Russia the world’s last line of defence against Isramerica’s murderous grand design
By Greg Felton | February 8, 2015
The world is heading for war. The Isramerican empire is funneling tons of heavy weaponry into Ukraine to provoke Russia into launching a defensive attack, and then that response will be used to justify starting a major war. It is a waste of time trying to find any intelligent discussion in the mainstream corporate media of why the U.S. wants to provoke war with Russia. Its job is to cover up and falsify, not report. For example, take the following well-known acts of violence.
Despite what the media told us at the time, we know that the collapse of World Trade Centre had nothing to do with Muslim anger, and the Boston Marathon bombing had nothing to do with Chechen terrorism. These three events, among others, were executed with such clumsiness that they should have immediately been exposed as frauds, but they worked because their simplistic cause-and-effect narrative, black-and-white morality and shock value stampeded the public into doing what was expected: embrace official anti-Muslim bloodlust, self-identify with the officially approved victims, and, most importantly, accept the need to sacrifice liberty for security, as in this official declaration.
If we look at the Charlie Hebdo shooting synoptically with the Boston Marathon bombing and the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attack, Isramerica’s handiwork in Ukraine becomes frighteningly obvious. These seemingly discrete false-flag attacks fit together to reveal a coherent pattern of deliberate, Isramerican subversion that is now being played out in Ukraine.
Debunking the cover story
The Charlie Hebdo shooting had nothing to do with anti-Westernism or press freedom. It was executed with such clumsiness that no sentient being could possibly buy the cover story that our organs of orthodoxy shamelessly regurgitated.
First of all, the identification of the two black balaclava-wearing shooters is not credible—an identity card of one of them fortuitously found in a car. If the shooters took pains to conceal their identity so completely, such carelessness is implausible. More likely, the card was planted to implicate the shooters, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, just like the pristine passport identifying one of the “hijackers” that just happened to found among the rubble of the World Trade Centre. To date, no positive ID of the Charlie Hebdo shooters has been made.
Second, the idea that Muslims committed murder over defamatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is unsupported. We have only video of two unidentified people claiming, in Arabic, to be avenging the Prophet, but we have no proof that these men are Muslims. They could just as easily be Musllim impersonators. Besides, if Muslims felt that strongly about the cartoons, they should have gone after the staff of the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. In 2006, the newspaper’s cultural editor Flemming Rose commissioned defamatory cartoons, but perhaps no avenging attack took place because Rose is a zionist Jew with close ties to Daniel Pipes.
Third, we have a smoking gun, literally, that proves the Charlie Hebdo attack was staged. The video below shows one of the masked “Muslim” shooters killing a Paris police officer who is lying on the sidewalk. As this footage and commentary show, the killing is a badly staged hoax.
Finally, we come to the issue of press freedom, the shibboleth used to inflame democratic passions about journalism, especially the freedom to satirize. As if on cue, the “je suis Charlie” crusade erupted and had people all over the world commiserating with their fallen fourth-estate brethren and bemoaning an assault on one of the sacred institutions of a free Western society. But this sentiment is unjustifiable. First, the cartoons in question fail to meet the definition of satire:
“Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles. A writer in a satire uses fictional characters, which stand for real people.” (http://literarydevices.net/satire/)
Gratuitous, defamatory renderings of the Prophet Muhammad serve no useful purpose, cannot improve humanity and contain no irony or humour. Therefore we have no business treating them as legitimate forms of journalistic expression. Second, France arrested dozens of people on charges of “defending terrorism” because they verbally satrized the shooting. Those arrested include a 14-year-old girl as well as three school workers who allegedly refused to observe a moment of silence.
I am tempted to say that the staff at Charlie Hebdo brought the attack upon themselves through their ignorance and arrogance, but that would feed the propaganda, as was the case with the WTC/Pentagon attack, that Muslims were to blame for a mass murder.
To see the machinations behind the attack, let us gag the “je suis Charlie” reflex, tune out the lamentations about press freedom and reject the nonsensical Muslim revenge causality. For it to make sense we need to approach it from the point of view of who benefited—cui bono? as the Romans used to say. Going from effect to cause negates the sense-dulling effect of official anti-Muslim propaganda and shows the attack to be not an act of direct violence against French civilians but an act of indirect intimidation against the French government.
Disobeying the empire
In the week and a half leading up to the Jan. 7, 2015, Charlie Hebdo attack, the government of François Hollande committed two acts of disobedience against the Isramerican empire.
The first occurred on Dec. 29, 2014, in the UN Security Council when France chose to stand with the civilized word in support of Palestinian statehood. There was no reason to oppose the motion. It was rational, logical, fair and just. But for Israel a successful vote would have been disastrous because Israel requires unfettered power to terrorize and murder the region’s native Palestinian population and steal their land to set up illegal Jewish colonies. A vote to acknowledge Palestine as a state would have been a lethal challenge to Israel’s raison d’être. In November 2014, Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to threaten France with grave consequences should it vote for Palestinian statehood.
The second came a week later when Hollande announced France would end economic sanctions against Russia, sanctions that the empire demanded because of events in Ukraine. France was in the forefront of the European anti-sanctions movement, and therefore posed a real threat to Israel’s plans to destabilize Middle Eastern regimes.
The grand design that animates Israel’s lethal Middle East policy was defined as far back as 1982 by Oden Yinon, a journalist formerly attached to Israel’s foreign ministry. In an article entitled A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, he gave a candid depiction of Israel’s imperial objectives, which we still see unfolding today. The article reads, in part:
The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.…
In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.
While the Cold War was on, Israel could do nothing overtly subversive, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, the Yinon Plan became doable. That fact became clear immediately after the WTC/Pentagon attack. On CBS’s Meet the Press host Tim Russert, showed an embarrassed Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld his own notes from 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, which proved he wanted to frame Saddam Hussein for the attack:
best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]…. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.
The need to frame Hussein was corroborated by George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke:
The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, “I want you to find whether Iraq did this.” Now he never said, “Make it up,” but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this…“Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.” And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer.
Iraq has been largely destroyed based on a fabricated premise. The next victim to fall would be Libya; now it’s Syria’s turn. As the next sections show, The Yinon Plan is the backdrop against which the Charlie Hebdo shooting must be understood.
Russia, Syria and the Yinon Plan
Overall, Israel’s main target in the Yinon Plan is Iran because it could soon have its own nuclear power capability, thus breaking Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly and weakening its ability to use it to blackmail European governments into acquiescing in the genocide of Palestine. Sabre-rattling, disinformation and sanctions have so far failed to intimidate Iran, and when taken together with its geographical location has meant that more attention is being paid to Iran’s ally, Syria.
In spring 2011, Isramerica’s assault on Syria become overt with the formation of the Free Syrian Army, ostensibly an indigenous rebel force against the authoritarian Assad regime. In reality, it’s not Syrian and it’s not indigenous. It’s a foreign insurgency designed to foment unrest and overthrow Assad in favour of a leader more to Isramerica’s liking. The leader of the FSA is Media al-Harati, a Dublin-based Libyan who had been head of the Tripoli Army Brigade after the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi. Adding to its illegitimacy are its organizers. The attendees at a Syrian opposition conference on July 6, 2011, in Saint-Germain, France, included:
- Bernard-Henri Lévy, zionist philosopher;
- Bernard Kouchner, former French foreign minister and a major proponent of war on Iraq;
- Frederick Ansel, member of the youth wing of Israel’s Likud Party; and
- Alex Goldfarb, former Knesset member and advisor to former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Significantly, nobody felt the need to challenge Goldfarb’s credentials as a member of the Syrian opposition or as a spokesman for the group “Democratic Change in Syria,” probably because the meeting was chaired by Zionists.
The key event that was supposed to stampede the world into abetting the overthrow of Assad was a deadly sarin gas “attack” in a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013. Instantly and without evidence, the Syrian Army was blamed and Obama was expected to authorize invasion because he had said that use of chemical weapons was “a red line” that Assad could not cross without repercussions.
