Iran has strongly condemned the European Union’s latest move to impose fresh sanctions on a number of Iranian institutions and companies despite the ongoing negotiations between representatives of Iran, the US and the EU in the Omani capital, Muscat.
“Under the circumstances that the nuclear negotiations are going on and efforts by the negotiating parties are underway to reach an acceptable agreement, this move by the European Union is questionable and contradicts the purpose of talks and the opposite side’s commitments,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said on Sunday.
She added that the EU’s move to impose bans on a number of Iranian entities was a sign of “unusual insistence” on the EU’s past policies and an “astonishing move” at the current juncture.
Iran has voiced objection to the European Union through its embassy in Brussels.
Afkham’s remarks came after the Council of the European Union announced on November 7 that the bloc has imposed sanctions on Iran’s Sina Bank, Power Plants’ Equipment Manufacturing Company, Naftiran Intertrade Company (a.k.a. Naftiran Trade Company) (NICO), and Naftiran Intertrade Company Srl.
It added that an Iranian businessman, Sorinet Commercial Trust Bankers, and Sharif University of Technology should be included again on the list of persons and entities subject to restrictive measures on the basis of a new statement of reasons.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, US Secretary of State John Kerry and the EU’s representative, Catherine Ashton, kicked off trilateral talks in the Omani capital, Muscat, on Sunday to exchange views on the outstanding issues hindering a final deal on Tehran’s civilian nuclear work.
Sources close to the Iranian negotiating team say the main stumbling block in the way of resolving the Western dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program remains to be the removal of all the bans imposed on the country, and not the number of centrifuges or the level of uranium enrichment.
Tehran wants the sanctions entirely lifted while Washington, under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby, insists that at least the UN-imposed sanctions should remain in place.
With Canada’s annual “Remembrance Day” just around the corner, it would be wise to broach the issue of “remembering” those Canadians who fought and died in the two bloodiest conflicts in world history with some humility and skepticism.
On November 11 Canadians across the political spectrum will evoke their plastic patriotism by commemorating war veterans who fought in the First and Second World Wars. The obedient masses will blindly recite jingoist platitudes and regurgitate outdated wartime propaganda that has been instilled in the minds of each and every Canadian citizen since birth.
Like Americans and Britons, most Canadians believe that World War I and II were quintessential “good wars” fought to secure “freedom and democracy” and other such flimsy fantasies. Most people reared in Canada’s degraded education system foolishly believe that this country’s participation in WWI and WWII was “the right thing to do” and that the outbreak of such wars was “inevitable.” Without doing one scintilla of actual research, the gullible masses can tell you why these fratricidal wars that caused the deaths of untold millions of people were “necessary” and “just.”
Do any of these ignorant zombies stop for a moment to think about what they are promoting? The “necessity” of an enormous bloodbath that plunged much of the world into pandemonium? Following WWII, Canadian society has evidently devolved into a brain-damaged loony-bin filled to the brim with parrots and yes-men incapable of independent thought or critical analysis.
The fact is that Canada was not attacked in World War I or II. Positioned between two gigantic oceans, Canada is relatively safe geographically from foreign invasion and therefore had no real incentive to fight in either war. So why did Canada fight?
In his book The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler discerns that Ottawa’s decision to go to war in 1914 and again in 1939 was essentially “because Britain went to war.” Indeed, as a de facto colony of Britain, Canada has only ever had a ceremonial facade of independence throughout its history. When London decided to go to war, Canada immediately followed suit, revealing the country’s blind subservience to the Crown.
And what was Britain’s reasoning for going to war the second time around? The brainwashed masses will say that “Nazism” was a grave and pressing danger and had to be stopped. But only if one is viewing the world through British or Jewish spectacles does that suggestion have any merit. As far as much of the global East and South were concerned, British imperialism was a far greater threat than anything posed by Hitler’s regional ambitions. From the perspective of the Arabs of Palestine and the Middle East, Jewish Zionism and its British imperial patrons were a worse adversary than Hitler’s Germany by a long shot. Germans were not the ones brutally occupying and suppressing the people of Palestine for the past two decades leading up to WWII, it was the English (and later the Zionist Jews).
Disgracefully, Canada still has major streets named after the British WWII leader Winston Churchill, a pugnacious warmongering drunkard who did everything in his power to guarantee the destruction of millions of German civilians. At one point during the war, the lunatic British statesman drew up plans to use the lethal anthrax chemical as a hellish bio-weapon against Germany, an act of unconscionable malice that would have rendered the whole of central Europe an uninhabitable toxic wasteland. Fortunately, Churchill’s military advisors talked some sense into the primitive dolt when he sobered up, so he never followed through with the maniacal strategy. However, he did succeed in annihilating hundreds of thousands of German civilians in what Chris Floyd of The Moscow Times described as “massive conventional bombing raid[s] on the enemy’s capital[s], also aimed at civilians, designed to ‘castrate’ the enemy population.”
In a ZoomerTV documentary entitled “Unlikely Obsession: Churchill and the Jews,” various commentators, all of whom are either Jewish or philosemitic, note Winston Churchill’s intimate relations with Britain’s Jewish-Zionist community throughout his political career, especially the moneyed elite among the Jews. One commentator unwittingly reveals the real causes underpinning Churchill’s bellicose stance towards Germany: he was on the payroll of wealthy Jews who bailed him out of his financial quandaries. The Zionist-produced documentary in essence recognizes that Churchill put the interests of Jews above those of Britain and its people, and that his unrelenting confrontation with Hitler and National Socialism was in large part spurred by the Jewish-Zionist financiers who kept the taps from going dry at Churchill’s residence.
“I am, of course, a Zionist,” said Churchill in 1956, “and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration.” (New York Times, Nov. 6, 1991.) The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a British government decree, addressed to a House of Rothschild baron, which promised to help the Zionists establish a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. But what is routinely left out of this equation is that Balfour’s sordid pledge to fulfill the Zionist dream was, according to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, secured by way of “persistent propaganda, through unceasing demonstration of the life force of our people.” Weizmann went on to say: “We [Zionists] told the responsible authorities: We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not. You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.” (Judische Rundschau (Jewish Review), Jan. 16, 1920.)
In other words, the Zionists bribed and perhaps blackmailed the British elite into gifting them Palestine. They did this by promising to use their economic and political clout to drag the United States into the First World War, thereby helping turn the tide of the war in favour of Britain. And they succeeded in doing so. Weizmann later boastfully acknowledged this amazing fact of history in a revealing 1941 letter to Winston Churchill. “It was the Jews,” Weizmann stated unequivocally in the letter, “who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it – and may do it – again.” Weizmann insisted that the Jews would once again gladly form the backbone of the British war effort against Germany and Italy, telling Churchill that, “There is only one big ethnic group which is willing to stand, to a man, for Great Britain, and a policy of ‘all-out-aid’ for her: the five million American Jews.” (A transcript of this letter is available at David Irving’s website)
In his informative essay “The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1,” writer Thomas Dalton quotes a shameless Churchill who proudly conceded this point, stating in July 1922: “Pledges and promises were made during the War… They were made because it was considered they would be of value to us in our struggle to win the War. It was considered that the support which the Jews could give us all over the world, and particularly in the United States, and also in Russia, would be a definite palpable advantage.” To solidify this notion, Dalton goes on to quote former British Prime Minister Lloyd George, himself a Christian Zionist, who similarly confessed: “The Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to… a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.” (Dalton’s essay can be found on the Inconvenient History website) One may wonder why mainstream historiography of this period is reluctant to mention Britain’s acquiescence to Zionist demands vis-à-vis Palestine and its role in escalating both world wars to cataclysmic proportions.
