“I am Israeli”
Israel will not recognize an Israeli nationality while it seeks to maintain Jewishness at all costs
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | October 15, 2013
Israel is almost certainly the only country that deceives the global community every time one of its citizens crosses an international border. It does so because the passports it issues contain a fiction.
When a border official opens an Israeli passport for inspection, he or she sees the passport holder’s nationality stated as “Israeli.” And yet inside Israel, no state official, government agency or court recognizes the existence of an “Israeli” national.
This month the highest court in the land, Israel’s Supreme Court, explicitly affirmed that it could not uphold an Israeli nationality. Instead, the judges ruled, citizenship and nationality in Israel should be considered entirely separate categories, as they have been since Israel’s founding in 1948. All Israelis have Israeli citizenship, but none enjoys Israeli nationality.
This fiction of Israeli nationality, contained in Israeli passports and presented to the international community, is not simply a piece of legal eccentricity on Israel’s part. It is the keystone of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state – and much depends on it.
From this simple deception, Israel has been able to gerrymander its population by excluding Palestinian refugees from their land and homes while allowing millions of Jews to immigrate. And the same deception has served to veil a system of segregation in legal rights – a form of apartheid – between Israeli Jews and the country’s Palestinian minority, who comprise a fifth of the total population.
The need to maintain the state’s Jewishness at all costs, meanwhile, is emerging as the chief obstacle erected by Israel to prevent a peace agreement with the Palestinians from being reached.
So how does this Israeli magician’s trick work? Perversely, nationality in Israel is based not on a shared civic identity, as it is in most places, but on one’s ethnic identity. That means for the overwhelming majority of Israeli citizens, their nationality falls into one of two categories – Jewish or Arab. That is why Israel must lie on its passports: no border official would allow in a person bearing a passport that declared simply that they were “Arab” or “Jewish.”
The peculiarity of this classification system is further underlined by its anomalies. What does Israel do with the small number of non-Jews who marry an Israeli and then choose to naturalize? The answer is that the state can select from more than 130 nationalities. ‘Misfits’– those who are neither Jewish nor Arab – are typically assigned the nationality they held before they naturalized, such as French, British, American, Georgian, Ukrainian, and so on.
A great deal is at stake in this arcane system, which is why since 1948 the Israeli Supreme Court has on three separate occasions ruled against groups of Israeli citizens who have demanded the right to be identified as Israeli nationals.
This month, faced with a petition from a group called “I am Israeli,” the judges argued that recognizing such a nationality would threaten the state’s foundational principles. In the words of Justice Hanan Melcer, uniting Israeli citizenship and nationality would run “against both the Jewish nature and the democratic nature of the state.”
Anita Shapira, a professor emeritus of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, concurred, saying that the petitioners were making a “revolutionary” demand.
However, Aeyal Gross, a Tel Aviv law professor, took a different view. The ruling, he wrote in the Haaretz newspaper, “will continue to obscure the possibility of having real democracy in Israel.”
So why the court’s aversion to an Israeli nationality? A clue is provided by the concept of citizenship in Israel. Another uncomfortable fact is that Israel has not one, but two citizenship laws: the famous Law of Return of 1950 gives every Jew in the world the right to come to Israel and instantly receive citizenship; the much less known Citizenship Law, passed two years later, confers citizenship, in very restricted circumstances, to non-Jews.
The primary purpose of the 1952 Citizenship Law was to give citizenship, belatedly and reluctantly, to the small proportion of Palestinians who managed to remain inside Israel in 1948 and their descendants. Today they are a substantial minority, and a growing one.
But as Israel has no immigration policy beyond the Law of Return, which applies only to worldwide Jewry, the 1952 law is also the only route by which a non-Jew can naturalize. In practice, that applies only to the tiny number of individuals who marry Israeli citizens each year and are prepared to enter a lengthy and usually antagonistic naturalization process. An additional law prevents most Palestinians outside Israel as well as Arab nationals from naturalizing, even following marriage to an Israeli.
The purpose of all this legal chicanery is to maintain Israel’s existence as a “Jewish state” – meaning the state of the Jewish people. It is, in other words, designed to perpetuate a system that has two main goals: ensuring a commanding Jewish majority inside Israel; and enforcing segregation in citizenship and legal rights based on ethnic belonging.
This segregation is possible because Israel, in addition to recognizing only ethnic nationalities, confers national rights on one national group alone – Jews. From that legal distinction flows much of the structural discrimination in Israel: Palestinians who try to claim equality, even in the courts, face a legal system in which their civic rights, as citizens, are always trumped by the exclusive, and superior, national rights enjoyed by the Jewish population.
Were the government or courts to decide that an Israeli nationality existed, all of that would come to an end. Recognition of an Israeli nationality, as government officials and the courts understand only too well, would entail equality between citizens – or a “state of all Israeli citizens,” a liberal democracy, as Israel’s Palestinian minority have been demanding at the ballot box for nearly two decades.
The reality is that a Jewish state requires structural segregation: in allocation of land, 93 per cent of which has been nationalized for the Jewish people, and resources like water; in residency, with Jews and Palestinian citizens living almost entirely apart; in education, where Jews and Palestinian citizens have separate and unequal schools; in employment, where vast swathes of the economy are defined as security-related, including the water, construction and telecommunications industries, and therefore open only to Jews.
But additionally and equally problematic, a Jewish state also privileges Jews who are not citizens, those living in Brooklyn or London, over Palestinians who actually hold citizenship. It does so through the bifurcation of citizenship and nationality.
Because from Israel’s point of view they are included in its definition of a Jewish national, Jews anywhere in the world – even those who have never stepped foot in Israel – can buy property from the state in much of the 93 per cent of territory that was nationalized, and much of it seized from Palestinian refugees. Palestinian citizens, on the other hand, are mostly restricted to living on the 3 per cent of the land they have so far kept out of the state’s grasp.
In short, Israel conceives of itself as not chiefly representing Israeli citizens, nor even of representing Israeli Jewish citizens but as representing Jews all around the world – those who have citizenship as well as those who have yet to take advantage of it by immigrating under the Law of Return.
What does this have to do with the peace process? As international pressure has mounted on Israel in the past few years to concede a Palestinian state, Israel has raised a new precondition for successful talks: the Palestinian leadership must recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Most observers have assumed that this relates to Israel’s desperate need to prevent millions of Palestinian refugees claiming a right of return. They are partly right, but for the wrong reasons.
The future of the refugees has long been part of the final-status issues to be decided in talks. Even most Palestinians doubt that the Palestinian National Authority will insist on more than a symbolic return of a few, mainly elderly, refugees to Israel. So raising this again, in terms of recognizing Israel’s Jewishness, is largely redundant.
Israel’s logic is slightly different. Israel needs the Palestinian leadership’s acceptance of its Jewishness as a way to subvert any future claims for equality from Israel’s Palestinian minority. Were the Palestinian minority able to gain equal citizenship – by ending Israel’s strange conception of nationality – then they could make demands to reverse the perverse realities entailed by Israel’s definition as a Jewish state.
Foremost would be the demand to end the special immigration privileges enjoyed by Jews. The Palestinian minority would insist on an equal immigration law, giving their exiled relatives the same rights to become Israeli citizens as Jews around the world currently enjoy. And that would mean a right of return by other means.
So in shutting the door on an Israeli nationality this month, Israel’s Supreme Court also played another role: pushing the hopes of a peace agreement that bit further out of sight.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
October 15, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Jewish State, Jews, Law of Return, Palestine, Supreme Court of Israel, Zionism | Leave a comment
Police unlawful harassment and racial profiling Philly,Pa
Josh Moyo · September 27, 2013
As debate over the merits of “stop and frisk” policing continues, a new YouTube video has added fuel to the fire by revealing the disturbing tactics of two Philadelphia officers.