The Israeli imperial influence here is obvious: Netanyahu used that exact cliché in a Sept. 27, 2012, speech to the UN when he said Iran would cross a “red line” if its nuclear enrichment of Uranium reached 20 per cent. Moreover, a pre-emptive assault on Syria by sea-based U.S. Tomahawk missiles had been on the drawing board, leaving open the question of whether the sarin gas attack was really designed to justify a foregone conclusion. It was not be the first time a mass murder was used to rationalize an aggression: The USA PATRIOT Act, written and robotically passed in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack was in fact drafted the previous month by Philip Zelikow. Soon after the attack
Just as Muslims had nothing to do with bringing down the World Trade Center or ventilating the Pentagon, Syria had nothing to do with the attack. The sarin belonged to the Isramerican insurgents and was supplied by Saudi Arabia. Even after the case against Assad blew up in the U.S.’s face, Obama was still trapped by his inflammatory rhetoric, and the Yinon Plan seemed poised to claim another victim after Iraq and Libya. Then, Putin came up with a face-saving diplomatic solution for Obama that ruined everything. He offered to support a UN Security Council resolution that would have Syria surrender its chemical weapons to UN inspectors in exchange for a promise from Obama not to bomb.
Putin’s Sept. 11, 2013, opinion piece in the New York Times was a plea for statesmanship over sadism, and as such amounted to a frontal assault on the Yinon Plan.
From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos… It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”… We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.… If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues. [my emphasis]
If the Yinon Plan were to succeed, Russian moderation and power would have to be weakened considerably.
Ukraine’s fascist coup
What didn’t work for Isramerica in Syria finally did work in Ukraine. A year ago this month, the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovitch was overthrown in a coup that brought to power the pro-Western, pro-NATO, neo-fascist régime of Arkadiy Yatsenyuk. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland even boasted that the U.S. spent $5 billion to subvert the Yanukovich government and its eastward-looking pro-Western politics, even though former White House resident George W. Bush promised to Putin that the U.S. would not interfere in Ukraine. Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, who comes from a leading Jewish Isramerican family.
The coup was pure stagecraft. After it happened and Yankuovich was forced to flee for his life, the empire and its media mouthpieces reinvented the coup as a “democratic, Ukrainian revolution” and proceded to regurgitate a spate of anti-Putiin/anti-Russian propaganda. One extreme case was a clumsily fabricated story in the New York Times about Russian special forces invading eastern Ukraine to start an uprising. Just two days later on April 20, 2014, the Times issued a half-assed retraction because the sheer ineptitude of the story had made it indefensible.
It turns out the Russian troops didn’t invade; they were already in Ukraine under an international treaty, and Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the treaty allowed for up to 25,000 Russian troops. Moreover, Putin only mobilized Russian forces to defend Russia’s security and to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Crimea who wanted to flee the fascist coup. Russia did not take any aggressive action.
One of the few informed writers on the coup in Ukraine, investigative journalist Robert Parry, ties it to the larger issue of implementing the Yinon Plan:
Since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go. By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events – now including Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia – that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.
On Dec. 11, 2014, the Israel-occupied U.S. Congress passed Russian Sanction Bill H.R. 5859, without it having been read or debated. Just over three weeks later. French President François Hollande repudiated the sanctions. Two days latter, 12 members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered.
The Common Russian Denominator
The execution of the Charlie Hebdo attack is reminiscent of the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing: Two brothers were accused of a shock mass killing; their motives were contrived and illogical; both were Muslims; police set out to execute them afterwards; and Isramerica was the only beneficiary. Dzhokhar Tsarnayev, one of the Boston marathon bombers, somehow managed to survive. Although he was severely wounded, he is expected to be fit for his show trial this April.
One significant difference in the two attacks, though, is the ethnicity of the brothers. Saïd and Chérif Kouachi were French citizens of Algerian heritage; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are Chechens. Setting up Franco-Algerians as patsies for a false-flag attack does not seem out of character for Isramerica, but setting up Chechens is another matter.
The U.S. had been up to its eyes in anti-Russian subversive activity since 1991 when the Dzhokar Dudaev government in Chechnya declared independence from the Russian federation. From 1994 to 1996 Russia and Chechnya were at war and then again from 1999 to 2009, but fighting in the North Caucasus persists. Seeing an opportunity to undermine Putin’s rule, the U.S. and the U.K. began funneling money and support to various secessionist ethnic groups in the region.
For example, the Jamestown Foundation, a CIA front founded in 1984 by former CIA Chief William Casey, is affiliated with the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, which puts on seminars and conferences to foment anti-Putin activism. Between January and July 2012, Georgian intelligence reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in the capital Tblisi attending some of these seminars, a fact that got little to no attention in the stage-managed post-bombing propaganda.
Given the importance of the Chechen independence movement, it made no obvious sense to set Chechens up to look like terrorists, especially the Tsarnaev brothers. Moreover, these brothers had had a relationship with the FBI going back at least two years. Given that not one but two parts of the U.S. security apparatus knew who the brothers were and that they posed no threat, the idea that they set off the bombs is implausible.
The only way the Boston Marathon bombing makes a lick of sense is as a political gambit—a false flag attack that was an indirect message to Putin to convince him to roll over on Assad: “We made Chechens look like terrorists, so now you stop blocking our attempts to attack Syria.”
In the hierarchy of the Yinon Plan, Chechnya doesn’t register, so sacrificing a peripheral activity to get at Syria seemed like sacrifice worth making even though it didn’t work.
Note that the sarin gas attack in Damascus, occurred just four months after the Boston Marathon bombing, which raises the question of whether it would have been necessary if Putin had done as Isramerica wanted.
At any rate, we only “know” the Tsarnaev brothers committed the bombing because we were told they did, just as we were told the Kouachi brothers shot up Charlie Hebdo.
In fact, the backpacks that contained the bombs belonged to the mercenary security/ murder-for-hire outfit Craft International. As I wrote in May 2013, no agency admitted to hiring Craft and of course no mainstream news agency would touch this angle. At the time, though, New Hampshire State Senator Sheila Tremblay said that a black ops team was behind the bombing, but she was later pressured into issuing a political apology, the standard punishment meted out to anyone who has the poor judgment to expose imperial deceptions.
Are these the real bombers? Click here for enlargement and commentary.
Executing the Yinon Plan drives everything Isramerica does in the Middle East, and it is the only motive that can explain the Boston Marathon bombing, sarin gas attack, the coup in Ukraine, and Charlie Hebdo shooting. To get at Iran, Isramerica focused its attention on Syria. To get at Syria it first has to isolate and weaken Russia.
We are headed to something approaching another major European war if Isramerica and its puppet regimes can effectively poison the world against Russia.
Boycott Hamas, brand Hezbollah terrorists, don’t trust Iran…
By Stuart Littlewood | Intifada-Palestine | February 10, 2015
Every general election brings with it the irksome task of reading the manifestos of the political parties. Now the Board of Deputies of British Jews have launched their very own “Jewish Manifesto”. The 40-page document is intended to persuade policy-makers and politicians to promote key aspects of Jewish life in Britain and do some big favours for the abhorrent Zionist regime in Tel Aviv
“It will form the centrepiece of the Board’s drive to ensure that all the political parties take the concerns of Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community into account when setting out their own proposals for government.”
Favours we are asked to do for the Rogue State
At the heart of the Manifesto is a list of “policy asks”, some of which attempt to demonise Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and portray them as Britain’s enemies as well as Israel’s.
Others aim to perpetuate Israeli dominance in the Holy Land at the Palestinians’ expense, like this one from the ‘Ten Commitments’:
- “Advocate for a permanent, comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resulting in a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state.”
The Board of Deputies explicitly state that the UK Jewish community is committed to equality for Israel and the Palestinians, yet here they want us to press for a “secure” Israel with Palestine only “viable”. And that has become the mantra among Israel’s stooges in the West. We know what it will mean on the ground, and it’s despicable. Why should the Palestinians, whose land it is, live in permanent fear and subjugation, defenceless among the shredded and disconnected remnants of their territory and not even in control of their borders? Let’s turn it round so we have “a secure Palestine alongside a viable Israeli state”. How do the Board of Deputies like the sound of that?
