There has been a ridiculous notion amongst numerous left groups and those opposed to the Syrian government, that the Israeli regime does not want to see Assad fall. As self-professed “anti-zionists”, many in these groups are content to delude themselves into believing that both their enemies are on the same side. In the case of several socialist groups, they believe that this forcing of the Syrian crisis into their blanket “anti-authoritarian” narrative (regardless of the state in which they are applying that narrative to) enables them to maintain a façade of anti-imperialism.
London based socialist newspaper The Socialist Review writes: “Israel, although hostile to Syria, could depend on the Baathist regime to keep the frontier quiet. Thus criticism of Bashar is more muted in Tel Aviv.”
The notion that ordinary Syrians struggling to change their country are the pawns of a ‘Western plot’ is absurd… In fact the Arab League is attempting to throw the regime a lifeline.
This view is also pervasive amongst the Islamic opposition to the Syrian government. Rafiq A. Tschannen of the The Muslims Times writes:
Israel believes that it would be safer under Assad regime than the new government whose credentials are unknown or the new Islamic extremist regime that would open a new war front with the Jewish state.
Israeli state media has actively fuelled this manipulation, as it has been beneficial to the Israeli state to both discredit the Syrian government in the eyes of Syrians and Arabs amongst whom cooperation with Israel has historically been a red line. Therefore the goal of these reports has been to create the false perception that Israel is uninvolved in the insurgency against the Syrian government. Similarly to how the NATO powers were keen to portray the Libyan insurgency as a “home-grown revolution”.
In this early 2011 Haaretz article entitled Israel’s favourite dictator, great lengths are taken to paint the Syrian president as a weak stooge of the Israeli state. The article regurgitates common Syrian criticisms and sources of frustration about the Syrian government’s failure to take back the Golan Heights. It even goes as far as to chastise Assad for not attacking Israel. The irony that an Israeli paper would be critical of a president’s failure to attack Israel is apparently lost on many. All the more incredible that these anti-Zionist groups have chosen to believe the spin of Israeli state media.
The Turkish based Syrian opposition, the Syrian National Council (SNC), also jumped on this bandwagon. The now deposed leader of the SNC, Burghan Ghallion told the Israeli paper Ynetnews “We are convinced that the Syrian regime’s strongest ally is Israel”.
Debunking the Myth
However the following facts expose all of the above as merely a part of the psychological warfare machinery directed from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the NATO countries, which is an essential part of the overall aggression against Syria, and that such leftists have willingly become a part of:
Israel’s most important ally, the US, has been amongst its other allies repeatedly calling for regime change in Syria
Israel’s strongest ally the United States has been pushing for regime change in Syria since before the first signs of insurrection began. Most famously in 2007, General Wesley Clarke, who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander between 1997 and 2000 said he had received a memo from the US Secretary of Defense’s Office which read that the Syrian Government would be one of the seven governments the US would destroy in the subsequent five years.
The Guardian’s recent headline “Saudi Arabia plans to fund Syria rebel army” is in the typical style of the liberal media based in the NATO countries, a malignant manipulation. The text of that article is specifically about plans by the US’ and by extension Israel’s most important regional allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to pay the salaries of insurgents. But, buried further down, the very same article also reports that such support began months before. A less misleading headline therefore would replace “plans to fund” with “increases support for”, however a truthful headline would suggest external control over Syria’s insurgency has existed since its onset.
Indeed both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have a long history of hostility to the Syrian Ba’ath Party and Syrian foreign policy, a fact which is reflected in both of their leading medias (Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya respectively) severely distorted coverage of events in Syria from the outset.
But to highlight this context would give too much weight to the Syrian government’s consistent analysis that the crisis within its borders is externally created. A fact which leftist groups also fall over themselves trying to downplay or dismiss with the result of boosting the opposing narrative which imperialism has made dominant through its media machinery.
Why did that same Guardian article, and western leftists who claim that Assad is good for Israel, fail to mention that for example in early April, the US openly pledged to double its assistance to the insurgents to the tune of an additional $12 million, under the cover of “humanitarian aid”? Or the recent US admission that it is actively arming the insurgency using Qatar as a proxy? Or that in February, solid Israeli ally British Foreign Minister William Hague pledged more equipment to the insurgents, insisting there was “no limit on what resources” Britain would provide?
It shouldn’t have to be explained to anti-Zionists that US and Israeli foreign policy is one and the same.
Axis of Resistance
Syria is a member of the Axis of Resistance, which is the only effective military resistance to Israel left. It is made up of Syria, Iran and the resistance inside Lebanon with Hizbullah at the helm. Far from being a ‘safe’ option for Israel, asAl Akhbarwriter Amal Saad-Ghorayeb sets out in her three part critique of the third-way position that has seized much of the western left, Syria has consistently put itself on the front line, risking its own survival, and has been involved in every Arab-Israeli conflict since they took power. Syria has been the strongest supporter of the Lebanese resistance movements against Israeli occupation; Hizbullah has repeatedly unequivocally attributed its ability to effectively win the 2006 war against Israeli invasion of Lebanon to its support from Syria and Iran.
A year since the beginning of the insurrection in Syria, the ridiculous notion that Israel was not pursuing regime change in Syria began to crumble. Israeli Intelligence Minister, Dan Meridor was quoted on Israeli radio, pointing out what was obvious all along: Regime change in Syria would break the Iran-Syria mutual defence pact thereby isolating Iran and cutting the supply of arms to Hezbollah. Finally, Israel’s greatest adversary, Syria, would be crippled.
This was not reported in Israeli mass media, which ensured that the lid was kept on the obvious, clearly in the knowledge that it would make the position of the insurgent’s self-professed anti-Zionist cheerleaders in the west and Arab world more untenable. Yet those cheerleaders who maintain that Assad is good for Israel have been unable to reconcile then why Israel relentlessly beats the war drums against one of Syria’s most important allies, Iran.
