Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians
“The stated aim was, as always, to stop the launching of the rockets. The means: killing a maximum of Palestinians, in order to teach them a lesson. The decision was based on the traditional Israeli concept: hit the civilian population again and again, until it overthrows its leaders. This has been tried hundreds of times and has failed hundreds of times.” (Uri Avnery “Kill a Hundred Turks and Rest”: The Five-Day War in Gaza March 2008).
Operation Grapes of Wrath ~ Lebanon, in 1996
“Ehud Barak will be remembered in Israel’s history as the one who introduced the abuse of innocent civilians as political cards. Barak was probably not the first Israeli warrior to abuse civilians on a tactical level, but he was the one who turned it into a central Israeli strategy. Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon, in 1996, with Barak as an influential cabinet member, openly targeted civilians, turning them into refugees to make them put pressure on Beirut’s government. The recent siege on Gaza follows a similar logic: put pressure on civilians to achieve political goals. (A clear war crime, it goes without saying.)” (Ran HaCohen ‘Israel Says ‘No’’ Feb. 2008).
Israelis fire 1,300,000 bullets during first few days of Intifada
“Malka, in an interview with the Israeli paper Ha’aretz on 14 June, revealed that during the first few days of the intifada, Israeli occupation soldiers fired 1,300,000 bullets on Palestinian population centres and other targets. This massive firepower, which had no operational justification given the Palestinians’ inherently inferior firepower (they possessed only light firearms and in limited numbers), showed that the Israeli army was interested more in decimating and harming the Palestinians and less in ending the violence. According to Israeli sources, then-Chief of Staff and now Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz didn’t plan to bring about the end of the conflict. Instead, he thought he had finally seized the opportunity to “beat and vanquish” the Palestinians in order to “burn into their consciousness” and make them “internalise their weakness and inferiority vis-a-vis Israel’s strength”. Mofaz’s ultimate aim, of which he later convinced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was to hector Palestinians into negotiations in a weakened and exhausted state whereby they would have no choice but to accept Israel’s dictates and demands. The new revelations, Palestinian officials argue, prove that the escalation of violence during the first few months of the intifada was, first and foremost, Israel’s responsibility. “This is what we have been saying all along that this is not about Israeli security but rather about Israel’s terrorising the Palestinian people for the purpose of arrogating their land and rights. Israel is now admitting that,” said Michael Tarazi, adviser to Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat.” (Khalid Amayreh ‘The second intifada, an Israeli strategy’ July 2004).
Lebanon 2006
“This intentional and coldly calculated Israeli policy of targeting innocent Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure stems from a time-honoured, but hardly ever successful, Israeli doctrine of applying intense “pressure” against a civilian population in order to compel them, in-turn, to pressure the resistance into submitting to Israeli dictates, thereby doing Israel’s bidding by proxy. It has been consistently used against the Palestinians ever since the Nakba of 1948, and is still applied now in the ongoing barbaric offensive and hermetic siege against Gaza. Israel may have plagiarized this doctrine from the legacies of previous oppressors, but it has refined it to a degree that it no longer raises any moral qualms in most of Israeli society, where it is widely accepted by the public as a right, even a duty in the fight for Israel’s “security.” (Omar Barghouti ‘The Massacre at Qana’ August 01 2006); “As Limor and Shelah reveal, in spite of the fact that the conflict on the ground took place on a very narrow strip of land (the Israeli border on the south and Litani River on the north), the Israeli artillery had managed to shoot over 170,000 shells. In comparison, in the 1973 war while fighting against two strong state armies over two very large fronts, the Israelis had launched only 53,000 shells. The figures relating to the Air Force are even more striking. Though less than a few concrete targets were available for the IDF intelligence, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) had launched as many as 17,550 combat missions, this translates into 520 missions a day, almost as many as in the 1973 war (605 a day). Yet, in 1973 the IAF was fighting two well-equipped air forces, it was engaged in a fair amount of air-to-air combat and a relentless struggle against the latest Soviet ground-to-air missiles. None of that happened in the Second Lebanon War. The IAF was engaged solely in hammering the Lebanese soil. It literally threw and launched everything it had in its disposal, presenting a merciless method that in places (southern Beirut for instance), had a similar effect to the infamous 1940s Anglo-American carpet bombardment.” (Gilad Atzmon ‘Saying NO to the Hunters of Goliath’ August 13, 2007); “That was on Aug. 30, by which time U.N. teams had identified 359 separate cluster-bomb sites. Since then, the true dimensions of the problem have become even clearer: 770 cluster-bomb sites have now been identified. And the current U.N. estimate is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million bomblets on Lebanon, of which up to a million have yet to explode.” (Saree Makdisi ‘Israel’s Cluster Bomb War’ Oct. 2006).
On Christmas Eve, while Christians knelt in churches to honour the birth of the eternal light of the Child of Bethlehem — the Child of peace, Israeli Herods struck Gaza and the life-light of little Hala haemorrhaged into eternal death.
Hala Ahmed Abu Sbaikha, all of 3 years old, was, like all toddlers, both vivacious and shy, playful, affectionate with bright curious eyes and with a so soft cheek to rest a bedtime kiss.
Why did the Herods of Israel attack Gaza?
There are three possible answers — one false, one truly appalling, one heinous.
Ostensibly, reports in western pro-Israel media, that devoted one sentence to Hala’s death, garbled on and on with the usual Herod hasbara (propaganda); the attack was Israel’s divine right to excessively inflict collective punishment for the shooting, by a Gaza sniper, of an Israeli civilian labourer, Salah Shukri Abu Latyef, 22, working on the border fence. Salah was airlifted to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
No mention, of course, that four days previously, Odeh Jihad Hamad in Beit Hanoun, 29, was a kilometre away from the border collecting scrap metal when Israeli soldiers fatally shot him in the head. Israeli forces did not allow ambulances to attend to Odeh for an hour and a half after the shooting.
Or that since November 2012, when Israel’s Pillar of Cloud assault (weapons testing operation) that killed 171 Palestinians had ended in an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, Israel has committed over 300 ceasefire violations encompassing aerial attacks, military incursions, the levelling of agricultural land, gunship attacks on fishermen, harassing, targeting and wounding farmers, unlawful kidnappings, and the killing of ten Gazan civilians.
Definitely suppressed was the fact that for seven years, the people of Gaza have been held captive by the illegal Israeli siege and in the last two months Israel’s blockade of fuel has caused a disastrous humanitarian crisis with severe shortages of critical supplies and electricity for health services. In freezing temperatures blasted by a winter storm of unprecedented proportions, vulnerable Gazan families and their children have had no electricity, heat, or light, and when the waste water pumping system collapsed pouring sewerage into the streets, shockingly, Israel opened two dams close-by causing the flooding, devastation and misery to soar.
So why did the Herods of Israel truly attack Gaza?
They attack because they can. They attack because, for 65 years, have been granted impunity by democratic western nations. They attack to test their weaponry on Gazan families to sell to said western democratic nations. They attack because they don’t want peace. They attack because they want Palestinians to leave Eretz Israel (the whole of Historic Palestine). They attack to to drive Palestinians from their ancestral lands into the sea.
On the first Sunday after Christmas, Catholics and Copts commemorate the Feast of the Holy Family recalling Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus’ flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s ordering of the Massacre of the Innocents; the infanticide of male babies and toddlers in the Bethlehem region.
But Hala’s family had no escape. For seven years, Israel and the US-supported Egyptian military government have sealed Gaza’s borders so that it’s 1.7 million refugee population, half of whom are children, has no recourse to refuge from Herod’s war crimes.
Herod the Great (i.e., Herod the Deranged) was a vassal of the Roman Empire. Today there is political twist. The US empire (and its client states, UK, EU, Australia) is Israel’s vassal. The US pays an annual tribute of 3 billion dollars even though Israel publicly insults and leads US presidents by the nose on a merry dance to the tune of incompetency played by Herod’s fool, the UN.
The UN has the the legal duty and responsibility to protect all children. On the website of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, it informs us that “the Security Council recognised early on the need for robust action including sanctions against individuals persistently committing violations against children in armed conflict. These sanctions include arms embargoes, asset freezes, and travel bans.
The readiness of the Security Council to impose sanctions against violators of the rights of children in armed conflict has developed over time. In Security Council resolution 1539 (2004), the Council expressed for the first time its intention to consider imposing targeted and graduated measures against parties to conflict violating the rights of children. This commitment was reaffirmed in resolutions 1612 (2005), 1882 (2009), and 1998 (2011).
Israel’s Herods have slaughtered 1,400 children since 2000. Has the UN or any state robustly imposed sanctions on Israel’s child-killers? NO.
Let’s look more closely at why Zionist Herods attack Gaza?
Impunity aside, ultimately, they attack because they are depraved Untermenschen, not just the military but every Zionist who supports Israel’s illegal occupation, warmongering and apartheid policies. They attack because a three year old Palestinian child’s life, its delightful vitality, its laughter, its wonder, its tears, its fun and its fears means nothing to these inhuman thugs and nothing to the UN and nothing to the leaders and citizens of western democratic nations who look away from Israel’s war crimes and daily crimes against humanity.
On Christmas Eve, the songs of Christmas angels were muted by explosions when Herods’ tanks and warplanes “forcefully” bombed Gaza for two hours hitting Hala’s home in Al-Maghazi refugee camp,massacring her innocence and injuring her mother Buthaina, and brothers Mohammed 6 and Bilal, 4.
Little Hala should be alive now. It was her sacred right.
Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Aceh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 and then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.
With some people – the really bad liars – it’s easy to spot what criminologists call “guilty demeanor.”
When George W. Bush sat reading to schoolchildren on the morning of 9/11, remaining in the classroom for almost ten minutes after supposedly learning that America was under attack, the guilty look on his face was palpable.