Titled “Police unlawful harassment and racial profiling,” the video is dated Sept. 27 and shows two pedestrians being stopped by police officers after saying “hi” to a third, unseen individual on the street.
“You don’t say ‘Hi’ to strangers,”one officer, identified as Philip Nace by the Philadelphia Daily News, said as he confronts the two pedestrians and pushes one against the car. The other individual is recording the scene on his smartphone as it unfolds.
After Nace tells the man to put his phone away because he’s “under investigation,” the phone is set down but continues to record.
“Investigation of what? I was walking,” the man said, to which the officer replies, “That’s not what I saw … if you keep running your mouth I’ll split your wig open.”
The two go back and forth, with the man asking Nace why he’d been stopped, and Nace offering that he doesn’t know what information the police have on them.
“Are you accusing me of robbing somebody?” the pedestrian asks.
“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” Nace said.“I said we could’ve got a call, that somebody wearing the clothes you’re wearing just robbed somebody. That’s why we stopped you. Is that wrong of us?”
When asked if he’s permitted to grab pedestrians in this manner, Nace replies,“I’ll grab you any way I got to… Why don’t you shut up? Everyone thinks they’re a [expletive] lawyer and they don’t know jack [expletive].”
At one point, the officers attempt to justify their actions by claiming the two pedestrians were jaywalking. Nace also accuses the two pedestrians of “weakening the country” by “freeloading.”
The race of the two pedestrians is not clear in the video, but “stop and frisk” tactics are increasingly coming under fire as demeaning, and for unfairly targeting minorities without sufficient cause.
“This is exactly what the city of Philadelphia says its cops don’t do,” Mary Catherine Roper, senior staff attorney for the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Daily News. “The only way we stop it from happening is if the police department acknowledges that it does happen and takes steps to root it out.”
In August, a federal judge ruled New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy unconstitutional on the grounds that it is a form of racial profiling.
Meanwhile, a new study released in September revealed that “stop and frisk” tactics are causing a large proportion of the public to mistrust the police. The lack of faith can become so severe that even those who are victimized become reluctant to report crimes.
October 14, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights, Philadelphia, Philip Nace, United States | Leave a comment
Israeli Factor in Syrian Conflict Unveiled
By Nicola Nasser | People’s Voice | October 14, 2013
More than two and a half years on, Israel’s purported neutrality in the Syrian conflict and the United State’s fanfare rhetoric urging a “regime change” in Damascus were abruptly cut short to unveil that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries.
All their media and political focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and on the intervention of the international community on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” to avert the exacerbating “humanitarian crisis” in Syria was merely a focus intended to divert the attention of the world public opinion away from their real goal, i.e. to safeguard the security of Israel.
Their “Plan A” was to enforce a change in the Syrian regime as their “big prize” and replace it by another less threatening and more willing to strike a “peace deal” with Israel and in case of failure, which is the case as developed now, their “Plan B” was to pursue a “lesser prize” by disarming Syria of its chemical weapons to deprive it of its strategic defensive deterrence against the Israeli overwhelming arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Their “Plan A” proved a failure, but their “Plan B” was a success.
However, the fact that the Syrian humanitarian crisis continues unabated with the raging non-stop fighting while the United States is gradually coming to terms with Syria’s major allies in Russia and Iran as a prelude to recognizing the “legitimacy” of the status quo in Syria is a fact that shutters whatever remains of U.S. credibility in the conflict.
President Barak Obama, addressing the UN General Assembly on last September 24, had this justification: “Let us remember that this is not a zero-sum endeavor. We are no longer in a Cold War. There’s no Great Game to be won, nor does America have any interest in Syria beyond the well-being of its people, the stability of its neighbors, the elimination of chemical weapons, and ensuring it does not become a safe-haven for terrorists. I welcome the influence of all nations that can help bring about a peaceful resolution.”
This U-turn shift by the U.S. dispels any remaining doubts that the U.S. ever cared about the Syrian people and what Obama called their “well being.”
The U.S. pronounced commitment to a “political solution” through co-sponsoring with Russia the convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference is compromised by its purported inability to unite even the “opposition” that was created and sponsored by the U.S. itself and the “friends of Syria” it leads and to rein in the continued fueling of the armed conflict with arms, money and logistics by its regional Turkish and Gulf Arabs allies, which undermines any political solution and render the very convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference a guess of anybody.
Israeli “Punishment”
Meanwhile, Israel’s neutrality was shuttered by none other than its President Shimon Peres.
Speaking at the 40th commemoration of some three thousand Israeli soldiers who were killed in the 1973 war with Syria and Egypt, Peres revealed unarguably that his state has been the major beneficiary of the Syrian conflict.
Peres said: “Today” the Syrian President Basher al-Assad “is punished for his refusal to compromise” with Israel and “the Syrian people pay for it.”
When it became stark clear by the latest developments that there will be no “regime change” in Syria nor there will be a post- Assad “Day After” and that the U.S. major guarantor of Israel’s survival has made, or is about to make, a “U-turn” in its policy vis-à-vis the Syrian conflict to exclude the military solution as “unacceptable,” in the words of Secretary of State John Kerry on this October 6, Israel got impatient and could not hide anymore the Israeli factor in the conflict.
On last September 17, major news wires headlined their reports, “In public shift, Israel calls for Assad’s fall,” citing a report published by the Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post, which quoted Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, as saying: “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren added.
And that’s really the crux of the Syrian conflict: Dismantling this “arc” has been all throughout the conflict the pronounced strategy of the U.S.-led so-called “Friends of Syria,” who are themselves the friends of Israel.
The goal of this strategy has been all throughout the conflict to change the regime of what Oren called the Syrian “keystone in that arc,” which is supported by a pro-Iran government in Iraq as well as by the Palestinian liberation movements resisting the more than sixty decades of Israeli military occupation, or otherwise to deplete Syria’s resources, infrastructure and power until it has no choice other than the option of yielding unconditionally to the Israeli terms and conditions of what Peres called a “compromise” with Israel as a precondition for the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Syria the Odd Number
This strategic goal was smoke-screened by portraying the conflict first as one of a popular uprising turned into an armed rebellion against a dictatorship, then as a sectarian “civil war,” third as a proxy war in an Arab-Iranian and a Sunni-Shiite historical divide, fourth as a battle ground of conflicting regional and international geopolitics, but the Israeli factor has been all throughout the core of the conflict.
Otherwise why should the U.S.-led “Friends of Syria & Israel” care about the ruling regime in a country that is not abundant in oil and gas, the “free” flow of which was repeatedly pronounced a “vital” interest of the United States, or one of what Obama in his UN speech called his country’s “core interests;” the security of Israel is another “vital” or “core” interest, which, in his words, “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure.”
The end of the Cold War opened a “window of opportunities” to build on the Egyptian – Israel peace treaty, according to a study by the University of Oslo in 1997. A peace agreement was signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Hebrew state in 1993 followed by an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty the year after. During its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Israel tried unsuccessfully to impose on the country a similar treaty had it not been for the Syrian “influence,” which aborted and prevented any such development ever since.
Syria remains the odd number in the Arab peace — making belt around Israel; no comprehensive peace is possible without Syria; Damascus holds the key even to the survival of the Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel. Syria will not hand over this key without the withdrawal of the Israeli Occupation Forces from Syrian and other Arab lands and a “just” solution of the “Palestinian question.”
This has been a Syrian national strategy long before the Pan-Arab Baath party and the al-Assad dynasty came to power.
Therefore, the U.S. and Israeli “Plan A” will remain on both countries’ agendas, pending more forthcoming geopolitical environment.
Nicola Nasser can be reached at: nassernicola@ymail.com.
October 14, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Lebanon, Michael Oren, Middle East, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
License to Heal or License to Steal?
By Peter Breschard | Dissident Voice | October 13th, 2013
It’s time to take some of the profit out of the for-profit healthcare system currently victimizing the people of the United States. This is a small step and one which can be implemented on levels which do not necessitate the consent of an entire nation.