Here are a few more Manifesto gems…
- They want restitution for private property the Nazis stole during the Holocaust leaving many survivors living in dire poverty and without a legacy for the descendants.
This is a very cruel injustice. But what about all the land, homes, other property, infrastructure and natural resources the Jewish State confiscated from the Palestinians during the Nakba and continued to seize ever since? When will that be returned? According to the UN, last year alone Israel demolished the homes of 1,177 Palestinians in Jerusalem and West Bank (never mind the countless thousands of homes they reduced to rubble in Gaza).
They don’t like to see Israel boycotted.
- “We urge resistance of calls for boycotts of Israel. By their very nature, such measures attribute blame to only one side of the conflict, and through this stigmatisation they perpetuate a one-sided narrative.”
At the same time they want our help in boycotting Palestinians.
- The Manifesto urges the British government “to refuse to engage with Hamas politicians, officials or supporters until the movement agrees to recognise Israel, abide by previous diplomatic agreements, and desists from terrorist attacks”.
Are the Board of Deputies aware that Israel refuses to recognise the Palestinian State, has failed to honour previous agreements and never ceases its terrorist attacks? Are they also aware that the UK does not list Hamas’s political wing as a proscribed organisation, only its military wing – the Izz al-Din al-Qassem brigades.
The boycott of Israel simply calls for non-violent measures that “should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
There’s nothing controversial. The same is required of Israel by international and humanitarian law.
Other bizarre “asks” include these:
- The Manifesto wants us to “promote awareness of the acute threats to Israeli and regional security, and encourage further security cooperation between the UK and Israel”.
Many experts conclude that the main threat to Middle East peace is Israel itself. It would be foolish to be drawn into closer co-operation. Our already slavish support for Israel (and indeed its protector, the US) undermines our own security, puts UK citizens in harm’s way and blackens our reputation. It is hard to see how this is in our national interest.
- The Manifesto says the world must ensure “no backsliding towards an Iranian military nuclear capability… it is vital that Iran knows that there is a credible military option to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons if diplomacy should fail”.
The Zionist regime is reckoned to have up to 400 nuclear warheads. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. In short, Israel is the neighbour from Hell.
These endless attempts to drive a wedge between Britain and Iran are tiresome. Israel would love to launch a war against Iran if support from the US and its EU lackeys was assured. Iran has no nuclear weapons and poses no threat to the UK. What’s more, our Iranian friends are menaced by an unrestrained nuclear-armed Israeli regime on their doorstep. UN Security Council resolution 487, in 1981, called on Israel “urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards”. Israel has defied it for 34 years. In 2009, the IAEA called on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection. Israel still refuses while Iran has complied.
- “Years of disingenuity and obfuscation from the Iranian authorities should not be naively forgotten.”
So says the Manifesto, oblivious to the staggering hypocrisy.
The “violent nature” of Hezbollah
For a long time Israel has planned to annex Lebanon’s Litani River. Hezbollah (the ‘party of God’) was formed in response to the Israelis’ 1982 invasion and occupation. An international commission concluded that Israel’s aggression was contrary to international law, the government of Israel had no valid reasons for invading Lebanon and Israel was directly or indirectly responsible for the massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, declared an act of genocide by the UN General Assembly.
So Hezbollah came into being for very good reasons. Israel began overflying Lebanese territory in 2000 after its troops vacated parts of southern Lebanon they had occupied since 1978. These flights are a constant provocation. In 2006 Israel launched another invasion and received a bloody nose from Hezbollah. The conflict killed over six thousand people and severely damaged Lebanese infrastructure. Much of Southern Lebanon was left uninhabitable due to unexploded Israeli cluster bombs.
The Jewish Manifesto talks of Hezbollah’s “violent nature” but in the circumstances how valid is this next “ask”?
- It wants Hezbollah in its entirety designated as a terrorist organisation, and asks the UK to take the lead in getting the whole EU to proscribe Hezbollah’s political wing.
Lebanon’s Cabinet has confirmed Hezbollah as an armed organisation with the right to “liberate or recover occupied lands”. Israel routinely breaches UN Resolution 1701 by crossing the Blue Line or violating Lebanese airspace and still occupies the Shebaa Farms area. Hezbollah is hardly going to disband with Israel next door always poised to grab what isn’t theirs.
Why should the UK take on another of Israel’s enemies and try to weaken Lebanon’s defence against the Zionist predator?
In case we forget, the US defines terrorism as an activity that
(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
(ii) appears to be intended
- to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
- to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
- to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.
Anyone spring immediately to mind?
- The Manifesto also asks Britain to maintain an expenditure of 0.7% of GNP on overseas development.
So that so we continue to subsidise the Zionists’ never-ending occupation of Palestine?
- It urges us to “support efforts to remember and understand the Holocaust and strive to prevent any future genocide”.
Most ordinary people in the UK (though not necessarily our politicians) have taken on-board the lessons of the Holocaust and don’t need constant reminding. How about the Israeli regime?
The ‘Israel problem’ a Jewish family matter
Finally, this ‘hot potato’:
- July 2014 was the worst month for anti-semitism on record, presumably on account of another murderous assault on Gaza by the Israeli military. “A robust political and policing response is required when criticism of the policies of a government spills over in to hatred, intimidation or violence against a religious or ethnic group” ..
Prime Minister Cameron’s Holocaust Commission Report says: “The Community Security Trust, an organisation that looks after the safety and security needs of the Jewish community, recorded more than 1,000 incidents last year, making 2014 the worst year on record.”
Do Jewish leaders in the UK need reminding that Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land have suffered a high tide of hatred, intimidation, violence and worse for decades under Israel’s brutal occupation?
We’re told that anti-semitism is often bound up with perceptions of the political and military decisions of the Israeli government, and that Israel represents a fundamental component of Jewish identity. In that case, one would have thought, Israel’s appalling conduct – and damage to reputation – is something the global Jewish family would wish to deal with themselves. Wise heads have warned long enough that Jews worldwide will pay the price for Israel’s crimes. Many Jews, to their great credit, have taken heed and faced up to the moral challenge, and are now fiercely critical of the Israeli regime’s behaviour.
For example, over 400 rabbis from Israel, the USA, Canada, Britain and other countries have just signed a call to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop the practice of home demolitions. “Every year, hundreds of Palestinian homes are demolished due to discriminatory administrative plans created and implemented by the Israel military without significant Palestinian influence. Palestinians are very rarely allowed to build, even on their own land.”
That’s leadership.
Opportunity of nuclear talks may not come again: Zarif
Press TV – February 8, 2015
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has attached special significance to the ongoing talks on Iran’s nuclear program, saying the negotiations serve as an opportunity that may not be repeated.
“The only way to resolve the issue is through negotiations,” Zarif said on Sunday at a press conference on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“We have made quite a bit of success” during the negotiations to resolve remaining issues on Iran’s nuclear program “over the past many months,” Zarif said, adding that the talks are an “opportunity” to resolve the standoff between Iran and the West.
“This is the opportunity to do it and we need to seize this opportunity. It may not be repeated,” the Iranian foreign minister stated.
He said the first objective of the negotiations is to assure the opposite side that Iran’s nuclear program “remains exclusively peaceful,” adding, “It means that Iran should be able to exercise its right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes because without exercising that right it is impossible to make sure that it is peaceful.”
The second objective, Zarif went on to say, is the removal of all “unacceptable” sanctions imposed on Iran.
“We are prepared to reassure the international community and some of the negotiating partners that Iran’s nuclear energy is peaceful, but at the same time it is important the restrictions that have been imposed on Iranian people be lifted,” he stated.
“It is important for everybody to realize that the only way to deal with Iran is through respect and negotiations and meeting on a non-zero sum game.”
The Iranian foreign minister said those who insisted on imposing sanctions on Iran should now realize that the restrictions “did not achieve their intended result.”