Zionists duly acknowledged and praised Churchill’s role as an underling and workhorse for Zionism thereafter. In 1954, American Zionists endowed Churchill with the “Theodore Herzl Award” for his “outstanding” pro-Zionist work ethic. Churchill was an “architect of the Jewish State and protagonist of Zionism,” declared representatives of the Zionist Organization of America who bestowed the disreputable “honour” upon the self-interested British politician. (The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1954) In 2012, an Israeli group erected a statue of Churchill in Jerusalem. A spokesman of the group, Anthony Rosenfelder, described Churchill as “a passionate Zionist all his life and a philo-semite.” (The Independent, Nov. 3, 2012.)
Decades of intense Allied propaganda cannot dispute these facts which expose the hidden truth that Britain, Canada, the US, France and the rest of the Allied Powers fought and died by the millions for reasons alien to their jurisdictions. It was not in the national interests of any of these countries to sacrifice large amounts of blood and treasure to fight a wholly avoidable conflict that offered not even a semblance of economic, cultural or national benefit.
Neither WWI nor WWII were “good” or “just” wars by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, they were both catastrophic blunders that set the whole of Europe and Asia as well as parts of the Middle East and North Africa ablaze. The Second World War in particular delivered the world into the hands of the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire, thereby sealing the eternal fate of humanity as drone-like economic cogs and geopolitical cannon fodder for American, British and Jewish interests.
With all things considered, “Remembrance Day” amounts to little more than a glorification of war and an exercise in jingoism and self-aggrandizement. It re-enforces the insulting myth of the “good” and “necessary” wars. It encourages the refusal to recognize the wrongs committed by “our side” in those bloody conflicts. This ‘day of reverence’ for our soldiers acts as a mind control mechanism to deceive the public into believing that our government has always acted benevolently and in the interests of the people, when in fact the opposite is true.
May 14, 1948– Official Recognition- The United States of America becomes the first country to officially recognize Israel as an independent nation.
1949-1973-US-Israel Aid Commences– The United States gives Israel an average of $122 million per year in foreign aid payments.
Summer 1954– Lavon Affair– Israel recruits Egyptian Jews to blow up American and British targets in Egypt. Israel planned on blaming the murderous false-flag attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to garner support from the US and Britain. After officially denying any involvement, the Israeli government finally admitted their role in the incident in 2005 by honoring the surviving agents with a certificate of appreciation.
1955-1970- Israel Steals American Uranium to Build It’s First Nuclear Weapons– In 2011, the Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy examined hundreds of newly de-classified documents from the FBI and CIA and discovered that Israeli spies in collaboration with American Jews stole hundreds of kilograms of weapons grade uranium from US stockpiles and shipped it to Israel. Although Israel does not officially acknowledge the possession of nuclear weapons, their nuclear arsenal is estimated at between 200-300 nuclear weapons. (Source)
1963– AIPAC Formed– The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby” is formed, but refuses to comply with US law and register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. AIPAC has been in violation of federal law for nearly 50 years, but through political contributions and connections, AIPAC officials have remained above prosecution for their many violations of Federal law, including espionage (as addressed later).
June 8, 1967– USS Liberty– Israeli jets and torpedo boats attack the American naval ship USS Liberty with the intention of murdering every sailor on board and then blaming the attack on Egypt. Israel’s goal was to draw America into the Israeli-Arab War. Israel has officially claimed the attack was an “accident,” but every survivor of the USS Liberty claimed that it could not possibly have been an accident given that Israeli jets flew directly over the ship hours earlier on several occasions and one pilot flew so close that he waved to the US sailors, and the sailors waved back. Given the proximity of the jets and the surrounding facts of the incident, there is no question that Israel knew whose ship it was. Lt. General Marshall Carter, the director of the NSA, told congress the attack, “couldn’t be anything else but deliberate.” A later coverup ensued, and in 2002, Captain Ward JAGC senior counsel for the court of inquiry claimed that the court of inquiry’s findings were intended to coverup what was a deliberate attack by Israel on a ship it knew to be American.
1975– Oil Guarantee- The Jewish US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, secretly brokered a deal in which the United States of America guaranteed Israel’s oil supply in the event of a crisis. The 1975 Israel-United States Memorandum of Understanding (see the full text here) required the United States to maintain an oil reserve for Israel and guarantee the shipping of that oil to Israel in times of emergency. This deal has cost the United States more than a hundred billion dollars since it was first enacted. The most troubling aspect of this deal was not the cost however, but the stipulation that in case of an oil emergency in which both the US and Israel needed oil, the US would give its oil to Israel. Section 3 (b):
If the oil Israel needs to meet all of its normal requirements for domestic consumption is unavailable for purchase in circumstances where’ quantitative restrictions through embargo or otherwise also prevent the United States from procuring oil to meet its normal requirements, the United States Government will promptly make oil available for purchase by Israel in accordance with the International Energy Agency conservation and allocation formula as applied by the United States Government, in order to meet Israel’s essential requirements. If Israel is unable to secure the necessary means to transport such oil to Israel, the United States Government will make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport.
This is oil that would have been used to heat homes during the winter, power ambulances, and provide the fuel for tractors to farm America’s agricultural lands. To put this into perspective, in the event of an oil crisis, the fuel that Americans would need to heat their homes, get them to work, and produce food would go to Israel. This agreement very well could have starved tens of thousands of Americans in order to save Israelis if an oil crisis would have taken place.
1978– US Starts Paying Egypt $1.3 Billion Annually In Exchange For Maintaining Good Relations With Israel- John McCain admitted in a CNN interview that US-Egyptian aid was essentially a bribe to maintain good relations with Israel. The aid was pledged during a US-brokered peace negotiation between Egypt and Israel, and began to be distributed just after the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace accord.
1980-1981- Israel Teams Up With Republicans to Defeat Jimmy Carter- During the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, Israel, upset at President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to create a peaceful two-state solution in Palestine, used its clandestine operations in Iran to prevent American hostages from being released before Carter’s re-election bid. Carter wrote in his White House Diaries that Israel was purposefully thwarting the peace process with Palestine so it could continue to settle on Palestinian land. History has certainly proven Carter right, and Peter Beinart, the author of The Crisis of Zionism confirms this fact by investigating every major Israeli-Palestinain peace negotiation, and pointing out Israel’s efforts to subvert them. According to Consortium News, Israel used its operatives in Iran to ensure that US hostages were not released before the election, which doomed Carter’s chances for re-election. The hostages were released immediately after Reagan’s inauguration, and Israel was subsequently caught shipping US weapons to Iran after an Israeli chartered plane crashed in the Soviet Union. Israel claimed to have the Reagan administration’s approval for the transfer. As the Consortium article points out, recent discoveries make the cooperation between the Israelis and Republicans to remove a US President by using American hostages as political pawns, impossible to ignore.
