prominent and influential Jewish religious leaders, says that non-Jews (Goyim) exist only to serve Jews. “Goyim were born only to serve us,” said Rabbi Yosef during a sermon in October 2010. “Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the people of Israel.” /18

The view that Jews are a distinct people with a primary commitment to Israel and the Jewish community is forthrightly affirmed by Elliott Abrams, an American Jewish scholar who was President George W. Bush’s senior advisor for “global democratic strategy,” and in 2006 was a key advisor on Middle East affairs to the US Secretary of State. In his book Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America, /19  he writes: “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nations in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.” Judaism and the Jewish way of life,” writes Abrams, is not “entirely voluntary, for the Jew is born into a covenantal community with obligations to God.” Jews, he goes on, “are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies …”

The Jewish sense of alienation from, and abiding distrust of, non-Jews is also manifest in a remarkable essay published in 2002 in the Forward, the prominent Jewish community weekly. Entitled “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” it is written by Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney and a member of the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. / 20 Rabbi Fischer is also national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is thus not an obscure or semi-literate scribbler, but rather an influential Jewish community figure. And this piece did not appear in some marginal periodical, but rather in what is perhaps the most literate and thoughtful Jewish weekly in America, and certainly one of the most influential.

In his essay, Rabbi Fischer tells readers: “If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history … Our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.” He goes on:

“We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and the Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettos and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

“Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate the half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what’s what. …

“We remember that the food they [Europeans] eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria… Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn’t change a thing, but after 25 centuries it’s nice to know.”

Time and again in history, Jews have wielded great power to further group interests that are separate from, and often contrary to, those of the non-Jewish populations among whom they live. This creates an inherently unjust and unstable situation that all too often has ended tragically in violent conflict between Jews and non-Jews.

In our age, the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict is more than just a problem of Zionism or politics, or a dispute over land. Israel’s often arrogant policies, and especially its inhumane treatment of non-Jews, have roots in centuries-old attitudes that are laid out in ancient Jewish religious writings.


Notes

  1. Deuteronomy 7:6 and 14:2.
  2. Numbers 23:9; Exodus 33:16.
  3. Deuteronomy 28: 1, 10; 15: 6.
  4. Genesis 27: 28-29; Deuteronomy 6: 10-11.
  5. Isaiah 60: 10-14; Isaiah 61: 5-6.
  6. Joshua 24:13; Psalms 2:8.
  7. Deuteronomy 11: 23, 25: 2: 25.
  8. Deuteronomy 23:19-20.
  9. Deuteronomy 7: 2, 16.
  10. Esther 9:2, 5; Deut . 2:34.
  11. Deuteronomy 20: 10-14, 16-17.
  12. Joshua 8: 24-27.
  13. Joshua 10: 26-40
  14. Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22: 20-21 / Exodus 31: 15; Exodus 35: 2 / Exodus 21: 17; Leviticus 20: 9.
  15. Israel Shahak, a Jewish scholar who for years was a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, provides striking examples of this in modern-day Israel in his eye-opening book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, published first in 1994.
    ( http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jewhis1.htm )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_history.html)
  16. From the book by Schneerson, Gatherings of Conversations, published in 1965. Quoted in: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism (London: 1999), pp. 59-60.
    ( http://www.mailstar.net/shahak2.html )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_fundamentalism.html)
    Also cited by Jewish scholar Allan C. Brownfeld in his review published in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2000.
    ( http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0300/0003105.html )
  17. Quoted in: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism (London: 1999), p. ix.
    ( http://www.mailstar.net/shahak2.html )
    (http://members.tripod.com/alabasters_archive/jewish_fundamentalism.html)
    Also cited by Jewish scholar Allan C. Brownfeld in his review published in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2000.
    ( http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0300/0003105.html )
  18. “Yosef: Gentiles exist only to serve Jews,” The Jerusalem Post (Israel), Oct. 18, 2010. (http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782)
  19. Elliott Abrams, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America (New York: 1997), pp. 30, 145, 181.
  20. Dov Fischer, “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” Forward (New York), April 19, 2002, p. 11.
    ( http://rabbidov.com/American%20Jews/wererightworldwrong.htm )
    Some of Fischer’s remarks here are gross distortions of history. For example, his mention of “a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry” is a breathtaking falsehood. For one thing, the entire Soviet period lasted 72 years, not 100. And during at least some of that period, above all during the first ten years of the Soviet era, Jews wielded tremendous, if not dominant power. Rabbi Fischer seems to have forgotten such figures as Leon Trotsky, com­mander in chief of the young Soviet state’s Red Army, Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, and Yakov Sverdlov, the first Soviet president. (See: M. Weber, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s Early Soviet Regime,” The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994. (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html )

Revised October 2010

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Ringworm Children, testing of large radiation doses on humans.

“In fact, medical discourse was an important mediator of Orientalist ideas to the Jews of Palestine. Public medicine was one of the main fields of regular interaction between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews during the Mandate period, and this was reflected in the presence of Mizrahi Jews in this discourse. It often depicted members of various Mizrahi communities as variations on a single type – they were described as primitive, superstitious, ignorant, neglectful of their children, passive, lacking drive and the will to change – in general, as an essentially different type, physically and mentally, from the immigrants from Europe.” – Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a ‘new Jewish type

Israel’s very own history of eugenics

Written by Jonathon Cook | The Blog from Nazareth | September 26, 2014

This hour-long documentary, the Ringworm Children, raises so many disturbing questions about Israel and its relationship with the US that one hardly knows where to begin.

In the 1950s, waves of new immigrants swept into Israel. To the dismay of the country’s Ashkenazi leaders (those originating from Europe and the US), the great majority were from Arab countries. Levi Eshkol, a later prime minister, expressed a common sentiment when he called them “human rubbish”. Israel, deprived of “good-quality” Jews, was being forced to bring to its shores Arab Jews, seen as just as primitive and dirty as the Palestinians whom Israel had recently succeeded in ethnically cleansing.