“When the sanctions were imposed on Iran, Iran had less than 200 centrifuges. If the objective was to prevent Iran from developing its nuclear technology, they (sanctions) utterly failed because now we have 20,000 centrifuges.”
Commenting on a possible extension to the nuclear talks, Zarif said, “I do not think another extension is in the interest of anyone, as I do not believe this extension was either necessary or useful.”
Zarif also responded to a question on the possible consequences if the nuclear talks fail, saying, “If we don’t have an agreement, it is not the end of the world.”
Iran and the P5+1 group of countries – Russia, China, France, Britain, the United States and Germany – are seeking to reach a high-level political agreement by the end of March and to confirm the full technical details of the accord by July 1.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian foreign minister slammed the Tel Aviv regime’s claims that Iran is after a nuclear weapon.
“We do not have a weapons program,” he said, adding that the Israelis cannot hide their acts of aggression against Palestinians and others in the region through their hypothetical allegations.
Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and Israel
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | February 4, 2015
The disclosure that convicted al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui has identified leading members of the Saudi government as financers of the terrorist network potentially reshapes how Americans will perceive events in the Middle East and creates a risk for Israel’s Likud government which has forged an unlikely alliance with some of these same Saudis.
According to a story in the New York Times on Wednesday, Moussaoui said in a prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of the group’s donors and that the list included Prince Turki al-Faisal, then Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many leading clerics.
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then Saudi ambassador to the United States, meeting with President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas. (White House photo)
“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” Moussaoui said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.”
Although Moussaoui’s credibility came under immediate attack from the Saudi kingdom, his assertions mesh with accounts from members of the U.S. Congress who have seen a secret portion of the 9/11 report that addresses alleged Saudi support for al-Qaeda.
Further complicating the predicament for Saudi Arabia is that, more recently, Saudi and other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have been identified as backers of Sunni militants fighting in Syria to overthrow the largely secular regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The major rebel force benefiting from this support is al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.
In other words, the Saudis appear to have continued a covert relationship with al-Qaeda-connected jihadists to the present day.
The Israeli Exposure
And, like the Saudis, the Israelis have sided with the Sunni militants in Syria because the Israelis share the Saudi view that Iran and the so-called “Shiite crescent” – reaching from Tehran and Baghdad to Damascus and Beirut – is the greatest threat to their interests in the Middle East.
That shared concern has pushed Israel and Saudi Arabia into a de facto alliance, though the collaboration between Jerusalem and Riyadh has been mostly kept out of the public eye. Still, it has occasionally peeked out from under the covers as the two governments deploy their complementary assets – Saudi oil and money and Israeli political and media clout – in areas where they have mutual interests.
In recent years, these historic enemies have cooperated in their joint disdain for the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt (which was overthrown in 2013), in seeking the ouster of the Assad regime in Syria, and in pressing for a more hostile U.S. posture toward Iran.
Israel and Saudi Arabia also have collaborated in efforts to put the squeeze on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who is deemed a key supporter of both Iran and Syria. The Saudis have used their power over oil production to drive down prices and hurt Russia’s economy, while U.S. neoconservatives – who share Israel’s geopolitical world view – were at the forefront of the coup that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
The behind-the-scenes Israeli-Saudi alliance has put the two governments – uncomfortably at times – on the side of Sunni jihadists battling Shiite influence in Syria, Lebanon and even Iraq. On Jan. 18, 2015, for instance, Israel attacked Lebanese-Iranian advisers assisting Assad’s government in Syria, killing several members of Hezbollah and an Iranian general. These military advisors were engaged in operations against al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
Meanwhile, Israel has refrained from attacking Nusra Front militants who have seized Syrian territory near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. One source familiar with U.S. intelligence information on Syria told me that Israel has a “non-aggression pact” with these Nusra forces.
An Odd Alliance
Israel’s odd-couple alliances with Sunni interests have evolved over the past several years, as Israel and Saudi Arabia emerged as strange bedfellows in the geopolitical struggle against Shiite-ruled Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and southern Lebanon. In Syria, for instance, senior Israelis have made clear they would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail in the civil war rather than Assad, who is an Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam.
In September 2013, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.
“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 told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “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 “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
And, in June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.
Skepticism and Doubt
In August 2013, when I first reported on the growing relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia in an article entitled “The Saudi-Israeli Superpower,” the story was met with much skepticism. But, increasingly, this secret alliance has gone public.
On Oct. 1, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hinted at it in his United Nations General Assembly speech, which was largely devoted to excoriating Iran over its nuclear program and threatening a unilateral Israeli military strike.
Amid the bellicosity, Netanyahu dropped in a largely missed clue about the evolving power relationships in the Middle East, saying: “The dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the emergence of other threats in our region have led many of our Arab neighbors to recognize, finally recognize, that Israel is not their enemy. And this affords us the opportunity to overcome the historic animosities and build new relationships, new friendships, new hopes.”
The next day, Israel’s Channel 2 TV news reported that senior Israeli security officials had met with a high-level Gulf state counterpart in Jerusalem, believed to be Prince Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States who was then head of Saudi intelligence.
The reality of this unlikely alliance has now even reached the mainstream U.S. media. For instance, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described the new coziness in an article in the Jan. 19, 2015 issue.
He wrote: “On May 26, 2014, an unprecedented public conversation took place in Brussels. Two former high-ranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi Arabia – Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki al-Faisal – sat together for more than an hour, talking regional politics in a conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.
“They disagreed on some things, like the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement, and agreed on others: the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat, the need to support the new military government in Egypt, the demand for concerted international action in Syria. The most striking statement came from Prince Turki. He said the Arabs had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel anymore.’”
Though Klein detected only the bright side of this détente, there was a dark side as well, as referenced in Moussaoui’s deposition, which identified Prince Turki as one of al-Qaeda’s backers. Perhaps even more unsettling was his listing of Prince Bandar, who had long presented himself as a U.S. friend, so close to the Bush Family that he was nicknamed “Bandar Bush.”
Moussaoui claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, at a time when Bandar was the ambassador to the United States.
According to the New York Times article by Scott Shane, Moussaoui said he was assigned to “find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” but that he was arrested on Aug. 16, 2001, before he could carry out the reconnaissance mission.
The thought of anyone in the Saudi embassy, then under the control of “Bandar Bush,” scheming with al-Qaeda to shoot down George W. Bush’s Air Force One is shocking, if true. The notion would have been considered unthinkable even after the 9/11 attacks, which involved 15 Saudis among the 19 hijackers.
After those terror attacks which killed nearly 3,000 Americans, Bandar went to the White House and persuaded Bush to arrange for the rapid extraction of bin Laden’s family members and other Saudis in the United States. Bush agreed to help get those Saudi nationals out on the first flights allowed back into the air.
Bandar’s intervention undercut the FBI’s chance to learn more about the ties between Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 perpetrators by giving FBI agents only time for cursory interviews with the departing Saudis.
Bandar himself was close to the bin Laden family and acknowledged having met Osama bin Laden in the context of bin Laden thanking Bandar for his help financing the jihad project in Afghanistan during the 1980s. “I was not impressed, to be honest with you,” Bandar told CNN’s Larry King about bin Laden. “I thought he was simple and very quiet guy.”
The Saudi government claimed to have broken ties with bin Laden in the early 1990s when he began targeting the United States because President George H.W. Bush had stationed U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, but – if Moussaoui is telling the truth – al-Qaeda would have still counted Bandar among its supporters in the late 1990s.
Bandar and Putin
Bandar’s possible links to Sunni terrorism also emerged in 2013 during a confrontation between Bandar and Putin over what Putin viewed as Bandar’s crude threat to unleash Chechen terrorists against the Sochi Winter Olympics if Putin did not reduce his support for the Syrian government.
According to a leaked diplomatic account of a July 31, 2013 meeting in Moscow, Bandar informed Putin that Saudi Arabia had strong influence over Chechen extremists who had carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Russian targets and who had since deployed to join the fight against the Assad regime in Syria.
As Bandar called for a Russian shift toward the Saudi position on Syria, he reportedly offered guarantees of protection from Chechen terror attacks on the Olympics. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year,” Bandar reportedly said. “The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”
Putin responded, “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism.”