If you’re not intelligent enough to already have realized that the present for-profit healthcare system in the United States constitutes a human rights violation, you might as well go back to watching black and white 1950s sitcoms on your smart phone, and stop reading altogether.
“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do harm to anyone.”
That’s one translation of the Hippocratic Oath. “First do no harm” is one way of saying it.
Let’s face it, the for-profit healthcare extortion system in the United States is doing a lot of harm to a lot of people.
When a doctor asks a high price for their services, they are saying one thing. They are saying that if you don’t meet their price, they will withhold their services. That’s how a market is supposed to work. Unfortunately, when doctors withhold their services in order to get more money, people have been known to die. It’s pay or die when it comes to the present healthcare extortion system in the United States.
Individual states license doctors to practice their discipline within that state’s borders. States currently allow licensed medical professionals free reign to charge excessive amounts for their services. The argument that the medical profession exists within a free market and doctors are worth whatever they can get remains entirely bogus. In reality, the for-profit medical profession is an extortion racket where, unless a patient meets the system’s financial demands, something very bad might very well happen to them. Has anyone, anyone ever, compared prices when they needed brain surgery? The states through their licensing powers become willing partners in this extortion racket. Doctors in the present system are asking their patients that most delightful of questions, “Your money or your life?”
If a licensed hunter is limited in the number of deer he can bag in one season, certainly a state has the authority to limit the profit margin on licensed professionals within its jurisdiction. If states and local governments can regulate the prices charged by cab drivers, those same licensing authorities most certainly have the capability to cap the incomes of medical professionals whose entire careers depend upon the state issuing them a license to practice.
A modest proposal. Allow doctors to make as much as they want through earnings and investments within the current healthcare system. However, if their income is more in a year than the governor of the state which issues their license, they will be charged a fee of 75% of those overage monies, which will be paid to the licensing authority. On the plus side the licensing authority will take those monies and initiate a program which reimburses doctors 5% of their outstanding student loans if they perform two weeks of non-profit medical community service each year. Of course there will be other trivial details which can be worked out rather easily once this concept is accepted by those of good faith.
It’s time for individual states to stop participating in the healthcare extortion racket. If any doctor says they will leave the state if they can’t make as much money as they can extort from their captive audience, well, here’s your scrub hat, what’s your hurry?
Related article
October 13, 2013 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Economics, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Medicine, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, United States | Leave a comment
US nuclear force facing series of missteps: Report
Press TV – October 12, 2013
The US military’s nuclear force faces a set of serious problems amid the recent firing of two high-ranking nuclear commanders for alleged bad behavior, according to a new report.
A series of missteps in US nuclear bases spell trouble for a nuclear force doubted by some for its relevance, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
The recent setbacks include a failed safety and security inspection at a base in Montana in August, followed by the firing of the colonel there in charge of security forces, the report said.
In May, 17 Minuteman 3 missile launch control officers at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., had been taken off duty over what one officer called “rot” inside the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) force.
The AP disclosed that launch crews at Minot scored the equivalent of a “D” grade on missile operations. The officer in charge of training and proficiency of Minot’s missile crews was fired in June.
The fired nuclear launch officers were “not taking the job seriously enough,” making their bosses concerned that they did not understand what it takes to “stay up to speed” on nuclear missile operations, the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Mark Welsh, told Congress in May. What it boiled down to, he said, was a lack of “proper attitude.”
Capping the problems facing the US nuclear force, a two-star US general in charge of the Air Force’s nuclear intercontinental missiles was fired on Friday due to personal misbehavior.
Maj. Gen. Michael Carey was removed from command of the 20th Air Force, which is responsible for maintaining a total of 450 ICBMs at three bases across the US.
On Wednesday, Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, deputy commander at US Strategic Command, which oversees all nuclear war-fighting forces, was also fired for illegal gambling activities.
October 13, 2013 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Minot Air Force Base, United States Strategic Command | Leave a comment
Learn History with Philip Zelikow!
corbettreport · October 11, 2013
SHOW NOTES AND MP3: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=8131
As Philip Zelikow prepares to teach an online history course, we peel back the layers of propaganda from the former Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission. From cover up to predictive programming, we examine the ways that Zelikow helped to shape (and write) the history he’s now teaching.
October 13, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11 Commission, Philip D. Zelikow, Philip Zelikow, Zelikow | Leave a comment
Zionists Attack Northeastern University
By Richard Edmondson | October 11, 2013
Located in Boston, Northeastern University is a four-year college and graduate school offering degrees in law, political science, African American studies, and various other fields. The school seems to be generally well thought of, and is even involved in a research program to develop high-resolution images of human brain activity. But recently the university, or more specifically some of its faculty members, has come under attack by Zionists.
This of course is not new. Faculty members who criticize Israel have found themselves targeted at one university after another in America. Norman Finkelstein is probably one of the more famous cases in point, but he is not by any means the only one. Attacks at Northeastern have focused in the main on Denis Sullivan, professor of International Affairs and director of the school’s Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development; Economics Professor M. Shahid Alam; and Berna Turam, who also teaches in the International Affairs program.
On July 5, 2013 the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) wrote a letter to the university’s president, Joseph Aoun, calling for Sullivan’s and Alam’s dismissal, and also complaining about a campus student group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), whose activities—along with classroom comments made by the professors cited—are said to be causing Jewish students at Northeastern to “feel unsafe and uncomfortable.”
The issue has received considerable coverage in the Jewish newspaper, The Algemeiner—this of course would be the same Algemeiner which just a couple of months ago published some fairly rancid accusations made by an official with the Simon Wiesenthal Center against musical entertainer Roger Waters.
In an October 4 article, the Algemeiner reports on “allegations of rampant anti-Semitism” on the Northeastern campus, and also airs an official response from the university that apparently was thought to have been issued in an insufficiently prompt manner:
Boston’s Northeastern University responded on Friday to allegations of rampant anti-Semitism from students by faculty on campus, after The Algemeiner pressed the school on why it hadn’t answered a formal letter from three months ago from the Zionist Organization of America, which helped the students make their case.
Also, it appears that Jewish students at the school have been videotaping classroom lectures—whether openly or clandestinely isn’t specified, but the 12-page letter to Aoun makes reference to “three separate and very disturbing videos,” and accuses faculty members of making “false and demonizing accusations against Jews and Israel.”
Of the three professors, Sullivan seems to have aroused the most ire. The ZOA letter devotes a full two and a half pages to his alleged misdeeds, including the following:
In one course, Professor Sullivan was promoting a so-called “one-state solution” to the Palestinian Arab-Israeli conflict. In effect, he was calling for the elimination of the Jewish State of Israel, to be replaced by another Arab state. A Jewish student in the class raised her hand an asked a legitimate question—what this “solution” would mean for Jews living in Israel. Instead of answering the question, Professor Sullivan personally attacked the student, as the rest of the class snickered. Understandably, the Jewish student felt unable to defend herself against her professor. She was so traumatized by the attack that she began crying in class and had to leave the room. This Jewish student was an international affairs major with a concentration in the Middle East. But she ended up changing her concentration because of the anti-Israel climate in the department.
Another female student—apparently also suffering from anti-Semitism-induced traumatization—“no longer wears a Star of David on campus, nor does she make it known that she is Jewish.”
The ZOA accuses the SJP of “vandalizing” the university by posting “anti-Israel stickers all over the campus,” and also speaks of the vandalization (for three years straight) of a campus menorah during Chanukah season. The damaging of the menorah is not specifically blamed on the SJP, but the student group is taken to task for disrupting a pro-Israel event as well as for posting “hateful falsehoods about Israel that cross the line into anti-Semitism” on a law school bulletin board.
But from the Zionist perspective, perhaps the gravest sin of all was that committed by Professor Alam—who apparently has counseled his students not to be too intimidated should they happen to be accused of anti-Semitism.