Into this deeply racist atmosphere stepped Dr Chaim Sheba, a eugenicist, who believed that the Arabs Jews were bringing along with them diseases that threatened the Ashkenazi Jews. His obsession was ringworm, an innocuous childhood disease that affects the scalp. He went to the US, collected old military X-ray equipment and zapped tens of thousands of these children’s heads with potentially lethal doses of radiation. The survivors tell of their horrifying experiences during and after the treatment, and of the brothers and sisters they lost at a young age.

But this isn’t just a history lesson exploring an unusual aspect of Israel’s racist underpinnings. The documentary exposes a massive cover-up by the state: many of the children’s medical files – long thought to have been lost – were actually held by one of the doctors involved. Even after this disclosure, the state has continued to refuse the victims access to the files, despite the fact that such access may be vital in helping them receive the correct life-saving treatment, as well as proper compensation.

The final shocking twist is the discovery that all these experiments cost the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s terms – in fact, more than Israel’s entire annual budget at the time. How could Israel have afforded it?

The documentary suggests persuasively that the US, with its own long fascination with eugenics, most likely sub-contracted these experiments to Israel as a way to bypass the increasing domestic legal impediments it faced. The US presumably footed the huge bill.

There are a couple of troubling omissions in the documentary itself. The first is that Dr Sheba did not carry out these experiments on Arab Jews only. He also exposed many Palestinian children in Israel to the same huge doses, for the same racist reasons.

The other is that Dr Sheba is still venerated to this day in Israel and has one of the country’s most famous hospitals, the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, named after him. As the documentary makes clear, there was plenty of evidence by the 1950s of the extremely dangerous effects of radiation on humans. What Dr Sheba did was a form of genocide. That he is still honoured in Israel is, to my mind, no different from Germany naming a hospital in Berlin the Josef Mengele Medical Center.

But keeping Dr Sheba’s reputation unblemished is, I suspect, important to those who wish to prevent other, even more unseemly skeletons being unearthed over this affair.

March 30, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Russia’s Lukoil starts output from giant Iraq oil field

Press TV – March 29, 2014

Russia’s oil giant, Lukoil, has begun pumping crude oil from one of the world’s largest undeveloped oil fields in southern Iraq, as the Arab country works to bolster its oil exports.

During a Saturday ceremony to inaugurate the West Qurna-2 field in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi said crude production at the massive oil field is expected to reach some 400,000 barrels per day (bpd), from an initial 120,000 bpd.

The Iraqi minister further expressed hope that the country’s oil output could possibly reach four million bpd by the end of this year.

“This is a historic and great accomplishment that would enable the government to implement its development programs by increasing its revenues,” added Luaibi.

Lukoil Chief Executive Vagit Alekperov also hailed the launch of West Qurna-2 as “strategically important” for the Russian company, which is the principal firm developing the enormous West Qurna-2 field.

The inauguration of West Qurna-2 will allow Russia’s second oil producer to more than double its overseas crude output.

Earlier in the day, Dhiya Jaafar, the head of Iraq’s South Oil Company, said oil exports from southern Iraq have averaged 2.48 million bpd so far this month and would rise to 2.65 million following the inauguration of West Qurna-2.

West Qurna-2, with an estimated 14 million barrels of recoverable reserves, is the second biggest untapped oil field after Rumaila in southern Iraq.

Iraq is dependent on oil exports for government revenue and is working to boost its oil sales. The Arab country has proven reserves of 143.1 billion barrels of oil as well as 3.2 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Baghdad seeks to increase its crude production capacity to nine million bpd by 2017.

March 29, 2014 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

How low will Israel stoop to win the propaganda war?

By Stuart Littlewood | September 15, 2009

“The Israel Project”, a US media advocacy group, has produced a revised training manual to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war, keep their ill-gotten territorial gains and persuade international audiences to accept that their crimes are necessary and conform to “shared values” between Israel and the civilized West.

It’s a clever document.

The manual teaches how to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and the blatant disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of the aerosol of persuasive language. It is designed to hoodwink us ignorant and gullible Americans and Europeans into believing that we actually share values with the racist regime in Israel and that its abominable behaviour is therefore deserving of our support.

Israel is hoping for a public relations massacre. The other side – the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization – don’t take communications seriously and have neglected to correct Israeli distortion. They are happy, it seems, for Israel’s one-sided definitions to prevail, which of course makes the task for Israel so much easier. This latest propaganda offensive is potentially the “coup de grace” to finish off the tormented Palestinians. See it here.

And the manual will no doubt serve as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks is recruiting to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet.

This quote at the beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Top priority: demonize Hamas

The manual’s numerous messages are aimed at the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK. The strategy from the start is to isolate the democratically-elected Hamas and to rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian population of their human rights.

  • “Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.”

The plight of the Palestinians under Israel’s heel was an international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene.

But this is familiar ground. We scorned George Bush and Tony Blair and had to differentiate between them and their respective peoples. We now have to do the same with Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. We are tired of having to make that same differentiation between the Israeli people and the dreadful leaders they produce.

  • “ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO DEFENSIBLE BORDERS: With more than three years of violent history since Israel’s agreement to withdraw from Gaza and portions of the West Bank [sic], Americans have had time to take stock of the situation and form opinions. The big picture: they believe that Hamas’s leadership of Gaza has made Israel and the region less safe, while some are more receptive to what they perceive as a moderate approach in the West Bank by Mahmoud Abbas. Based on these experiences, they are willing to grant Israel more leeway in resisting calls to give more land for more peace.”

Here we clearly see the motive for demonizing Hamas – Israel wants more leeway to continue its land-grabs and other criminal activities.

  • “If… If… If… Then”: Put the burden on Hamas to make the first move for peace by using If’s (and don’t forget to finish with a hard then to show Israel is a willing peace partner). “If Hamas reforms… If Hamas recognize our right to exist… If Hamas renounces terrorism… If Hamas supports international peace agreements… then we are willing to make peace today.”

How one-sided and daft can you get? Substitute Israel for Hamas.