Bandar’s Mafia-like threat toward the Sochi games – a version of “nice Olympics you got here, it’d be a shame if something terrible happened to it” – failed to intimidate Putin, who continued to support Assad.
Less than a month later, an incident in Syria almost forced President Barack Obama’s hand in launching U.S. air strikes against Assad’s military, which would have possibly opened the path for the Nusra Front or the Islamic State to capture Damascus and take control of Syria. On Aug. 21, 2013, a mysterious sarin attack outside Damascus killed hundreds and, in the U.S. media, the incident was immediately blamed on the Assad regime.
American neocons and their allied “liberal interventionists” demanded that Obama launch retaliatory air strikes even though some U.S. intelligence analysts doubted that Assad’s forces were responsible and suspected that the attack was carried out by extremist rebels trying to pull the U.S. military into the civil war on their side.
Yet, pushed by the neocons and liberal war hawks, Obama nearly ordered a bombing campaign designed to “degrade” the Syrian military but called it off at the last minute. He then accepted Putin’s help in reaching a diplomatic solution in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical weapons arsenal, while still denying any role in the sarin attack.
Later, the Assad-did-it case crumbled amid new evidence that Sunni extremists, supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, were the more likely perpetrators of the attack, a scenario that became increasingly persuasive as Americans learned more about the cruelty and ruthlessness of many Sunni jihadists fighting in Syria. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mistaken Guns of Last August.”]
Targeting Putin
Putin’s cooperation with Obama to head off a U.S. military strike in Syria made the Russian president more of a target for the American neocons who thought they finally had reached the cusp of their long-desired “regime change” in Syria only to be blocked by Putin. By late September 2013, a leading neocon, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, announced the goal of challenging Putin and recognizing his sore point in Ukraine.
Taking to the Washington Post’s op-ed page on Sept. 26, 2013, Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important step toward ultimately ousting Putin. Gershman wrote, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit.“]
However, in early 2014, Putin was obsessed with Bandar’s implicit threat of terrorism striking the Sochi Olympics, thus distracting him from the “regime change” – being pushed by NED and neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland – next door in Ukraine.
On Feb. 22, 2014, putschists, spearheaded by well-organized neo-Nazi militias, drove elected President Viktor Yanukovych and his government from power. Putin was caught off-guard and, in the resulting political chaos, agreed to requests from Crimean officials and voters to accept Crimea back into Russia, thus exploding his cooperative relationship with Obama.
With Putin the new pariah in Official Washington, the neocon hand also was strengthened in the Middle East where renewed pressure could be put on the “Shiite crescent” in Syria and Iran. However, in summer 2014, the Islamic State, which had splintered off from al-Qaeda and its Nusra Front, went on a rampage, invading Iraq where captured soldiers were beheaded. The Islamic State then engaged in gruesome videotaped decapitations of Western hostages inside Syria.
The Islamic State’s brutality and the threat it posed to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-dominated government of Iraq changed the political calculus. Obama felt compelled to launch airstrikes against Islamic State targets in both Iraq and Syria. American neocons tried to convince Obama to expand the Syrian strikes to hit Assad’s forces, too, but Obama realized such a plan would only benefit the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
In effect, the neocons were showing their hand – much as Israeli Ambassador Oren had done – favoring the Sunni extremists allied with al-Qaeda over Assad’s secular regime because it was allied with Iran. Now, with Moussaoui’s deposition identifying senior Saudi officials as patrons of al-Qaeda, another veil seems to have dropped.
Complicating matters further, Moussaoui also claimed that he passed letters between Osama bin Laden and then Crown Prince Salman, who recently became king upon the death of his brother King Abdullah.
But Moussaoui’s disclosure perhaps cast the most unflattering light on Bandar, the erstwhile confidant of the Bush Family who — if Moussaoui is right — may have been playing a sinister double game.
Also facing potentially embarrassing questions is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, especially if he goes through with his planned speech before a joint session of Congress next month, attacking Obama for being soft on Iran.
And, America’s neocons might have some explaining to do about why they have carried water not just for the Israelis but for Israel’s de facto allies in Saudi Arabia.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Saying “No” to Netanyahu
Israel’s demands are not good for Americans
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Report • February 3, 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be visiting Washington during the first week in March. His annual visit coincides with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) summit in Washington, at which he is expected to speak. He will also be addressing a joint session of Congress on March 3 rd as a guest of the new Republican majority. Per Speaker of the House John Boehner, Netanyahu will be providing additional insights regarding the threats posed by Iran and by Islamic terrorism, which the president had “papered over” in his State of the Union address. Boehner has in mind promotion of policies that would be contrary to those embraced by the White House, most particularly President Barack Obama’s intention to continue negotiations to come to an understanding over Iran’s nuclear program. That would mean Congress’s imposing new and intentionally deal breaking sanctions on Iran just to show it we are serious and a possible demand that any agreement with Tehran be subject to legislative approval.
Netanyahu has frequently warned that Iran’s construction of a nuclear arsenal is just around the corner. He has been making that claim regularly since 1996 and apparently is not particularly bothered that his warning has proven to be inaccurate since the Mullahs have yet to develop the long anticipated weapon of mass destruction. He will no doubt again express his view that there is a secret Iranian weapons program that imminently threatens both Israel and the United States. It is not clear if he will produce a cartoon showing a ticking bomb as he famously did at the United Nations in 2012.
Concerning the terrorist threat, Netanyahu will undoubtedly play the Charlie Hebdo card, insisting that it is the duty of the West united with Israel to oppose Islamic barbarism. It will be convenient dodge as it allows him to avoid answering for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and it conveniently conflates all believers in a specific religion with political violence. No matter what Netanyahu says he will undoubtedly be cheered both when he speaks to Congress and also by the 1,500 attendees at AIPAC, which will include many Congressmen, journalists, and even Supreme Court justices. He will be treated like visiting royalty even though his message is essentially one of hate.
It is my understanding that a number of groups are organizing to protest both AIPAC and the Netanyahu visit. I hope they will be highly visible and noisy as hell, possibly forcing some of the summit attendees to think about just what they are supporting. I also urge the demonstrators to focus on Netanyahu’s actual message because everything that he has come to Washington to sell is essentially false.
Starting with Iran, the entire narrative of Iran as a nuclear threat is bogus, largely invented in Israel and the United States and in part based on manufactured evidence. I am not suggesting for a moment that Iran is a friend to the American people, but its malignancy has been much overstated by the Israel Lobby and its friends. It does not threaten the United States in any way and it hardly impacts on the security of countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which should be worrying about their viability based on their own behavior rather than due to an exaggerated Iranian menace. The reality is that the United States government has twice in 2007 and 2011 confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. Even Israel’s Mossad agrees and both governments admit that Tehran has not made the essentially political decision to proceed with such a program.
Not only has Iran neither developed nor tested a nuclear device, she has never enriched her uranium stocks to anything approaching weapons-grade. Her Fordow “secret” plant and other nuclear sites now have IAEA inspectors in place, the heavy-water reactor at Arak is not operational and many centrifuges are not operating. Most Iranians and many Americans understand that a negotiated settlement over the program as an alternative to a major regional war is highly desirable.
Netanyahu’s second point will be that the world is threatened by Islamic terrorism, requiring democratic nations to stand by Israel. But standing by Israel and adopting the Israeli standards for dealing with terrorism are precisely the problem. The only places in the world where Islamists have the remotest ability to take power are in those countries where the United States adhered to the Israeli model and intervened militarily, leaving chaos in its wake. Today that would include Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria. Highly publicized terrorist attacks in Europe and in the United States have killed relatively few people and produced a predictably panicked response but do not threaten either a national security crisis or the stability of any government. In the U.S. since 9/11 there have been 69 deaths, either terrorist or criminal, that can plausibly be linked to Muslims or Islamic sensibilities, less than five a year. During the same time period 200,000 Americans have been murdered, making terrorism by local Muslims pretty much a statistical anomaly. For what it’s worth, the policies being pursued overseas by Washington during the same time period directly or indirectly contributed to the killing of as many as half a million Muslims while turning at least three million more into refugees, which inevitably fuels terrorism.