1980-1990- Israel Steals American Technology and Equipment at Unprecedented Levels-According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “It is worth mentioning that in the 1980s, regardless of Jonathan Pollards’ espionage activities for Israel, Israeli companies and individuals were involved many cases of technological espionage, stealing U.S. secrets, technology and equipment. The most outstanding case involved Milco, a U.S. based company owned by Israeli tycoon Arnon Milchan, which bought and shipped equipment with which could have also been used as triggers for nuclear weapons.” Recently released FBI documents revealed that current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was integrally involved in the Milco incident.
1982- Sabra and Shatila Massacres– The Israeli military purposefully allowed a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refugee camps, which were under Israel’s control, and rape, murder, and dismember 800 civilians. Nearly all of the dead were women, children, and elderly men. In 1983, an Israeli investigation concluded that then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent the massacre. The New York Times recently uncovered de-classified transcripts of conversations between US officials and Israeli officials, in which Israeli officials misled the Americans about the events in Beirut, and bullied them into accepting outrageous accusations that the Palestinian women and children were “terrorists,” and therefore deserved to be massacred. According to the New York Times, “The Sabra and Shatila massacres severely undercut America’s influence in the Middle East, and its moral authority plummeted.” Only a year later, in 1983, the US marine barracks were bombed in Lebanon, in which 241 marines were killed.
1985– Jonathan Pollard Incident– A Jewish American named Jonathan Pollard was caught stealing American secrets and selling them to Israel. At first, Israel denied any involvement in the incident, but later admitted complicity in 1998. The wife of Pollard’s handler, Avi Sella, worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and Pollard later admitted that a prominent ADL member was deeply involved in the spying. Like AIPAC, the ADL does not register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act as per the law, even though it works closely with the Mossad, and has been caught spying on Americans for Israel. Amazingly, the ADL even had the gumption to shamelessly appeal to President Clinton in 1993 to commute their spy’s sentence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also campaigned for Pollard’s release.
1987– Israel Starts Receiving Regular Payments of More Than $3 Billion Per Year. The real US-Israel aid is estimated to be $15-$20 billion per year when valuable military equipment deemed “scrapped”, loan guarantees, under the table aid, and preferential contracts are factored in.
1990– First Gulf War. Saddam agreed to withdraw from Kuwait if Israel complied with international law and withdrew from Palestine. Instead of encouraging Israel to abide by international law, the US launched an attack on Iraq, even though Iraq did not threaten America’s oil supply nor pose any danger to US interests. Israel did not send any troops or material support for the invasion.
1993- ADL Spying Scandal– San Francisco newspapers broke the story that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which has close ties to Israel, had been paying American police officers for confidential information, illegally wire-tapping phones, and even dumpster diving to acquire private information on American citizens. The Anti-Defamation League later sold the information to the Israeli and South African governments. Among the individuals the ADL spied on were civil rights activists deemed “anti-Israel”, Congressmen such as Nanci Pelosi, reporters, labor unions, the NAACP, African National Congress, and the Rainbow Coalition. Presumably the ADL was going to use any damning material acquired during their spying efforts to blackmail these politicians and influential people into changing their negative stances on Israel. Just one of their spies, Roy Bullock, had compiled files on more than 9,800 Americans and 950 organizations spanning three decades. After the search of the ADL offices, the San Francisco District Attorney said the ADL was conducting a “national spy network.”
1993– AIPAC President David Steiner Caught on Tape Bragging About his Organization’s Incredible Power in America. Steiner first admitted to manipulating the US Secretary of State into giving Israel more foreign aid. Steiner said he, ”met with [Secretary of State] Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know they’re looking for the Jewish votes, and I’ll tell him whatever he wants to hear … Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don’t even know about.”
In the same conversation, Steiner said he would support any politician who has been good to Israel over his own brother. He also discussed his efforts to get Jewish, and pro-Israel candidates re-elected, even by paying for a rigged poll. Steiner was attempting to raise money for dozens of pro-Israel candidates through his position at AIPAC, even though the organization claims that it doesn’t engage in such behavior. In the conversation, Steiner asked a potential Jewish donor to get his children to write checks in order to subvert political donation laws.
Steiner also said, “We gave two employees from AIPAC leave of absences to work on the [Clinton] campaign. I mean, we have a dozen people in that campaign, in the headquarters…. and they’re all going to get big jobs. We have friends. I also work with a think tank, the Washington Institute. I have Michael Mandelbaum and Martin Indyk being foreign policy advisers. Steve Speigel—we’ve got friends—this is my business.”
“I talked to Bill Clinton [and he made a commitment that] he’s going to be very good to us.” ”One of my officers, Monte Friedkin, is one of the biggest fund-raisers for them [Clintons]. I mean, I have people like that all over the country.”
When asked if he knows who Bill Clinton would put on the Supreme Court if elected, Steiner replied, “We’re talking now. We don’t have no commitments yet. We’re just negotiating. We’re more interested right now, in the Secretary of State and the Secretary of National Security Agency. That’s more important to us.” He also said, “we are negotiating” who will be Secretary of State.
1993- Israel Caught Selling US Military Secrets to China– Israel sold $2-3 billion worth of sensitive US military technology to China. This was technology that the US had specifically forbidden to be delivered to China in anyway shape or form, as it would undermine America’s national security. Read this link for the full story.
1996 GAO Spy Report– The Government Accountability Office reported that Israel spies on the US more than any other ally.
2000-2003 Iraq Sanctions- In 2000, AIPAC distributed a letter asking AIPAC members to put pressure on the US Congress and the President to ramp up sanctions on Iraq and block the oil for food program, which was providing Iraqi civilians with much needed food and medicine. In 2003, AIPAC attempted to block a bill that would have allowed US companies to export food and medicine to Iraqi civilians. AIPAC took the position that the food and medicine would not help the Iraqi people, which is obviously untrue, and that the bill would hasten Saddam’s effort to procure weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was of course not building weapons of mass destruction, and the AIPAC efforts ended up murdering thousands of Iraqi civilians.
September 11, 2001– Five Dancing Israelis– The terrorists who perpetrated the worst attack on America in its history stated on record that their motivation was America’s unabashed support for the apartheid regime of Israel. Five dancing Israelis were actually caught filming the world trade center attacks and dancing in celebration afterwards. When the Israelis were caught in a van that had contained explosives, they said we are all on the same side now against the Palestinians. The dancing Israelis later admitted on an Israeli talk show that they were there to document the event. Before the US government classified all information on Israel’s involvement in 9-11, the FBI officially concluded that Israel had to have known of the attack before 9-11-2001 and didn’t warn the US. After the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We are benefitting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” He also said, “these events have swung American public opinion in our favor.”At best, Israel knew of the attacks before hand and did not warn America because of the strategic support against the Palestinians that it would bring. At worst, Israel had a hand in planning the attacks.
2001- Israeli Spies Deported– More than 60 Israeli spies were arrested and detained. Most of them failed lie-detector tests about their spying activities on the US and their connection to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
2002- Harvard Economist Estimates Total US-Israel Aid At $3 trillion. Dr. Thomas R. Stauffer, a world renowned economist who taught economics and Middle East studies at Harvard, as well as serving twice in the Executive Office of the President on a task force for oil imports and controls, estimated that as of 2002 (in 2002 dollars) Israel has cost the US $3 trillion. His estimate took into account direct military aid, political support, oil price increases as a result of conflicts, and peripheral/hidden foreign aid.
In Stauffer’s estimation, US aid to Israel costs 275,000 American jobs per year due to unfair trade imbalances and sanctions on Israel’s enemies. In one example of under the table aid, Stauffer pointed out that the US actually gave Russia and Romania billions of dollars in undeclared aid to facilitate Jews moving to Israel. The US has also spent hundreds of billions in the region to secure friendly relationships with Israel. John McCain admitted in an interview that US aid to Egypt is really just a bribe so the Egyptians will maintain friendly relations with Israel. The US has also given Turkey and Greece billions for the same purpose.
A summary of Stauffer’s breakdown can be found here.
2003– Iraq War– In January 2003, AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr stated, “quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” Jeffrey Goldberg reported during a profile piece of AIPAC’s policy director Steven J. Rosen that, “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war.”
In addition, the US media, which by this point was almost completely controlled by Jewish American supporters of Israel (see this link for proof), refused to investigate the validity of the government’s accusation of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. The mainstream media then went a step further by criticizing anti-war activists and even called them traitors who were against the troops. Many Americans leaders and reporters came out after the war and criticized the media for its pro-war propaganda, but very few spoke of the Israeli connection for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.
Even though Israel aggressively lobbied America to attack Iraq, they committed no troops or resources to the struggle.
2005– AIPAC Spying Scandal– A pentagon analyst pleads guilty to passing military secrets to two AIPAC employees en route to Israel. After some political wrangling, all charges were dropped against the two Jewish AIPAC employees in 2009, even though the analyst agreed to testify against the AIPAC employees, and the government had overwhelming evidence to prosecute. It was later reported by Time magazine that Jane Harman, a Jewish congresswoman, was bribed by AIPAC to lobby the Department of Justice to drop the spying charges against the AIPAC employees. In 2009, CQ politics reported that Harman was caught on a NSA wiretap telling an Israeli agent that she would lobby the Department of Justice to drop the case.
2008-2009-Israel Fires White Phosphorous Shells Into Civilian Locations, Including a Crowded Refugee Camp. At first, the Israeli army categorically denied the use of white phosphorous gas on civilians (a war crime), but then later admitted it when video footage made it impossible to deny. These weapons were made in the USA. The entire planet criticized the barbaric and internationally illegal war crimes, but President Bush and the United States supported the Israeli atrocities, which hurt America’s standing in the world.
2010- Israel is Caught Stealing America’s Nuclear Triggers– The United States Bureau of Industry and Security released a report concluding that nuclear triggers were illegally exported to Israel. (Source)
2010– Israel Bribes US News Outlets for Biased Stories– Newly declassified files prove that Israel has actually been covertly paying American media outlets tens of millions of dollars to publish pro-Israel stories. Among other things, the documents revealed that Israel paid the Atlantic magazine $50,000 to disrupt a US peace proposal that would have allowed Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel. These documents came from a Senate hearing, which ended up being censored by American politicians who received significant campaign financing from non-gentile sources. The bribed senators even went as far as sealing the most damning documents from the investigation.
January 13, 2012- Atlanta Jewish Times Owner Claims the Mossad is Considering Assassinating President Obama- Andrew Adler, the owner of the Atlanta Jewish Times, writes an article stating that Israel has three options in order to defend itself. 1. Attack Hezbollah and Hamas 2. Defy the US and attack Iran 3. “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.” He went on to say, “Yes you read three correctly. Order a hit on a US President in order to preserve Israel’s existence.” He claimed to know for sure that this option was already “being discussed in Israel’s most inner circles”, and given his high powered Israeli friends, you can bet that he is correct.
April 18, 2012-The Bilzerian Report Estimates the Total Cost of America’s Relationship with Israel, Adjusted for Inflation and Including the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be in Excess of $5 trillion, or $16,000 per American.
July 28, 2012– CIA Reports that Israel is the Largest Spy Threat in the Middle East. The report details numerous incidents of Israeli spies breaking into American diplomats’ homes and offices to steal sensitive material.
Around this time last year, parliamentary records show, the retired property developer and hugely generous Labour party donor, Sir David Garrard, had given a modest £60,000 towards the party’s election campaign for 2015. It came in addition to around half a million he had already given since 2003.
Fast forward to 16 June of this year, Garrard hosts a Labour Friends of Israel event, at which Labour leader Ed Miliband is the main speaker. The prime minister hopeful had, the year before, proclaimed that he was a Zionist. The lobbying group he addressed boasts dozens of Labour peers and MPs amongst its membership, including the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.
Despite the atrocities being committed as Miliband spoke – a few thousand miles away during “Operation Protective Edge” in Gaza, he made not one mention of the Palestinian casualties in his speech, though he did take time to note Israel’s own losses. By that point, 172 Palestinian lives had been taken, and over 1,200 were wounded. The newspapers were in outcry, but from Miliband – performing before his party donors – silence.
That same day, the silence was rewarded. Garrard transferred a whopping £630,000 to the Labour party accounts, over ten times his donation from the previous year.
It was a near identical episode to David Cameron speaking in 2009, back when he too was hoping to take office as prime minister.
At a well-attended Conservative Friends of Israel annual fundraising lunch held in London, he again made no mention of the Palestinian lives that had been lost, this time as part of “Operation Cast Lead”. Not one mention. In that war, 1,370 Palestinians had died. At the time, a leading British journalist wrote: “I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza. Afterwards I said as much to some Tory MPs. They looked at me as if I was distressingly naive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience.”
No other foreign nation is as well represented in the campaign finances of British elections as Israel. In fact, no other nation comes close – and money linked to pro-Israel donors is a single interest influence akin to that of the trade unions (the largest democratic organisations in the country) or indeed the megabucks flowing in from City financiers.
And with that money, war crimes are being glossed over, rules bent, and our hard-won democracy warped by foreign interests.
The money is already pouring in.
In April, the Conservative Branch for Brigg & Goole, the constituency of Andrew Percy MP, received £6,000 from a notable pro-Israel supporter, Lord Stanley Fink. During the recent conflict, Percy attended an Israeli military briefing about the Iron Dome missile defence system – later glibly observing that “Israel acts as we would” in response to the mass civilian casualties being inflicted by the IDF.
On the same day, £3,000 dropped into the bank account of the Conservative party in Harrow East. Their MP, Bob Blackman, also visited Israel during “Operation Protective Edge”. The money also came from Lord Fink.
And the pro-Israel peer pulled off a democracy-warping hat-trick that day – £3,000 for the Conservatives in Brighton & Kemptown, home to Conservative Friends of Israel linked Simon Kirby MP.
Over and above his backing of individual MPs, Lord Fink has also contributed over £60,000 to the Conservative Central Party accounts since July last year, and his total donations to the Conservatives over the years are now nearing £3 million.
Elsewhere, Lord Fink has been a “loyal donor” to Just Journalism, a now defunct group organised by the pro-Israeli Westminster think tank the Henry Jackson Society. Just Journalism claimed to be correcting “media bias” against Israel but instead acted as a pro-Israel “flak” group aggressively criticising any British publication who queried Israel’s human rights record, including the Guardian and the London Review of Books. The group folded in 2011.
Lord Fink is also a member of the Jewish Leadership Council (more on their influence later).
In March, the Conservative Branch in Poplar & Limehouse received £3,000 from another pro-Israel funder – Sir Michael Hintze. Hintze was ranked by Forbes in 2014 as the 1,016th richest person in the world, with a net worth of approximately $1.8 billion.
The constituency he has plugged money into is a swing seat; a six per cent change would depose incumbent Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick (a member of both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine).
The Conservatives have their own reasons for targeting the seat, using the youthful ex-banker and Tower Hamlets councillor Tim Archer. The Respect party are running George Galloway, and he could split the Labour vote, opening the way for a Conservative win. George Galloway also happens to be the most outspoken critic of Israel in British politics.
British-Australian Hintze is not a man the Conservatives would want to annoy. Since July of last year, he has donated just over £1.5 million to the party (the figure is doubled if you look back to 2002).
Current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne MP received nearly £40,000 in 2008 and 2009 directly from Hintze. Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Theresa May MP, David Davis MP and David Willets MP have also been subject to his financial largesse.
But the first politician Hintze backed in the Conservatives was Dr Liam Fox MP, with a £10,000 gift back in January 2007.
Fox then rose to become Secretary of State for Defence, before being disgraced when it was revealed he had allowed his close friend Adam Werrity access to the Ministry of Defence and to travel on official visits (despite not being a government employee).
Hintze was implicated because he had allowed Fox a desk in his London office as part of a £29,000 donation to Fox’s controversial charity – Atlantic Bridge – another pro-Israel lobbying organisation. Hintze served on its Executive Council.
In late 2011, “multiple sources” told the Independent on Sunday that Werrity had used contacts developed through Atlantic Bridge to arrange visits to Iran, meeting with opposition groups in both Washington and London, and had even been debriefed by MI6 about his travels.
The newspaper described the activities as “a freelance foreign policy” with Werrity seemingly “acting as a rogue operator”.
It was also revealed that Werrity was capable of arranging meetings “at the highest levels of the Israeli government”, and that Mossad had, bizarrely, believed Werrity to be Fox’s chief of staff.
The Guardian also raised the possibility that Werrity and Fox could have been operating a “shadow foreign policy,” using Atlantic Bridge as a cover organisation. The charity was investigated by the Charities Commission in 2011 and shut down.
Another patron of Atlantic Bridge, alongside Hintze, was Michael Lewis, ex-chairman of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).
That lobbying group describes itself as a “British organisation dedicated to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain”. It was reported that Michael Lewis had paid for some of Werrity’s trips to Israel, charges he later denied.
Fox’s resignation was forced over the scandal – although true to Westminster form – no scandal is too much, in fact, he is already back, having politely refused a role as foreign secretary in July but now planning a new career as a backbencher.
Reviewing the Electoral Commission records for 2014, the pro-Israel donor Michael Lewis has popped up again. In March, he wrote another cheque for £10,000, to none other than Liam Fox.
In the past, Lewis has also backed William Hague – to the tune of £5,000. Hague later became foreign secretary.
According to Peter Oborne, now chief political commentator for the Telegraph, Michael Lewis’s baby BICOM is “Britain’s major pro-Israel lobby”.
In a searing expose for Channel 4 in 2009 and later a pamphlet calling for transparency from the Israel lobby, Oborne showed how BICOM was funded by a Finnish billionaire whose father made a fortune selling Israeli arms.
Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, who the Sunday Times ranked as the 57th richest individual in Britain with a net worth of over £1.5 billion, founded BICOM in 2001 and is its chairman.
Zabludowicz is also a member of the United Jewish Israel Appeal, a charity whose website claims it has three strands of work – “Supporting Israel”, “Connecting with Israel” and “Engaging with Israel”.
Since 2009, Zabludowicz has given approximately £125,000 to the Conservative party, either directly to party central, or to the party operating in Finchley and Golders Green, Harlow, Watford or Burton.
Zabludowicz is also a member of the Jewish Leadership Council – primarily concerned with philanthropic and educational matters within the British Jewish community, but who in June 2011 also met with the government to discuss the Middle East (BICOM attended the meeting too), and again in January 2012.
The Jewish Leadership Council, whose members also include pro-Israel Tory funders such as Lord Stanley Fink, and Tony Blair’s controversial man in Israel Lord Michael Levy, have taken it upon themselves to vigorously defend Israeli leaders from the principles of universal jurisdiction – which proves a great example of how influential the lobby is ,how intent the lobby is on insulating Israel from legal redress, and exactly why British voters should be wary of how much money the lobby is pumping into our elections.
In a celebratory post in 2011, on their own website, the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) explained that two years ago, they had “commissioned a legal opinion from Lord Pannick QC which recommended a change in the law. We wanted to protect universal jurisdiction itself, a vital innovation that grew out of the Holocaust, while preventing it from being abused.” (“Preventing it from being abused” roughly translates to “being applied to Israel”).
Following an arrest warrant being issued for Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the group said: “We immediately sent our legal opinion to the government and opposition and worked with Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour Friends of Israel and Liberal Democratic Friends of Israel to begin generating support for this law change.”
“Within a few days, Gordon Brown had publicly promised to change the law as soon as possible,” the JLC bragged.
The Conservative party had already placed an advert in the Jewish Chronicle promising to change the law if they were elected. In 2011, the universal jurisdiction laws of the United Kingdom were changed, with arrest warrants now requiring the assent of the Attorney-General before they could be issued for alleged war criminals.
This was just as the pro-Israel lobby wanted. Rather than facing arrest when visiting the UK, Israeli politicians, generals and other war criminals can now feel assured that warrants would first have to pass through the Attorney-General, who is none other than Jeremy Wright MP, who is of course, another member of Conservative Friends of Israel.
The really interesting thing about the Junior Senator from Texas is the fact that he demonstrates that anyone who wants it badly enough can become president. It is, of course, something for which there is a precedent, when voters elected an inexperienced and largely unknown Barack Obama. Cruz shares Obama’s lack of preparation for the highest office while he is also something of a throwback to fellow Texan George W. Bush’s tradition of anti-intellectualism and lack of curiosity about how the rest of the world interacts with the United States. This is particularly unfortunate as Cruz, a conventional Republican conservative on all social issues, ironically has chosen to identify differences in foreign policy to distinguish himself from the rest of the Republican pack.
Cruz might rightly be seen by some as a nightmarish incarnation of a narrow minded conservative Christian vision of what the United States is all about, aggressively embracing a world view based on ignorance coupled with the license granted by God endowed “American exceptionalism” from sea to shining sea. His father is an Evangelical preacher and the son has successfully absorbed much of both the blinkered notions of right and wrong as well as the Elmer Gantry style, but that is not to suggest that he is stupid. By all accounts Cruz, a graduate of Princeton and of Harvard Law School, is extremely intelligent and by some accounts endowed with both extraordinary cunning and ambition. He is possessed of excellent political instincts when it comes to appealing to the constituencies in the GOP that he believes to be essential to his success.
Washington has seen presidents who were truly religious in the past but it has rarely experienced the Cruz mixture of demagoguery combined with a Biblically infused sense of righteousness which admits to no error. His Manichean sense of good and evil is constantly on display, but he is most on fire when he is speaking to his fellow conservative Christians, most recently at the gathering of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Iowa. Cruz was one of a number of GOP speakers, which included potential presidential hopefuls Bobby Jindal and Paul Ryan, who were received tepidly while Cruz was greeted with cheering and a standing ovation before launching into his most recent theme, blaming the White House for not pressuring foreign governments to protect their Christian minorities. The enthusiastic reception was not surprising as Cruz is, after all, the “real thing” speaking “their language” fluently and the Evangelicals know it.
Cruz is intelligent enough to realize that what he is peddling is a type of narrative designed to make himself electable. What he actually believes is somewhat irrelevant except that if he is an actual zealot he might well be immune to viewpoints that run counter to his biases, dangerous in a president. A year ago Cruz grandstanded in leading the GOP dissidents’ attempt to shut down the government over the issue of Obamacare, a move that the party leadership regarded as a major “tactical error.” He was widely condemned for his performance in the media and within his own party but he made points with the constituency he was courting, the Tea Partiers.
The disturbing thing about Cruz is that his foreign policy statements are awash in what must be a willful disregard of reality, but, as with the threatened government shutdown, he apparently knows what will sell with the Bible thumping America first crowd that he is primarily targeting. His latest leitmotif which he has been hammering relentlessly is the worldwide persecution of Christians, with the clear implication that it is uniquely a Muslim problem. It is also a line that is being pursued by the Israeli government and American Jewish groups, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow a protector of Christianity. He opposes negotiations with Iran, for example, because a Christian pastor is in prison there. That several other Americans are also being held by the government in Tehran, including a former US Marine, appears to be of secondary importance and US broader regional interests do not enter into the discussion at all.
As part of his strategy to outflank his competition in the GOP, Cruz is shameless in his promotion of Israel and its interests. He did so recently by telling an audience of beleaguered Middle Eastern Christians that they had “no greater ally than Israel,” a statement so palpably out of sync with the actual experiences of those in the audience that he was booed of the stage. His response: “Those who hate Israel hate America.” Countering conservative critics of his performance Cruz subsequently wrote that “… the only time at least some of these writers seem to care about persecuted Christians is when it furthers an anti-Israel narrative for them.”
Cruz will, of course, find Israel haters wherever he looks as it constitutes a convenient way to dismiss critics without affording them a hearing. He will never concede that Israel discriminates against its Christian minority in spite of the considerable evidence that it does so. That Israel chooses to describe itself as a Jewish State, a designation that Cruz enthusiastically supports, does not ring any bells for him though he is quick to pounce on Iran for calling itself the Islamic Republic.
This willful blindness derives from the fact that Israel is central to Cruz’s foreign policy thinking. He has visited the country three times since becoming Senator. In Des Moines last week he spoke about Israel and he has referred to it from the Senate floor literally thousands of times, according to the Congressional Record. His private Senate office features a large framed photo of himself with Netanyahu. Nearly every speech Cruz makes sooner or later comes around to the issue of “standing for Israel” even when there is no logical reason to make that connection. At the recent Values Voters Summit in Washington he brought the cheering crowd to its feet by shouting “We stand for life. We stand for marriage. We stand for Israel.”
To be sure, part of the Cruz strategy comes from his recognition that no Republican can become a presidential candidate without the endorsement of Israel’s supporters. Cruz has met privately with the leaders of Jewish organizations, including Bill Kristol, editor of the neocon Weekly Standard and founder or board member of the multitude of pro-Israel alphabet soup organizations that seem to spring up spontaneously. The Weekly Standard has, not surprisingly, promoted the Cruz candidacy. Cruz also has his eye on Jewish money. He is seeking the support of Las Vegas casino mega-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who could single handedly fund his campaign if he should choose to do so, as well as with other potential donors.
Cruz, who apparently believes he has learned something from the Vietnam and Iraq fiascos, describes his foreign policy in simple terms: have a clearly defined objective, use overwhelming force, and then get out. If viewed at face value, the formula is an antidote for prolonged and unsuccessful nation building, which would be good, but it has to be taken in the context of Cruz’s other pronouncements. He describes the world as being “on fire” and his rhetoric is uniformly belligerent. He sees “overwhelming” military intervention by the US as a God given right whenever the policy makers in Washington feel threatened and he also regards the military option as a first resort without any regard for what is going on in the country that is the target. Making a mess and leaving it is a recipe for international anarchy.
In a recent speech Cruz denounced the Administration for talking with Iranian representatives at the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York. He characterized the event as “swilling chardonnay with the Iranian government.” That the United States has very compelling interests to be working with Iran both on ISIS and on nuclear proliferation apparently escaped Cruz’s grasp, so he was left with little more than a cheap shot joke to explain his unwillingness to negotiate with a government that he and Israel have repeatedly demonized.
Regarding Russia, Cruz has called for an expansion of NATO and more sanctions without any explanation of what the strategy might be or any curiosity about where increasing pressure on Moscow might lead. As a Cuban American he is inevitably hostile towards the government in Havana. Regarding Iran, Cruz supports harsher sanctions even though it would mean an end to negotiations over that country’s nuclear program.
Cruz’s foreign policy vision has been reported to be finding a “sweet spot” between the nation building of the Democrats and the reflexive belligerency of some Republican Senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who have not apparently realized that the country is weary of war. In reality however, Cruz veers strongly towards McCain-like solutions, accepting military interventions while eschewing the occupation and rebuilding bits only because they are too expensive and prone to misadventure to entertain. Sadly, like other GOP hawks, Cruz does not recognize that Washington has caused many if not most international problems, that foreign nations actually have interests that should be respected or at least considered, that military solutions are rarely sustainable, and that inextricably linking the United States to a rogue nation like Israel might not actually be good policy. But such considerations count for little when a man with a mission is on his way to become President of the United States.
Clashes took place in eastern Lebanon on Sunday afternoon, as a group of militants attacked a Hezbollah checkpoint, the Lebanese National News Agency reported.
There were conflicting media reports on Sunday evening over the number of wounded and killed in the attack in the outskirts of Britel, in the Baalbek region.
According to the NNA, there were several casualties on the side of the armed militants.
News channel LBCI, which identified the militant gunmen as members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, said there were injuries on both sides, while radio station Sawt Lubnaan said at least two Hezbollah fighters had been killed.
Sawt Lubnaan also reported that the army had not intervened until late, and that the clashes had relatively subsided by 5:00 pm.
The NNA also reported clashes outside of Yuneen, and the sound of rockets or bombs near some villages east of Baalbek.
Recently, Twitter was abuzz with its latest agent provocateur tweeting in support of the orcs of our time, ISIS.
I’ve emblazoned the image with the word “Fake” in order to avoid spreading this nonsense unwittingly.
The tweets of this person declaring her undying devotion and love for ISIS from right here within the borders of the United States garnered some pretty ludicrous responses. After all, ignorance only begets ignorance.
In this crazed flurry of suggestions to bomb Mecca and Medina, to kill Muslims, and to even go as far as attempting to find and kill this girl, these folks overlooked a glaring detail that I was able to discern in 5 minutes. “Ahimla Jihada” is fake. Twitter apparently discovered this early on and any attempt to access the Twitter account @ahimla2 will reach this page:
So who is she? First and foremost, the name “Ahimla” doesn’t exist in any language on earth. Google it. All you will get are nutters plotting to kill this phantom or results thinking you misspelled the Indian city “Shimla”.
You won’t find a single person on earth named “Ahimla”. People have all kinds of crazy names. Frank Zappa named his kids Dweezil, Moon Unit, and even —as awesome as it is— Rodan. Ving Rhames named his kid Reignbeau. Yes. Pronounced “Rainbow”. David Duchovny named his kid…well…Kyd. But the twit behind this fake Twitter account had to use the one name that just didn’t exist on planet earth. Finally, the last name “Jihada”? That really took a lot of thought.
As for the picture, herein is something very sad and a lesson in sleuthing fabricated propaganda on the internet. Bookmark the URL https://www.tineye.com/ right now. Using this website you can upload any image and it will search the internet for every instance of the image and even similar images going back for years.
I always use this site whenever I get images over social media allegedly portraying atrocities committed in some crisis point of the world. A majority of the time those pictures end up being lifted from something completely unrelated to what they are purported to represent. Don’t get duped! I hope everyone will start using this site to verify the authenticity of images that make claims with an objective of manipulating public opinion.
In this case I was able to find the source of this poor girl’s image. It was taken on April 1, 2009, five years ago, by a photographer who thought this girl’s infectiously cute smile would make a great picture. It was lifted from his Flickr account. Here’s the link to the original post:
Note, that he titled the picture “Angel Face”. How both ironic and tragic is it that this young girl’s angelic face was used to represent such great evil by someone who can be described as no less than a diabolical liar. Not only is this innocent girl’s life in danger but there are clearly people ready to exact violence upon any girl who even looks like her. That would be any Muslim woman who wears a scarf.
In the end, there are two critical details to be gleaned from this:
First, in the absence of any American-Muslims supporting such terrorist organizations they found the need to fabricate such a person. American-Muslims deserve a pat on the back for this. We have all kinds of crazies just like anyone else, but we should be proud that these incognito Islamophobes couldn’t find a real extremist to retweet. They had to fabricate one.
Second, it should make everyone painfully aware of what we’re up against. There are dubious forces from an increasingly belligerent political Right [is Loonwatch unable to use the word Zionist?] who are out to brainwash, by hook or crook, the American public into hating their fellow citizens of the Muslim faith and to justify a foreign policy in the “10/40 Window” that has tarnished America’s reputation globally and needlessly puts our men and women in uniform in harm’s way. It’s high time we fight misinformation with information.
In late summer 2013, Official Washington was rushing to the judgment that the “evil” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had launched a barrage of missiles tipped with Sarin gas to slaughter hundreds of civilians in rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.
It was inconceivable to virtually every person who “mattered” in Washington that there was any other interpretation of the events on Aug. 21, 2013. Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius even explained the “big picture” reason why President Barack Obama needed to launch punitive bomb strikes against Assad’s government for crossing Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons.
“What does the world look like when people begin to doubt the credibility of U.S. power?” Ignatius wrote a week after the Sarin incident. “Unfortunately, we’re finding that out in Syria and other nations where leaders have concluded they can defy a war-weary United States without paying a price.
“Using military power to maintain a nation’s credibility may sound like an antiquated idea, but it’s all too relevant in the real world we inhabit. It has become obvious in recent weeks that President Obama … needs to demonstrate that there are consequences for crossing a U.S. ‘red line.’ Otherwise, the coherence of the global system begins to dissolve.”
At the time, there were only a few of us raising questions about Official Washington’s Sarin-attack “group think,” partly because it made no sense for Assad to have invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to examine chemical weapons attacks that he was blaming on the opposition and then to launch a major Sarin attack just miles from where the inspectors were unpacking at their hotel.
I also was hearing from inside U.S. intelligence that some CIA analysts shared those doubts, suspecting that the supposedly high number of Sarin-laden rockets (which represented the strongest evidence against Assad’s forces) was wildly overstated and that public panic might have exaggerated the scope of the attack.
But perhaps the strongest reason to doubt Official Washington’s hasty conclusion blaming Assad was what had been occurring inside the Syrian rebel movement over the prior two years, i.e., its radicalization into a hyper-violent Sunni jihadist force that was prepared to inflict any brutality on civilians to achieve its goal of ousting the secular Assad and establishing an Islamist state in Damascus.
Blinded by Propaganda
Most Washington’s pols and pundits had not noticed this change because of a geopolitical blindness inflicted by neoconservative propaganda, which insisted that the only acceptable way to view the Syrian civil war was to see Assad as the “bad guy” and the rebels as the “good guys.”
After all, “regime change” in Syria had long been near the top of the neocon agenda as it was for Israel, which wanted Assad out because he was allied with Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Early in the civil war, Assad’s harsh response to what he termed rebel “terrorism” had also rallied the Obama administration’s “liberal interventionists” to the side of “regime change.”
Thus, the notion that some vicious Syrian rebel group might willfully kill innocent civilians as a provocation to get the U.S. military to attack Assad’s defenses – and thus pave the way for a rebel victory – was outside Official Washington’s accepted frame of reference. In August 2013, the rebels were wearing the white hats, as far as U.S. mainstream opinion was concerned.
Over the past year, however, reality has reasserted itself, at least somewhat. The Sarin case against Assad has largely crumbled with a UN report finding Sarin on only one rocket and independent scientists concluding that the one Sarin-laden rocket had a maximum range of only about two kilometers, meaning it could not have come from the suspected Syrian base about nine kilometers away.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh also learned from his well-placed sources that inside the U.S. intelligence community suspicion had shifted toward rebel extremists working with hardliners in Turkish intelligence. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria-Sarin Attack?”]
But most “important people” in U.S. officialdom, including New York Times and Washington Post editors, still insisted that Assad must have done the Sarin attack. They even report it as flat fact. They are, after all, not the sort of folks who easily admit error.
A Shift in the Paradigm
However, over the past year, the paradigm for understanding the Syrian conflict has begun shifting. In September 2013, many Syrian rebel forces repudiated the political opposition that the Obama administration had organized and instead embraced al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, an aggressive jihadist force which had emerged as the most effective fighters against Assad.
Then, in February 2014, al-Qaeda’s leadership disavowed an even more brutal jihadist force known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The Islamic State promoted a strategy of unspeakable brutality as a way of intimidating its rivals and driving Westerners from the Middle East.
ISIS got its start after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi organized “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a hyper-violent Sunni militia that targeted Iraq’s Shiites and destroyed their mosques, touching off a vicious sectarian war across Iraq.
After Zarqawi’s death in 2006 – and the alienation of less-extreme Iraqi Sunnis – al-Qaeda in Iraq faded from view before reemerging in Syria’s civil war, refashioned as the Islamic State and crossing back into Iraq with a major offensive last summer.
Amid reports of the Islamic State massacring captives and beheading American and British hostages, it no longer seemed so far-fetched that some Syrian rebel group would be ruthless enough to obtain Sarin and launch an attack near Damascus, killing innocents and hoping that the Assad regime would be blamed.
Even the Post’s Ignatius is looking more skeptically at the Syrian rebel movement and the various U.S.-allied intelligence agencies that have been supplying money, weapons and training – even to fighters associated with the most extreme militias.
Opening the Door
In a column on Friday, Ignatius faulted not only Syria’s squabbling “moderate opposition” but “the foreign nations — such as the United States, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — that have been funding the chaotic melange of fighters inside Syria. These foreign machinations helped open the door for the terrorist Islamic State group to threaten the region.”
Ignatius acknowledged that the earlier depiction of the Syrian opposition as simply an indigenous movement of idealistic reformers was misleading. He wrote: “From the beginning of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Syria has been the scene of a proxy war involving regional powers: Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all wanted to topple Assad, but they competed with each other as regional rivals, too.
“At various points, all three nations provided Sunni rebel groups with money and weapons that ended up in the hands of extremists. … The United States, Saudi Arabia and Jordan joined forces in 2013 to train and arm moderate rebels at a CIA-backed camp in Jordan. But this program was never strong enough to unify the nearly 1,000 brigades scattered across the country. The resulting disorganization helped discredit the rebel alliance known as the Free Syrian Army.
“Syrian rebel commanders deserve some blame for this ragged structure. But the chaos was worsened by foreign powers that treated Syria as a playground for their intelligence services. This cynical intervention recalled similar meddling that helped ravage Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya during their civil wars. …
“The story of how Syria became a cockpit for rival intelligence services was explained to me by sources here [in Istanbul] and in Reyhanli, a rebel staging area on the Turkey-Syria border. Outside efforts to arm and train the Syrian rebels began more than two years ago in Istanbul, where a ‘military operations center’ was created, first in a hotel near the airport.
“A leading figure was a Qatari operative who had helped arm the Libyan rebels who deposed Moammar Gaddafi. Working with the Qataris were senior figures representing Turkish and Saudi intelligence. But unity within the Istanbul operations room frayed when the Turks and Qataris began to support Islamist fighters they thought would be more aggressive.
“These jihadists did emerge as braver, bolder fighters — and their success was a magnet for more support. The Turks and Qataris insist they didn’t intentionally support the extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State. But weapons and money sent to more moderate Islamist brigades made their way to these terrorist groups, and the Turks and Qataris turned a blind eye.”
Regarding the rise of these radicals, Ignatius quoted one Arab intelligence source who claimed to have “warned a Qatari officer, who answered: ‘I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help’ topple Assad. This determination to remove Assad by any means necessary proved dangerous. ‘The Islamist groups got bigger and stronger, and the FSA day by day got weaker,’ recalls the Arab intelligence source.”
Selling the Sarin Story
Based on such information, the idea of anti-Assad extremists securing Sarin – possibly with the help of Turkish intelligence, as Hersh reported – and launching a provocative attack with the goal of getting the U.S. military to devastate Assad’s army and clear a path for a rebel victory begins to make sense.
After all, back in Washington, the propaganda strategy of blaming Assad could count on the ever-influential neocons who in August 2013 did start pushing the rush-to-war bandwagon and shoved aside any doubters of the Assad-did-it conventional wisdom.
Israel took a similar position on Syria, favoring even the victory of al-Qaeda extremists if necessary to oust Assad and hurt his Iranian allies.
In September 2013, then-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview that “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. … 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.” He said this was the case even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
So, the danger from the Sunni extremists was played down and the focus remained on ousting Assad. No wonder there was such “surprise” among Official Washington’s “group thinkers” when the Islamic State opened a new front inside Iraq and routed the U.S.-trained Iraqi army. Once again, the neocons had made sure that American eyes stayed wide shut to an inconvenient truth.
But the neocons are not through with the Syrian fiasco that they helped create. They are now busy reshaping the narrative – accusing Obama of waiting too long to arm the Syrian rebels and insisting that he switch from bombing Islamic State targets inside Syria to destroying the Syrian air force and creating a no-fly zone so the rebels can march on Damascus.
The recklessness of that strategy should now be obvious. Indeed, if Obama had succumbed to the interventionist demands in summer 2013 and devastated Assad’s military, we could now be seeing either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in control of Damascus. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Noses into the Syrian Tent.”]
Obama might be wiser to take this opportunity to declassify the U.S. intelligence on the Sarin gas attack of Aug. 21, 2013, including the dissents from CIA analysts who doubted Assad’s responsibility. That information might shed substantial new light on how Turkish and Arab intelligence services — with the help of the neocons — enabled the rise of the Islamic State.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
David Brooks is a prominent and powerful journalist. He is a columnist for the New York Times and a commentator for PBS New Hour and NPR.
Now we learn, through an article in Jewish Journal, that Brooks’ son is in the Israeli military. In other words, he has a profound conflict with impartiality, as the New York Timesethics code calls it, and Brooks, the Times, NPR, etc. have not revealed this to the public.
The Jewish Journal article reports:
One of the more interesting nuggets buried in a long, Hebrew-language interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks in the recent Ha’aretz magazine is the revelation, toward the very end, that Brooks’s oldest son serves in the Israel Defense Forces.
I find it interesting, and disturbing, that Ha’aretz hid this information from its English readers.
(By the way, I have written extensively about numerous journalists having close personal and family ties to the Israeli military – see below.)
Philip Weis has a strong article that tells about Brooks’ reporting, and notes:
“So when David Brooks was commenting favorably on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza this summer on National Public Radio, his son was serving in the Israeli army. Why didn’t NPR tell us?”
It is ironic, then, that Weiss also decides not to tell readers insider information he feels they shouldn’t know:
“This is now the third Times reporter/writer whose son has gone into the Israeli Defense Forces. Famously Ethan Bronner, of course… and a third person I will not identify (I know the individual personally, the beat didn’t involve the Middle East, the son left before long).”
Weiss’s reluctance to share his insider information with others is a bit reminiscent of Ha’aretz. Perhaps it’s ok, since this is a personal friend. But it shows again that some are inside a loop that the rest of us aren’t.
This is also reminiscent of Common Dreams, which exposed an Israel-partisan who posed as an anti-Semite on numerous websites, but refused to disclose his name, thus keeping its insider information away from the rest of us – even though many of our websites may also have been victimized by this infiltrator.
Again, some are in the loop. The rest of us aren’t.
*
Some of my articles on US journalists’ personal ties to the Israeli military
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … 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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Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Aletho News 