Words that work

The manual sets out numerous examples of “words that work” – supposedly.

  • “We know that the Palestinians deserve leaders who will care about the well being of their people, and who do not simply take hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance from America and Europe, put them in Swiss bank accounts, and use them to support terror instead of peace.”

No mention here of the billions of tax dollars Israel takes from the US and spends on munitions to obliterate and vaporize its neighbours.

  • “Peace can only be made with adversaries who want to make peace with you. Terrorist organizations like Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are, by definition, opposed to peaceful co-existence, and determined to prevent reconciliation. I ask you, how do you negotiate with those who want you dead?”

Hamas and Hezbollah are only regarded as terrorists by the White House and Tel Aviv and by US-Israeli stooges and flag-wavers in Westminster and elsewhere.

In Executive Order 13224 – “BLOCKING PROPERTY AND PROHIBITING TRANSACTIONS WITH PERSONS WHO COMMIT, THREATEN TO COMMIT, OR SUPPORT TERRORISM” – Bush used this definition: “The term “terrorism” means an activity that –

(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended —
(A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking
.”

It describes the antics of the US and Israel perfectly.

  • “There is NEVER, EVER, any justification for the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children. NEVER… there is one fundamental principle that all peoples from all parts of the globe will agree on: civilized people do not target innocent women and children for death.”

Quite so. Where does that leave Israel, which recently killed 320 children in Gaza and 773 civilians, including 109 women? From 2000 (the start of the second Intifada – the Palestinian urising against the Israeli occupation) up to the end of last year Israel had slaughtered 4,936 Palestinians in their homeland, including 952 children, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. In the same period Palestinians killed 490 Israelis in Israel including only 84 children. So, Israel’s kill-rate is at least 10 to 1, and rising since the blitzkrieg on Gaza.

Iran-backed or US-backed – take your pick

  • “Use humility. ‘I know that in trying to defend its children and citizens from terrorists that Israel has accidentally hurt innocent people. I know it, and I’m sorry for it. But what can Israel do to defend itself? If America had given up land for peace – and that land had been used for launching rockets at America, what would America do? Israel was attacked with thousands of rockets from Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. What should Israel have done to protect her children?’”

Palestinians too have a right to defend themselves. Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election and is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel is extravagantly funded and supplied by the US. Here’s part of their begging-bowl “Military Aid Speech”:

  • “Israel makes the request for military assistance out of self-defense. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect our borders. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect their citizens.
  • “Israel does not ask for US troops to protect itself. It does not ask for a single American soldier to protect its borders. It only asks for the funds for them to protect themselves. They need the equipment so that their own troops can ensure the safety of their civilian population through this gathering conflict with the enemies of democracy.
  • “They didn’t ask to have our nation built in range of Iranian missiles. They didn’t ask that their nation be a focal point for religious extremists who have declared war on the West and on democracy.
  • “But they are, and they need your help.”

And here’s the rationale behind it:

  • “Americans fundamentally believe that a democracy has a right to protect its people and its borders. And while Americans don’t want to increase foreign aid in a time of significant budgetary deficits and painful spending cuts, there is one and only one argument that will work for Israel (in four easy steps):

(1) As a democracy, Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its borders and protect its people.

(2) Terrorist groups, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to pose a direct threat to Israeli security and have repeatedly taken innocent Israeli lives.

(3) Israel is America’s one and only true ally in the region. In these particularly unstable and dangerous times, Israel should not be forced to go it alone.

(4) With America’s financial assistance, Israel can defend its borders, protect its people, and provide invaluable assistance to the American effort against the war against terrorism.”

It’s evident that Americans don’t believe in democracy enough to allow Palestinian democracy to flourish.

  • “When the terror ends, Israel will no longer need to have challenging checkpoints to inspect goods and people. When the terror ends we will no longer need a security fence.”

There are no rockets coming out of the West Bank, so why is the security fence still there – and still being built? Why are the occupation troops still there? Why are hundreds of checkpoints still there? Why is Israel still stealing land, demolishing Palestinian homes and building settlements there?

  • “Remind people – again and again – that Israel wants peace.

Reason One: If Americans see no hope for peace – if they only see a continuation of a 2,000-year-long episode of “Family Feud” – Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their president’s clout on helping Israel.

Reason Two: The speaker that is perceived as being most for PEACE will win the debate. Every time someone makes the plea for peace, the reaction is positive. If you want to regain the public relations advantage, peace should be at the core of whatever message you wish to convey.”

Israel has never met its peace agreement obligations. It doesn’t want peace – every action is directed at keeping the conflict going until the Israelis have stolen enough land and established enough ‘facts on the ground’ – Jews-only settlements, highways, disconnected Palestinian bantustans – to enable them to redraw the map to suit their expansionist agenda and make the occupation PERMANENT.

Gaza in a vice

  • “Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process. Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.”

Israel never left. It still occupies Gazan airspace, coastal waters and airwaves, and controls all borders except Rafah where it nevertheless exerts a veto. Israel has Gaza in a vice, which is crushing the tiny enclave’s economy, starving its 1.5 million citizens and creating a huge humanitarian crisis in an attempt to bring the elected government to its knees.

  • “Draw direct parallels between Israel and America – including the need to defend against terrorism… The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens.”

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they are victims of terror and Western nations need to huddle together with Israel for mutual protection. Fortunately, level-headed people are beginning to realize who the terrorists really are.

It must be blindingly obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens need to wake up to this, and British citizens should avoid falling into the same trap.

Inject with “core values” and repeat over and over again…

  • “The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘security’, and ‘peace’. These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American.”

If so fluent in this language, why doesn’t Israel acknowledge its neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

  • “A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick – that is just about the time the public will wake up and say ‘Hey – this person just might be saying something interesting to me!’ But don’t confuse messages with facts…”

Never let facts get in the way of a good message!

  • “How can the current Palestinian leadership honestly say it will pursue peace when previous leaders rejected an offer to create a Palestinian state just a few short years ago and now refuse to live up to their responsibilities as outlined in the Road Map?”