At 9:03 that morning, as schoolchildren chanted “kite plane must hit steel,” Chief of Staff Andrew Card supposedly whispered in Bush’s ear: “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center, America is under attack.” But in reality, Card could not possibly have told Bush that. Whatever Card said required only two seconds. That was not enough time to explain a novel situation outside the President’s usual frame of reference.
In fact, Card must have said something like: “The operation is under way, await further instructions.”
If the Secret Service had really learned that America was under surprise attack, its agents would have immediately grabbed Bush and rushed him – at full speed – to a safe location. Instead, Bush just sat there looking guilty as the children read the book “My Pet Goat” for eight or nine minutes while the Secret Service did nothing.
When the reading session finally ended, Bush remained at the school for another twenty minutes.
After Bush had dawdled nearly half an hour in the classroom, the presidential motorcade took its time following the pre-announced route to the airport. Bush’s plane unhurriedly took off around 10 a.m. – almost an hour after Bush supposedly learned of the 9/11 “surprise attack.”
The whole world knew exactly where Bush was; the school event had been widely publicized in advance. If hijacked planes had really been used as missiles that day, the President would have been considered their number one target. But apparently the Secret Service knew Bush wasn’t in danger. The Secret Service’s complete lack of interest in the safety of the Commander-in-Chief (and in their own safety) proves, all by itself, that 9/11 was an inside job.
New York Times “embedded White House journalist” David Sanger was in the Florida classroom that day. He saw with his own eyes that the Secret Service knew Bush wasn’t a target.
In the twelve-and-a-half years that followed, Sanger never breathed a word about the obvious Secret Service foreknowledge.
That raises the term “embedded journalist” to a whole new level.
A few days ago, Sanger followed in the footsteps of the “Pet Goat President,” and gave the world another lesson in “guilty demeanor.”
During a C-Span interview, Sanger was asked by a 9/11 survivor why the New York Times has refused to cover the obvious controlled demolition of World Trade Center Building 7. Sanger’s response was evasive, obfuscatory, and mendacious.
The C-Span caller asked Sanger:
“Across the street from the New York Times building there’s a billboard asking where your paper’s coverage is of the over 2,000 architects and engineers who are demanding a new investigation of Building 7’s destruction on 9/11, and the overwhelming evidence that pre-planted explosives destroyed it. Since this has everything to do with our national security, can you explain what rational and scientific basis your paper has for failing to fairly and objectively cover this crucial issue?”
Sanger’s demeanor suggested he knew he was lying as he gave this circuitous answer:
“Trust me, the people who work at the New York Times have as much of a critical interest in what happened on 9/11 as anybody else. Because not only are they reporters there, but they live and work within the city. And we’ve devoted a fairly considerable amount of repertorial time over the past number of years to the question of all the different theories – conspiracy theories, regular theories, non-conspiracy theories – about what happened on that day. And you’ve heard the huge variety of them. We have not yet found any convincing evidence to suggest that there was a plot …that there was a plot that the President knew about in advance, which was one of the issues that came up. I was with the President on 9/11 at the school in Florida. I can tell you that he looked pretty shocked by what had happened, and shell-shocked by what had happened. And we have not found any evidence so far. That doesn’t mean that there’s none there. But we have not found any evidence so far to suggest that the building collapses were caused by anything other than the two airplanes that flew into them.”
Sanger blatantly evaded the caller’s question about Building 7. When he blamed the explosive destruction of the Twin Towers, and the smooth free-fall drop of Building 7, on “the two airplanes that flew into them” he was lying in two ways.
First, no airplane flew into Building 7.
Second, Sanger must know that the US government agency NIST admits that the planes and their jet fuel did very little damage to the Twin Towers. NIST blames office fires fueled by burning paper and carpets, not plane crashes or jet fuel, for the explosive pulverization of most of the Towers and their contents.
But whatever happened to the Towers, the destruction of Building 7 was the most obvious – and most perfect – controlled demolition in history. No smoother and more symmetrical near-free-fall implosion of a tall building has ever been recorded. Even Canadian scientist Frank Greening, the most prominent defender of NIST’s account of the destruction of the Twin Towers, has been forced to admit that NIST’s claim that Building 7 “just fell down from office fires” is ludicrous.
If David Sanger is really unaware of any evidence that Building 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition, he should just call up Frank Greening, the most-cited defender of the US government’s position on the destruction of the World Trade Center. Or he could try any of the more than 2000 Architects and Engineers.
Sanger’s bad faith – or his guilt-induced brain-freeze – is obvious when he divides the “different theories” about 9/11 into three categories: “Conspiracy theories, regular theories, and non-conspiracy theories.”
What can this possibly mean?
A “conspiracy” is a plan by a group of two or more people to commit a crime. How could there possibly be a “regular theory” or a “non-conspiracy theory” of 9/11? Is Sanger suggesting that a single individual may have acted alone?
As an embedded national security journalist, Sanger knows that the CIA was responsible for putting the weaponized term “conspiracy theorist” into circulation. The terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” were virtually unheard-of until the mid-1960s, when the CIA issued a memorandum to its thousands of Operation Mockingbird media assets telling them to attack JFK assassination researchers using those words. That memo is preserved as CIA Document 1035-960, released in response to a 1976 FOIA request by none other than the New York Times.
Apparently the CIA put out a similar memo after 9/11. And Sanger apparently got the memo.
Or maybe he didn’t need to.
Sanger has been a speaker at Foundation for Defense of Democracies – the neocon-Zionist successor to Project for a New American Century, which openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” exactly one year before 9/11.
Former New York Times journalist Phillip Weiss calls Sanger a “complete insider” and a proponent of the Zionist notion that Iran is a threat to America.
Weiss has elsewhere alluded to another of Sanger’s possible motives for complicity in 9/11: Zionist sympathies. In his article “Do Jews dominate in American media? And so what if we do?” Weiss points out that the majority of his former colleagues and bosses at the New York Times are, in effect, Israeli propagandists: “The Jewish cohort of which I am a part has largely accepted the duty … of supporting Israel.”
David Sanger must know that Zionist billionaire Larry Silverstein, a close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, bought the condemned-for-asbestos World Trade Center just six weeks before 9/11, doubled the insurance, then collected double-indemnity due to the “two unrelated terror attacks” (the two planes). Silverstein has confessed twice on television to the controlled demolition of World Trade Center Building 7.
Sanger must know that Netanyahu’s first reaction to 9/11 was “It’s very good!” He must know that Israeli spies were arrested in New York filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center. He must know about the New York Police Department radio recording describing Israelis being arrested on 9/11 near the George Washington Bridge with a truck full of explosives.
Sanger apparently has plenty of reasons for parsing “conspiracy theories” from “non-conspiracy theories” and pretending he doesn’t know that 9/11 was an inside job.
In an important April 16 Russia Today op-ed piece, British investigative radio journalist Tony Gosling finally broached the media taboo against identifying the Iron Lady’s influential behind-the-scenespro-Israel “advisor” dubbed “the man in the shadows”:
The taboo not a single commentator has broached though is the shadowy ‘advisory’ role played throughout her premiership by European banking fraternity’s Labour peer Lord Victor Rothschild. He was revealed in the book the Thatcher government tried to suppress, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, to be behind London’s top secret service appointments. In 1986 Rothschild penned ‘Paying for Local Government’ the policy paper that led to the notorious Poll Tax that fell hardest on the poorest, and which brought Britons onto the streets of London in their hundreds of thousands in 1990, riots echoing London’s Poll Tax revolt of 1381.
And according to the then BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, Lord Victor also initiated the sacking in 1987 of the last independent-minded Director General of the BBC, a castration from which the corporation never quite recovered.
One word captures the essence of the Thatcher legacy; ‘privatisation‘. As an exasperated former Tory Prime Minster Harold Macmillan put it “she’s selling off the family silver!”. And so tens of mind-boggling billions of pounds of silver were auctioned off to the highest bidders, mostly to Rothschild’s kith and kin. From shipyards and public housing to telephones, steel, oil, gas and water, anyone in the world was free to own the infrastructure and manufacturing heart of Britain that was once collectively ‘ours’. [emphasis added]
So, the next time you hear someone bemoan the consequences of “Thatcherism,” just tell them that the predictably oligarch-benefiting ideology should more accurately be called “Rothschildism.” Or if, like me, you’re in Japan, you could explain that the much-touted “Abenomics” — a deferential reference to Thatcherism’s “Chicago model” -based American counterpart “Reaganomics” — is simply the latest disastrous reincarnation of “Zionomics.”
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst. He is also the creator and editor of The Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter @O_Cathail.
The rushed campaign to insert Stanley Fischer straight from his position leading Israel’s central bank into the number two spot at the Federal Reserve has allowed little time for research into the appointee’s career or for informed public debate about his record. Like the failed recent Obama administration-Israel lobby pincer move to ram approval for U.S. military strikes on Syria through Congress, avoiding such due diligence through velocity may actually be the only means for successful Senate confirmation.
Some of Fischer’s accomplishments – from co-authoring a seminal textbook on macroeconomics to handling economic crisis at the IMF have – not surprisingly – been recalled by his many supporters. Other doings that shed light on Fischer’s controversial attributes – such as overhauling how U.S. aid and trade packages are delivered to Israel – have been mostly ignored. Appointing an openly dual Israeli-American citizen into the most important central bank in the world could be a watershed moment. While the doors of federal government have long swung open for Israel-lobby appointees focusing most – if not all – their energies on advancing the interests of a foreign state, any who were actually Israeli dual citizens have traditionally kept that a closely-guarded secret. Fischer’s long-term boosters, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), likely want to accustom Americans to openly dual citizens circulating between top roles in the U.S. and Israeli governments. A closer examination of Fischer reveals that average Americans have good reason to oppose his appointment, because his lifelong achievements for Israel have imposed high costs and few benefits to the United States while making peace more difficult to achieve.