One professor not only has made false and demonizing accusations against Jews and Israel, but has also bragged about how students are now too intimidated to speak up and challenge his views. In a lecture delivered on April 10, 2012, M. Shahid Alam, an economics professor, accused “Zionist partisans” and “partisans of Israel”—code for Jews—of “trying to shut out the daylight, the daylight of truth about Zionism, about Israel and the hostility of these two and their crimes against humanity, the war crimes. Their brutality, their massacre, their ethnic cleansing.” Alam also outrageously told students in his lecture that Israelis’ “whole life depends upon defending lies. They have to defend lies.”
In addition to demonizing Jews and Israelis to students at Northeastern, Alam bragged about the hostile environment in his classes, where pro-Israel students are now afraid to speak up: “If there are one or two people who want to say something, they don’t because they can sense that they will get no support from the class.” Alam also embraced claims that he is anti-Semitic and encouraged students to follow in his footsteps: “You know we should really laugh away accusations of anti-Semitism. It has now become laughable. And there may come a time when you wear that label as a mark of distinction.”
A Jewish student, apparently in class at the time Alam made the remarks, reportedly was so “horrified” by the professor’s comments he wrote a letter to Aoun and other university officials, a portion of which is quoted by the ZOA. “I sat painfully listening to Professor Alam insinuate, that students should be proud to be called anti-semitic,” the student wrote. “I had never in my life, ever, experienced anti-semitism first hand until this past year when I witnessed Professor Alam and Professor Sullivan display an age old hatred against the Jewish people.”
As for the ZOA’s letter to Aoun, it is signed by Morton A. Klein, national president, and Susan B. Tuchman, director of the Center for Law and Justice. Moreover, it contains what could be construed as a not-so-thinly veiled threat against the school (emphasis included):
All these problems raise the question of whether Northeastern University is complying with its legal obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We have enclosed a policy letter issued in October 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR has made it clear that schools receiving federal funding must remedy a hostile environment for Jewish students and ensure that the hostility does not recur, pursuant to Title VI. If a school fails to comply with Title VI, then it risks losing its federal funding.
In a brief written statement issued last month, the university speaks of its “incredible diversity” and its commitment to “academically rigorous” standards, commenting also on its efforts to ensure a proper learning environment for all students.
If any member of our community feels marginalized for any reason, the university has a range of offices and avenues where grievances can be heard and resolved. This includes a dedicated Office of Diversity and Inclusion, our extensive student affairs operation, and the university ombudsman. We encourage members of the Northeastern community to take advantage of these many resources, which include the opportunity for confidential discussions.
Specific concerns presented by members of the Northeastern community are swiftly and thoroughly investigated. This is vital to maintaining a productive and enlightened learning environment.
However, unsubstantiated allegations made by third parties are not sufficient for Northeastern—or any university—to launch internal investigations. Pursuing unsubstantiated allegations is just as irresponsible as ignoring legitimate concerns.
“Dismissing the reports in our letter as ‘unsubstantiated’ allows the administration to avoid the real issue, about whether Jewish students are being subjected to a hostile learning environment and what must be done to remedy the problem,” Tuchman commented to the Algemeiner by way of response. “Northeastern’s reaction is just another slap in the face for students and their concerns.”
The videos mentioned above were produced by a 501c-3 organization called Americans for Peace and Tolerance. Whether the organization is affiliated with the ZOA, I do not know, but the video below follows closely the subject matter contained in the ZOA letter. “In many academic institutions around the US, Israel has become the subject of relentless criticism and outright demonization,” the narrator comments at the beginning. Could anything the Jewish state have done possibly account for these negative feelings having been aroused in such large numbers of people? The narrator doesn’t seem to think so. His video focuses almost exclusively on what he narrowly views as anti-Semitism, tendering, like a devalued currency, an official definition of “the new anti-Semitism” issued by the US State Department.
“Alam promotes the anti-Semitic conspiracy notion that a mostly Jewish elite group of neoconservatives sought to place American power in the service of Israel”—one almost has to laugh at an attempt to portray what is so obvious to so many people as being nothing more than a conspiracy fantasy. On the surface what we find here is a coordinated attack upon a university, similar to so many we’ve seen in the past, but looked at from a slightly different angle, the video and the ZOA letter can also be viewed as signs of a growing desperation, as an effort to stave off the rapidly accelerating disintegration of Israel’s “legitimacy” as a nation and the increasing recognition and awareness of its criminality. Compare the relatively benign statements made by the Northeastern University professors in the above video with the racist, and in some cases outright genocidal, comments quoted in the video below:
If the people at the ZOA were intellectually honest, instead of harping solely upon comments by Sullivan and his colleagues would they not at least have acknowledged that a number of statements of a deplorable nature have been made by prominent Israelis, including officials of the Israeli government? And would this not have supplied some context, maybe even helped people to understand and make sense of the “relentless criticism and outright demonization” the poor Jewish state has had to suffer? I wonder why they left that out? Perhaps it just slipped their minds.
October 12, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Antisemitism, Israel, M. Shahid Alam, Northeastern University, Zionism, Zionist Organization of America | Leave a comment
Arafat poisoned to death: Lancet medical journal
Alalam | October 12, 2013
A report by one of the world’s leading medical journals has supported earlier findings that Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was poisoned to death nearly a decade ago.
According to British journal the Lancet, Arafat was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium 210.
The journal published a peer review of last year’s research by Swiss scientists, who have been researching the suspicious circumstances surrounding Arafat’s death.
The earlier work “found high levels of the highly radioactive element in blood, urine, and saliva stains” on Arafat’s “clothes and toothbrush,” according to a report on al-Jazeera.
In July 2012, experts at Lausanne University, Switzerland, said they had evidence Arafat might have been poisoned with polonium.
The investigation into Arafat’s mysterious death led to the exhumation of his body in November 2012 for further testing.
The decision to exhume Arafat’s body was made after French prosecutors opened a murder probe into his death in August 2012 following the discovery of high levels of polonium on his personal belongings.
Arafat died in 2004 at the age of 75 in a Paris military hospital.
The analysis at the time was that he had a rare blood disorder.
October 12, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Arafat, Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat | Leave a comment
US denies lawyer for abducted al-Libi
Press TV – October 12, 2013
A federal judge refused on Friday to allow a court-appointed attorney to represent Abu Anas al-Libi, a Libyan man who was abducted by US military forces in Tripoli on October 5.
The refusal came after some US defense lawyers from the Federal Defenders of New York demanded to be allowed to represent al-Libi, arguing there is no legal basis for holding him “offshore” on a navy vessel.
However, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan claimed it was premature because the Libyan man has not apparently been formally arrested.
“The government denies that any federal criminal arrest has taken place, and there is no evidence to the contrary,” wrote Kaplan.
Kaplan also said even if an arrest is made, the appropriate time to assign counsel would depend on the first court appearance.
Al-Libi was abducted over his alleged involvement in the 1998 twin bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and is believed to be held in military custody and interrogated on board a navy ship, the USS Antonio, in the Mediterranean.
According to a law enforcement source, authorities in New York have not indicated when or if he might be brought to the US.
Kaplan said that the Federal Defenders have expressed concerns about the legality of the man’s detention but added that the matter is outside his jurisdiction.
Officials say al-Libi has not been Mirandized, and is facing open-ended interrogation on the ship without access to a lawyer.
Even US Secretary of State John Kerry last week defended al-Libi’s abduction as “legal” and “appropriate.”
Dr. Randy Short, an American human rights activist, who talked Thursday to Press TV on the arrest of al-Libi, said “I am just intrigued that the same government that funded al-Qaeda to destroy Libya” and “the same government [that] funds and supports al-Qaeda which is fighting and killing people in Lebanon and in Syria now goes back retroactively and attack someone who may have even been in their service”.