This must be a reference to Ehud Barak’s so-called “generous offer”, another of the myths Israelis love to peddle. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, seized by Israel in 1967 and occupied ever since, comprise just 22 per cent of pre-partition Palestine. When the Palestinians signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993 they agreed to accept the 22 per cent and to recognize Israel within “Green Line” borders (i.e. the 1949 armistice line established after the Arab-Israeli war). Conceding 78 per cent of the land that was originally theirs was an astonishing compromise on the part of the Palestinians.

But it wasn’t enough for greedy Barak. His “generous offer” required the inclusion of 69 Israeli settlements within the 22 per cent remnant. It was plain to see on the map that these settlement blocs created impossible borders and already severely disrupted Palestinian life in the West Bank. Barak also demanded the Palestinian territories be placed under “temporary Israeli control”, meaning Israeli military and administrative control indefinitely. The “generous offer” also gave Israel control over all the border crossings of the new Palestinian state. What nation in the world would accept that? The unacceptable reality of Barak’s offer, contained in the map, was hidden by propaganda spin.

Later, at Taba, Barak produced a revised map but withdrew it after his election defeat. Don’t take my word for it – the facts are well documented and explained by organizations such as Israel’s Gush Shalom.

  • “Why is the world so silent about the written, vocal, stated aims of Hamas?”

And why is the world so silent about the written, stated aims of the racist regime and its political parties? Read their manifestos.

  • “Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values – such as democracy and freedom – and repeating them over and over again… You need to start with empathy for both sides, remind your audience that Israel wants peace and then repeat the messages of democracy, freedom, and peace over and over again… we need to repeat the message, on average, 10 times to be effective.”

Is democracy a shared value? Israel is an ethnocracy not a democracy. Is freedom a shared value? The world is still waiting for Israel to allow the Palestinians their freedom.

  • “The situation in the Middle East may be complicated, but all parties should adopt a simple approach: peace first, political boundaries second.”

Renounce resistance while still under Israel’s jackboot? The correct approach is for the international community to insist first that Israel complies with international law and the many UN resolutions it has contemptuously ignored. The boundaries are already defined. Whatever issues remain to be decided, Palestinians should not have to negotiate under occupation or duress.

Rockets, bombs and atrocities: the language of peace

  • “Bottom line: What will happen if we fail to get the world to care about the fact that Israeli parents in southern Israel need to literally dodge rockets when they drive their children to kindergarten in the morning? What will happen if the world allows Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to get nuclear weapons? What will Israel do if bad press causes American citizens to ask [their] government to turn its back on Israel? Why do I care so much about the success of your communications efforts? I care because I never want our children to live through what my family and yours lived through in the Holocaust.”

Only one in 500 makeshift Qassam rockets causes a fatality, small beer compared to the devastation and carnage resulting from Israel’s state-of-the-art rocketry targeted on Gaza. How does it look when Palestinians are forced to pay the price for the Holocaust? And how much does Israel care about the Palestinian holocaust it has caused?

The manual then gives a long glossary of terms. Here’s a sample:

  • “Deliberately firing rockets into civilian communities”: Combine terrorist motive with civilian visuals and you have the perfect illustration of what Israel faced in Gaza and Lebanon. Especially with regard to rocket attacks but useful for any kind of terrorist attack, deliberate is the right word to use to call out the intent behind the attacks. This is far more powerful than describing the attacks as “random”.

Israelis know all about bombarding civilian targets. And they are careful not to mention that Sderot, until recently the only Israeli township within range of Gazan rockets, is built on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village whose inhabitants were forced from their homes by Jewish terrorists.

  • “Economic Diplomacy”: This is a much more embracing and popular term than the current lexicon of “sanctions”. It has appeal across the political spectrum: the tough economic approach appeals to Republicans, and the diplomacy component satisfies Democrats.

We can all play this game. Israel is now beginning to suffer “economic diplomacy” in the form of worldwide boycotts.

  • “Economic Prosperity”: Whenever Israel talks about the “economic prosperity” of the Palestinians, it puts Israel in the most positive light possible. After all, who can disagree?

What sort of prosperity is it when nothing can be imported or exported without Israel’s approval and fisherman can’t even put to sea in their own waters without having their boats shot up by the Israeli navy?

  • “Human to Human”: “We know that the average Palestinian and the average Israeli want to come together and make peace. They want to live in peace. Israeli leaders have come together with Arab leaders to make peace in the past. But how do you make peace with Hamas and Hezbollah?”

Simple. You get off their land and stay off. There can be no peace under occupation. You have to be very stupid not to understand that.

  • “Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Would Israel care to tell the world how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) its US-supplied F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats have poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza?

Still more advice…

  • “Living together, side by side”. This is the best way to describe the ultimate vision of a two-state solution without using the phrase.

Sounds cute but is worn out. Who would want to live alongside bigots and extremists who have made your life a misery for 61 years?

  • “When talking about a Palestinian partner, it is essential to distinguish between Hamas and everyone else. Only the most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian American expects Israel to negotiate with Hamas, so you have to be clear that you are seeking a ‘moderate Palestinian partner’.”

Where are the moderate Israeli partners?

  • “The fight is over IDEOLOGY – not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.”

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to by the UN?

  • “Think PRO-PALESTINIAN. While I have spoken about Israeli casualties, I want to recognize those Palestinians that have been killed or wounded, because they are suffering as well. I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child.”

Israel won’t even allow cement into Gaza to build the graves.

  • “And so I say to my Palestinian colleagues … you can stop the bloodshed. You can stop the suicide bombings and rocket attacks. If you really want to, you can put an end to this cycle of violence. If you won’t do it for our children, do it for your children.”

Effective Israeli sound bite. Speechless.

  • “I want to see a future where the Palestinians govern themselves. Israel does not want to govern a single Palestinian. Not one. We want them to govern themselves. We want them to have complete self-determination.”

Is that why Israel tried to snuff out Palestine’s democracy – and the people’s right to self-determination – immediately after the 2006 elections?