A third point that Netanyahu will not be making as he is a beneficiary of it is the astonishing power of the Israel Lobby in the United States. As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt demonstrated in their book, the Lobby is in reality a loose aggregation that is bound together to promote what are perceived to be Israeli interests. It includes think tanks, PACS and other lobbying groups, journalists and media outlets, Christian evangelicals, leading figures in academia and it is all backed up by deep pocket donors who both fund political candidates and provide the fuel to keep everything moving. Pat Buchanan once described Congress as “Israeli occupied territory,” but to be sure he was being too kind and Tom Friedman’s observation that it is bought and paid for by the Lobby might actually be closer to the mark. In an actual occupation there would characteristically be at least some resistance but in the United States Congress there is virtually none now that Ron Paul is retired. If any daring congressmen stay home sick when Netanyahu speaks it will be a surprise and the only real question regarding the impending joint session address is how many standing ovations the Israeli leader will receive. Will it exceed the 29 he recorded last time around?
So there are three good reasons for saying “no” to Benjamin Netanyahu, or, even better, telling him to go away and stay away. First, he is striving mightily to involve the United States in a war with Iran for which there is no compelling national interest and which will cost Americans heavily in both lives and treasure. Second, he has poisoned Washington’s relationship with the Muslim world through the largely successful selling of his message that all believers in Islam are essentially terrorists. And third, he and his associates in the Israel Lobby are a cancer in our political system, using money and even coercion to bring about a “special relationship” that is hardly a relationship at all but is instead a mechanism to impel U.S. subordination to Israeli interests.
It is shameful that Netanyahu will be in Washington at all on a mission to tell the U.S. Congress what to do, but one can always hope that both he and Speaker Boehner have finally gone too far. Will this be a wake-up call for the American public, aware at last that it is being led by the nose by a foreign country aided by its own venal and corrupted quislings? One can always hope, and it might just be that Netanyahu will finally pay a price for his hubris with his own voters next month and be turned out of office. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that we have seen the last of Benjamin Netanyahu?
Egypt Lists Hamas as “Terrorist Organization”
Al-Akhbar | January 31, 2015
An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas and listed it as a terrorist organization.
Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which the Egyptian authorities have also declared a terrorist group and have repressed systematically since the army ousted one of its leaders, Mohammed Mursi, from the presidency in 2013.
“The court ruled to ban the Qassam Brigades and to list it as a terrorist group,” said the judge of the special Cairo court which deals with urgent cases.
Egypt had previously banned Hamas from operating in Egypt.
Egyptian officials claim weapons are smuggled from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip into Egypt, where they end up with militant groups fighting to topple the Western-backed Cairo government.
Islamist militants based in Egypt’s Sinai region, which has a border with Gaza, have killed hundreds of police and soldiers since Mursi’s political demise. The insurgency has spread to other parts of Egypt, the most populous Arab country.
Hamas on Saturday dismissed Egyptian media accusations for the group of standing behind deadly attacks in the Sinai Peninsula.
“Neither Hamas nor the Gaza Strip have anything to do with what happened in Sinai or any other place in Egypt,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement.
Barhoum termed claims by Egyptian media that Hamas was behind the attacks as “an attempt to demonize” the Palestinian group.
“Hamas does not interfere in the affairs of any Arab country, particularly Egypt,” he said.
The Palestinian faction has repeatedly denied accusations that it has carried out attacks in the North African state, saying it cannot act against Egypt’s national security.
Since then-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi rose to power in Egypt in 2013 and was elected president, the country’s relationship with the besieged Gaza Strip has worsened.
In November, Egypt decided to create a one kilometer-deep buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula along the border with Gaza by clearing more than 800 houses, displacing more than 1,100 families, and destroying and neutralizing hundreds of subterranean tunnels.
Gaza, which has been under a brutal illegal Israeli blockade for almost eight years, relied heavily on smuggling tunnels across the Egyptian border to obtain vital supplies. The only border crossing between Egypt and Gaza has also been routinely closed, leaving many Palestinians stranded or without access to important medical treatment.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has also repeatedly condemned the militant attacks in Egypt and denied any involvement.
However, the Sisi regime has clamped down severely on Mursi supporters. The crackdown has left at least 1,400 people dead and more than 15,000 imprisoned, with hundreds sentenced to death in trials the United Nations described as “unprecedented in recent history.”
(Reuters, Anadolu, Al-Akhbar)
CIA, Mossad Behind Killing of Imad Mughniyeh, Washington Post Confirms
Al-Akhbar | January 31, 2015
A report from the Washington Post on Friday confirmed that the CIA and Israel’s spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria.
Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.
He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
On January 19, Jihad, Mughniyeh’s 24-year-old son, was also killed by Israeli forces in Syria, along with five Hezbollah members and and an Iranian general in a helicopter airstrike near the city of Quneitra.
The bomb that killed Mughniyeh, built by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with the CIA operatives on the ground in Damascus.
“The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” a former US intelligence official told the newspaper.
The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.
According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W. Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.
The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included approval to target Mughniyeh.
“There was an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with him,” a former US official who served in Baghdad told the Post.
According to the newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting on the issue with the head of Israel’s military intelligence service in 2002.
“When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs,” a former US official told the Post.
Though it is not clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint operation to kill him in Syria’s capital.
The agencies collected “pattern of life” information about him and used facial recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a restaurant the night he was killed.
In 2013, an Al-Akhbar investigation into the 2008 assassination revealed that Mossad, under the leadership of Meir Dagan at the time, was responsible for the operation, which took around six weeks to implement, from A to Z.
Mossad and CIA have repeatedly planned and carried out assassinations on Hezbollah’s senior commanders and members in Lebanon and Syria.
In 2013, Hezbollah commander Hassan al-Laqqis was assassinated in the suburbs of Beirut, an attack that the resistance group said was orchestrated by Israeli intelligence.
On Friday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah spoke about the latest attack on Hezbollah members in Quneitra, stressing that Israel had “planned, calculated and took a premeditated decision to assassinate” Hezbollah fighters.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Israel-Egypt cooperation surpasses expectation
MEMO | January 28, 2015
Cooperation between the Israeli and Egyptian military and intelligence apparatuses exceeds all expectations, Israel’s Channel 10 stressed on Monday, noting that Cairo agrees with Tel Aviv’s requests pertaining to confronting “radical” Islamic movements in Sinai and the Gaza Strip.
In a report the channel’s military affairs broadcaster Alon Ben-David said that cooperation between the Egyptian and Israeli armies does not depend only on the coordination and sharing of intelligence information, but goes beyond this to field cooperation, in reference to the parties’ joint operations against those who are considered sources of danger for Israel and Egypt in Sinai.
Last year the Israeli TV station revealed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued instructions to carry out operations in the heart of Sinai.
Meanwhile, Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, which is close to Netanyahu, asserted on 12 June 2014 that the Egyptian army depends on intelligence information provided by Israel in its operations against jihadists in Sinai.
General Amos Yadlin, former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Division, said the confluence of interests between Israel and the “moderate Sunni” governments represents an unprecedented opportunity for Israel to strengthen cooperation with them so as to enhance Israel’s strategic environment and help it cope with the significant challenges it faces.
In an article published by the Makor Rishon newspaper on Monday, Yadlin stressed that Israel has greatly benefited from cooperation with Egypt, Jordan and some countries in the Gulf, calling on Netanyahu’s government to take advantage of this opportunity.
However, Yadlin said that what could undermine such opportunity is the unstable situation in some Arab countries, as well as the deliberate embarrassment that Israel is causing the Arab ruling elites by rejecting the peace initiative that was launched by the late Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz.
Chutzpah Squared, Bibi and Boehner
By Jim Lobe | LobeLog | January 22, 2015
As Mitchell Plitnick pointed out on Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress on February 11, although now it appears that Bibi would like to put off the occasion until March 3, when AIPAC will be holding its annual policy conference and unleashing its 12,000-plus attendees on Capitol Hill. The lobby group presumably aims to persuade its members of Congress to do everything they can to sabotage a possible nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran—as well as bolster Bibi’s chances of retaining the premiership in the March 17 elections in Israel. Much has happened that is relevant to the visit in the last 24 hours, and a brief round-up, which unfortunately is all that I have time for today, seems in order.
The invitation was clearly arranged without any notification of or coordination with the White House, which, as Mitchell reported, noted that its handling appeared to be “a departure from protocol.” It also appears now that Boehner didn’t even consult Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who, in addition to complaining about the negative impact Netanyahu’s appearance might have on the negotiations, explained on Thursday that the common practice is for the two leaders from each party to agree before issuing an invitation to a foreign leader:
…[I]t’s out of the ordinary that the Speaker would decide that he would be inviting people to a Joint Session without any bipartisan consultation. And of course, we always—our friendship with Israel is a very strong one. Prime Minister Netanyahu has spoken to the Joint Session two times already. And there are concerns about the fact that this—as I understand it from this morning—that this presentation will take place within two weeks of the election in Israel. I don’t think that’s appropriate for any country—that the head of state would come here within two weeks of his own election in his own country.
Meanwhile, the White House announced that Obama won’t meet Netanyahu for the same reason: “As a matter of long-standing practice and principle, we do not see heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections, so as to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country,” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told reporters in an emailed statement. Kerry won’t meet with Bibi either, according to the State Department.
Meanwhile, Obama’s position that Congress should give diplomacy a chance by not enacting new sanctions legislation got a key endorsement from the presumed front-runner in the 2016 Democratic presidential race, Hillary Clinton. Speaking at a conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she said:
If we’re the reason—through our Congress—that in effect gives Iran and others the excuse not to continue the negotiations, that would be, in my view, a very serious strategic error… Why do we want to be the catalyst for the collapse of negotiations until we really know whether there’s something we can get out of them that will make the world safer [and] avoid an arms race in the Middle East?… [R]ight now, the status quo that we’re in is in my view in our interests and therefore I don’t want to do anything that disrupts the status quo until we have a better idea as to whether there’s something we can get out of it.
Clinton’s position, of course, should be quite helpful in keeping wavering Democrats in line. And, in the wake of Obama’s veto threat and Boehner’s invitation to Bibi, it seems that even some of the Democratic co-sponsors of the original Kirk-Menendez bill are moving in the White House’s direction. “I’m considering very seriously the very cogent points that he’s made in favor of delaying any congressional action,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Politico. “I’m talking to colleagues on both sides of the aisle. And I think they are thinking, and rethinking, their positions in light of the points that the president and his team are making to us.”
The fact that he would mention that some Republicans may also be “rethinking” their positions, while not provable yet, is significant, particularly in light of today’s Washington Post op-ed, “Give Diplomacy a Chance,” by the foreign ministers of France, Britain, and Germany and the high representative of the European Union (EU) for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, with whom Kerry met on Wednesday. The four of them could not have been clearer:
Maintaining pressure on Iran through our existing sanctions is essential. But introducing new hurdles at this critical stage of the negotiations, including through additional nuclear-related sanctions legislation on Iran, would jeopardize our efforts at a critical juncture. While many Iranians know how much they stand to gain by overcoming isolation and engaging with the world, there are also those in Tehran who oppose any nuclear deal. We should not give them new arguments. New sanctions at this moment might also fracture the international coalition that has made sanctions so effective so far. Rather than strengthening our negotiating position, new sanctions legislation at this point would set us back.
It’s worth remembering that the writers of that statement include the foreign ministers of Washington’s three closest European and NATO allies—the countries (at least Britain and France) that Americans normally think of when a politician, including the Republican variety, talks about building closer ties with “our traditional allies.” Asked to choose between Israel and Washington’s western allies that, unlike Israel, have suffered real casualties alongside U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, some Republicans may not find it to so easy to follow AIPAC’s lead, despite rich campaign rewards dangled by the billionaire donors in the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), notably its chairman, Sheldon Adelson. So, when Boehner told Politico Thursday, “Let’s send a clear message to the White House — and the world — about our commitment to Israel and our allies,” he failed to clarify which “allies” he was referring to.
Of course, Europe is also Israel’s biggest trading partner by far, and European leaders and parliaments have been expressing increasing frustration over the past year with Netanyahu’s positions on Israel-Palestine as well as the general rightward drift of Israeli politics. In his last foreign venture, Netanyahu made himself thoroughly obnoxious in France. By being seen as actively trying to sabotage an agreement with Iran that, if it is indeed concluded, will gain the strong backing of the president of the United States and the leaders of Washington’s closest European allies, Netanyahu will isolate Israel even more from its western supporters.
That may be part of the reason why Israel’s national-security professionals have apparently been willing to go “rogue,” as Josh Rogin and Eli Lake called it in their big story Wednesday on Bloomberg about dissent in the Israeli intelligence community regarding the potentially disastrous impact of new sanctions legislation on the Iran negotiations. The intelligence community did this before when Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were repeatedly threatening to attack Iran earlier this decade.
Although Mossad’s director issued an extremely unusual statement on Thursday denying any opposition to new sanctions, the phrasing indicated a certain lack of conviction.
Meanwhile, it will be very interesting to find out who initiated the idea that Netanyahu should be invited to address Congress at such a critical moment and to do so without any consultation with the State Department, the White House, or the minority leader in Congress. It’s hard to believe that either Boehner or McConnell would have the temperament or imagination to act on their own. One wonders whether Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer or someone at the RJC or Bill Kristol thought it was a great idea. Or maybe it was Bibi himself. Certainly the Emergency Committee for Israel welcomes the visit and plans to hold a reception for Bibi when he gets to Washington. Still, it’s hard to figure out how Israel’s relations with the United States or Europe are going to be improved by this.
AN ADDITIONAL THOUGHT: I think mainstream Jewish organizations that place a high stock in maintaining their bipartisan identity — including the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, and even AIPAC — are going to have a difficult time dealing with this situation due to the fact that Boehner has acted in such a transparently partisan manner. It’s important to remember that both Kristol’s ECI and Adelson’s favorite Zionist group, the Zionist Organization of America, implicitly attacked AIPAC last February for essentially throwing in the towel on the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill precisely because the powerful lobby group had run into a solid wall of Democratic opposition and didn’t want to risk its bipartisan image. As Kristol said at the time, “[I]t would be terrible if history’s judgment on the pro-Israel community was that it made a fetish of bipartisanship — and got a nuclear Iran.” If Democrats line up strongly against Boehner’s and Bibi’s little coup, that same community is going to have to make some hard decisions.
~
Congress Seeks Netanyahu’s Direction
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | January 22, 2015
Showing who some in Congress believe is the real master of U.S. foreign policy, House Speaker John Boehner has invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session and offer a rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s comments on world affairs in his State of the Union speech.
Boehner made clear that Netanyahu’s third speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress – scheduled for Feb. 11 – was meant to counter Obama’s assessments. “There is a serious threat in the world, and the President last night kind of papered over it,” Boehner said on Wednesday. “And the fact is that there needs to be a more serious conversation in America about how serious the threat is from radical Islamic jihadists and the threat posed by Iran.”
The scheduling of Netanyahu’s speech caught the White House off-guard, since the Israeli prime minister had apparently not bothered to clear his trip with the administration. The Boehner-Netanyahu arrangement demonstrates a mutual contempt for this President’s authority to conduct American foreign policy as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.
In the past when Netanyahu has spoken to Congress, Republicans and Democrats have competed to show their devotion by quickly and frequently leaping to their feet to applaud almost every word out of the Israeli prime minister’s mouth. By addressing a joint session for a third time, Netanyahu would become only the second foreign leader to do so, joining British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who never used the platform to demean the policies of a sitting U.S. president.
Besides this extraordinary recognition of another country’s leader as the true definer of U.S. foreign policy, Boehner’s move reflects an ignorance of what is actually occurring on the ground in the Middle East. Boehner doesn’t seem to realize that Netanyahu has developed what amounts to a de facto alliance with extremist Sunni forces in the region.
Not only is Israel now collaborating behind the scenes with Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist leadership but Israel has begun taking sides militarily in support of the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the Syrian civil war. A source familiar with U.S. intelligence information on Syria said Israel has a “non-aggression pact” with Nusra forces that control territory adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The quiet cooperation between Israel and al-Qaeda’s affiliate was further underscored on Sunday when Israeli helicopters attacked and killed advisers to the Syrian military from Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran. In other words, Israel has dispatched its forces into Syria to kill military personnel helping to fight al-Nusra. Iran later confirmed that one of its generals had died in the Israeli strike.
Israel’s tangled alliances with Sunni forces have been taking shape over the past several years, as Israel and Saudi Arabia emerged as strange bedfellows in the geopolitical struggle against Shiite-ruled Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and southern Lebanon. Both Saudi and Israeli leaders have talked with growing alarm about this “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran through Iraq and Syria to the Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon.
Favoring Sunni Extremists
Senior Israelis have made clear they would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail in the Syrian civil war rather than President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam. Assad’s relatively secular government is seen as the protector of Shiites, Christians and other minorities who fear the vengeful brutality of the Sunni jihadists who now dominate the anti-Assad rebels.
In one of the most explicit expressions of Israel’s views, its Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, a close adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in September 2013 that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.
“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 told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “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 “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Saudi Arabia shares Israeli’s strategic view that “the Shiite crescent” must be broken and has thus developed a rapport with Netanyahu’s government in a kind of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” relationship. But some rank-and-file Jewish supporters of Israel have voiced concerns about Israel’s new-found alliance with the Saudi monarchy, especially given its adherence to ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam and its embrace of a fanatical hatred of Shiite Islam, a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites that dates back 1,400 years.
Though President Obama has repeatedly declared his support for Israel, he has developed a contrary view from Netanyahu’s regarding what is the gravest danger in the Middle East. Obama considers the radical Sunni jihadists, associated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, to be the biggest threat to Western interests and U.S. national security.
That has put him in a different de facto alliance – with Iran and the Syrian government – since they represent the strongest bulwarks against Sunni jihadists who have targeted Americans and other Westerners for death.
What Boehner doesn’t seem to understand is that Israel and Saudi Arabia have placed themselves on the side of the Sunni jihadists who now represent the frontline fight against the “Shiite crescent.” If Netanyahu succeeds in enlisting the United States in violently forcing Syrian “regime change,” the U.S. government likely would be facilitating the growth in power of the Sunni extremists, not containing them.
But the influential American neoconservatives want to synch U.S. foreign policy with Israel’s and thus have pressed for a U.S. bombing campaign against Assad’s forces (even if that would open the gates of Damascus to the Nusra Front or the Islamic State). The neocons also want an escalation of tensions with Iran by sabotaging an agreement to ensure that its nuclear program is not used for military purposes.
The neocons have long wanted to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran as part of their “regime change” strategy for the Middle East. That is why Obama’s openness to a permanent agreement for tight constraints on Iran’s nuclear program is seen as a threat by Netanyahu, the neocons and their congressional allies – because it would derail hopes for militarily attacking Iran.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Obama made clear that he perceives the brutal Islamic State, which he calls “ISIL” for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as the principal current threat to Western interests in the Middle East and the clearest terror threat to the United States and Europe. Obama proposed “a smarter kind of American leadership” that would cooperate with allies in “stopping ISIL’s advance” without “getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.”
Working with Putin
Thus, Obama, who might be called a “closet realist,” is coming to the realization that the best hope for blocking the advances of Sunni jihadi terror and minimizing U.S. military involvement is through cooperation with Iran and its regional allies. That also puts Obama on the same side with Russian President Vladimir Putin who has faced Sunni terrorism in Chechnya and is supporting both Iran’s leaders and Syria’s Assad in their resistance to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
Obama’s “realist” alliance, in turn, presents a direct threat to Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran represents an “existential threat” to Israel and that the “Shiite crescent” must be destroyed. There is also fear among Israeli right-wingers that an effective Obama-Putin collaboration could ultimately force Israel into accepting a Palestinian state.
So, Netanyahu and the U.S. neocons believe they must do whatever is necessary to shatter this tandem of Obama, Putin and Iran. That is one reason why the neocons were at the forefront of fomenting “regime change” against Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych last year. By splintering Ukraine on Russia’s border, the neocons drove a wedge between Obama and Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit.”]
Even the slow-witted mainstream U.S. media has begun to pick up on the story of the emerging Israeli-Saudi alliance. In the Jan. 19 issue of Time magazine, correspondent Joe Klein noted the new coziness between top Israeli and Saudi officials.
He wrote: “On May 26, 2014, an unprecedented public conversation took place in Brussels. Two former high-ranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi Arabia – Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki al-Faisal – sat together for more than an hour, talking regional politics in a conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.
“They disagreed on some things, like the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement, and agreed on others: the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat, the need to support the new military government in Egypt, the demand for concerted international action in Syria. The most striking statement came from Prince Turki. He said the Arabs had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel anymore.’”
Not only did Prince Turki offer an olive branch to Israel, he indicated agreement on what the two countries consider their most pressing strategic interests: Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war. In other words, in noting this extraordinary meeting, Klein had stumbled upon the odd-couple alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia – though he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Obama had shifted his position on Syria as the West made a “quiet retreat from its demand” that Assad “step down immediately.” The article by Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta noted that the Obama administration still wanted Assad to exit eventually “but facing military stalemate, well-armed jihadists and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the United States is going along with international diplomatic efforts that could lead to more gradual change in Syria.”
At the center of that diplomatic initiative was Russia, again reflecting Obama’s recognition of the need to cooperate with Putin on resolving some of these complex problems (although Obama did include in his speech some tough-guy rhetoric against Russia over Ukraine, taking some pleasure in how Russia’s economy is now “in tatters”).
But the underlying reality is that the United States and Assad’s regime have become de facto allies, fighting on the same side in the Syrian civil war, much as Israel had, in effect, sided with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front by killing Hezbollah and Iranian advisers to the Syrian military.
The Times article noted that the shift in Obama’s position on Syrian peace talks “comes along with other American actions that Mr. Assad’s supporters and opponents take as proof Washington now believes that if Mr. Assad is ousted, there will be nothing to check the spreading chaos and extremism.
“American planes now bomb the Islamic State group’s militants in Syria, sharing skies with Syrian jets. American officials assure Mr. Assad, through Iraqi intermediaries, that Syria’s military is not their target. The United States still trains and equips Syrian insurgents, but now mainly to fight the Islamic State, not the government.”
Yet, as Obama adjusts U.S. foreign policy to take into account the complex realities in the Middle East, he now faces another front in this conflict – from the U.S. Congress, which has long been held in thrall by the Israel lobby.
Not only has Speaker Boehner appealed to Netanyahu to deliver what amounts to a challenge to President Obama’s foreign policy but congressional neocons are even accusing Obama’s team of becoming Iranian stooges. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democratic neocon, said, “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran.”
If indeed Netanyahu does end up addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress, its members would face a stark choice of either embracing Israel’s foreign policy as America’s or backing the decisions made by the elected President of the United States.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Charlie Hebdo, Zionism & Media Deception – Interview with Hafsa Kara-Mustapha
Brandon Martinez interviews Hafsa Kara-Mustapha on a January 18, 2015 episode of the Non-Aligned Media Podcast.
Hafsa Kara-Mustapha is a London-based journalist and political commentator who has written extensively about the Middle East for publications such as Middle East Magazine, Jane’s Foreign Report and El Watan newspaper. She also appears frequently on Press TV and Russia Today.
Brandon Martinez is an independent writer and journalist from Canada who specializes in foreign policy issues, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. For years he has written on Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. Listeners can contact him at martinezperspective[at]hotmail.com or visit his blog.
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The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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