October 12, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | al-Qaeda, Human rights, John Kerry, Libya, Obama, United States | Leave a comment
Nobel Prize part of West’s propaganda fog
By Finian Cunningham | Press TV | October 11, 2013
The Nobel Peace Prize should be renamed the Nobel Propaganda Prize, after this year’s ever-so contrived award to the UN-approved chemical weapons team sent to disarm Syria.
Other dubious winners of the “illustrious” prize include the accused war criminal, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who oversaw the genocidal carpet-bombing of Indochina during the 1970s.
More recently, another accused war criminal, US President Barack Obama, is among the honorees of the award despite his ongoing use of assassination and murderous aggression in multiple countries, including Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.
A Norwegian-based committee of seemingly Scandinavian neutrality makes the award every year as it has done for more than a century ever since 1901. The prize was the creation of Alfred Nobel, a major armaments manufacturer. That in itself speaks volumes on the institution’s contradictory nature.
Last year, the winner of the Nobel Prize was yet another disgrace to morals and commonsense in the form of the European Union. How can a bloc of governments be remotely considered peaceful when it is wiping out basic social welfare for millions of its citizens in the service of criminal banks and elite private wealth? Or when it is lifting a weapons embargo on extremists running amok in Syria? Or colluding in the enforcement of crippling economic sanctions on Iran – based on nuclear calumnies cooked up by Western military intelligence – sanctions that are killing women and children from the lack of basic imported medicines?
While there have been a few deserving winners of the Nobel Peace Prize down through the years, nevertheless it is best to treat this institution with skepticism, if not derision. The meritorious aspects of the award can serve to give credence to the dubious and deplorable associates. In that way, it is more Propaganda Prize than Peace Prize.
This year’s recipient, the inspection team belonging to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have only begun their work last week to dismantle stockpiles in Syria. This is part of the arrangement that Russia proposed last month to avert an illegal war of aggression being planned by the Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has fully signed up to the disarmament process.
However, it is precocious, to say the least, to award the OPCW with the Nobel prize, just like it was for the Oslo-based committee to give the award to Obama in 2009, only within months of his first election and before he went on to prove himself one of America’s most warmongering presidents since World War II.
How do we know that the OPCW will be effective in disarming the chemical weapons of the Western-backed mercenary groups fighting to overthrow the Assad government? How do we know that the OPCW will not mischievously misuse its remit and Nobel Laureate status to advance the Western propaganda narrative against the Syrian government?
The awarding of a peace prize based on no track record conjures suspicion that the institution and its benign connotations are being used to inculcate a reprehensible political agenda.
The same insidious propaganda formula of supposed virtue concealing vice can also be seen in the report this week by the New York-based Human Rights Watch group on massacres carried out by foreign-backed militants in Syria.
That report accuses up to 20 Al Qaeda-linked groups, including Al Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams, of killing scores of civilians in Syria’s western Latakia Province during early August.
Such apparently damning testimony from a Western human rights organization may seem like a positive development.
But, as with the Nobel Peace Prize, there is a very real danger that the HRW report is merely acting as a whitewash of Western government crimes.
For a start, the HRW report claims that it has found the “first evidence of crimes against humanity by opposition forces”. That infers that previous atrocities are attributable to the Syrian government forces. This is simply false. Many reliable sources have found that most, if not all, major massacres in villages and towns across Syria over the past two and half years have been committed by the anti-government mercenary groups.
Western media and human rights groups, including HRW and Amnesty International, have deliberately or incompetently misattributed those crimes to Syrian government forces, which then serve to bestow a false moral authority on Western governments for their illicit interference in Syria.
For example, both HRW and Britain’s state-run media outlet, the BBC, as well as the US government’s Voice of America, have run reports that Syrian state forces carried out napalm bombings of schools in Raqqa and Aleppo in the north of the country. These reports are based on unverified amateur video released by so-called opposition groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, which themselves have been involved in carrying out atrocities, as in Latakia Province during August.
HRW and the Western media continue to blame the chemical weapons incident on 21 August near Damascus on the Syrian government. HRW has openly attacked other credible sources, which have reported that that incident was a heinous fabrication, very possibly perpetrated by Western-backed militants as a calculated provocation.
There is strong suspicion, backed up by circumstantial and testimonial evidence, that the children portrayed as poisoned in the opposition-released videos of the 21 August incident in East Ghouta near Damascus were kidnapped by militants during their terror raids on villages in Latakia during the previous weeks. Their deaths were therefore staged for vile propaganda purpose, with which the Western governments, media and human rights industry have subsequently lashed Bashar al-Assad, eventually leading to the appointment of the OPCW inspection team and, bizarrely, their Nobel award.
The latest report by HRW on the massacres in Latakia notes that there are still over 200 people, mainly women and children, missing from those attacks. But HRW does not address the glaring connection to the anonymous child victims filmed in the East Ghouta incident.
A further insidious propaganda effect of the HRW report into the massacres by militants in Latakia is that it reinforces the illusion that the militants in Syria are divided between the “bad extremists” and the “good moderates”, whom the Western governments support. HRW says that it found no evidence linking the supposedly Western-backed Free Syrian Army to the Latakia atrocities.
However, this is contradicted by earlier reports that the leader of the FSA, General Salim Idris, and the moderate “darling” of Western governments, was in Latakia during the murderous rampages. Not only was Idris present in Latakia, he was videoed celebrating “the success” of operations.
On 11 August, the New York Times reported: “The visit by the Free Syrian Army commander, Gen. Salim Idris, appeared intended to show that he and his fighters were also involved in the Latakia seizures [sic] as part of a new front in the civil war.” That report added that Idris crowed about “accomplishments” in a released video.
The Human Rights Watch group is therefore not a positive contribution to clear the fog of war that the West has been pumping out relentlessly over Syria – far from it. HRW is a deep and insidious part of the problem. In fact, it is whitewashing the very real criminal involvement of Western governments and media in the covert war of aggression against Syria.
Nobel Peace Prizes and Western human rights groups may sound innocuous. But they are a central part of the Western propaganda machine, as much as MI6, CIA, Mossad, the Pentagon, Whitehall and the panoply of Western news media outlets with august titles, such as BBC and New York Times.
~
Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime.
October 11, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Free Syrian Army, HRW, Latakia, Nobel Peace Prize, Obama, OPCW, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Syria | Leave a comment
Obama at the UN General Assembly: Five Years a Zionist Lackey
Fifteen Minutes an American President
By James Petras | October 10, 2013
Obama’s rhetorical exercise in ‘peace talk’ at the United Nations General Assembly impressed few delegations and even fewer Americans: Far more eloquent are his five years of wars, military interventions, cyber-spying, drone murders, military coups and the merciless prosecution of patriotic truth tellers.
If his ‘peace message’ fell flat, the explicit affirmations of imperial prerogatives, threats of military interventions and over two dozen (25) references to Israel as a ‘strategic ally’, confirmed the suspicions and fears that Obama was preparing for even more deadly wars.
Playing the ‘War Card’ in the Face of Massive Opposition
Obama’s UN speech took place at a time when his war policies have hit rock bottom both at home and abroad. After suffering at least two major diplomatic defeats and a string of negative polls, which revealed that a strong majority of Americans rejected his entire approach to foreign policy, Obama made an overture to Iran. Up to that point few delegates or citizens were impressed or entertained by his ‘new vision for US diplomacy’. According to many experts, it was vintage Obama, the con-man: talking peace while preparing new wars.
Nothing in the past six years warranted any hope that Obama would respond to new overtures for peace emanating from Iran, Syria, or Palestine; his habitual obedience to Israel would push for new wars on behalf of the Jewish State. At no point did Obama even acknowledge the sharp and outraged criticism by leading heads of state regarding his policy of cyber colonialism (massive spying) and his pursuit of imperial wars.
Obama’s Double Discourse: Talking Peace While Making War
At his 2009 inauguration, Barak Obama proclaimed, “We are going to have to take a new approach with a new emphasis on respect and a new willingness to talk.” And then he proceeded to launch more wars, armed interventions, clandestine operations and assassination campaigns in more countries than any US President in the last fifty years.