  • “The big picture approach is this: You must isolate Hamas as:

– A critical cause of the delay in achieving a two-state solution

– The biggest source of harm to the Palestinian people, and

– The reason why Israel must defend its people from living in terror.

Read from the Hamas Charter. Now, here’s how to attack Hamas: indict them with their own indoctrination materials. Yes, people know Hamas is a terrorist organization – but they don’t know just how terrifying Hamas can be. The absolute best way to heighten their awareness is to read from the Hamas Charter itself. Don’t just “quote” from it. Read it. Out loud. Again and again. Hand it out to everyone.”

At last Israel makes a good point. After three years of “government” Hamas must be mad to persist with its ill-advised charter. They have been severely tested. They have matured. They have earned credibility in many eyes. Israel’s behaviour makes Hamas look good. But all that will count for nothing if they don’t rewrite their charter as a matter of urgency.

Regev’s pearls of wisdom. But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes?

  • “It’s not just Israel who refuses to speak to Hamas. It’s the whole international community… Most of the democratic world refuses to have a relationship with Hamas because Hamas has refused to meet the most minimal benchmarks of international behaviour.” – Mark Regev

Isn’t that a little cheeky, Mr Regev, coming from a regime widely condemned for war crimes, piracy and mega-lawlessness?

  • “It was the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Anan, that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community…

That if Hamas reforms itself …

If Hamas recognizes my country’s right to live in freedom…

If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians…

If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process… then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas. – Mark Regev

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

  • “Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear programme. And for good reason. Iran’s president openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles. We only saw, last week, shooting a rocket to launch a so-called satellite into outer space and so forth. The Iranian nuclear programme is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.” – Mark Regev

Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Mr Regev? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Would you also like to comment on why Israel hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention? What proof do you have of Iran’s nuclear weapons plans?

And why do you persist in misquoting Mr Ahmadinejad?

The Holy City is not up for grabs

  • “The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians. Consider:

– 71 per cent of Americans trust Israel most to protect the holy sites in Jerusalem, compared to 6.1 per cent who trust the Palestinian authority most. 8.5 per cent per cent trust neither.

– 54 per cent of Americans believe that ‘Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty’ while just 23.9 per cent believe that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into Israeli controlled and Palestinian controlled areas’.

Given the choice between the two, Americans of all political and demographic stripes trust Israel to protect and have sovereignty over Jerusalem.”

Israel is in control right now and prevents Muslims and Christians from outside the city visiting the holy places. No way can Israel be trusted. The UN’s partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a ”corpus separatum” under international management. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law rewritten for Israel’s sole benefit, regardless of America’s misinformed opinion.

Get the name-calling right

I’ll close with the following extract:

  • “Many on the left see an ‘Israel vs. Palestinian’ crisis where Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.”

By the same token we must call the racist regime what it is – US-backed Israel.

Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. More funding has probably come from Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In any case, it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So, the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. Israel’s problem is entirely self-inflicted and shouldn’t concern the rest of us.

Hamas’s election manifesto in 2006 called for maintaining the armed struggle against US-backed Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which seems a perfectly valid aim.

Our obligation to respect and promote human rights

The Israel Project’s training manual is an unpleasant piece of work. It runs to 116 pages and I have only scratched the surface. It recycles many of the discredited techniques used by the advertising industry before standards of honesty, decency and truthfulness were brought in to protect the public.

And it serves to undermine with clever words the inalienable rights pledged by the UN and the world’s civilized nations to all peoples, including the Palestinians.

When you have to stoop this low you simply don’t have a case.

The Palestinian side urgently needs to strip away the deception and re-frame the Holy Land situation in truthful language. And it needs to debunk this Zionist handbook. If the PA and the PLO won’t do it, who will?

Everyone should bear in mind the following, written nearly 61 years ago:

“Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”

It would seem that Israel has not read or understood the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which all nations signed up to. Attempts to wipe out the rights of people who happen to be in the way of the Zionist vision of a “Greater Israel” deserve no support whatever.

March 29, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Danger of False Narrative

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | March 27, 2014

The American people got a nasty taste of the danger that can come with false narrative when they were suckered into the Iraq War based on bogus claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction that he planned to share with al-Qaeda.

Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died in the conflict along with hundreds thousands of Iraqis. The war’s total financial cost probably exceeded $1 trillion, a vast sum that siphoned off America’s economic vitality and forced cutbacks in everything from education to road repair. Plus, the war ended up creating an Iraqi base for al-Qaeda terrorists that had not existed before.

But perhaps an even more dangerous problem coming out of the Iraq War was that almost no one in Official Washington who pushed the false narrative – whether in politics or in the press – was held accountable in any meaningful way. Many of the same pols and pundits remain in place today, pushing similar false narratives on new crises, from Ukraine to Syria to Iran.

Those false narratives – and their cumulative effect on policy-making – now represent a clear and present danger to the Republic and, indeed, to the world. The United States, after all, is the preeminent superpower with unprecedented means for delivering death and destruction. But almost nothing is being done to address this enduring American crisis of deception.

Today, Official Washington is marching in lockstep just as it did in 2002-03 when it enforced the misguided consensus on Iraq’s WMD. The latest case is Ukraine where Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of committing “aggression” to expand Russian territory at the expense of noble ”democratic” reformers in Kiev.

Not only is this the dominant storyline in the U.S. media; it is virtually the only narrative permitted in the mainstream press. But the real narrative is that the United States and the European Union provoked this crisis by trying to take Ukraine out of its traditional sphere of influence, Russia, and put it in to a new association with the EU.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Ukraine joining with the EU or staying with Russia (or a combination of the two) – depending on the will of the people and their elected representatives – this latest U.S./EU plan was motivated, at least in part, by hostility toward Russia.

That attitude was expressed in a Sept. 26, 2013, op-ed in the Washington Post by Carl Gershman, the neoconservative president of the National Endowment for Democracy, which doles out more than $100 million in U.S. funds a year to help organize “activists,” support “journalists” and finance programs that can be used to destabilize targeted governments.