Aside from wanting to get rid of Assad to secure military hegemony of the region, Israel also has an economic interest in scuppering the Syria, Iran, Iraq oil pipeline which would rival both Israel’s BTC pipeline and the eternally fledgling plans for Europe’s Nabucco pipeline.
Pro-Israel Opposition
With increasing momentum, the already tenuous facade of being pro-Assad in the Israeli media began to crumble and increasingly, voices within the Syrian opposition have been crossing the red line of sounding friendly towards Israel.
MK Yitzhak Herzog, who has previously held ministerial posts in the Israeli parliament, said that Syrian opposition leaders have told him they want peace with Israel after Syrian President Bashar al Assad falls.
Another SNC member, Ammar Abdulhamid declared his support for friendly relations between Israel and Syria in an interview with Israeli news paper Ynetnews.
Earlier this year a telephone conversation between the SNC’s Radwan Ziyade and Mouhammad Abdallah emerged where they begged Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barack for more support.
Outside the SNC the children of former leadership figures now in opposition have joined the pro-Israel rat race. Ribal al-Assad, the son of Bashar Assad’s uncle and exiled former vice-president Rifaat al-Asaad welcomed the possibility of Syria making peace with Israel. And son of former Syrian prime minister Nofal Al-Dawalibi, said in an interview on Israeli radio that the Syrian people want peace with Israel. Dawalibi formed the “Free Syrian Transitional National Government”, another external opposition group rivaling the SNC for power in a situation where the Syrian government falls. The sectarian infighting and disunity, that is a mirror of post-Gaddafi Libya, is now threatening to plague Syria.
Lower down the opposition hierarchy, pro-Israel voices are still to be found.
Syrian Danny Abdul-Dayem, the almost one-hit-wonder unofficial spokesman for the FSA, appeared on CNN begging Israel to Attack Syria.
And in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Sheikh Abdullah Tamimi, an exiled Imam from the Syrian city of Homs, said that the Syrian Opposition does not have any enmity towards Israel. Tamimi proceeded to request monetary and military support for Sunnis in Syria and Lebanon.
Anti-Assad Zionists and Israeli Leaders
Socialists have chosen to be blind to the fact that prominent Zionists have been backing the Syrian insurgency since its inception.
Another well known Zionist Bernard Henri-Levy, who spear-headed the destruction of Libya by NATO aerial bombardment, has also called for an attack on Syria.
More recently voices within the Israeli government have been more vocal and demanding in their desire to see the Syrian government’s replacement with a more friendly puppet regime.
Israeli President Shimon Peres, upon receiving the ‘Medal of Freedom’ from US President Barack Obama, said that the world had to get rid of Assad. That he was receiving such a medal requires its own article dedicated to psychoanalyzing such an event, but that he could also claim, while being part of a system that is responsible for some of the gravest abuses to humankind in history, that from a “human” point of view Assad must go, should really get so-called anti-Zionists thinking.
Finally, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon accused the ‘world’ of wrong doing for failing to act against the Syrian government and then offered Israeli ‘assistance’ for Syrian ‘refugees’. Thin euphemism for arming insurgents on the border.
Conclusion
In spite of the overt desire of the US government for regime change in Syria, which they have made clear time and time again, Israel has obvious economic and military interests for pursuing regime change in Syria, most notably the the break up of the Axis of Resistance and the destruction of plans for rival oil pipelines. Despite numerous public statements by Syrian opposition members that they are pro-Israel and the multitude of Israeli government officials calling for the fall of the Syrian government as well as Zionist lobbyists and key Zionist figures like Bernard Henri-Levy backing the insurgency, so called ‘anti-Zionist’ socialists and Islamic groups persist in their claim that Israel has no stake in regime change in Syria and that the insurgency inside Syria is from the grass roots. Though all information contrary to this delusion is in clear sight, it seems that the socialist and Islamic groups are willfully blind.
This position has become increasingly untenable however, most recently in light of the murder of Syria’s Deputy Defence Minister Asef Shawkat, which along with the simultaneous murder of Defence Minister Raoud Dajiha and Assistant to the Vice President Hassan Turkomani, which the Syrian government laid the responsibility for squarely at the doors of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as new information has come to light as revealed by Al Akhbar editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin.
In an article published today, Amin writes of Shawkat, that in spite of the incessant attempts by the US, Israel et al to demonise him, he in fact,
played a major role in resisting Israeli occupation in and around Palestine. Right to the end, he took practical charge of meeting the needs of the resistance forces in Palestine and Lebanon, and of their members and cadres in Syria. He oversaw everything from their accommodation and transportation, to their training camps and provisions, and arranging for cadres from inside Palestine to come to the country secretly for training.
For the resistance in Lebanon, Shawkat was a true partner, providing whatever assistance was needed without needing orders or approval from the leadership. He was a central player in the June 2006 war. He spent the entire time in the central operations room that was set up in line with a directive by Assad to supply the resistance with whatever weapons it wanted, notably missiles, from Syrian army stocks. Shawkat and other officers and men of the Syrian army – including Muhammad Suleiman who was assassinated by the Mossad on the Syrian coast in 2008 – spent weeks coordinating the supply operation which helped the resistance achieve the successes that led to the defeat of Israel.
Despite the accusations levelled against Asef Shawkat regarding security, political or other matters, for Imad Mughniyeh, the assassinated military leader of Hezbollah, he was just another comrade, a modest man who would bow when shaking hands with Hassan Nasrallah, and liked to hear the news from Palestine last thing at night.
However anti-Zionist one proclaims to be, there are few in this world that can claim to have done as much as the above for the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist entity. But having proven to willfully ignore all of the facts and history of Syria’s long history of resistance to Israel, it is a great tragedy that those who cling to the argument dealt with in this essay, would only perhaps be able to let go of it should Syria fall and then the reality of Palestine’s total military abandonment would be all too devastatingly clear to see.
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with the millions of Syrians who have been struggling for dignity and freedom since March 2011. We call on people of the world to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the Syrian people. We demand that Bashar al-Asad leave immediately without excuses so that Syria can begin a speedy recovery towards a democratic future.
Since March 2011, Asad’s regime has steadily escalated its violence against the Syrian people, launching Scud missiles, using weapons banned by the Geneva Convention such as cluster bombs and incendiary munitions, and using aerial bombardment. The regime has detained and tortured tens of thousands of people and committed untold massacres. It has refused political settlements that do not include Asad in power, and it has polarized the society through strategic acts of violence and by sowing seeds of division. The regime has also, since the early days of the uprising, sought to internationalize the crisis in order to place it within geopolitical battles that would only strengthen the regime. Staying true to the logics of an authoritarian regime, Asad could never accept the legitimate demands of the Syrian people for freedom and dignity. Thus, there is no hope for a free, unified, and independent Syria so long as his regime remains in power. … Full text
Frederic Jameson (Duke University, United States)
Tariq Ali (British Pakistani writer, journalist, and filmmaker, United Kingdom/ Pakistan)
Ilan Pappe (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)
Etienne Balibar (Columbia University, United States/ France)
Nigel Gibson (Emerson college, United States/ Britain)
Norman Finkelstein (American researcher and writer, United Sates)
John Holloway (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, United States/ Mexico)
Vijay Prashad (Trinity College, United States/ India)
Salameh Kaileh (Intellectual, Syria/Palestine)
Bill Ayers (University of Illinois at Chicago, United States)
Bernardine Dohrn (Northwestern University, United States)
Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University, United States/Palestine)
Lieven de Cuater (Philosopher, Belgium)
Jihane Sfeir (l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, Lebanon/ Belgium)
Jean-Pierre Filiu (Institut d’études politiques de Paris, France)
Farouk Mardam Bey (Intellectual, Syria)
Faraj Bayrakdar (Poet, Syria)
Ziad Majed (American University of Paris, Lebanon/ France)
Kamal Bandara (Intellectual, Tunisia)
Francois Burgat (CNRS, France)
Adam Shapiro (Activist, United States)
Razan Ghazzawi, (Activist, Syria)
Yassin el-Haj Saleh (Intellectual, Syria)
Thierry Boissière (Institut français du Proche-Orient, France)
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison (universitaire, France)
Jens Hanssen (University of Tornoto, Canada/ Germany)
Ghassan Hage (The University of Melbourne, Australia/ Lebanon)
Hani al-Sayed (American University of Cairo, Syria/ Egypt)
Hazem al-Azmeh (Intellectual, Syria)
Sadri Khiari (Intellectual, Tunisia)
Oussama Mohamad (Film maker, Syria/ France)
Jihad Yazigi (Journalist, Syria)
Saad Hajo (Cartoonist, Syria)
Wendy Brown (UC Berkeley, United States)
R. Radhakrishnan (UC Irvine, United States/ India)
Ann Ferguson (Philosopher, United States)
Samir Aita (Le Monde Diplomatique editions arabes, Cercle des Economistes Arabes)
Santiago de Rico Alba (Philosopher, Spain)
Asef Bayat (University of Illinois, USA)
Chela Sandoval (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned that a US military confrontation with Iran could be devastating for the American economy.
“A war in the Middle East, in the present context, may last for years,” Brzezinski said in an interview with Newsmax.TV published on Wednesday.
“And the economic consequences of it (the war) are going to be devastating for the average American; High inflation, instability, insecurity,” he added.
He warned the US administration not to rush into a war with Iran and said, the consequences of yet another military strike in the Middle East “will be certainly very costly for the United States.”
The four-decade politician said that a possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran even not for a very long time would prompt the costs of oil to skyrocket as the vital oil-shipping route would be a dangerous passage as a result of the military conflict.
“In effect, the American taxpayer should be ready to pay $5 to $10 a gallon for the pleasure of having a war in the Strait of Hormuz,” Brzezinski explained.
He described democracy as the “best weapon of choice” in the present circumstances, but warned that negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear energy program would fail to yield result if they are meant to corner Iran.
“If the negotiations are designed to humiliate Iran and to put it in some sort of separate box, confining it to a status totally different from all the other signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, then we probably will not get an agreement.”
The United States and Israel have repeatedly threatened that all ‘options’, including the military action, are on the table against Iran to force the Islamic Republic to halt its nuclear energy program, which Washington, Tel Aviv and some of their allies claim includes a military aspect.
Iran dismisses the allegations, arguing that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has the right to use the nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday accused the US and Israel of using legitimate grievances in Syria as an excuse to destroy the country and the resistance to Israel’s control over the Middle East.
Speaking after the death of three senior Syrian politicians in a bomb attack on Wednesday morning, Nasrallah hailed the men and warned that Syria risked destruction if it slid further into civil war.
“(The West and Israel) took advantage of the legitimate demands of the Syrian people…they put Syria into a war, they forbade negotiations,” he said.
“What is required (by the US) in Syria is to divide it, to destroy it, to rip it apart just like Iraq,” he said, referring to the chaos left behind after 10 years of US occupation in Iraq.
Nasrallah said that Israel had been concerned by Syria’s increased military capabilities and had sought to sow discontent in the country.
“They looked at Syria and saw over the past years… first of all a new military strategy began in Syria,” he said, adding that before the uprising the country was “a real military power that (was) capable of presenting a real military threat to Israel.”
Speaking on the sixth anniversary of the 2006 war with Israel, in which the Jewish state suffered defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, Nasrallah said Hezbollah’s victory had increased concern about Syrian strength.
“There is only one army left that is not connected with the Americans. Its the Syrian army. Since the July (2006) war they have been working on destroying this army,” he said.
Nasrallah also confirmed that the “most important” weapons used against Israel in the war were supplied by Syria.
“Syria is a real supporter of the resistance… on the military level as well,” he said. “The most important missiles that landed in occupied Palestine were manufactured or made in Syria.”
Call for calm
Referring to Lebanon Nasrallah called for calm in the country which has seen an upturn in violence in recent months, much of it related to the Syrian crisis.
“I call for calm and patience. You have heard a lot of curses and you will hear a lot of curses in the future,” he said.
“This doesn’t concern only the Sunnis and the Shia… amongst all sects there are some who are trying to rip apart our community.”
The Shia leader also urged all sects in the country to move away from provocative language, calling for a new document dealing with sectarianism.
Under the new rules, he said, “if a Shia person, whether he be a politician or a religious person, if he says anything offensive then we, the Shia, will stand against him. Same goes for the Sunnis, the Druze and the Christians.”
“Can we go ahead and adopt such a document in Lebanon?”
He also backed the current government to continue despite ongoing tensions between rival factions, saying such debate was healthy.
“In the government we have disagreements… but there are positives as it shows it is a coalition government, not a government of Hezbollah,” he said.
A French auto workers’ union member says the country’s largest automaker Peugeot cannot find a replacement for the Iranian market after the company was forced to slash 8,000 jobs over Iran sanctions, Press TV reports.
“We have no sales not for economic reasons but for political reasons. The Iranian market is one that cannot easily be replaced for Peugeot. It’s an unacceptable decision for us,” Jean-Pierre Mercier from a closed Peugeot plant told Press TV.
Peugeot’s announcement on Thursday that PSA Peugeot Citroen would axe 8,000 jobs and shut the first car factory in 20 years has caused a political firestorm.
“If the state can prevent Peugeot from selling cars to Iran, why cannot they prevent these firings? Unfortunately, the unions insufficiently mobilized to tip the scale and stopped the embargo,” Mercier said.
Iran is Peugeot’s largest foreign customer, with half a million in auto sales translating into some several billion Euros each year. However, citing new banking sanctions, Peugeot ended cooperation in February.
Peugeot’s auto sales this year are down nearly a quarter of a million units, almost exactly the amount that Iran would have normally purchased.
According to reports, giving up the Iranian market might have been the price of Peugeot’s recent alliance with Detroit’s General Motors, owned by the US government, which has imposed sanctions on Iran for decades.
This is while Renault, another major French automaker, saw their Iranian sales double last year to 100,000 vehicles and they expect this number to rise.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, the Wall Street Journal’s always available advocate of “let us reason together before we bomb Iran,” is now urging an immediate US surrogate attack on Syria by “unleashing the CIA.” Gerecht, a former CIA officer who served in Istanbul and Paris, once described the Agency disparagingly as a mixture of Monty Python and Big Brother, so it is particularly ironic that now he wants to go about unleashing it. He apparently hopes that the Big Brother component will prevail because Monty Python would no doubt prefer to execute a silly walk.
Gerecht, who currently perches at the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, argues that unless there is a “muscular CIA operation” to arm the rebels with “paralyzing weaponry” and other support that would provide them with a military advantage there will be between 200,000 and 4.5 million deaths in Syria. The numbers appear to be plucked out of the ethosphere and it should also be noted that Gerecht’s knowledge of paralyzing weapons and their deployment is limited as he never served in the US military.
The call for a humanitarian intervention in Syria comes oddly from Gerecht, who has never hesitated to call for the killing of any Iranian civilians who might get in the way of a US/Israeli assault, using inter alia the argument that Iranians have “terrorism in their DNA.” It also ignores the dismal record of various US interventions over the past fifty years and conveniently avoids the subject of blowback. The operation would be eerily reminiscent of the support for insurgents in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, an initiative that drove the Russians out to be sure, but also produced chaos in Afghanistan and created al-Qaeda. The situation in Syria is somewhat similar, at least in terms of potential downside, as Assad’s departure would create a power vacuum and no one really knows who the rebels are and what they represent.
But perhaps Gerecht is not really thinking about what is good for Syria and the Syrian people at all. He is a former employee of Doug Feith’s Pentagon Office of Special Plans that produced the disastrous war against Iraq and is also a close friend and associate of Richard Perle, who, together with Feith, drafted the 1996 proposal “A Clean Break”, which recommended specific policies to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “A Clean Break” endorsed encouraging Arab states hostile to Israel to splinter along tribal and ethnic lines, similar to what has been happening in Iraq. What could be better than replacing a unified and hostile Syria with a chaotic civil war in which Alawites, Sunnis, and Shia are at each others’ throats while the Christian minority frantically looks for a way out? The Washington based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), apparently agrees, noting that the disruption caused by the Arab Spring has actually been good for Israel in strategic terms.
In April 2011 – Turkish President Abdullah Gul in a New York Times Op-Ed, warned both Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama that the “Arab Revolution is aimed at Israel”. However, later events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria proved that Abdullah Gul was totally wrong.
Last week, Gabriel M. Scheinmann, a visiting Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), admitted that the Zionist entity is in fact the winner of the so-called “Arab Spring”.
“The so-called “Arab Spring” has, paradoxically, made Israel stronger as Israel’s enemies have turned on each other. While Arab capitals burn, Jerusalem has calmly and carefully steeled itself against the possible immediate deleterious effects, building fences along its Egyptian and Jordanian borders and accelerating the deployment of its Iron Dome anti-missile system,” wrote Scheinmann. He then added: “Even as it rightly plans for the changes wrought by the “Arab Spring”, Israel should also recognize that as the Middle East convulses, it is more likely to be left alone. As Alawites battle Arab Sunnis and Kurds in Syria, as Kurds target Turks in Turkey, as the Imazighen fight Arabs in Libya, as the Army contends with Islamists in Egypt, and as Sunnis and Christians confront Shiites in Lebanon, people don’t have the time, energy, or resources to fight the Jews in Israel. The more the region tears itself apart, the more Israel floats to the top, unscathed economically, militarily, or diplomatically. While an Islamist ascent is undesirable, the intervening disorder only makes Israel stronger.”
Karen DeYoung, in Gen. Colin Powell’s biography, ‘SOLDIER: The life of Colin Powell’, has quoted Powell twice saying that “the Iraq war was the product of Donald Rumsfeld’s absorption in the “JINSA crowd.” By the way, Dick Cheney was on JINSA’s Board of Advisors before becoming vice president, where he was joined by Ledeen, Feith, Perle, James Woolsey, and John Bolton.
Both AIPAC and JINSA are behind Washington’s regime change in Tehran.” So far the Israel lobby has failed to make its dream come true, as Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, wrote: “The wars of 2001 and 2003 have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran’s advantage.”
Lebanon’s interior minister, retired Maj. Gen. Marwan Charbel in a recent interview with RT has claimed that the Zionist entity is the only country which has benefited from the so-called “Arab Spring”.
The so-called “Arab Spring” is the defacto working of Zionist elements in the United States. The brainchild is within the Israel-Firsters, and by extension the Zionist entity.
Iraq says it wants back all the archeological treasures, stolen by US forces in 2003, but Washington has offered to return only half.
Iraq rejected the offer made by the United States to bring back half of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, previously transferred from Baghdad to the United States during the US-led invasion of the country, insisting that Baghdad had to restore the whole archive, Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah reported on Sunday.
The archive includes centuries-old Torah scrolls and plenty of other documents in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
Iraqi Tourism and Archaeology Minister Liwaa Smaisim reiterated that “it (the Iraqi Jewish Archive) is part of the Iraqi heritage,” the ministry’s media office chief Hakim al-Shammari quoted him as saying.
On June 11, Smaisim said that the US had transferred the archive to Israel in addition to about 1,000 Iraqi antiquities.
The information angered archeologists and officials who accuse Washington of looting Iraq’s cultural heritage, and dissuaded Iraqi authorities from continuing cultural cooperation with the US.
“The ministry recently suspended cooperation with the American universities and their excavation missions in the country,” the Iraqi minister added.
The Palestinian Islamic Resistance, Hamas, condemned on Thursday, the kidnapping, torture and murder of 17 soldiers of Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) by the Zionist collaborators, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) armed thugs. It looks as though Hamas leaders are learning from their mistake of betraying their long-time ally, the Assad regime in Syria.
In April 2012, two Israel-Firster US Senators, Joe Lieberman (a Zionist Jew ) and John McCain (a Zionist Christian) paid a surprise visit to the Turkish-Syrian border to meet with the leaders of the USrael-backed FSA. In a joint statement, both of them urged US and its allies to arm the Syrian rebel militants.
PLA chief of staff Major General Mohammad Tareq al-Khadraa told Syrian TV SANA: “The fact that the armed terrorist groups kidnapped and killed 17 troops from the Palestinian Liberation Army in Syria proves the criminal, dirty role that these groups play and their links to Western and Zionist agendas.”
The PLA is a battalion in the Syrian army, although it is made up of Palestinians living in Syria and who are conscripted to the armed forces. Roughly 470,000 Palestinian refugees live in Syria.
Faruk Logoglu, former Turkish ambassador in Washington, was quoted saying recently: “Turkey’s hosting armed FSA fighters and allowing them to carry out attacks in Syria – is against all international norms; against all neighborly relations. It’s a basic rule that countries must respect the sovereignty of others“.
Some Turkish commentators believe that Washington expects Turk soldiers to die in Syria to topple Bashar al-Assad, while some want Ankara to exploit the downing of the Turkish spying aircraft by Syria overflying Syrian airspace – to isolate al-Assad’s three main supporters; Russia, Iran and Hizbullah.
It would be better if Hamas and the rest of the Muslim leadership come out of its mindset of; “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They must judge their “newly found friend” by its past which has proven, again and again to be poodle of Zion. It wants to destabilize and breakup every Muslim nation-state which the Zionist regime thinks may pose a threat to Israel’s survival in the future.
Gen. Robert Mood, chief of UN monitoring mission in Syria has already confirmed that the arms deliveries from abroad (the US, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) is the main reason the bloodshed is on the rise.
The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.
The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.
Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.
The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing for the middle and working class.
The Ascendancy of the Police State
Central to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of the welfare state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in the Middle East, launched by every President from Bush (father), Clinton, Bush (son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against Muslim countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the massive police state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.
The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism against countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a domestic police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars designed to enhance Israel’s overwhelming power in the Middle East. These American Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured strategic positions within the US police state apparatus in order to terrify and repress activists, especially American Muslims and immigrants critical of the state of Israel.
The events of 9/11/01 served as the detonator for the biggest global military launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police state powers in the history of the United States. The bloody terror of 9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda – transforming the US into a police state while launching a decade-long series of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and, now, Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon. The military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while social programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the ‘Global War on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to maintain or raise living standards for millions and increase access to services for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.
As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy tanked. On the domestic front vital public investment in education, infrastructure, industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying mercenaries (private contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and providing a golden opportunity for military procurement officers and their private contractor-cronies to run up (and pocket) huge billion dollar cost overruns.
As a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military policy, which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial economic interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil contracts negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism. Indeed, the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has become far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy than any combination of Big Oil – and all to the benefit of Israeli regional power.
Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State
From the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed to successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding welfare state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare legislation took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war, under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of welfare-militarism was the powerful industrial-technological foundations of the US war-machine and its dominance over world markets. Subsequently, the declining competitive position of the US in the world-economy and the massive relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs) overseas strained the ‘marriage’ of domestic welfare and militarism to the breaking point. Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands for welfare and unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift from stable well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work. While the global US economic position declined, its global military expansion accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes of the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military alliance.
The demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global welfare systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash welfare to fund their massive global military expansion. There was virtually no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western trade unions into highly authoritarian organizations run by self-perpetuating millionaire ‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union membership from 30% of the work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012 (with over 91% of private sector workers without any representation) meant that American workers have been powerless to organize strikes to protect their jobs, let alone apply political pressure in defense of public programs and welfare.
Militarism was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched his multi-billion dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy wars’ throughout Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US Marines into the tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation of military spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union with a new ‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and then Iraq, the first of many US invasions in the Middle East. President Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way slashing public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and destroying Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing colonial enclaves in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military presence in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.
The constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular anti-Vietnam War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese Communists, were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like Grenada and Panama) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome –public opposition to militarism. This prepared the American public for incremental militarism while chipping away at the welfare system.
If Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill Clinton provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders in the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to the ‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly, Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel’s military view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington. Clinton put in place the first series of repressive police state ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and expanded the national prison system. In sum, Bill Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of the US economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards the Arab world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led directly to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state into the police state .
Exploiting the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes nearly tripled the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab states. The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544 billion in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military expenditures financed major foreign military occupations and colonial administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan, border wars in Pakistan and US Special Forces covert operations (including kidnappings and assassinations) in Yemen, Somalia, Iran and seventy-five other countries world-wide.
Meanwhile financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits ballooned, living standards plunged, international trade deficits reached record levels and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years. Multiple imperial wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars multiplied while the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between domestic welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back of basic social programs for all Americans topped the Presidential and legislative agenda.
Previous ‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the US Post Office, public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly and handicapped and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At the same time the federal government increased its funding of private military and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the scope and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents in support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan and Yemen. They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya, Syria, Iran, and Somalia. By the first decade of the new century it had become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism were in a zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic programs were slashed.
The severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare programs were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally important was the huge increase in the funding for personnel and surveillance technology for the burgeoning police state at home.
The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State
The precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of social services, public education and access to affordable health care for the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental to the process: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate) economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police legal-political-administrative state apparatus engaged in permanent ‘internal warfare’ at home, designed to sustain and complement permanent imperial warfare abroad.
Agencies and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically during the first decade of the new century. The police state penetrated telecommunications systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets; dominated judicial procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’, academic and professional associations. The expanded police state covertly and overtly entered the private lives of tens of millions of Americans.
The loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has been staggering.
As the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state apparatus, christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the budget and agencies providing welfare and public services, health, education and unemployment shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies have been hired and costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with tax-payer money, while hundreds of thousands of teachers and public health and social welfare professionals have lost their jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is composed of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and contracted agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has faced no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred at the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social Security Administration, which currently face large scale ‘retrenchment’.
Among the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to key positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have been the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and Michael Mukasey.
Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (from 2001 – 2003). During that time he was responsible for the arbitrary arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of Muslim and South Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without charge and subject to physical and psychological abuse – without a single resident alien or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast, Chertoff quickly intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff has been the chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ – co-author of the notorious ‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other essential components of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted ‘military tribunals’ and organized the vast internal spy network, which now preys on private US citizens.
Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an enthusiastic defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals, torture and overseas assassinations of individuals suspected of what he called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.
Both Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties to Israel. Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli citizenship as he launched the Administration’s domestic war on US citizens.
A cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state apparatus and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ – code languages for military imperialism – reveals a disproportionate number of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting potential US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in upholding Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights.
Back in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the bogus ‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning technology in airports throughout the US and Europe. He established his own security consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the manufacturers of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael Chertoff every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport body scan.
The fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security complex and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security counterparts in the state of Israel, underscores the imperial state’s ties to the Israeli military establishment.
As the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high tech surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal and state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.
The police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare has a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and its budgetary allocations.
Unlike the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a population of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor force’ is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts, traders and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of ‘contract’ office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the bottom. They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants, cooks, caterers, gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’, health coverage and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own private networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems and messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body guards; it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it certainly does not want national wealth to support high quality public health and educational systems. It has no interest in supporting this mass of public institutions which it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing up’ vast amounts of public wealth for speculation. In other words, the dominant sector of capital has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’; indeed it shares many sentiments with the proponents of the police state and supports shrinking the welfare state. It is concerned about lowering taxes on finance capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds for Wall Street while controlling the impoverished citizenry.
Conclusion
The conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of militarized imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at home, as well as the proliferation of security state agencies and related private industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists in top positions of the police state apparatus.
This convergence of international and domestic structural changes took hold during the 1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the first decade of the 21st century. The downgrading of the vast public services of the welfare state was covered up by a massive government propaganda campaign to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a fabricated widespread domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most hapless of suspects (including oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped by FBI agents). The supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state found themselves on the margins of any national debate. The mass media/regime propaganda campaign demanded and successfully secured massive increases in centralized powers of domestic policing, surveillance, provocations, disappearances and arrests. Throughout the past decade what the welfare state lost in support and funding, the police state gained. The rise of financial capital and the deregulation of the financial system crowded out any public subsidies to promote and sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing sector. This has led to a major break in the links between industry, labor and the welfare state. Huge tax write-offs to big business, combined with the growth in expenditures for a non-productive police state bureaucracy and the series of costly overseas wars, has caused unsustainable budget and trade deficits, which then became the pretext to further savage the welfare state.
Significant political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the rise of the police state over the public welfare state. The success of prominent American Zionists in securing power within key media propaganda mills and obtaining appointments to critical positions in the top echelons of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the imperial state bureaucracy (Treasury and State Department) has put Israel’s colonial interests and its own police-state apparatus at the center of US politics. The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled repression targeting US citizens and residents.
US society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to the expanding and lucrative financial – security complex embedded in the police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing – welfare sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’. The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First doctrine’ of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector, embedded in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the total gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and middle classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to finance bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while paying the bondholders of US debt.
Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to be reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to affordable health care and unemployment support will be slashed. The police state cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies, greater policing, more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while financing the existing welfare state with its vast educational, health and human services and pension benefits.
In sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States within its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for further cuts in social welfare.
The American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase of US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both military spending and welfare support and where US military spending was constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors of manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist influence was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’ — they did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting the agendas for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.
Times have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to militarism and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained ascendancy and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth of the police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of an inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step. The enormous budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US welfare. The police state erodes real public services and undermines social movements. Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding bailouts and subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key decision-making positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state against the interests of the American people. The state of Israel is the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial settlements, clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.
Today the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare established through public programs of the recent past requires that we transform an entire structure of power: true welfare reform requires a revolutionary strategy and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement breaking with the entrenched ‘two party’ regime tied to the financial- imperial- internal security system.
Syria appears to be entering an even more chaotic and dangerous period in its civil war now that Israeli officials are concocting potential threats that must be addressed by Israeli intervention. The latest series of stories derives from U.S. and Israeli intelligence circles and suggests that Syria has a “vast stockpile” (Wall Street Journal) or “hundreds of tons” (Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News) of chemical weapons that could fall into the hands of Al Qaeda, Iran’s ayatollahs or God knows who, should Bashar al-Assad’s regime fall. Naturally, Israel would have to protect its interests and intervene to prevent this from happening:
Hundreds of tonnes of Syria’s stockpile of deadly nerve gas could fall into the hands of terrorist groups if the regime of Bashar al-Assad falls apart amid widening concerns that Israel could go to war to try to stop this ‘Doomsday threat‘.
The fact that this would give Israel a further opportunity to tweak its Iranian enemy and ensure the installation of a pro-Israel puppet regime in Syria would of course be entirely incidental and unintentional.
The Sky News report in particular seems to be pure garbage, claiming to know the locations of all chemical warfare labs in the country plus additional storage sites. The report provides no attribution or source, not even an anonymous one. According to Sky, Al Qaeda is not only active in Syria, but has specifically told its member to get their hands on chemical weapons. Again no quotations or source offered to bolster the claim. To hear Sky tell it, missiles filled with Sarin and other potent nerve gases are sitting on launching pads waiting either for Assad to launch them or for the rebels to get their fingers on the button. And of course the rockets can hit “any location in Israel,” the required hysteria inducing phrase harkening back to Saddam’s SCUDs and other visions of Zionist apocalypse.
Here is former Mossad chief Danny Yatom nicely hitting all the grace notes of hasbara interventionism :
Israel is deeply concerned that Assad may deliberately give Hezbollah chemical weapons – or that they could end up in the hands of other terror groups. In either case, this could lead to a regional war, Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad warned.
“The conventional wisdom should be that we cannot exclude a non-conventional attack on Israel. We would have to pre-empt in order to prevent it. We need to be prepared to launch even military attacks… and military attacks mean maybe a deterioration to war,” he told Sky News.
Though on its face, Yatom is advocating for Israeli intervention, it’s also possible he’s playing the not so subtle game of pressuring the U.S. and its allies to act by threatening to act if they don’t do so first. The operative thinking would be saying to the Americans: if you don’t do something, we will; since you won’t like how we’ll handle this, you better take care of it yourself.”
Israel seems to be laying down its marker and saying it too has an interest in determining the nature of the next Syrian regime. Israel will go to very great lengths to ensure it does not have a proto-Iranian regime on its front doorstep, even to the extent of directly intervening. All of which would be devastating not just for Syria, but for the entire region. Israeli “intervention” into affairs in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza has greatly destabilized those countries and wreaked general mayhem. More of this sort of “help” the Middle East does not need.
Here’s more unfounded hysteria on behalf of interventionism:
There are widespread fears that a Gaddafi-style collapse of Syria into chaos, would mean that chemical weapons would spread around the globe.
Yes, of course widespread fears. So widespread we don’t even have to tell you who specifically is afraid and of what. People, we’ve seen this movie before and it was a stinker the first time. Do we need to see it again to know just how bad the sequel is? The original was called Bush Brings You Iraqi WMD. Remember those mushrooms clouds Condi Rice pictured for your visual delectation? Isn’t it a bit like having déjà vu all over again, to paraphrase Yogi Berra?
No less a Hero of Zion than Yair Naveh, IDF deputy chief of staff, is also getting into the act:
Major general Yair Naveh, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, recently warned a private congregation at a Jerusalem synagogue that Syria’s chemical weapons posed a mortal threat to the Jewish State.
“As for Syria, we all hear the news … (if) Syrians … behave this way to their people it is clear … how they will behave towards us – to our sons – when they get the opportunity against us, with the largest chemical weapons arsenal in the world, with missiles and rockets that cover all of Israel”.
Naveh is also quoted more extensively in this AFP article. If the name sounds familiar, this is the same Yair Naveh who ordered the execution of unarmed Palestinians in contravention of Israeli Supreme Court rulings. News of which was leaked by Anat Kamm to Uri Blau, all of which landed both of them in court (and her in prison), while Naveh earned a promotion for his trouble.
Though the WSJ is also a Murdoch media trophy, it has slightly higher standards and actually notes how problematic this entire issue can be:
Because of the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the Iraq war, U.S. officials are extremely cautious about using reports of Mr. Assad’s chemical stockpiles to support military intervention.
But note that this is precisely what the WSJ, Sky, and similar media reports are doing: ratcheting up pressure for regime change. The war hawk camp in the Obama administration makes no bones about this and beats the drums of war using every available weapon to do so:
“The regime has a plan for ethnic cleansing, and we must come to terms with this,” the first U.S. official said. “There is no diplomatic solution.”
But the statement simply has no basis either in fact or even in fantasy. But “ethnic cleansing” does have such a nice genocidal ring to it. Just the thing to rouse the quiescent world from its moral slumber.
Unnamed “opposition leaders” (and you know how reliable those folks have been lately) further buttress the ethnic cleansing meme:
Opposition leaders maintain there are increasing indications that the Damascus regime is trying to cleanse strategic areas, such as Hama and Homs, of Sunnis in order to set up an ethnic state that could be defended by the Assads’ Allawite [sic] ethnic minority.
No word on who these opposition leaders are or what the “increasing indications” specifically are. Of course not. What do you expect? Facts, evidence. C’mon.
To be clear, I harbor no affection for Assad and his regime. If there was an effective way to end his rule and guarantee the Syrian people would have a genuine representative government–I’d be all for it. But as it is, Syria is likely to get a domestic version of Ahmad Chalabi, rather than a real Syrian nationalist patriot to run its government. At least, that’s what I fear will happen if the west and Israel try to cast their typical spell on the country, bringing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” as Israel did to Lebanon in 2006 (remember Condi’s infamous line?).
Tehran – A new book reveals that a department known as Kidon within the Mossad has dispatched assassins into Iran in order to murder the nuclear scientists, thereby stunting the country’s nuclear energy program.
Authors Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their book Spies against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars state that the notorious spy agency has killed at least four Iranian nuclear scientists, including targeting them with operatives on motorcycles, an assassination technique used by the elite killers at Kidon.
The Kidon killers “excel at accurate shooting at any speed and staying steady to shoot and to place exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark.
Kidon, known to be one of the world’s most efficient killing machines, is technically described as a little Mossad within Mossad.
Tasked with carrying out covert ops across the world, Kidon has embarked on a number of black ops and assassinations in different countries.
Those who kill for Kidon are selected either from within the Mossad spy agency or from among the natives of the countries where they plan to carry out assassinations.
For instance, in case of the nuclear assassinations conducted in Iran by Kidon, they basically hired people with Iranian or dual nationalities. One of the Mossad assassins was Majid Jamali Fashi who confessed he had cooperated with Mossad for financial reasons only.
Majid Jamali Fashi assassinated Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, a professor at Tehran University in January 2011 by blowing an explosive-laden motorbike via a remote-controlled device. He reportedly received training from Mossad inside Israel as well as $120,000 to assassinate the Iranian scientist. According to his confession, Jamali Fashi received forged documents in Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Airport to travel to Tel Aviv.
He confessed, “I woke up early in the morning and as we were trained I went to the warehouse. I had to prepare the box which contained the bomb. I took the motorbike out of the house and reached a location that I had to contact them. I went to the alley [where the professor resided]. It was vacant. No one was there. I brought the bike to the sidewalk and parked it in front of the house. They told me that the mission had been accomplished and that I had to discard my stuff.”
Jamali Fashi was executed under the Iranian judicial system on 15 May, 2012. Parenthetically, Azerbaijan has in recent years become an apparent haven for Mossad spies and assassins.
Another Mossad operative of Iranian nationality has been identified as Ja’far Khoshzaban, alias Javidan, who has been working under the auspices of Azeri security forces and who has been involved in nuclear assassinations. The Iranian intelligence ministry has demanded the extradition of Mossad’s Iranian spy from Azerbaijan. Iran has reportedly obtained documents, suggesting that Azeri officials have aided and abetted Mossad and CIA agents in their targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists, namely Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. As a matter of fact, the CIA is constantly mentioned along with Mossad as the main elements in the nuclear assassinations.
Ahmadi Roshan was assassinated on January 11, 2012 when an unknown motorcyclist attached a magnetic bomb to his car near a college building of Allameh Tabatabaei University in northern Tehran.
Using the same ‘sticking bomb technique’, the Kidon assassins attached bombs to the vehicles of Iranian university professors Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi and detonated the explosives on November 29, 2010. Professor Shahriari was killed immediately, but Dr. Abbasi and his wife only sustained minor injuries.
As a rule, the Kidon kill team is comprised of four highly seasoned men: 1. Tracer 2. Transporter 3. Helper 4. Killer. The tracer spots the target. The transporter guides the assassination team to the target. The helper basically serves as the motorcycle driver who helps the killer and the killer is tasked with shooting the target or attaching magnetic bomb to the car of the victim.
According to the book Spies against Armageddon, the Kidon agents are well-trained in shooting and placing “exquisitely shaped sticky bombs” and consider it their hallmark.
These facts aside, it rather seems sort of naïve to disregard the role of the CIA-backed MKO terrorists in the nuclear assassinations and give all the credit to the Kidon agents. There is solid evidence which evinces the MKO role in the assassination of the Iranian scientists.
American commentator Richard Silverstein believes that the primary source of income for the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) comes from the assassinations the group conducts within the Iranian soil at the behest of the Mossad. He argues that “If you’re a terrorist on behalf of Israel, as MKO is, then you’re kosher as far as (US-based Israeli publicist) Dershowitz is concerned. And your money is golden. Where does the money come from? Possibly from the Iran assassinations the MKO performs on Mossad’s behalf, which undoubtedly pay well. Then there’s the possibility that the USD 400-million Bush allocated for destabilizing Iran in 2007 has found its way either to the MKO or Mossad (or both)”
More to the point, the CIA works in the same satanic league with the Mossad and MKO. Time and again, the officials in Washington have encouraged and even confessed to the killings of the Iranian nuclear scientists.
Former US senator Rick Santorum callously described the assassination of Iranian scientists as “wonderful,” threatening that those who work for Iran’s nuclear program “are not safe.”
“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.”
He also said, “I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.”
Also, former Bush administration ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on Fox News that the killing of an Iranian scientist and sanctions against Iran constitute only “half-measures in the quest to stunt Iran’s nuclear ambitions”.
Former White House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called for covert action, including “taking out their scientists” and cyberwarfare.
Quotations of this nature are legion and all these facts reinforce the idea that Washington has been making clandestine efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear energy program in cahoots with Tel Aviv and their lackey i.e. the MKO.
– Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.
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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Since March 2011, Asad’s regime has steadily escalated its violence against the Syrian people, launching Scud missiles, using weapons banned by the Geneva Convention such as cluster bombs and incendiary munitions, and using aerial bombardment. The regime has detained and tortured tens of thousands of people and committed untold massacres. It has refused political settlements that do not include Asad in power, and it has polarized the society through strategic acts of violence and by sowing seeds of division. The regime has also, since the early days of the uprising, sought to internationalize the crisis in order to place it within geopolitical battles that would only strengthen the regime. Staying true to the logics of an authoritarian regime, Asad could never accept the legitimate demands of the Syrian people for freedom and dignity. Thus, there is no hope for a free, unified, and independent Syria so long as his regime remains in power. … Full text
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday accused the US and Israel of using legitimate grievances in Syria as an excuse to destroy the country and the resistance to Israel’s control over the Middle East.
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