Obama’s record over the past five years reads:
(1) Continued war, slaughter, and military bases in Iraq.
(2) A 40,000 plus US “troop surge” in Afghanistan.
(3) An unprovoked assault against Libya, devastating the country, reducing oil production by 90%, throwing millions into chaos and poverty. and allowing a multitude of terrorist groups to divide the country and distribute its huge arsenal of weapons.
(4) Over 400 un-manned aerial drone attacks, murdering over 4,000 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
(5) Cross-border ground and air attacks in Pakistan and counter-insurgency warfare that forcing over 1.5 million refugees to flee the war zones.
(6) The arming and financing of ‘African Union’ mercenaries to invade and occupy Somalia, sending hundreds of thousands of Somalis into refugee camps.
(7) Unconditional support for Israel, including the ‘sale’ of advanced weapons and an annual $3 billion dollars ‘aid’ package to a racist regime intent on more land grabs in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the displacing, killing, arresting and torturing of thousands of Palestinians and Bedouins.
(8) The sending of the US Naval armada to the Persian Gulf while imposing even more brutal economic sanctions drafted by Israeli-Firsters in order to strangle the Iranian economy and starve its over 70 million citizens into submission.
(9) Maintaining the notorious Guantanamo torture camp where hundreds of prisoners languish without trail (despite early promises to close it).
(10) Arming and training Islamist terrorists and ‘pro-Western’ mercenaries to invade Syria, killing over 100,000 Syrians and driving over one million refugees from their homes. Obama’s plans to bomb Syria are on hold, as of October 2013, thanks to Russian President Putin’s peace initiative.
(11) Engaging in grotesque global cyber-spying and the massive theft of highly confidential military, economic and political communications within allied nations (from Germany to Brazil) at the highest levels.
(12) Unleashing a violent destabilization campaign in democratic Venezuela, following the defeat of the US candidate; Obama was the only leader in the world to refuse to recognize the election.
Altogether, Obama’s five years in office have been marked by his relentless pursuit of imperial power through arms and domination; This has come at enormous economic cost to the American people in the form of huge fiscal deficits and significant overseas and domestic political losses.
As a result, Obama’s rising tide of militarism has had the opposite effect of provoking a countercurrent of peace initiatives to challenge the assumptions and prerogatives of the war-mongers in the White House. The dynamics of this immense clash between the global war and peace forces will be played out in the next several months.
The Dynamics of Obama’s Foreign Policy
Obama’s future policy reflects the interplay between a highly militarized past and the tremendous current pressure for peace and diplomacy. The changes emerging from these powerful conflicting forces will have a decisive impact on the global configuration of power, as well as on the trajectory of the US economy for the foreseeable future.
We have proceeded by outlining in telegraphic form the principle events and policies defining Obama’s embrace of a militarist policy over the past five years. We will now proceed to highlight the current countervailing forces and events pressuring the White House to adopt a diplomatic and peaceful resolution of conflicts. We will identify the leading pro-war power configuration acting as an obstacle to peace. In the final section we will spell out the policy resulting from these conflicting forces.
The Dynamics of Peace against the Legacy of War
By the early fall 2013, powerful tendencies emerged which seemed to undermine or, at least, neutralize Washington’s drive to new and more deadly wars. Eight major events constrained Washington’s empire builders to temporarily rethink their immediate steps to war.
These include: (1) President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for Syria to destroy its chemical weapons, under UN supervision, denying the US its current pretext for bombing Damascus. The subsequent UN Security Council resolution, which was unanimously approved, did not contain the ‘war clause’ (Chapter 7) – thereby removing Washington’s pretext to bomb Syria for ‘non-compliance’ to the tight time-table for disarming its chemical arsenal.
(2) Iran’s President Rohani’s calls for peace and reconciliation, his offer to start prompt and consequential negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program has isolated Israel and its Zionist agents in the international arena and forced Obama to reciprocate, resulting in a move toward US-Iranian negotiations.
(3) Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff’s, powerful denunciation of US cyber spying against her government, economy and citizens before the General Assembly resonated with the vast majority of political leaders. Coming from the most powerful economy in Latin America, the sixth largest economy in the world and a leading member of BRICS, Rousseff’s rejection of US cyber-colonialism and its IT and telecommunication corporations and her call for national development, control and ownership of these communication networks, set a clear anti-colonial tone to the proceedings. Washington’s response, its affirmation of its ‘right’ to spy on allies and their private citizens, as well as foes, has isolated Washington and found few supporters for such global cyber-imperial pretensions. To accommodate Brazil, Washington will be forced to enter into negotiations and acknowledge (if not comply with) Brazil’s demands.
(4) US domestic public opinion, in the run-up to Putin’s diplomatic solution of the Syrian crisis, was overwhelmingly opposed to Obama’s moves to bomb Syria. By a margin of two to one, the American electorate opposed any new war; and Congress was prepared to heed its constituents, as letters were running nine to one against war. In other words, Obama lacked domestic support for attacking Syria and was under strong pressure to accept Putin’s diplomatic solution. The mass involvement of American citizens, at least temporarily, pushed back the war-mongers among Israel’s wealthy and influential backers in Washington.
(5) Obama’s militarist foreign policy faces pressure from the Congressional deadlock over the budget and debt ceilings. Lacking a federal budget and with government offices closing, the White House has been forced to lay-off millions of military and civilian employees. Obama is not in a position to launch a costly new war, even if his Zionist patrons are “storming” Congress and clambering for one. The ‘fiscal crisis of the state’, which exploded in September 2013, is turning into a powerful political antidote to the policy of serial wars Obama undertook during his first five years in office. The debt-ceiling crisis and its aftermath further weaken the White House’s capacity and willingness to pursue an extended war agenda in the Middle East. Congress’s refusal to raise the debt ceiling, without budget reductions, could foreshadow a crisis in financial markets spreading to the world economy and leading to profound recession. The White House has its hands full trying to stabilize the domestic economy and placate Wall Street, thus weakening its willingness to engage in a new war.
One caveat: It is possible that, facing political divisions and an economic crisis, political adventurers and pro-Israel advisers might convince Obama to launch a war to ‘unify the country’ and ‘divert attention’ from his domestic debacle. A military distraction, of course, could backfire; it could be seen as a partisan ploy and deepen domestic divisions, especially if a US attack on Iran or Syria led to a wider war.
(6) The Snowden revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) global spying have weakened the White House’s ties to its allies and heightened antagonism with its adversaries. Trust and co-operation, especially with regard to intelligence, have been weakened in Asia, Latin America and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Several countries are discontinuing the use of US-IT companies which had collaborated with the NSA. By losing access to the communications of top officials in targeted countries, these revelations may have undermined Washington’s global reach. Obama and Kerry’s outrageous justifications for spying on their allies and private citizens and their defense of intervention in cyber space have stirred up powerful political currents of anti-imperialism among major trade partners. At the UN General Assembly Bolivian President Evo Morales asserted, ‘The US is mistaken if it thinks it is the owner of the world’. His attack on US military imperialism, “…terrorism is combatted through social policy not with military bases”… resonated among the vast majority of UN delegates. In stark contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bellicose speech received a hostile reception among those heads of state who didn’t simply walk out in disgust.
The Snowden disclosures of cyber-imperialism has seriously weakened the US capacity for war by exposing its intelligence operations and discrediting the war mongers associated with the NSA, making war planning more difficult.
The domestic and foreign forces, as well as world conditions for peace, would be overwhelming in any normal imperial system. But there is a ‘special factor’, a powerful ‘undertow’, which opposes the forces for peace, i.e. Israel and its US-based billionaire funded, 300,000 member-strong national and local Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) deeply embedded in government and civil society.