Gershman, whose job amounts to being a neocon paymaster, expressed antagonism toward Russia in the op-ed and identified Ukraine as “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

The NED, which was founded in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, listed 65 projects that it was financing in Ukraine, using U.S. taxpayers’ money. In other words, Gershman’s op-ed reflected U.S. policy – at least inside the State Department’s still-neocon-dominated bureaucracy – which viewed the EU’s snatching of Ukraine from Russia’s embrace as a way to weaken Russia and hurt Putin.

‘European Aspirations’

Later, as the Ukrainian crisis unfolded, another neocon, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, reminded Ukrainian businessmen that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” implying that the U.S. expected something for all this money.

You might wonder why the American taxpayers should spend $5 billion on the “European aspirations” of Ukraine when there are so many needs at home, but a more relevant question may be: Why is the United States spending that much money to stir up trouble on Russia’s border? The Cold War is over but the hostility continues.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described this thinking in his memoir, Duty, explaining the view of President George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: “When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”

As Vice President, Cheney and the neocons around him pursued a similar strategy during George W. Bush’s presidency, expanding NATO aggressively to the east and backing anti-Russian regimes in the region including the hardline Georgian government, which provoked a military confrontation with Moscow in 2008.

Since President Barack Obama never took full control of his foreign policy apparatus – leaving the Bush Family apparatchik Gates at Defense and naming neocon-leaning Democrat Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – the bureaucratic momentum toward confronting Russia continued. Indeed, the elevation of operatives like Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, gave new impetus to the anti-Russian strategy.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who got his “dream job” last year with the considerable help of his neocon chum Sen. John McCain, has acted as a kind of sock puppet for this neocon-dominated State Department bureaucracy.

Either because he is overly focused on his legacy-building initiative of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal or because he has long since sold out his anti-war philosophy from the Vietnam War era, Kerry has repeatedly taken the side of the hawks: on Syria, Iran and now Ukraine.

On Syria and Iran, it was largely the behind-the-scenes cooperation between Obama and Putin that tamped down those crises last year and opened a pathway for diplomacy – much to the chagrin of the neocons who favored heightened confrontations, U.S. military strikes and “regime change.” Thus, it became a neocon priority to divide Obama from Putin. Ukraine became the wedge.

The Crisis

The Ukrainian crisis took a decisive turn on Nov. 21, 2013, when President Viktor Yanukovych rebuffed a deal offered by the EU and the International Monetary Fund because it would have imposed harsh austerity on the already suffering Ukrainian people. Yanukovych opted instead for a more generous aid package of $15 billion from Russia, with few strings attached.

But Yanukovych’s turning away from the EU infuriated the U.S. State Department as well as pro-European demonstrators who filled the Maidan square in Kiev. The protests reflected the more anti-Russian attitudes of western Ukraine, where Kiev is located, but not the more pro-Russian feelings of eastern and southern Ukraine, Yanukovych’s strongholds that accounted for his electoral victory in 2010.

Though the Maidan protests involved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians simply eager for a better life and a less corrupt government, some of the most militant factions came from far-right parties, like Svoboda, and even neo-Nazi militias from the Right Sektor. When protesters seized City Hall, Nazi symbols and a Confederate battle flag were put on display.

As the protests grew angrier, U.S. officials, including Assistant Secretary Nuland and Sen. McCain, openly sided with the demonstrators despite banners honoring Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era fascist whose paramilitary forces collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of Poles and Jews. Nuland passed out cookies and McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. [For more on the role of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, watch this report from the BBC.]

On Feb. 20, the violence intensified as mysterious snipers fired on both protesters and police. As police fought back, neo-Nazi militias hurled Molotov cocktails. More than 80 people were killed including more than a dozen police officers, but the U.S. press blamed the Yanukovych government for the violence, portraying the demonstrators as innocent victims.

Official Washington’s narrative was set. Yanukovych, who had been something of a hero when he was moving toward the EU agreement in the early fall, became a villain after he decided that the IMF’s demands were too severe and especially after he accepted the deal from Putin. The Russian president was undergoing his own demonization in the U.S. news media, including an extraordinary denunciation by NBC at the end of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

In the U.S. media’s black-and-white scenario, the “pro-democracy” demonstrators in the Maidan were the good guys who were fired upon by the bad-guy police. The New York Times even stopped reporting that some of those killed were police, instead presenting the more pleasing but phony narrative that “more than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”

To this day, the identity of the snipers who touched off the conflagration remains in serious doubt. I was told at the time that some U.S. intelligence analysts believed the shooters were associated with the far-right opposition groups, not with the Yanukovych government.

That analysis gained support when a phone call surfaced between Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, Paet reported on a conversation that he had with a doctor in Kiev who said the sniper fire that killed protesters was the same that killed police officers.

As reported by the UK Guardian, “During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.”

Paet said, “What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.

“So she also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. … So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.”

Ashton replied: “I think we do want to investigate. I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.”

Though this exchange does not prove that the opposition used snipers to provoke the violence, it is relevant information that could have altered how Americans viewed the worsening crisis in Ukraine. However, except for an on-the-scene report from CNN with the same doctor, the Paet-Ashton phone call disappeared into the U.S. media’s black hole reserved for information that doesn’t fit with a preferred narrative.

Black Hats/White Hats

So, with giant black hats glued onto Yanukovych and Putin and white hats on the protesters, the inspiring but false U.S. narrative played out in heroic fashion, with only passing reference to the efforts by Yanukovych to make concessions and satisfy the protesters’ demands.

On Feb. 21, Yanukovych tried to defuse the violence by signing an agreement with three European countries in which he accepted reduced powers, moved up elections so he could be voted out of office, and pulled back the police. That last step, however, opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias to seize government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for his life.

Then, on Feb. 22, under the watchful eye of these modern-day storm troopers, a rump parliament – in violation of constitutional procedures – voted to impeach Yanukovych, who reemerged in Russia to denounce the actions as a coup.