Economics
Stanley Fischer was born in Northern Rhodesia in 1943. He studied at London School of Economics and received a PhD in economics from MIT. He taught and chaired the MIT economics department and co-authored a leading macroeconomics textbook with Rudiger Dornbusch. Fischer joined the World Bank in 1988 and became the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1994. He oversaw emergency bailout lending and austerity programs over Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil and Argentina. High flying Citigroup – under the helm of Sanford “Sandy” Weill – recruited Fischer in 2002. There he rose to become vice president with a seven-figure pay package.
Israel
Fischer has not only been an ardent supporter of Israel, his professional efforts began when he took sabbatical leave to Israel in 1972 and 1976-1977. He was a visiting scholar at the Bank of Israel in 1980. More importantly for Israel, Stanley Fischer won an appointment to the Reagan administration’s U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Discussion Group that dealt with Israel’s 1984-1985 economic crisis. In October of 1984, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres arrived in Washington asking an initially reluctant Reagan Administration for an additional $1.5 billion in U.S. emergency funding – over and above the already-promised aid $5.6 billion aid package.1 The help amounted to U.S. taxpayers funding each Israeli citizen $1,650. Another key component of the plan called for a largely unilateral lowering of U.S. tariffs and trade barriers to Israel, a program initially called “Duty Free Treatment for U.S. Imports from Israel” but later repackaged and sold as America’s first “free trade” agreement. Over time the FTA reversed a previously balanced U.S.-Israel trading relationship for one that has produced a cumulative deficit to the U.S. that passed $100 billion in 2013. Seventy American industry groups opposed to the give-away in 1984 were disenfranchised when Israeli Economics Minister Dan Halpern and AIPAC illegally obtained a classified compendium of their industry, market and trade secrets to use against them in lobbying and public relations. An FBI espionage and theft of government property investigation was quashed before it could narrow in on those inside the U.S. government who delivered the secrets to Halpern.
The U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Discussion Group fundamentally transformed U.S. aid to Israel forever. Before the Reagan administration, most U.S. aid to Israel took the form of loans that had to be repaid with interest. After the input of Fischer’s team, subsequent U.S. aid was delivered in the form of outright grants paid directly from the U.S. Treasury – never to be repaid or conditioned when Israel took actions the U.S. opposed.
Like many of Fischer’s later IMF austerity programs, the Joint Discussion Group initially announced that strings attached to the aid would make it temporary. Secretary of State George Shultz insisted during a 1985 address to AIPAC that “Israel must pull itself out of its present economic trauma …. No one can do it for them … our help will be of little avail if Israel does not take the necessary steps to cut government spending, improve productivity, open up its economy and strengthen the mechanisms of economic policy. Israel and its government must make the hard decisions.”1 Shultz wanted to make the huge American cash transfer conditional on major Israeli economic reforms, but intense AIPAC lobbying in Congress threatened to make the State Department influence irrelevant. In the end, Congress delivered aid without Israeli sacrifices, such as selling off bloated state-owned industries and spending belt-tightening. The proposed privatization of $5 billion in state enterprises threatened too much bureaucratic “turf” and too many jobs, so Israel put them on hold. Fischer apologetically characterized the Likud years as a “wasted opportunity by a government that should have known better.”2 Not until 1996 were Fischer’s proscribed economic remedies adopted by American neoconservative consultants to Benjamin Netanyahu as minor points in the “Clean Break” manifesto for Israeli regional hegemony. They remain among the few unimplemented tasks in a plan that called for military action against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
Despite the absence of any real economic reforms that would take Israel off the American taxpayer dole, Fischer co-wrote a blustering 1986 article for the Wall Street Journal called “Israel Has Made Aid Work” that AIPAC circulated widely as an official memorandum of its achievements. “Israel is the largest single recipient of economic aid from the U.S. This is partly because the economic stability of Israel is uncertain and is important to U.S. national interests. Therefore a report on the progress of the Israeli economy is relevant to policy decisions to be made here.” Fischer never bothered to substantiate his premise, that U.S. national interests were somehow served by the bailout or that any aid given to Israel produced tangible benefits. Instead Fischer delivered a fusillade of dry and all but unreadable statistics about Israel’s temporary economic performance. Issues of long-term importance to most Americans, such as returning U.S. aid to the traditional format of loans to be repaid and the likely impact of the FTA on U.S. jobs went unaddressed by Fischer. Fischer’s core achievement – that the transformation of aid from loans to outright taxpayer give-aways – has been unchanged since 1986. The premises behind this ever-increasing entitlement and one-sided FTA performance are likewise never reexamined by Congress – despite the fact that a majority of polled Americans have come to oppose aid increases to Israel. Fischer’s rare admonitions that Israel be held to account, unlike like the economies he transformed through biting IMF austerity programs, have remained nothing more than lip service.
At the end of 2004 Israel’s U.N. ambassador recruited Fischer to become the head of Israel’s central bank, asking, “Why not be our governor?”3 Fischer accepted and initially provided endless amusement to reporters by insisting on speaking Hebrew during press conferences and refusing to speak English. Initial concerns that Fischer’s global stature and experience would overshadow and chafe the relevant players in Israel proved unfounded as Fischer moved energetically into his new role. AIPAC continued to trumpet Fischer’s accomplishments steering Israel through the global financial crisis, though beneath the surface he was performing far more serious tasks for Israel and its global lobby.
Iran Sanctions
As Bank of Israel governor, Stanley Fischer played a central role in coordinating the implementation of AIPAC-generated sanctions against Iran – ostensibly over its nuclear program. Stuart Levey, the head of the U.S. Treasury Department’s division for “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence,” an office created after heavy AIPAC lobbying, met often with Fischer in Israel alongside the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and chiefs of both the Mossad and Shin Bet to explore how to “supplement” UN sanctions and end-run Russian and Chinese opposition.4 The Levey-Fischer strategy was “to work outside the context of the Security Council to engage the private sector and let it know about the risks of doing business with Tehran” particularly against European banks that had only partially drawn back their business dealings with Iran. In 2010, Israel dispatched Fischer to meet with Chinese and Russian “counterparts” in order to financially isolate Iran.5
Fischer’s final official duties for the Israeli government included drilling for “big crisis” scenarios – specifically, Fischer told an Israeli television station – the unavoidable financial fallout of a military attack on Iran.6 “We do plans, we do scenarios, we do exercises about how the central [bank] will work in various situations.”7 After years targeting Iran, Fischer became convinced in his final months in Israel that sanctions alone were not enough to collapse its economy. Fischer reluctantly concluded that even as Iranian economic prospects “continue to go down” the country would likely “find a way to continue to keep economic life going.”7
Fischer suddenly resigned and left the Bank of Israel on June 30, before completing his second five-year term.
Israelis into the Fed and then where?
The last time Fischer’s name was floated to lead a major organization was during a rushed Bush administration attempt at damage control. In 2007, the controversial architect of the Iraq invasion and later World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz was engulfed in an ethics scandal over his pay and promotion package for Shaha Ali Riza. In two short years leading the institution, Wolfowitz catalyzed the alienation of most divisions within the bank and the distrust of economics ministries around the world. Fischer, along with Robert Zoellick and Robert Kimmitt and a handful of others, was considered as an emergency replacement while the administration and stakeholders strategized on how to ease Wolfowitz out with a minimum of scandal.8 In the end, Fischer stayed put in Israel.
It came as a surprise to many when the Wall Street Journal and Israel’s Channel 2 news simultaneously reported in early December 2013 that the White House was “close to nominating” Fischer to be appointee Janet Yellen’s second-in-command at the U.S. central bank.9 Media reports initially indicated that Fischer’s candidacy-to-Senate-confirmation would proceed on greased skids – with no Senate debate – taking only a week so that the pair could quickly take over the Fed in January. However, the Senate concluded its 2013 business without taking up the matter. The earliest date the measure could be put up for a vote is January 6, 2014. Even that date might slip since Senator Rand Paul and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plan to delay the vote unless a long-languishing measure to “Audit the Fed” is also put up for a vote.
This rushed approach has meant relatively little reporting on the deeper implications of having an openly dual Israeli-American citizen a heartbeat away from Fed chairmanship. That is unfortunate, since Israel and its U.S. supporters have many hidden reasons for wanting stronger influence at the Fed that they would likely prefer not to discuss.
That the Fed is a key player in Iran sanctions implementation is certainly no secret. The Fed has been an equal partner in levying hundreds of millions in fines against foreign banks such as R.B.S, Barclays, Standard and Chartered and H.S.B.C. which were charged with violating the Iran sanctions regime. Although AIPAC never mentions it, American exporters have been seriously hurt by sanctions on Iran and the punitive secondary boycott. A coalition representing the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Coalition for American Trade, the National Foreign Trade Council and others urged Congress not to enact sanctions provisions they estimated would cost $25 billion and 210,000 American jobs. (pdf) Keeping such a costly regime in place despite thawing relations and any hard evidence of an Iranian nuclear weaponization program has therefore required immense ongoing efforts by Israel lobbying groups.
An equally important target for Fischer and Israel may be – somewhat ironically given their pro-boycott programs – anti-boycott activities. In the 1970-80s the Federal Reserve played an active “moral suasion” role chastising and corralling U.S. banks away from any activity that Israel construed as compliant with the Arab League economic boycott. An expert with deep experience enforcing the international boycott of Iran, Fischer is likely aware of the many active American grass-roots campaigns aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinians through targeted boycotts. These boycotts range from efforts to get retailers to stop carrying manufactured goods produced in the occupied West Bank (Ahava and Soda Stream), to overturning contracts with firms providing services in occupied territories (Veolia), to academic boycotts and even efforts to get labor union pensions to divest from Israel bonds. Working more closely with Israel and AIPAC, the Fed could become a vital node for reinterpreting and enforcing old or new laws aimed at outlawing and punishing groups organizing such grass-roots activities by targeting U.S. bank accounts and freezing their financial flows.
Fischer may also want to launch “exercises” to prepare the U.S. financial system for the fallout of Israeli military attacks on Iran. New bills in Congress drafted by AIPAC call not only for additional sanctions aimed at thwarting a fledgling deal on Iran’s nuclear program (favored 2-to-1 by Americans). AIPAC’s bill forces the U.S. to “have Israel’s back” in the event of a unilateral Israeli strike. If Israel has already decided to attack Iran, it would benefit immensely from having Fischer inside the Fed, protecting the financial flows Israel now regards as all but a birthright from its primary global underwriter. Less well-known is the Fed’s authority to authorize foreign bank acquisitions. Any future Israeli campaign to further entwine its banks into the U.S. financial system through acquisitions would likely find a much more welcoming regulator in Fischer.
Whatever the real motivation for Fischer’s sudden, inexplicably rushed insertion into the Federal Reserve, it is also worthwhile to note longstanding Fed policies have correctly considered U.S. citizenship to be preferable for at least one key position, “because of the special nature of the supervisory function, the need to ensure confidentiality of information, and the delegated nature of the function.” Unfortunately, that policy preference covers only Fed bank examiners rather than top leadership – the Federal Reserve Act is silent on the wisdom of installing a revolving door for returning U.S. citizens who took on dual citizenship as a condition of serving a foreign government.
AIPAC, Fischer’s co-author of harmful U.S. economic policies on behalf of Israel, likely sees the Fischer appointment as an important test case to assess American tolerance for openly dual Israeli-American citizens running key U.S. federal agencies. In 2009 former AIPAC research director Martin Indyk, who was at the center of AIPAC’s research division during the FTA push, said that “the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement served as a wedge that opened up the Congress to free trade agreements across the world, including the NAFTA agreement.” Likewise, if Fischer can be “wedged” into the Fed, it begs the question of why former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and historian Michael Oren could not someday lead the Near East division of the State Department. From AIPAC’s perspective, having qualified Israelis directly run key divisions of the U.S. Treasury such as Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, rather than indirectly through AIPAC-vetted appointees such as Stuart Levey and his hand-picked successor David Cohen, could probably boost the volume of taxpayer give-aways while improving coordination with Israel. Given AIPAC and Israel’s overly large influence on U.S. military initiatives in the region, the lobby may now feel the moment is right for appointing Israeli generals into the Joint Chiefs at the Department of Defense. This, AIPAC may well reason, would be much more convenient than constantly arranging visiting Israeli military and intelligence delegations that increasingly serve as sole briefers (rather than DoD or the American intelligence community) of members of the US Congress.
Soon after word of his Fed nomination spread, Fischer again made uncharacteristically harsh statements about Israel at an NYU Law School forum. As reported in The Jewish Week, Fischer told the audience that Israel is not seeking peace “to the extent that it should” and that it is “divided between those who want to settle the West Bank and those who seek peace.” Fischer – who had every chance to pull U.S. and Israeli financial levers that could have forced Israel out of occupied territories or forced compliance with International law – never did. Adding to suspicion that the statement was simply more empty “lip service” aimed at building popular support among Americans tired of war, was the reporter of the quote – former AIPAC lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield. In 1986 Bloomfield was grilled as a key suspect (pdf) in the 1985 FBI investigation of AIPAC for espionage during the FTA negations
If Americans were ever polled on it – and they never are – the majority who now object to increasing aid to Israel would also likely object to quasi-governmental and governmental positions being staffed by people who – by citizenship or sheer strength of identity politics – are primarily occupied with advancing Israeli interests rather than those of the United States. It is obvious that the real reason AIPAC and its economic luminaries such as Fischer never substantiate any of the advertised benefits the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” delivers to America in return for all of the costs is simple – there simply aren’t any. As greater numbers of Americans become aware that the entire “special relationship” framework is sustained by nothing more than Israel lobby campaign-finance and propaganda networks, the harder the lobby will have to work to forcibly wedge operatives like Fischer into positions where they can thwart growing public opposition – whether it takes the form of boycotts or grassroots opposition to the U.S. fighting more wars for Israel. In the very short term, Americans can only fight such undue Israel lobby influence by again – like during the drive to attack Syria – staging a mass action to demand their senators reject Stanley Fischer’s nomination.
Oberdorfer, Don “Will U.S. Dollars Fix Israel’s Economy?” Washington Post, June 9 1985.
Maital, Shlomo “Stanley Fischer: the man and the plan,” Jerusalem Report, February 7, 2005.
BBC Monitoring Middle East, March 5, 2007.
Keinon, Herb “Russia won’t back crippling sanctions.” Comment comes day before high-level US-Israel meeting on Iran. Jerusalem Post, February 25, 2010.
Williams, Dan “Iran Stepping Up Its Atomic Efforts,” The Gazette, August 13, 2012.
A Drone Survival Guide with hints and tips on how to thwart the “robotic birds” has been published on the internet. With over 30,000 drones expected to be flying over the US by 2030, the Guide urges readers to familiarize themselves with the craft.
In light of the growing number of drones, the Guide advises a number of techniques to evade and scramble drones. The document is available online and has been translated into 17 different languages.
“Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day?” writes the Guide.
It contains the silhouettes and measurements of all of the most widely-used drones, from the ‘Killer Bee’ to ‘The Sentinel’ as well as information on where they are currently operational. It goes on to detail ways you can hide from a drone.
“Most drones are equipped with night vision, and/or infrared vision cameras, so-called FLIR sensors. These can see human heat signatures from far away, day or night. However there are ways to hide from drones.”
Among the tactics it advices for eluding the aerial craft are: hiding “in thick forests,” wearing space blankets to confuse heat sensors, not using wireless communication, and the use of mannequins or human-sized dolls as decoys.
“Wait for bad weather. Drones cannot operate in high winds, smoke, rainstorms or heavy weather conditions.”
As well as avoidance strategies to escape from the craft, the document also gives advice on how to hack into a drone’s systems. The Guide gives the assurance that as long as a drone’s communications are not encrypted then they can be hacked. It describes how to intercept and interfere with the workings of a drone and also details a process called “spoofing”.
“Small, portable GPS transmitters can send fake GPS signals and disrupt the Drones navigation systems. This can be used, for example, to steer drones into self-destruction flight paths or even hijack them and land them on a runway.”
The US’ use of drones for surveillance as well as military strikes has drawn global recognition. Last week the Yemeni parliament passed an anti-drone motion because of the civilian lives lost in the US strikes on Al-Qaeda militants in the country. Pakistan has also condemned the US for its use of the craft, decrying the strikes as an affront to its sovereignty.
Moreover, the Obama Administration has come into the firing line for increasing the amount of drones operating in American air space.
As has been widely reported, the American Studies Association, the umbrella organization of academics devoted to the study of US literature, history and culture, recently voted to join the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
In the days since that historic vote numerous high-profile US supporters of the Jewish state have vehemently decried the scholarly association’s historic decision.
The first to do so was Lawrence Summers, one-time Harvard president and prime architect–in his as deregulator-in-chief- of the finance industry–of the recession that has robbed millions of Americans of their jobs, savings and homes. He has been followed by numerous such as Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic and by Michael Roth president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Reading these reactions to the democratically determined posture of the ASA one particular argument appears with almost metronomic predictability. It goes something like this:
“Considering all the countries in the world where human rights abuses are rife, why in the world is the ASA so concerned about Israel, the only “democratic state” in the Middle East? Why is this organization along with the millions of others who support the BDS movement “singling Israel out” for such punitive treatment?”
One is left to wonder. Do these gentlemen always treat the intelligence of their audience with such contempt? Do they always assume that those to whom they speak are deeply ill-informed about the structural realities of contemporary politics and incapable of the most basic logical inductions in regard to the nature of Israel’s relationship to the US?
As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last 50 years knows, Israel has, it is true, long been “singled out” in America…. for extraordinary levels of financial, military and diplomatic support from the United States government.
Indeed it could be said without exaggeration that no small and putatively sovereign nation in modern history has ever been the object of such lavishly favorable treatment from a Great Power. There is nothing remotely comparable to the US indulgent treatment of Israel in Spain’s or Great Britain’s long historical runs as the world’s unquestioned hegemon.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the current US President who declared quite famously that the US and Israel must “work in lockstep” within the theater of international politics. Or we could listen to the current Vice-President and current Secretary of State who frequently remind audiences that there is “no daylight” between the US and Israel when it comes to strategic goals in the world.
Is there any historical precedent—within a political establishment that constantly talks about how partisan politics must “stop at the water’s edge”– for the pledge made by house minority leader Eric Cantor to the Israeli Prime Minister in November 2010 that he would “serve as a check” on his own country’s presidential administration should it begin to consider policies that he deemed detrimental to Israel?
Is there another country that could purposely [attempt to] sink a US warship, the USS Liberty in 1967, and never suffer any sanction or recognizable alteration in bilateral relations for doing so?
Is there any other country that could assassinate an unarmed US citizen in an act of piracy on the high seas–Furkan Dogan in 2010–and not only not be called on the carpet for it, but also have the operation–patently illegal under the international laws of the sea–that led directly to the death be met with virtual silence by US State Department spokespersons and the vast majority of the US Congress?
Can we imagine a situation where a person from another country who had become a billionaire working mostly in US industry could go on national TV in his native land and brag openly and without apparent fear of consequence about how he had helped steal nuclear secrets from the United States? This is exactly what happened a month ago with the Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan.
Is there another country (besides perhaps certain members of the so-called Five Eyes Group of English-speaking countries) that has direct access to the raw data from US citizen communications currently being swept up by the NSA?
Can we imagine the US allowing analysts in any of those “other” countries–whose situations everyone is now supposed to critique before ever deigning to critique Israel–to scrutinize virtually without limits and for their own particular purposes the private communications of American citizens?
And these are only a few of the many examples of extraordinary US indulgence of Israel that could be adduced here.
No, for at least 46 years and arguably more, the US-Israel relationship has not been “normal” at all, which is to say, in any way comparable to any other bilateral relationship (with the possible exceptions of those it maintains with the UK and Canada) maintained by the US.
Summers, and the small army of people echoing his message on letters-to-the-editor sections around the country know this quite well.
So why are they pretending that is not the case, and that, correspondingly, any systematic critique of Israeli behavior must first pass the test of comparability to that of various and sundry countries around the world?
Because, they are interested in doing what many people do when they find themselves with a largely untenable long-term position: try to steer the conversation from going where they don’t want it to go.
And where is that?
Away from the matter of Israeli behavior, and more specifically, how the fundamental legal design and international comportment of the Israeli state corresponds (or not) to the democratic values most Americans claim to believe in.
If you can ball people up talking about the issue of the Israeli human rights record in relationship to other places that have nothing remotely approaching the privileged, 51st State treatment accorded to Israel–and thus clearly unable to be compared to it in any meaningful way–you can avoid having people talk about things like the following.
That, despite the New York Times’s and much of the mainstream media’s attempts to convince Americans of the contrary, the only uninspected, which is to say, completely rogue and unaccountable nuclear program in the Middle East belongs to Israel. And it is not a small one, having, according to most reports, around 200 warheads.Therefore, the only country really capable of “wiping” some other country “off the map” or coercing it to obeisance through nuclear threat in the eastern Mediterranean, the Mashriq and Iran is Israel.
And no amount of talk (are you picking up on the pattern of argumentation yet?) about Iran’s completely non-existent nuclear bomb program–the assessment of the Directorate of National Intelligence of the US, not mine–can change this fact.
That Israel is an ethno-state, which is to say, a place where one must possess certain blood lines to accede to the fullest possible level of citizenship. Those who do not meet these requirements can live there, but in a decidedly second-class status.Israel is, of course, not alone among nations in offering citizenship on the basis of blood rights or jus sanguinis.
Where it does stand out in the international context, however, is in the way it does this while simultaneously denying full civic rights to millions of its native inhabitants. This means that a Jew from the USA or Russia can move to Israel and be granted that highest level of citizenship almost instantaneously. This, while the Palestinian whose family has lived in the territory now controlled by Israel for centuries is forced to inhabit a relative civic limbo in the same place, with all that that entails in terms of the potentially capricious encroachments of the state in his or her life.
As part of this approach to citizenship Israel forcibly prevents its already second-class but quite native Arab citizens from living as united families within the borders of Israel after marrying fellow Palestinians from the occupied territories or any other place in the world.
So pervasive is the emphasis on ethnic belonging that security officials at Ben-Gurion Airport blithely slot passengers into differing security protocols–and here I speak from personal experience—according to how they answer the following thinly veiled question regarding one’s pertinence to the most legally favored group: “Are you an Israeli or do you have family in Israel?
I don’t think that most Americans I know would associate this model of state and these behaviors (and this is a very small sample) with any system they would be happy or proud to live in or being what they understand to be truly democratic.
And no army of spinmeisters repeating the mantra that “Israel is the only Democracy in the Middle East” can change this salient fact.
That Israel has a large and growing population of religious citizens that is not only every bit as intolerant and backward-looking as the worst Muslim fanatics in Arab countries or the worst Christian fundamentalists in the US, but that has a considerably larger control over the political institutions of the country than is the case here or, for that matter, in the great majority of Islamic countries.Yet, this is hardly ever talked about in our press or by self appointed spokesmen for Israel such as those mentioned above. Rather, Israel’s most fervent supporters in the media constantly tell us (there’s that pattern argumentation again) about all those terrible Arabs— that want to impose sharia law on the world. Nary a word about how the haredim are encroaching daily upon the democratic freedoms of secular Israelis.
That the current President of Israel, apparently unaware that he was on camera, openly bragged in 2001 about his ability to manipulate the very same Americans that, in no small measure, have funded his political career and generally support his government’s efforts at ethnic cleansing (that is my understanding of what it is called in other parts of the world when you take over lands by force, displace the autochthonous inhabitants and place settlers of a different ethnic or national background on the seized territory) as well how he actively undermined the Oslo peace accords to which his government was a signatory and were brokered by the US.All this from a man, and from there, a government apparatus, that constantly tells the US and the world (there’s that pattern or argumentation once again) that there is “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side, no person of demonstrable good will ready to talk in serious and reasonable terms about the future of the region.
What Summers and those that echo his words want most of all is to avoid an honest and wide-ranging conversation among Americans about how, and to what degree (if at all), our joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel benefits the average citizen of this country.
If they were really the great friends of Israel they claim to be, they would repeatedly, indeed doggedly, say to their friends living in the Jewish state, as well as those living here for whom it is a prime object interest, what an old Jesuit, channeling the Gospel of Luke, once told me at the height of my youthful self-absorption:
“To whom much is given, much is expected”.
This is essentially what the ASA is doing.
It is a shame that instead of using their well-placed voices to second the call to have Israel live more fully within the parameters of its publicly proclaimed moral codes (you know, the only “democracy” in the Middle East) such prominent opinion leaders insist on throwing rhetorical smoke bombs designed to obscure most important issues at play in the country’s present-day drama.
Once again we hear that Israel has bombed the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “in retaliation” for something that they’ve done against Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country will “respond”. Many people would agree that a person in his position has a duty to protect his citizens. Certainly, those in the White House and Downing Street do, which is why Israel gets away with murder, quite literally. It’s all down to legitimate self-defence; or so we are led to believe.
What, though, is the reality? Why is that right of self-defence never extended to the people of Palestine? After all, it is their land which is under occupation; it is their land which is being stolen and colonised; it is their land from which they are being excluded in a decades-long act of ethnic cleansing that its proponents hope will never end.
If retaliation and responses are the effects, then the occupation and colonisation of Palestine have to be the causes. There is no other way to look at the asymmetric conflict in the Holy Land. Despite what Israel and its apologists would have us believe, this is not a clash of equals, nor is it a case of a defenceless state struggling for its very existence in the face of overwhelming odds. It is, in fact, a nuclear-armed state, backed by the word’s superpowers and armed to the teeth with conventional weapons, most of them self-produced (and sold to the world for a staggering $7 billion a year boost to Israel’s economy), occupying, colonising and threatening a largely civilian population armed, at best, with AK47s and other small arms.
Israel is an occupying power; its occupation of somebody else’s land is the cause, and the resistance to the occupation by the Palestinians is the very legitimate effect; Israel doesn’t do retaliation, it is merely continuing to do what it has done for sixty-five years and counting, killing Palestinians and taking their land. That is the ugly reality of the situation. It is all very well for Netanyahu to say that his country will “respond” to acts of resistance by the Palestinians, but it is much more valid and legitimate for Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to say that action from Gaza is his people’s response to Israel’s brutal military occupation. That is a more accurate narrative for us to follow and accept.
Should anyone still doubt this, it is worth looking to history for further confirmation. It is reasonable, I think, to start not with Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, published in 1896, as he did not advocate a state in Palestine, but with the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917. This letter sent from the then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild was a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet”. The issue was never discussed and approved by parliament and it has no legal status, then or now. Balfour told Rothschild that the British government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…” It was written a month before the British army entered Jerusalem during the First World War and does not mention a state, just a “national home”. Such ambiguity was quite possibly deliberate. In any case, it is interesting that the Palestinians are described by what they are not (“non-Jewish”) rather than what they are; a typically-demeaning imperialist tactic to describe the Other as not being of Us.
In 1919, the US-established King-Crane Commission determined that “a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” That has to be one of the most accurate of political prophecies of all time.
A year later, on 1 July 1920, the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew openly sympathetic to the Zionist cause, read a message from King George “to the people of Palestine”. In it, the king assured the Palestinians that despite the existence of the Balfour Declaration and “measures” to be taken to put it into practice, such measures “will not in any way affect the civil or religious rights or diminish the prosperity of the general population of Palestine”.
Samuel went on to say, in 1921, that the British government would never consent to a policy which takes Palestinian-owned land and gives it to “strangers”. HM Government, he insisted, “would never impose upon [the people of Palestine] a policy which that people had reason to think was contrary to their religious, their political and their economic interests.”
The Zionists had other ideas and the result is that there is now a state in Palestine whose founders declared it to be a “Jewish State” in 1948 and which insists that the Palestinians, upon whose land the state was built, recognise it as such as a precursor to any meaningful peace agreement. What will happen to the 20 per cent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians in such a “Jewish State” has never been explained; some on the Israeli right want to expel them to Jordan, completing the ethnic cleansing started in 1948. Whatever happens, they certainly won’t be treated with justice as Israeli apartheid sinks its roots ever deeper in occupied Palestine.
Cause and effect; action and reaction; decide for yourself: whose land was taken from them and given to another people? Whose land has been colonised? Whose land is being stolen from them on a daily basis? Who are the aggressors and who are more justified in asserting their right of self-defence; Israelis or Palestinians?
By any reasonable legal and moral yardstick, it is the Palestinians who are responding to Israeli aggression; Israel cannot claim with any justification whatsoever that when it bombs an overcrowded refugee camp, as it did this week, and kills Palestinians, it is merely “retaliating” for something done by Palestinians resisting the occupation. Israel doesn’t do retaliation, it never has. It just does more of the same and what it has been doing for more than 65 years: taking Palestinian land and lives through violent and illegal means. The sooner that journalists and politicians acknowledge this and start to deal with the conflict in a fair and balanced way the sooner that a just and lasting peace may be possible.
Until then, we will no doubt continue to see Israel’s aggressive and expansionist colonialism dressed-up as the acts of a democratic state desperate for peace with its unreasonable neighbours. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Dov Lior, a popular chief rabbi in Israel, recently called Obama a Kushi, which is Israel’s equivalent to nig*er. Most Americans are completely unaware of the general contempt that many Jewish people have towards blacks, as Max Blumenthal found out when he interviewed dozens of young people in Israel who reiterated the Rabbi’s sentiments about Obama. Blumenthal’s video titled Feeling the Hate in Israel was removed from YouTube, Vimeo, and the Huffington Post shortly after going viral.
In order to understand the nature of this hatred we need to understand the historical context, which dates back hundreds of years. Although Jews were just a tiny percentage of the European population, they dominated the African slave trade. Jewish historians were so proud of this accomplishment that they bragged endlessly about their involvement and dominance of the industry in their historical texts. In Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History, prominent Jewish Historian Marc Raphael wrote “Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French, British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated. This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the triangular slave trade that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses….”
Jewish historical records show that Jewish involvement in the North American slave trade was so dominant that slave posts were frequently closed on Jewish holidays. Arnold Wiznitzer, a Jewish historian, wrote, “the buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of their lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices. If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed” In The United States Jewry 1776-1985 Jacob Marcus wrote, “all through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth century, Jews in the North were to own black servants. In 1820 over 75% of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves. Almost 40% of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more.” In the South, which had a much higher ratio of slave ownership than the North, only 5% of white people owned slaves.
White Europeans would have ended the morally corrupt practice of slavery in North America much sooner if it weren’t for powerful Jewish businessmen lobbying to keep their profitable industry alive. As Rabbi and historian, Bertram Korn said, “many Southern Jews believed slavery to be indispensable to their happiness and security. “The road to social and economic advancement and acceptance [for the Jews] was made easier by the institution of slavery.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan discovered these facts and published the book: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which quotes Jewish historical records such as the aforementioned to prove the case. The Anti-Defamation League, mainstream media, and many other Jewish American organizations slandered Farrakhan for publishing the book, even calling him anti-Semitic for merely assembling a collection of Jewish historical records.
This racism has not abated in recent times unfortunately. For example, when black African Jews returned to Israel in 1969 under the Right of Return Act, the government ruled that they were not real Jews and therefore did not qualify for citizenship or any legal status. The black Hebrews were also denied state benefits and work permits. It wasn’t until 2003 that black Hebrews were granted permanent residency, but not the automatic citizenship granted to all other races returning on the exact same provision. If it wasn’t for a group of Americans who shamed the Israeli government into granting black African Jews some legal status, they would probably never have received it. To this day black Jews are still not accepted by the Jewish community in Israel. Racial slurs, insults, and discrimination in housing rentals are commonplace. This treatment has reached such an unbearable level that Ethiopan Jews have taken to the streets to protest. In response, Sofa Landver, the Israeli Immigrant Absorption Minister, smugly replied that they should be grateful for all that Israel has done for them. This is reminiscent of white supremacist rhetoric in the America, which claims that Africans should be grateful their ancestors were brought to America. Israel was clearly created under the premise of future safety for all Jews, not just white European Jews. Therefore, black African Jews should have the same rights and entitlements to Israel as any other Jews.
The Israeli government has even been caught attempting to sterilize Ehtiopan Jews by giving them the controversial birth control, Depo-Provera, without warning them of the potential side effects. Ethiopian Jews are less than 1% of Israel’s population, but yet account for 60% of the women on Depo-Provera. The side effects are quite severe, including pain in the hands and back, heavy bleeding, and in some cases permanent sterilization. Around 10% of the women taking this drug develop substantial side effects. In 2004, the FDA warned against the dangers of the drugs. Unfortunately, many Ethiopan Jews fear being deported if they speak up about these types of human rights abuses.
In an effort to “preserve the Jewish character of the country,” Israel now plans on deporting immigrant workers and their children; even in cases where the children were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, and have spent their entire lives as Israeli residents. In 2012, massive riots broke out in Israel protesting the presence of African refugees. The crime rates of African refugees were half the rate of the Jewish population in Israel, yet the local population claimed to live in fear of the black immigrants. A member of the Jewish Knesset (Parliament) name Miri Regev said that the Africans are “a cancer in the body.” The Jewish Interior Minister said Israel, “belongs to the white man.” A survey of Jewish Israelis by the Israeli Democracy Institute found that a majority of Israelis agreed with Mr. Regev, and 33% supported anti-African violence against the refugees.
Israeli racism is so great that when the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) took a poll in 2007 they found that 66% of Israeli teens believe Arabs are less intelligent, uncultured, and violent. Fifty percent of the Israelis taking the poll said they would not share an apartment with an Arab, befriend an Arab or let their kids befriend Arabs, or even let Arabs into their homes. A poll taken by the ACRI in 2008 found that these trends were increasing. Another poll taken in 2007 by the Center Against Racism found that 75% of Israeli Jews did not approve of Jews living in the same apartment buildings as Arabs, and that more than 50% of Jews would not have an Arab boss and thought that marrying an Arab was tantamount to national treason. Fifty percent of Israelis also thought Arabs should not be allowed in the same entertainment sites and 40% wanted Arab’s voting rights rescinded. Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), recently admitted that Israel has become “more and more racist.”
Now imagine how much higher those percentages would have been if they were asked about black people. In Israel, it is against the law for a gentile to marry a Jew, which is presumably directed at preventing black immigrants and Arabs from marrying white Jews. Amnesty International has condemned their marriage policy as discriminatory.
Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Israel Hayom, recently published a column which stated, “It is not uncommon to see 13 or 14-year-old girls dating members of ethnic minorities…. You see them sitting together on street benches and out on the town. Dating a member of an ethnic minority no longer carries a stigma. They come along with money, a car, buying her things that her parents can’t give her, spoiling her. There are a million stories like this around here.” There are enough statistics on exploitation, seduction and coercion of young girls, but when it comes to ‘members of ethnic minorities’ – shhh! Don’t awaken the beast, or you might be considered a racist. The words ‘danger of assimilation’ are also kept out of our clean and enlightened lexicon.”
In a 2012 ynetarticle, a Jewish journalist claimed that she spent 15 of the most terrifying minutes of her life because lots of African refugees were around. She said that Tel Aviv was turning into the Harlem of the 80′s, and therefore black people should be deported from Israel.
In 2010, the leader of the Sephardic community and founder of the Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, stated that the sole purpose of non-Jews was to serve Jews. He also said in a television interview that “gentiles need to die… goyim have no place in this world.” Many of the top Israeli Rabbis issued a religious edict saying, “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”
Even though Israel takes a great deal of money from US in terms of direct foreign aid, “scrapped” military equipment that is really worth billions, one-sided contracts, and even charitable donations from Jews and Christians, according to Official Direct Assistance (ODA) Israel is one of the stingiest developed countries in the world. Israel is one of the richest countries on the planet with more than 10,000 millionaires, but gives nearly 10 times less than the world average and gives the 4th least of any developed nation per capita, only barely beating out much poorer countries like Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. So while Israel took in $3 billion from America in direct aid and tens of billions in the other aid measures mentioned above, they only gave $141 million in foreign aid to nations in need of assistance in 2010. While Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were pledging billions to Africa, the 40% of American billionaires who are Jewish, focused their charitable contributions on Jewish causes, which arguably need the money the least.
Unfortunately, Jewish Americans seem to have mimicked their Israeli counterparts’ prejudice. In 1993, San Francisco newspapers broke a story that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which has close ties to Israel, was supporting South African apartheid by paying police officers for confidential information, illegally wire-tapping phones, and even dumpster diving to acquire private information on anti-apartheid activists. The Anti-Defamation League later sold the information to the South African government.
The American media, which is predominately controlled by Jewish Americans (see this article for the names, pictures and titles, to prove this fact), spends a ridiculous amount of airtime focusing on racial strife in America in order to cause a divide between blacks and whites. The truth of the matter is that there is very little inequality between whites and blacks when Jewish people are subtracted from the white column. Although Jewish people represent only 2% of the American population, they comprise 33% of the Supreme Court, 12-35% of the Ivy League student population and nearly 80% of the top administrative positions, 64% of the Federal Reserve including the top two spots, 13% of the Senate, 6.5% of the House of Representatives, and the top positions of the IRS and SEC. In addition, 10.25% of America’s millionaires, 36% of America’s billionaires, and 45% of Forbes’ 40 richest Americans are Jewish. Given these figures, it is statistically impossible for white gentiles to be over-represented in many of these positions. What is really taking place is that Jewish tribalism and nepotism keeps black people from positions of power and influence, but uses their media to blame the inequality on white racism.
The American media also spends vast amounts of airtime on Israel and Middle East, but little to no airtime on Africa, even though America has just as much strategic and humanitarian interest in the continent. America gets more oil from Nigeria than Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, and Iran combined. The media has fooled the American people into believing that they get their oil from the Middle East so they continually intercede on Israel’s behalf. The reality is that America produces half of its own oil and gets the vast majority of the rest from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria. And given the history, Americans certainly owe much more to Africa than to Israel and the greater Middle East. Miraculously the Jewish controlled media ignored the Rwandan genocide, which killed nearly one million Africans; most likely because they didn’t care about the black people they once enslaved and didn’t want to take away from the sympathy of the Jewish holocaust. There are dozens of Jewish lobbies in America that have secured vast aid to the Middle East, but there are no Jewish lobbies for black African countries.
Even to this day the Jewish community is yet to apologize or acknowledge any role in the African slave trade. In fact, they even deny it, and crucify anyone who discusses it, which is similar one would think to holocaust denial. The denial of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, considering all the Jewish documentation, is equally as preposterous as denying the Jewish holocaust.
Update: In 2012, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai deported hundreds of black families from Israel to Sudan for not being Jewish, despite universal opposition from human rights groups. Many of the deported children had been born and raised in Israel and spoke fluent Hebrew. The Israeli government decided not to ship the deportees’ belongings with them back to Sudan, and instead left the refugees’ possessions to sit around in a warehouse for months while Israeli immigration officials were reported to have stolen what few valuable possessions were contained within. A week after the deportation, many of the refugee children began to die due to disease, in large part because their medicine was held back with their luggage in Israel.
Martin van Creveld, a former professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a world-leading writer on military matters, has made many enemies with his seemingly outrageous views.
But actually he does a great service by sharing his thoughts about what ‘mad dog’ Israeli might do next.
In a September 2003 interview in Elsevier (the Dutch weekly) Van Creveld said: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”
Van Creveld talked about ‘collective deportation’ as Israel’s only meaningful plan for the Palestinian people. “The Palestinians should all be deported. The people who strive for this [the Israeli government] are waiting only for the right man and the right time…”
As to whether Israel would care much about being branded a rogue state if it carried out a genocidal deportation against Palestinians, Van Creveld quoted a remark by former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
Lebanon, and now Gaza… Israel’s ‘mad dog’ credentials are beyond dispute. And the West is leaning over backwards not to be bothersome.
So has the right time arrived? Could the man they are waiting for be the snarling rottweiler Netanyahu, who seems to be in with a good chance at the Israeli elections?
He’s a ‘war on terror’ freak and therefore very appealing to a neurotic electorate. It was he who, in 2001, said: “There is an empire of terror. There are chiefdoms. Arafat has his own chiefdoms. Bin Laden has his own chiefdom. The Hezbollah in Lebanon have their chiefdom. There is Hamas and Islamic Jihad working under Arafat’s chiefdom. And they enjoy the support and sponsorship in close cooperation with such sovereign states as Iraq and Iran, havens in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern regimes. They work together, both in material support and of course political support…
“They are after our civilization. We must summon the forces of civilization and the force and the power to act against them now, when we have the power and when we still have the time to do so.”
These militant Islamics, he said, don’t hate America because of Israel. “It’s the other way around. They hate Israel because of America. They see us… as an outpost of common values, our common values of freedom. They hate that freedom. They hate our way of life. They hate our respect for individual rights, our ideas of free choice, our free society, our free press… It’s that flame of liberty that these people want to extinguish. But it is the United States holding that torch with its allies who can wipe out these terrorists. And we must do nothing short of it. We must wipe them out or they will wipe us out.”
Come again? Islamists hate Israel’s respect for individual rights? Pardon me while I die laughing!
In the meantime the US and Britain have been very obliging in the vast amounts of money, effort and lives they have expended in Iraq and Afghanistan for Israel’s benefit.
Later, in 2006, Netanyahu was cooking up the case for war against Iran, saying: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.”
Of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad he urged: “Stop him… He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.”
Speaking on Israeli Army Radio, Netanyahu claimed that Israel would be Iran’s first target for destruction but, to make sure Israel’s supporters remained in a cosy, warm embrace and firmly on-side, insisted that Iran’s arsenal would also be directed against the US and Europe.
When asked if President Bush could afford another military adventure after Iraq, Netanyahu said acting on the Iranian threat would not be adventurous but necessary.
Netanyahu was groomed and financed from an early age by the sinister and influential CFR – America’s Council on Foreign Affairs – and has links to George Schultz and warmongering neo-cons like Perle and Feith.
Van Creveld’s specialism is the future of war and he’s well placed for a shrewd appreciation of where Israel’s warpath is leading. Every lame-brained stooge and Zionist plant in the White House, Congress and Senate, and in Number 10, the Foreign Office, Westminster, and the front and back benches of the Labour and Conservative Parties should take note.
After Gaza did they reprimand the delinquent cur and banish it to its kennel? No. They still pat and stroke and feed the rabid beast.
In April 2007 the European Union agreed to set jail sentences up to three years for those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust.1 More recently, in response to the remarks of Bishop Richard Williamson, the Pope has proclaimed that Holocaust denial is “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.”
But what does Holocaust denial really mean? Begin with the word Holocaust. The Holocaust2 (spelled with a capital H) refers to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is supposed to be the German’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent Jewish victims of the Third Reich.
People like Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and Bishop Williamson who do not believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse. Their alternate historical scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as Holocaust denial. Rudolf and Zundel were shipped to Germany where they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to three and five years, respectively. Williamson may not be far behind.
Politicians deride Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences as “beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior.”3 Non-Zionist Jews who participate in such revisionism, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as “self-haters” and are shunned and spat upon. Even Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust denier.
But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions:
1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.
2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.
3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII.
Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?
Is it sacrilegious to ask, “If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?” Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.
Is it really “beyond international discourse” to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers? If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it “unacceptable behavior” to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?
For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping. Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes. So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?
“Holocaust Denial” might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.
The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of “Never Forget” while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. It allows Elie Wiesel to boast of having worked for these same terrorists (as a journalist, not a fighter) while refusing to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the war crimes his employer committed. It makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinian people.
The Holocaust story eliminates any comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed are. It memorializes the resistance of Jews in the ghettos of Europe while steadfastly denying any comparison with the resistance of Palestinians in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. It allows claims that this year’s Hanukah Massacre in Gaza, with a kill ratio of 100 to one, was a “proportionate response” to Palestinian resistance to unending occupation.
The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal: you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won’t remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed “soldier of Christ,” long before he was a bad Nazi.
The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination was an important neo-conservative tool to drive the United States into Iraq. The same neo-con ideologues, like Norman Podoretz, routinely compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler and Nazism with Islamofascism with the intent of driving us into Iran. The title of the recent Israeli conference at Yad Vashem made this crystal clear: “Holocaust Denial: Paving the Way to Genocide.”
“Remember the Holocaust” will be the battle cry of the next great clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned at the stake.
Daniel McGowan is a Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Because of admonishment by the administration, it is hereby stated that the above remarks are solely those of the author. Hobart and William Smith Colleges neither condone nor condemn these opinions. Furthermore, the author has been instructed to use his personal email address of mcgowandaniel@yahoo.com and not his college email at mcgowan@hws.edu for those wishing to contact him with comments or criticisms. Read other articles by Daniel.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has opened up much of the American public to serious discussion of Israel’s realities. He’s no expert on Zionist history, but the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel propagandists must now work 25 hours a day, 366 days a year, trying to discredit equating Israel and apartheid South Africa.
Curiously, Carter only mentions South African apartheid 3 times. He relates how, on his 1973 visit to Israel,
“General Rabin described the close relationship that Israel had with South Africa in the diamond trade (he had returned from there a day or two early to greet us) but commented that the South African system of apartheid could not long survive.”
He also tells us that
“Israeli leaders have embarked on a series of unilateral decisions, bypassing both Washington and the Palestinians. Their presumption is that an encircling barrier will finally resolve the Palestinian problem. Utilizing their political and military dominance, they are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories. The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land. There has been a determined and remarkably effective effort to isolate settlers from Palestinians, so that a Jewish family can commute from Jerusalem to their highly subsidized home deep in the West Bank on roads from which others are excluded, without ever coming in contact with any facet of Arab life.”
And he presents the 3 unattractive options in front of Israel’s public. One is
“A system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed, although many citizens of Israel deride the racist connotation of prescribing permanent second-class status for the Palestinians. As one prominent Israeli stated, ‘I am afraid that we are moving toward a government like that of South Africa, with dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship. The West Bank is not worth it.’”
Beyond that, his only citation re post-apartheid South Africa is listing Nelson Mandela as supporting the “Geneva Initiative” Israel/Palestine peace plan that Carter was involved in drawing up.
In reality, Israeli and American Zionist ties to racist Pretoria were so close that there can be no doubt that Zionism’s leaders were accomplices in apartheid’s crimes, including murderous invasions of Angola and Namibia.
Israel denounced apartheid until the 1973 Yom Kippur war as it sought to diplomatically outflank the Arabs in the UN by courting Black Africa. But most Black states broke ties after the war, in solidarity with Egypt, trying to drive non-African Israel out of the Sinai, part of Africa. Jerusalem then turned towards South Africa.
During WW ll, Britain had John Vorster interned as a Nazi sympathizer. But in 1976 Israel invited South Africa’s Prime Minister to Jerusalem. Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s PM, hailed “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.” Both confronted “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” Israel, alone in the world, allowed Bophuthatswana, SA’s puppet ‘black homeland,’ to open an embassy.
In 1989, Ariel Sharon, with David Chanoff, wrote Warrior: An Autobiography. He told of his 1981 trip to Africa and the US as Israel’s Defense Minister:
“From Zaire we went to South Africa, where Lily and I were taken to see the Angola border. There South Africans were fighting a continuing war against Cuban-led guerrilla groups infiltrating from the north. To land there our plane came in very high as helicopters circled, searching the area. When the helicopters were satisfied, we corkscrewed down toward the field in a tight spiral to avoid the danger of ground-to-air missiles, the Russian-supplied SAM 7 Strellas that I had gotten to know at the Canal.
On the ground I saw familiar scenes. Soldiers and their families lived in this border zone at constant risk, their children driven to school in convoys protected by high-built armored cars, which were less vulnerable to mines.
I went from unit to unit, and in each place I was briefed and tried to get a feel for the situation. It is not in any way possible to compare Israel with South Africa, and I don’t believe that any Jew can support apartheid. But seeing these units trying to close their border against terrorist raids from Angola, you could not ignore their persistence and determination. So even though conditions in the two countries were so vastly different, in some ways life on the Angolan border looked not that much different from life on some of our own borders.”
Sharon went to Washington to deal with a range of Middle Eastern questions. He also
“took the opportunity to discuss with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger, and CIA Director William Casey other issues of mutual interest. I described what I had seen in Africa, including the problems facing the Central African Republic. I recommended to them that we should try to go into the vacuums that existed in the region and suggested that efforts of this sort would be ideally suited for American-Israeli cooperation.”
By 1989 it was certain that apartheid was about to close down, hence Sharon’s “I don’t believe that any Jew can support apartheid.” But a 12/14/81 NY Times article, “South Africa Needs More Arms, Israeli Says,” gave a vivid picture of Israel’s earlier zeal for its ally’s cause:
“The military relationship between South Africa and Israel, never fully acknowledged by either country, has assumed a new significance with the recent 10 day visit by Israel’s Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, to South African forces in Namibia along the border with Angola.
In an interview during his recent visit to the United States, Mr. Sharon made several points concerning the South African position.
First, he said that South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa and southwestern Asia that is trying to resist Soviet military infiltration in the area.
He added that there had been a steady flow of increasingly sophisticated Soviet weapons to Angola and other African nations, and that as a result of this, and Moscow’s political and economic leverage, the Soviet Union was ‘gaining ground daily’ throughout the region.
Mr. Sharon, in company with many American and NATO military analysts, reported that South Africa needed more modern weapons if it is to fight successfully against Soviet-Supplied troops. The United Nations arms embargo, imposed in November 1977, cut off established weapons sources such as Britain, France and Israel, and forced South Africa into under-the-table deals….
Israel, which has a small but flourishing arms export industry, benefited from South African military trade before the 1977 embargo.
According to The Military Balance, the annual publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the South African Navy includes seven Israeli-built fast attack craft armed with Israeli missiles. The publication noted that seven more such vessels are under order. Presumably the order was placed before the 1977 embargo was imposed….
Mr. Sharon said Moscow and its allies had made sizable gains in Central Africa and had established ‘corridors of power,’ such as one connecting Libya and Chad. He said that Mozambique was under Soviet control and that Soviet influence was growing in Zimbabwe.
The Israeli official… saw the placement of Soviet weapons, particularly tanks, throughout the area as another danger.
South Africa’s military policy of maintaining adequate reserves, Mr. Sharon said, will enable it to keep forces in the field in the foreseeable future but he warned that in time the country may be faced by more powerful weapons and better armed and trained soldiers.”
American Zionists were equally committed to apartheid. The 5/86 ADL Bulletin ran “The African National Congress: A Closer Look.” It revealed the organization’s hatred of the movement leading the liberation struggle in South Africa. The ADL sent its tirade to every member of the US Congress!
It formally bowed to political correctness: “Discussion of the political scene in South Africa properly begins with the self-evident stipulation that apartheid is racist and dehumanizing.” But
“… this is not to suggest closing our eyes to what may emerge once apartheid is gone…. We must distinguish between those who will work for a humane, democratic, pro-western South Africa and those who are totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli and anti-American.
It is in this context that the African National Congress (ANC), so frequently discussed as an alternative to the Botha government, merits a close, unsentimental look…. The ANC, which seeks to overthrow the South African government, is a ‘national liberation movement’ that, plainly said, is under heavy Communist influence. The ANC has been allied with the South African Communist Party (SACP) for 50 years…. The fall of South Africa to such a Soviet oriented and Communist influenced force would be a severe setback to the United States, whose defense industry relies heavily on South Africa’s wealth of strategic minerals.”
ADL spying on America’s anti-apartheid movement, for BOSS, South Africa’s secret police, became public in 1993 when San Francisco papers revealed that Tom Gerard, a local cop and ex-CIA man, illegally gave police information to Roy Bullock, ADL’s man in SF.
Gerard pled no contest to illegal access to police computers. The ADL made a ‘we didn’t do it and won’t do it again’ deal with the DA. It agreed to an injunction not to use illegal methods in ‘monitoring’ the political universe. ADL National Director Abe Foxman said that, rather than go to trial, where — of course! — they would certainly have been found innocent, ADL settled because “continuing with an investigation over your head for months and years leads some to believe there is something wrong.”
Despite the slap-on-the-wrist deal, Bullock’s activities were documented. The ADL claimed that he was a free-lance informer whose activities for the apartheid regime were unknown to them. But (FBI) FD-302, a 1993 FBI report on an interview with Bullock, takes up a letter found in his computer files, “prepared for transmission to the South Africans.” It said that, “during an extended conversation with two FBI agents,” in 1990, they asked
“‘Why do you think South African agents are coming to the West Coast? Did I know any agents’ they finally asked?…. I replied that a meeting had been arranged, in confidence, by the ADL which wanted information on radical right activities in SA and their American connections. To that end I met an agent at Rockefeller Center cafeteria.”
The FBI said that “Bullock commented that the TRIP.DBX letter was a very ‘damning’ piece of evidence. He said he had forgotten it was in his computer.” Of course he hastened to tell the FBI that “his statements to the FBI that the ADL had set up his relationship with the South Africans were untrue.”
The ADL was so anti-ANC that only fools could think that they didn’t know that Bullock was working with the South Africans. Isn’t it more likely that he told the truth in 1990 and lied in 1993? The feds came on another matter in 1990, surprising him with questions re South Africans. They interviewed him in his lawyers’ office in 1993. Be certain that they told him what not to say. He also knew that if he wanted ADL help in his FBI troubles concerning South Africa, he had to claim that they had nothing to do with his BOSS connection. In any case, the ADL continued to work with Bullock. And NY’s 7/27/93 Village Voice reported that Irwin Suall, its Chief Fact-finder, i.e., head spy, told the FBI that “he didn’t think dealing with South African intelligence was different than dealing with any other police agency.”
Time hasn’t been kind to the ADL. The ANC runs its country and is a model of ethnic and religious tolerance. It never was anti-Semitic and there are Jewish ANCers in the Pretoria parliament. But Foxman always has a cleanup for Israeli and ADL infamies. On October 11th, 2007 he spoke at a NY Barnes & Noble bookstore on his latest book, “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control”. It has a chapter denouncing Carter. I was in his audience and challenged him:
“You brought up the fact that Jimmy Carter used the word apartheid in his title. But I would remind you that of course that Israel was allied to apartheid South Africa. I’m looking at the December 14, 1981 New York Times, “South Africa needs more arms, Israeli says,” Israeli meaning Ariel Sharon, the Minister of Defense, who was on a tour, as it were, with the South African army as it was invading Angola. And then, in May 1986…
Foxman: I get the point.
Brenner: Excuse me! The ADL sent this to every member of Congress, denouncing the African National Congress as pro-Soviet and wicked, yes, and anti-Semitic and so on and so forth.”
I sat several rows from him. Two words on my tape are indistinct and tentatively printed here in caps. But they don’t effect general understanding of his statement, even with its grammatical irregularities as he grappled with my surprise accusations:
“OK. The African National Congress during the fight for SUFFRAGE, the struggle for AFRICAN liberation, was anti-Semitic, it was pro-Communist, it was anti-Israel, it was, where ever it could, become friends and allies of Arab, Palestinian terrorism, etc.
I had the privilege, I had the privilege of flying to Geneva to meet President Mandela, before he was President, after he was freed and before he came to the United States on his 1st visit. I had the very, very special privilege of spending 5 hours with him and several American Jews who came to meet with him in advance of his visit, to better understand. And he said to us, ‘if,’ he said,
‘I understand why Israel made friends with apartheid South Africa. Because Israel was boycotted all over the world, Israel couldn’t have relations with other countries in the world, Israel wasn’t sold arms to defend itself, so I do not judge Israel, I understand why Israel, you need not to judge me, for the friends that I make. I make friends with the PLO, I make friends with those who supported our liberation movement, and if you don’t make it as a prerequisite that your enemies have to be my enemies, I will not make it a prerequisite for me.’
So Mandela, who was a heroic fighter in the struggle for, understood, very well, that just like he had to make deals with the devil, he made deals for support with people that he didn’t agree with, that he didn’t like. You certainly know from his record, he was not a Communist, yet he took the support of Communists, because they were the only ones, he understood, and respected, that Israel was dealing with South Africa.
South Africa was one of the few countries that sold it arms. Now these were the years that America wouldn’t sell Israel arms. Those were the years that Europe wouldn’t sell Israel arms. So he understood it. Was it pleasant for everybody? No. Did we send the stuff about the ANC then? Yes. And today things are changed, very dramatically changed.”
How accurately did he recall Mandela’s remarks? We know that the ANC made a deal with apartheid’s leaders. Blacks got their rights and hearings were to be held on what repressive crimes actually happened during the racist era. But white military and other officials retained their posts under the new Black-led government. So if Mandela said what Foxman claims he said, it was in that reconciling spirit: ‘You did what you thought you had to do, same with me, now lets move on.’
The ANC’s generous peace didn’t retrospectively make apartheid less criminal. If Mandela wanted relations between his new government and Israel to go to a friendlier level, that didn’t make Israeli and ADL collaboration with racism even a speck less felonious. And of course ANCers still denounce Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was emphatic at a Boston “End the Occupation” rally in 2002:
“You know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal. To criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic…. People are scared to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful. Well, so what?
For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.”
Five years later, Israel is still very powerful. But in time it too shall be replaced by a democratic secular binational Palestinian/Israeli state. The model for that is today’s South African constitution. Most whites there say that they as well as blacks are the better for it. And when secular bi-nationalism finally wins, Israelis as well as Palestinians will likewise rejoice in their equality, peace and prosperity.
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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