Against the Winds of Peace: The Zionist Power Configuration
On September 29, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu landed in New York, as part of an Israeli campaign to undermine world-wide support for a peaceful resolution of the war against Syria and the US-Iranian conflict. On September 30, Netayanhu met with President Obama and addressed the United Nations General Assembly the next day. Israel and Netanyahu represent the biggest and most powerful obstacle to the growing “tide of peace”. Given its status as a pariah state and the global community’s negative view of Israel and its bullying Prime Minister, Netanyahu has to rely almost exclusively on the US to maintain its monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region, its vast stockpile of chemical weapons and its military supremacy in the Middle East. The White House and the US Congress are crucial institutions backing Israel’s ambition for uncontested hegemony in the Middle East. And the Zionist Power Configuration is decisive in setting US policy throughout the region.
The ZPC operates on several levels: (1) dozens of Zionist billionaires and millionaires fund Washington-based propaganda mills (so-called ‘think tanks’), an army of pro-Israel Middle East ‘experts’ and Ivy League publicists, the 52 major American Zionist organizations and their 300,00 zealous militants. They pour tens of millions of dollars into electoral campaigns throughout the country, rewarding compliant politicians who support any legislation or resolution submitted by Zionist politicos and lobbyists (while brutally punishing any congressional ‘dissenters)’.
(2) Dozens of Zionist zealots occupy key positions within the Administration, especially as appointees dealing with the Middle East and Treasury, ensuring that US policymakers impose economic sanctions on Israel’s enemies and pursue wars in Israel’s interests. They unconditionally back Israel in its attacks on its neighbors and block any sanctioning vote in the UN. They make sure that Israel receives the most advanced weapons and the US Treasury pays its annual $3 billion-plus dollar tribute to the Jewish State.
(3)The Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations and their militants ensure local and national support for Israel, even at the expense of domestic US interests and priorities. The zealots actively intervene to ban, censor or threaten the employment of any critic of Israel or the ZPC – extending to the most mundane local level of harassment. They successfully limit the content and participants in the mass media, world affairs forums and university programs with their threats and bullying.
The mass media are controlled by pro-Israel moguls, news reporters, and commentators who mold public perception of Israel claiming it to be a ‘bastion of democracy’ while labelling Iran a “terrorist Islamist dictatorship”. Media analyst Steve Lendman describes, in his article entitled, “Israel Launches Anti-Rohani Media Blitz,” Netanyahu’s repeated lies on questions pertaining to Iran’s nuclear program and how the major US news media parrot Israel’s bellicose propaganda. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg back Netanyahu’s demand for harsh economic sanctions and threats of aggression against Iran. The Daily Alert, mouthpiece of the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization, reproduces and circulates scores of libelous polemical diatribes denigrating President Rohani, and slavishly praise each and every bellicose eruption out from the mouths of Israeli politicians and generals. For example, leading Zionist propagandist, Jeffrey Goldberg calls President Rohani a “dishonest war monger,” dismissing his peace overtures because he is not “ready to shut down his country’s nuclear program”. Aaron David Miller, another one of Israel’s Washington intellectuals, echoes Netanyahu’s “concerns about wily Iranian mullahs bearing gifts” while demanding that the US government “take care of Israel’s concerns”. The Zionist demand that the US “secure Israel’s concerns” is a no-brainer because the Jewish state is determined to strip Iran of its sovereignty, surrender its entire medical and civilian nuclear program, and submit to Israeli regional hegemony…
The US and British press reported that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has launched their own ‘full-scale invasion’ of the US Congress, sending over 300 full-time lobbyists to sabotage any form of rapprochement between the US and Iran. Just prior to the UN General Assembly meeting, AIPAC militants were writing legislation for the US Congress, which imposed new additional sanctions to further undermine Iranian oil exports; their efforts secured “bi-partisan” support of over 300 members of Congress. While President Obama faces a divided Congress, the Israel-Firsters from AIPAC easily secure a near unanimous vote to scupper any diplomatic dialog between Washington and Teheran. These new extremist sanctions were dictated by the Israeli Foreign Office and are designed to sabotage any White House negotiations.
While some corporate newspapers, like the Financial Times, describe the “suspicions in Congress which raise the bar for a deal”, they fail to mention the extraordinary intervention and influence of AIPAC in sowing these “suspicions” and authoring all anti-Iran legislation over the past two years! The mass media covers up the central role of the ZPC in opposing a US dialogue with Iran, and in subverting the push for peace favored by the vast majority of war-weary and economically-battered Americans. Even ‘progressive and leftist’ weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies are silent on the overwhelming role of the ZPC. Leading left journalists systematically skirt around any in- depth discussion of the AIPAC and the 52 pro-Israel Jewish organizations in manipulating the US Congress, the mass media and the Executive branch.
Any writer who attends US legislative committee hearings on the Middle East or observes Congressional debates, or interviews Congressional staff-members and lobbyists, or reads AIPAC reports, can compile ample public documentation of the major role that Israel, through it US Zionist organizations and agents, plays in dictating US-Iran relations. Nothing illustrates the extreme power the ZPC exercises over US policy toward Iran than the thundering silence of ‘progressives’ over the central ZPC role in policymaking. Is it simply cowardice or fear of being slandered as an ‘anti-Semite’? Or is it fear of being excluded or blacklisted by major media and publications? Or is it complicity: Being ‘critical of privileges and power’ while selectively excluding mention of Zionist access and influence?
So we have the situation in the US today where the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu dictates the ‘negotiating terms’ to the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations. According to Netanyahu’s dictates, the Islamic Republic of Iran must stop all uranium enrichment – including that for medical, research and energy use, close the enrichment facilities at Qom, remove all enriched uranium and halt the production of plutonium. Having set these ridiculous, sovereignty-killing conditions on Iran and having the unconditional support of the entire ZPC, Netanyahu proceeds to sabotage the peaceful, diplomatic process via the lap-puppies in the US Congress. As one Washington pundit noted the Obama regime “is very conscious of the fact that Israeli views on Iran have a large influence (sic) on opinion in the US Congress”.
No country on any continent would or could accept the terms dictated by Israel and its Fifth Column in the US – terms that undermine national sovereignty. In fact, all countries with nuclear power facilities and advanced medical and research institutions engage in some or all of these activities. By setting these extremist terms, Netanyahu is in effect dooming the negotiations from the start and setting the stage for war, the so-called “military option” that both he and Obama agree would follow from a collapse in negotiations.
In a rational democratic world, most experts would argue that the new alignment of forces for peace, including the vast and growing domestic opposition to new wars and world public opinion in favor of President Rohani’s overtures for negotiations, the US could easily ignore Israel’s war mongering. But a more realistic and reflective analysis, however, would argue that the negotiations will only proceed with great difficulty, especially in the face of ZPC sabotage in adding new sanctions rather than a good-faith act of cutting or reducing the current sanctions.
The Israeli-ZPC ‘war offensive’ went into high gear precisely at the moment when world public opinion, the UN and even the White House enthusiastically welcomed the peace overtures from newly elected Iranian President Rohani.
The purpose was to sabotage any dialogue with Iran before they even began. The ZPC took the following measures:
1. AIPAC and its clients in the US Congress have circulated new harsh sanctions and rapidly signed up dozens of Congressional supporters. The entire Zionist apparatus, led by the 52 Presidents of the Major Jewish American Organizations, backed the latest and most severe sanctions against the Iranian oil industry. They followed Netanyahu’s dictate to make the Iranian economy collapse. The purpose of the ZPC is to create the worst possible conditions for negotiations – undermining the ‘goodwill’ following Obama’s gestures (the phone conversation with Rohani) and sure to provoke widespread opposition among the sanction-weary Iranian population against a US-Iran dialogue.
2. The notorious Israeli spy outfit, Mossad, was most probably involved in the brutal assassination of Iran’s official in charge of cyber-defense, Mojtaba Ahmadi. Most experts agree that, since 2007, Israel’s intelligence agency has been behind the horrific assassinations of five Iranian nuclear engineers and scientists, as well as the head of their ballistic missile program. The timing of the current Mossad outrage is designed to further poison the climate for US-Iranian negotiations, even though the victim this time is not directly linked to Iran’s nuclear program.
3. Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly was pure corrosive vitriol, character assassination and fabrication. He made constant reference to Iran’s ‘nuclear weapons program’, although on-site reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and sixteen US intelligence agencies have repeatedly shown that no such program exists. Nevertheless, thanks to the power and influence of the ZPC, Netanyahu’s venomous message was relayed by all the major media and picked up and repeated by influential pro-Israel think tanks, academics and pundits. Netanyahu unleashed the Zionist pro-war propaganda machine to energize Jewish powerbrokers to ‘put the squeeze’ on the White House. The effect was immediate: Obama rushed out to parrot Netanyahu’s lies that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. Secretary of State Kerry obediently pledged to keep ‘the military option’ for dealing with Iran ‘on the table’ – in other words, the threat of a unilateral attack. UN Ambassador Samantha Power demanded the newly elected President Rohani make immediate concessions in order to prove his “seriousness.”
Conclusion: World Peace or Zionist War?
Recent political and diplomatic changes provide the world community with a measure of optimism regarding the prospects for peace. Under intense pressure from US public opinion, Obama temporarily went along with Russian President Putin’s diplomatic approach over chemical weapons in Syria.
The UN General Assembly’s favorable response to Iranian President Rohani’s call for dialogue has compelled Obama to openly consider direct negotiations with Teheran over its nuclear program.
World public opinion, favorable interlocutors in Iran, bold diplomatic initiatives from Russia, and cooperative behavior from Damascus, all events pointing to a peaceful resolution of current Middle East conflicts, face a formidable enemy embedded in the very centers of power in the United States, the ZPC, which acts on behalf of the ultra-militarist Israeli state.
Over the years, the ZPC has successfully pushed for crippling sanctions and wars against a number of Israel’s regional opponents. Leading Zionists in the Bush regime fabricated the myth of Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ leading the US to invade, occupy and destroy Iraq, despite massive opposition from the US public on the eve of the invasion. Zionists in the US Treasury Department and in the White House slapped broad economic sanctions on Iraq, Iran and Syria — preventing the biggest US oil companies from investing and trading with these resource-rich nations, which cost Big Oil close to $500 billion in lost revenues. An empirical study of congressional committees, legislative debates, resolutions and voting behavior demonstrates that the ZPC co-authored the sanction legislation and administrators, linked to the ZPC, implemented the measures.
The popular notion that Big Oil was responsible for these wars and sanctions, as part of some scheme to take over the oil production facilities of Iraq and Iran, lacks empirical basis. The ZPC defeated Big Oil: Exon, Mobil, and Chevron were no match for the ZPC when it came to penetrating Congress, authoring legislation, mobilizing billionaires to fund Congressional campaigns, organizing thousands of zealous militants or influencing the mass media — including the Wall Street Journal. The governments of billions of poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America can only dream of the annual $3 billion dollar tribute that the ZPC secures for Israel from the American tax-payers for the past 30-plus years.
The UN Security Council and its Human Rights Commission are powerless to sanction Israel for its war crimes because the ZPC guarantees a US veto of any resolution. Despite the opposition of the entire Muslim world, the ZPC ensures that Washington will continue to support Israel’s colonial expansion and land grabs in the occupied Palestinian territory, and its bombing of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Sudan. In other words, the ZPC has successfully undermined the interests of the biggest US multi-national corporations, the position of the UN Security Council and the needs of billions of poor in the Third World. The ZPC induces the US to start prolonged brutal wars costing the US economy over a trillion dollars and totally destroying six sovereign countries (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia). Today Israel and the ZPC set the terms for US-Iran negotiations — dooming them to failure. The mass media echo Netanyahu’s scurrilous (and infantile) characterization of President Rohani as ‘untrustworthy’, and a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ And US Secretary of State John Kerry parrots Netanyahu’s lies about Iran’s nuclear arms program. Shortly after his talk with Rohani, US President Obama dutifully made his report of the entire conversation to Netanyahu – seeking Israel’s approval. Obama then met with his Israeli ‘handlers’ and pledged fealty to the interests of Israel, bleating out that ‘military option (to attack Iran) is still on the table.’ For the one hundred and ninety-first time (over the past year) President Obama pledged the US’ unconditional support to defend Israel. Like a broken record (or broken political hack), Obama repeated that “Israel must (sic) reserve the right to take military action against Iran it if feels threatened by Iran.”
The Zionist propaganda apparatus has set the terms for the US government with regard to Iran. Tel Aviv orders and the ZPC demands that Obama ‘negotiate’ under Israeli terms. Iran, the ZPC insists, must provide detailed information on its military bases and defenses, end its legal enrichment of uranium for civilian use, turn over its existing stockpiles, end the production of plutonium at the Arak facility, dismantle the underground research facilities at Fordow and cease the conversion of first generation centrifuges to more efficient second generation ones.
President Obama might then permit the Iranians to enrich uranium to about 3.5 percent, operate a few primitive centrifuges and maintain a tiny stock of enriched uranium – for medical purposes…. These are conditions which Israel and the ZPC know that no free and independent country or national leader would ever accept. The Zionists seek to sabotage diplomacy in order to push the US into another Gulf war which they believe will establish Israel as the un-challenged regional hegemon.
It is essential for the peace camp in the United States to expose the role of the ZPC in dictating the US negotiating terms with Iran and publicly repudiate its control over the US Congress and the White House. Otherwise the majority of Americans who favor peace and diplomacy will have no influence in shaping US-Iran relations. The problem is that the majority of anti-war Americans and the international community cannot match the billionaire Jewish Zionists in buying and controlling the members of the US Congress. AIPAC has no rival among Christians, Muslims, or even anti-Zionist Jews. The pro-peace Pope Francis from his pulpit in the Vatican cannot match the power of the Presidents of the 52 Major Jewish American Organizations whose militants can literally “storm Washington” and push the US into war!
Until the 99% of non-Zionist Americans (of all ethnicities and persuasions) organize as a coherent force to push back the tiny 1% — Israel’s Fifth Column — all the hopes for peace awakened by President Putin’s initiative on Syria and President Rohani’s diplomatic opening at the United Nation, will collapse. Worse, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will again lead an American President, Obama, by the nose, from sabotaged diplomacy into another costly Gulf War, one in which thousands of US soldiers (not a single Zionist among them) and tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Iranians will perish!
October 11, 2013 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Dilma Rousseff, Iran, Israel, Obama, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment
How Archaeology Killed Biblical History
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2
Hector Avalos is professor of religious studies at Iowa State University and the author or editor of six books on Biblical studies and religion, including his recently published work, The End of Biblical Studies. Join us for a fascinating presentation detailing how the more we discover about the ancient world, the less reliable we find the Bible.
From the dust jacket of The End of Biblical Studies: Hector Avalos calls for an end to biblical studies as we know them. He outlines two main arguments for this surprising conclusion.
First, academic biblical scholarship has clearly succeeded in showing that the ancient civilization that produced the Bible held beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world and humanity that are fundamentally opposed to the views of modern society. The Bible is thus largely irrelevant to the needs and concerns of contemporary human beings.
Second, Avalos criticizes his colleagues for applying a variety of flawed and specious techniques aimed at maintaining the illusion that the Bible is still relevant in today’s world. In effect, he accuses his profession of being more concerned about its self-preservation than about giving an honest account of its own findings to the general public and faith communities.
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October 10, 2013 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Bible, Biblical studies, Christianity, Hector Avalos, Religious studies | Leave a comment
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Sam Husseini: The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq war
By Slava Zilber | American Herald Tribune | October 14, 2019
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny? … continue
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