Despite this highly irregular process, the U.S. government – following the lead of the State Department bureaucracy – immediately recognized the new leadership as Ukraine’s “legitimate” government. Putin later appealed to Obama in support of the Feb. 21 agreement but was told the ouster of Yanukovych and the installation of the U.S.-backed government were a fait accompli.

The rump parliament in Kiev also accused Yanukovych of mass murder in connection with the shootings in the Maidan — an accusation that got widespread play in the U.S. media – although curiously the new regime also decided not to pursue an investigation into the identity of the mysterious snipers, a point that drew no U.S. media interest.

And, a new law was passed in line with the desires of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists to eliminate Russian as one of the country’s official languages. New government leaders also were dispatched to the Russian-ethnic regions to take charge, moves that, in turn, prompted resistance from Russian-ethnic citizens in the east and south.

It was in this context – and with appeals from Yanukovych and ethnic Russians for help – that Putin got permission from the Duma to intervene militarily if necessary. Russian troops, already stationed in bases in Crimea, moved to block the Kiev regime from asserting its authority in that strategic Black Sea peninsula.

Amidst this political chaos, the Crimean parliament voted to break away from Ukraine and join Russia, putting the question to a popular vote on March 16. Not surprisingly, given the failed Ukrainian state, its inability to pay for basic services, and Crimea’s historic ties to Russia, Crimean voters approved the switch overwhelmingly. Exit polls showed about a 93 percent majority, just three points less than the official results.

Russia then moved to formally reclaim Crimea, which had been part of Russia dating back to the 1700s, while also massing troops along the borders of eastern Ukraine, presumably as a warning to the Kiev regime not to crush popular resistance to the anti-Yanukovych coup.

A Divergent Narrative

So, the factual narrative suggests that the Ukrainian crisis was stoked by elements of the U.S. government, both in the State Department and in Congress, encouraging and exploiting popular resentments in western Ukraine. The goal was to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and put it into the EU’s gravitational pull.

When Yanukovych balked at IMF’s demands, a process of “regime change” was put in motion with the U.S. and EU even turning their backs on the Feb. 21 agreement in which Yanukovych made a series of concessions negotiated by European countries. The deal was cast aside in a matter of hours with no attempt by the West to uphold its terms.

Meanwhile, Putin, who was tied up with the Sochi Olympics and obsessed over fears that it would be targeted by Islamist terrorists, appears to have been caught off-guard by the events in Ukraine. He then reacted to the alarming developments on Russia’s border, including the emergence of neo-Nazis as prominent figures in the coup regime in Kiev.

In other words, a logical – and indeed realistic – way to see the Ukraine-Crimea crisis is that Putin was largely responding to events that were outside his control. And that is important to understand, because that would mean that Putin was not the aggressor spoiling for a fight.

If there was premeditation, it was coming from the West and particularly from the neocons who remain highly influential in Official Washington. The neocons also had motive to go after Putin, since he helped Obama use diplomacy to quiet down dangerous crises with Syria and Iran while the neocons were pushing for more confrontation and U.S. military strikes.

But how did the U.S. news media present the Ukraine story to the American people?

First, there was the simplistic and misleading depiction of the pro-EU demonstrations as “democratic” when they mostly reflected the discontent of the pro-European population of western Ukraine, not the views of the more pro-Russian Ukrainians in the east and south who had pushed Yanukovych to victory in the 2010 election. Last time I checked, “democracy” referred to rule by the majority, not mob rule.

Then, despite the newsworthiness of the neo-Nazi role in the protests, the U.S. news media blacked-out these brown shirts because that ugly reality undercut the pleasing good-guys-vs.-bad-guys storyline. Then, when the snipers opened fire on protesters and policemen, the U.S. news media jumped to the conclusion that the killers were working for Yanukovych because that, too, fit with the desired narrative.

The violent overthrow of the democratically elected Yanukovych was hailed as an expression of “democracy,” again with the crucial role of the neo-Nazi militias largely airbrushed from the picture. The unanimous and near unanimous parliamentary votes that followed – as storm troopers patrolled the halls of government buildings – were further cited as evidence of “democracy” and “reform.”

The anger and fear of Ukrainians in the east and south were dismissed as Russian “propaganda” and Crimea’s move to extract itself from this political chaos was denounced as Russian “aggression.” U.S. news outlets casually denounced Putin as a “thug.” Washington Post columnist George F. Will called Putin “Stalin’s spawn.”

Former Secretary of State Clinton cited the Crimea situation to compare Putin to Hitler and to suggest that Putin was intent on recreating the old Soviet empire, though Crimea is only 10,000 square miles, about one-tenth of one percent the size of the old Soviet Union.

And, it wasn’t just that some or nearly all mainstream U.S. news organizations adopted this one-sided and misguided narrative. It was a consensus throughout all major U.S. news outlets. With a uniformity that one would normally associate with a totalitarian state, no competing narrative was permitted in the Big Media, regardless of the actual facts.

Whenever any of the more complex reality was included in a story, it was presented as Russian claims that were then followed by argumentative challenges. Yet, when U.S. officials made preposterous remarks about how uncivilized it was to violate another country’s sovereignty, the hypocrisy of their points went uncontested.

For instance, Secretary of State Kerry denounced Putin’s intervention in Crimea by declaring, “you just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.” But you had to look on the Internet to find any writer who dared note Kerry’s breathtaking double standard, since he voted in 2002 to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq in pursuit of hidden WMD stockpiles that didn’t exist.

This cognitive dissonance pervaded the U.S. press and the political debate over Ukraine and Crimea. The long history of U.S. interventions in foreign countries – almost always in violation of international law – was forgotten, except for the rare occasion when some Russian “claim” about American hypocrisy was cited and then swatted down. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Staggering Hypocrisy.”]

Careerism Prevails

Having worked many years in the mainstream U.S. news media, I fully understand how this process works and why it happens. Amid the patriotic chest-thumping that usually accompanies a U.S. military operation or American righteous outrage over some other nation’s actions, it is dangerous for your career to go against the flag-waving.

But it’s always been my view that such self-censorship is faux patriotism, as much as the happy story-lines are false narratives. Even if many Americans don’t want the truth, it is still the job of journalists to give them the truth. Otherwise, the U.S. democratic process is distorted and made dangerous.

Propaganda leads to bad policies as politicians – even when they know better – start parroting the errant conventional wisdom. We’ve seen this now with President Obama who – more than anyone – realizes the value of Putin’s cooperation on Syria and Iran but now must join in denouncing the Russian president and demanding sanctions.

Obama also surely knows that Yanukovych’s ouster violated both Ukraine’s constitution and principles of democracy, but he pretends otherwise. And, he knows that Crimea’s secession reflected the will of the people, but he must insist that their vote was illegitimate.

At a March 25 news conference in the Netherlands, Obama toed the line of the hypocritical false narrative. He declared, “we have said consistently throughout this process is that it is up to the Ukrainian people to make their own decisions about how they organize themselves and who they interact with.” He then added that the Crimean referendum was “sloppily organized over the course of two weeks” and thus a sham.

If Obama were telling the truth, he would have noted that Yanukovych – for all his faults – was democratically elected in a process that was deemed fair by international observers. Obama would have acknowledged that Yanukovych agreed on Feb. 21 to a process that would have allowed for an orderly and legal process for his replacement.

Obama would have admitted, too, that the violent coup and the actions of the rump parliament in Kiev were both illegal and, indeed, “sloppily organized” – and that the U.S. government acted hastily in recognizing this coup regime. But double standards seem to be the only standards these days in Official Washington.

What is perhaps tragic about Obama is that he does know better. He is not a stupid man. But he doesn’t dare go against the grain for fear of being denounced as “naïve” about Putin or “weak” in not facing down “Russian aggression.” So, he reads the lines that have been, in effect, dictated by neocons within his own administration.

I’m told that Obama, like Putin, was caught off-guard by the Ukraine crisis. But Obama’s unwillingness or inability to recast the false narrative left him with no political choice but to join in the Putin-bashing. That, in turn, means that Putin won’t be there to help Obama navigate around future U.S. war plans that the neocons have in mind for Syria and Iran.

Indeed, neutralizing the Obama-Putin relationship may have been the chief reason why the neocons were so eager to stoke the Ukrainian fires — and it shows how false narratives can get people killed.

March 28, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Iranian Threat That Never Was

By Sheldon Richman | Future of Freedom Foundation | March 26, 2014

If you take politicians and the mainstream media seriously, you believe that Iran wants a nuclear weapon and has relentlessly engaged in covert efforts to build one. Even if you are aware that Iran signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, you may believe that those who run the Islamic Republic have cleverly found ways to construct a nuclear-weapons industry almost undetected. Therefore, you may conclude, Democratic and Republican administrations have been justified in pressuring Iran to come clean and give up its “nuclear program.”

But you would be wrong.

Anyone naturally skeptical about such foreign-policy alarms has by now found solid alternative reporting that debunks the official narrative about the alleged Iranian threat. Much of that reporting has come from Gareth Porter, the journalist and historian associated with Inter Press Service. Porter has done us the favor of collecting the fruits of his dogged investigative journalism into a single comprehensive and accessible volume, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

A grain of truth can be found at the core of the official story. Iranian officials did indeed engage in secret activities to achieve a nuclear capability. But it was a capability aimed at generating electricity and medical treatments, not hydrogen bombs.

Porter opens his book by explaining why Iran used secretive rather than open methods. Recall that before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran was ruled by an autocratic monarch, the shah. The shah’s power had been eclipsed in the early 1950s by a democratically elected parliament. Then, in 1953, America’s Eisenhower administration sent the CIA in to foment civil discord in order to drive the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from office and restore the shah’s power.

During his reign, the shah, a close ally of the United States and Israel, started building a nuclear-power industry — with America’s blessing. Iran’s Bushehr reactor was 80 percent complete when the shah was overthrown.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became Iran’s supreme leader in 1979, he cancelled completion of the reactor and stopped related projects. But “two years later, the government reversed the decision to strip the [Atomic Energy Organization of Iran] of its budget and staff, largely because the severe electricity shortages that marked the first two years of the revolutionary era persuaded policymakers that there might be a role for nuclear power reactors after all,” Porter writes.

The new regime’s goals were “extremely modest compared with those of the shah,” Porter adds, consisting of one power plant and fuel purchased from France. Take note: the Iranian government did not aspire to enrich uranium, which is the big scare issue these days.

Iran brought the IAEA into its planning process, Porter writes, and an agency official, after conducting a survey of facilities, “recommended that the IAEA provide ‘expert services’ in eight different fields.” Porter notes that the IAEA official said nothing about an Iranian request for help in enriching uranium, “reflecting the fact that Iran was still hoping to get enriched uranium from the French company, Eurodif.”

Had things continued along this path, Iran today would have had a transparent civilian nuclear industry, under the NPT safeguard, fueled by enriched uranium purchased from France or elsewhere. No one would be talking about Iranian centrifuges and nuclear weapons. What happened?

The Reagan administration happened.

Continuing the U.S. hostility toward the Islamic Republic begun by the Carter administration, and siding with Iraq when Saddam Hussein’s military attacked Iran, the Reagan administration imposed “a series of interventions … to prevent international assistance of any kind to the Iranian nuclear program.” Not only did President Reagan block American firms from helping the Iranians; he also pressured American allies to participate in the embargo. This was in clear violation of the NPT, which recognizes the “right” of participating states to acquire nuclear technology for civilian purposes.

No wonder Iran turned to covert channels, most particularly A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani who “was selling nuclear secrets surreptitiously.” This would have been the time for Iran to buy weapons-related technology — however, Porter writes, “there is no indication that [Khan’s Iranian contact] exhibited any interest in the technology for making a bomb.”

This is indeed a manufactured crisis.

March 27, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment