February 18, 2011
The following press release was just issued by the publisher of Omar Barghouti’s upcoming book:
Effectively canceling a planned speaking tour, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem has inexplicably delayed the granting of a visa for Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign, due to tour the United States this April for the release of his new book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.
Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the book “lucid and morally compelling… perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom and peace.” Former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel d’’Escoto Brockmann called it “timely and responsibly written by a man who understands that creative nonviolence is the only way out of the dire situation in Palestine.””
In recent years, numerous foreign scholars and experts have been subject to visa delays and denials that have prohibited them from speaking and teaching in the U.S.—a process the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States. Foreign nationals who have recently been denied visas include Fulbright scholar Marixa Lasso; Iraqi doctor Riyadh Lafta, who disputed the official Iraqi civilian death numbers in the respected British medical journal The Lancet; respected South African scholar and vocal Iraq War critic Dr. Adam Habib, and Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan, who have both recently received visas to speak in the United States after many years of delays and denials.
For the release of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, Barghouti has standing invitations for events in New York City, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Brandeis University, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Barghouti studied, lived and worked in the United States for 11 years before permanently relocating to Jerusalem. He attended Columbia University, receiving both Bachelors and Masters degrees from the school. His U.S. born child, whom he needs a visa to visit, currently attends college in Indiana. Between 2005-2010, Barghouti visited the U.S. extensively without incident, on a 5 year visa, which only recently expired.
Barghouti’s publisher, Anthony Arnove of Haymarket Books, stated that “It’s essential authors be able to travel to promote their books and ideas, and as publishers we believe the free exchange of ideas is vital to a democratic culture. We find it frustrating that Omar’s visa is being delayed and potentially denied for political reasons and hope the Consulate will grant his visa immediately.”
Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.
U.S. Consulate:
Consul General Daniel Rubinstein
U.S. Consulate General, Jerusalem
18 Agron Road, Jerusalem 94190
Tel.: +972.2.622.7230, Fax: +972.2.625.9270
jerusalemvisa@state.gov
UsConGenJerusalem@state.gov
Department of State:
Visa Services
Public Inquiries Division
202-663-1225
usvisa@state.gov
*
On Facebook: Join the group “Let Omar Barghouti Be Heard” and invite your friends
February 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel |
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Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class. Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets. The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.
Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.
The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.
China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.
The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.
With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.
The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”
But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.
The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–”domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.
The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.
So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.
For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.
Their answer is: make the people pay.
And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.
With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.
All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America. With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.
American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.
The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.
These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).
There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.
Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.
These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.
A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.
What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15 per cent of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?
The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.
Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.
The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.
Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
~
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
February 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Hosni Mubarak’s former regime got many things wrong, but Egyptian officials sure knew how to accurately read at least some parts of U.S. foreign policy. A State Department cable written in December 2007 recently released by WikiLeaks describes how the Egyptian government believed that “their discussions with the United States” passed “through a perceived ‘Israeli filter.’” It’s fair to assume that Egypt was referring to how, as Helena Cobban writes in Salon, “pro-Israeli groups and individuals in Congress and the rest of the American political elite” have enormous influence on how Washington conducts foreign policy.
The pro-Israel apparatus’ influence, which has created a powerful “Israeli filter” that affects the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, was fully on display during the Obama administration’s noticeably confused and flat-footed response to the anti-Mubarak popular uprising.
Immediately after the beginning of the uprising, President “Obama began placing calls to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,” according to the New York Times. Netanyahu “feared regional instability” and “urged the United States to stick with Mr. Mubarak.”
The administration itself was split over what do to about Mubarak. The faction of the administration that favored having Omar Suleiman–the former Egyptian VP who was also Israel’s favorite– lead a “transition” included Dennis Ross, a core pillar of the Israel lobby inside the administration. The Los Angeles Times explained:
The other camp includes Dennis Ross, a former Middle East peace negotiator for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Ross, who has strong ties to Israel, is the author of a 2007 book that advised against treating the Muslim Brotherhood as a potential partner in Egypt’s political future, noting the group’s refusal to renounce violence “as a tool of other Islamists.”
Apart from managing the crisis, the White House is consulting with outside interest groups and foreign governments to ensure that its message is getting through.
National Security Council member Daniel Shapiro has sought to reassure pro-Israel groups that the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s political negotiations would not undermine the country’s peace treaty with Israel, according to people who have talked with him. Shapiro, who led outreach to Jewish voters in Obama’s presidential campaign, has tended to the president’s relations with Israel and other regional partners, as well as with Jewish leaders in the U.S.
While the Egyptian protesters forced Mubarak out, as well as ending any possibility that Suleiman would be the new dictator, the U.S. remains deeply concerned with how the revolution will affect Israel and its peace treaty with Egypt. Following Mubarak’s resignation, the White House insisted that “it’s important that the next government of Egypt recognize the accords that have been signed with Israel.”
February 15, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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The ongoing insurrection in Egypt is fantastic, but the barriers standing between the people and any substantive form of democracy are formidable and will need to be overcome in the near future. As one might expect there are plenty of ‘reformers’ waiting amongst the counter-revolutionaries to undermine any forthcoming revolution, ready and willing to proudly take on the mantle of power in the name of the democracy. Leading neoconservative ideologue, Paul Wolfowitz, suggests that Hossam Badrawi, the “recently appointed head of Egypt’s government party may be emerging as an interesting and reasonable transition figure.” Acknowledging that there are many such leaders who stand between the Egyptian people and a successful revolution, this article will focus on the elites in Badrawi’s higher circles in an attempt to draw attention to just a few of the many of the powerful groups and individuals ready and willing to smash/co-opt the peoples movement under the iron heel/velvet slipper of the Oligarchy.[1]
Until recently Hossam Badrawi served on the board of governors of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), but with the en masse resignations of many of the members of the NDP’s top executive committee, Badrawi a founding member of Arab Parliamentarians Against Corruption, became their new Secretary General. To gain an idea of Badrawi’s reformist ambitions for Egypt one might turn to look at some of his colleagues at Egypt’s International Economic Forum, a group whose “ultimate objective” is “fully integrating the Egyptian economy into the world economy on favourable terms.”
Notable elites serving alongside Badrawi on Egypt’s International Economic Forum’s executive committee include Taher Helmy, who is the founder and chair of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, a think-tank has been supported for the past two decades by the imperialist National Endowment for Democracy. In fact, the International Economic Forum’s current chairman, M. Shafik Gabr, also serves as a board member of Helmy’s think tank, and as a member of a World Economic Forum project called the Community of West and Islam Dialogue (C-100). Next up, the treasurer of Egypt’s International Economic Forum, Shahira Magdy Zeid, just so happens to be a board member of the Mubarak Women’s International Peace Movement — which is headed (of course) by the dictators wife, Suzanne. (Likewise, Taher Helmy is a board member of Mubarak’s ‘peace’ movement.)
Egypt’s International Economic Forum boasts of a small but impressive advisory board of just five individuals, the three most significant being: the former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Robert Pelletreau; World Economic Forum president, Klaus Schwab (a devotee of Orwellian politics who counts himself as a ‘peace’ advocate because of his service on the board of governors at the Shimon Peres Center for Peace); and Frank G. Wisner, Jr. , an important imperial power broker who after serving as U.S. Ambassador to Egypt (1986-91), went on to become the U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, where he supervised the aftermath of their recent transition from U.S.-backed dictatorship to ‘democracy.’ That the Philippines’ immensely powerful people-powered movement could be co-opted by the U.S. governments ‘democracy promotion’ apparatus provides a stark example of what the Oligarchy has in store for Egypt; that is, if they are not thwarted by what may turn out to be a truly revolutionary movement for change.[2]
Last but not least, especially considering their advisors’ special imperial pedigree, it makes sense to briefly examine some of the members of the Egypt’s International Economic Forum’s board of trustees. We might start here with the former information secretary of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, Ali Eldin Helal (who resigned earlier this month). In addition to his central role in dispensing state propaganda, Eldin Helal was the first vice president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (1985-7) — a group that received annual support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) between 1994 and 2005. Furthermore it is important to point out that at the same time as he worked for this human rights group he served on the council of the British-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (1983-92).[3]
Other trustees of Egypt’s International Economic Forum include Ahmed Ezz and Rachid Mohamed Rachid, who are both board members of a business orientated nonprofit called Future Generation Foundation that is headed by Mubarak’s son, Gamal; and Mona Makram-Ebeid, who is a founding member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs — an elite think tank that models itself on the imperial brains trust that is the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here it is interesting to point out that a particularly influential member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs is Naguib Sawiris, the eldest son of Orascom-empire patriarch, Onsi Sawiris. Naguib Sawiris presently serves on the international advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange board of directors, and is a recent board member of the ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ nonprofit, Foundation for the Future. In fact, Sawiris was linked to this group in 2007, during the time at which the romantic partner of Paul Wolfowitz, Shaha Riza (a former NED-scholar herself) managed this highly profitable neoconservative enterprise (for a critique of this group, see “The Foundation for the Future: What FOIA Documents Reveal,” pdf).[4]
Finally, another significant member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs is Mamdouh Salim, who is a member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights (see later), and is the vice president of the Forum of Dialogue and Partnership for Development’s board of trustees. This latter group provides a connection to another important group that has received funding from the NED, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies; this is because Ayat M. Abul-Futtouh acted as the program manager for the Forum of Dialogue and Partnership for Development from 2001 until 2003, before she moved on to become the managing director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies. Abul-Futtouh also happens to be a founder and a steering committee member of the Network for Democrats in the Arab World, and in 2006 she was invited to give a talk at Paul Wolfowitz’s current nominal home, the American Enterprise Institute; this talk was later published in 2008 the Institutes’s book Dissent and Reform in the Arab World: Empowering Democrats.
The current chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center’s board of trustees is Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Arab Organization for Human Rights founder, Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Although widely celebrated as a leading Egyptian pro-democracy activist, Ibrahim maintains intimate connections to U.S. neoconservatives and a wide variety of ‘democracy promoting’ organizations connected to the work of the NED (for a critical examination of his background, see “The Violence of Nonviolence”). Recently Ibrahim even joined the advisory board of a neoconservative group called Cyberdissidents.org, whose web site says they are “dedicated to supporting human liberty by promoting the voices of online dissidents.” Founded in 2008 this project is headed by their cofounder, David Keyes, who previously served as coordinator for democracy programs under the right-wing Zionist Natan Sharansky while based at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.
Retaining the theme on ‘democracy’ obsessed neoconservatives, it is significant that Sherif Mansour, the former program manager for the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies, is a current program officer for Middle East and North Africa at the neoconservative outfit, Freedom House. He is the coeditor with Maria Stephan of the book Civilian Resistance in the Middle East (Routledge, 2009).[5] Based at Freedom House, Mansour runs the New Generation program which advocates for political reform in Egypt and North Africa. Needless to say such ‘peace’ activists do not want the popular insurrection in Egypt to escalate to become a successful revolution that dismantles Egypt’s brutal state apparatus and creates a vibrant people-powered democracy. This helps explain why conservative commentators based in the United States are now asking: “Will Venezuela Be the Next Egypt?” The answer to that ridiculous question is a definitive no!
– Michael Barker is an independent researcher who currently resides in the UK. His other articles can be accessed here.
– Notes –
[1] This is a reference to the Jack London’s 1907 book The Iron Heel. In a forthcoming article titled “The Velvet Slipper and the Military-Peace Nonprofit Complex,”I elaborate on what I refer to as the velvet slipper approach to manipulating social movements — an approach currently in vogue among leading neoconservatives.
[2] For further details, see Kim Scipes, KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996); and William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chapter 3.
[3] Incidentally, elite ‘peace’-broker Peter Ackerman joined the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London as a visiting scholar, undertaking research which led him to co-authoring a book with Christopher Kruegler (the president of the controversial NED-funded Albert Einstein Institution) called Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger, 1994). Ackerman is a current board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the founding chair and primary funder of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and former chair of the neoconservative Freedom House.
[4] One might add that Naguib’s brother, Nassef Onsi Sawiris, is a board member of the cement behemoth, Lafarge, where he alongside numerous high-rolling members of the ruling class.
[5] It is noteworthy that Maria Stephan worked on this book while based at Peter Ackerman’s ‘democracy promoting’ International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. (See footnote #3)
February 13, 2011
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Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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In a February 3 Washington Post op-ed piece titled “Why Obama has to get Egypt right,” George Soros wrote that the U.S. president had “much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy.” Notwithstanding the reasonableness of his advice, past experience suggests that the Hungarian-born hedge fund manager has something to gain himself from regime change in Cairo.
In his public memo to the president he helped elect, Soros noted that it was a “hopeful sign” that the Muslim Brotherhood was cooperating with Mohamed ElBaradei, whom he disinterestedly described as “the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president.” He neglected to mention, however, that up to ElBaradei’s January 27 return to crisis-torn Egypt, the former IAEA chief had been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group, which Soros, the thirty-fifth richest person in the world, helped create and finance.
The International Crisis Group describes itself as “an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict,” but self-descriptions can often be misleading. “The ICG is a fascinating case study of the way human rights organizations, governments and international corporations work hand in glove these days,” George Szamuely wrote of the influential think tank’s role in the Balkans. “‘Independent’ figures like Soros identify a ‘crisis’ demanding urgent government attention. Governments act on them and then parcel out the lucrative contracts to Soros and his pals.”
One of Soros’s more notorious “pals” is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former head of Yukos Oil, who by the age of 32 had amassed assets worth more than $30 billion in the rigged post-Soviet “privatisation” of state-owned property. When the Jewish oligarch was arrested for tax evasion, embezzlement and fraud in 2003, Soros denounced the charges as “political persecution,” called for the expulsion of Russia from the G-8, and urged the West to intervene. Khodorkovsky’s partner in crime, Leonid Nevzlin, fled to Israel before he was found guilty in absentia of ordering the murders of several politicians and businesspeople that got in the way of Yukos’s expansion plans. Like Soros and Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin has since attempted to rebrand himself as a “philanthropist.”
Tel Aviv’s concerns about the loss of a friendly dictator next door, however, should be assuaged somewhat by the fact that ElBaradei could collaborate with the considerable number of Israel partisans at ICG. Former U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz, who helped start the group, was once dubbed “the Israel lobby’s chief legislative tactician on Capitol Hill,” and in 1998 led a group of neoconservatives who urged President Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Fellow neocon Kenneth Adelman assured Americans in a 2002 Washington Post op-ed that the Israeli-induced invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” Even more reassuring for nervous Israelis must be the presence of Nahum Barnea, the prominent Israeli columnist who sharply criticised fellow journalists Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Akiva Eldar for their “mission” of support for the Palestinians.
And among ICG’s elite international list of senior advisers—defined as “former Board Members (to the extent consistent with any other office they may be holding at the time) who maintain an association with Crisis Group, and whose advice and support are called on from time to time”—we find Shlomo Ben-Ami, former foreign minister of Israel; Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel; and Shimon Peres, current president of Israel.
On the face of it, it seems hard to reconcile the substantial pro-Israel presence at ICG with Soros’s claims to be a “non-Zionist.” But things are seldom what they seem with Soros. Two years after the founding of J Street, it emerged that he had given substantial donations to the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby. Not everyone is convinced by J Street’s claims to be a genuine alternative to AIPAC either. As one astute commentator put it, J Street is “little more than a spin-off of the existing Israel Lobby to make it more palatable to the liberal Democrats that make up the Obama Administration.”
Moreover, some of Israel’s most fervent advocates on Capitol Hill have received donations from Soros, who has become “one of the largest political-campaign contributors in American history.” In an interview with a conservative Jewish radio talk show, Senator Charles Schumer said he believed that HaShem (Orthodox Jewish term for “God”) gave him his name—which means “guardian”—so that he could fulfill his “very important” role in the U.S. Senate as a “guardian of Israel.”
Essentially filling the same role in the House of Representatives until 2008 was the late Congressman Tom Lantos, whom a former U.S. diplomat referred to as “the Hungarian-American guardian of Israel’s interests in Congress.” As co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Lantos knowingly deceived his co-chairman and the public about the identity of “Nayirah,” whose incubator atrocity story helped justify American intervention in the 1991 Gulf War. Lantos, who is said to have “shared a common drive for promoting democracy and human rights” with his close friend Soros, also championed the fugitive Nevzlin as an innocent victim of anti-Semitism.
“I hope President Obama will expeditiously support the people of Egypt,” Soros wrote in his Post op-ed. “My foundations are prepared to contribute what they can.” If the Egyptian people have as much sense as they have courage and determination, however, they will tell this self-described “committed advocate of democracy and open society” what to do with his “philanthropy”—and his Nobel laureate.
Maidhc Ó Cathail writes extensively on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. He also edits The Passionate Attachment blog.
February 12, 2011
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Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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The Mubarak regime has been a tool with which Israel and the US have pressured Palestinians
Along with the laundry list of domestic grievances expressed by Egyptian protesters calling for an end to the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the popular perception of Egypt’s foreign policy has also been a focal point of the demonstrations.
Signs and chants have called on Mubarak to seek refuge in Tel Aviv, while his hastily appointed vice-president, Omar Suleiman, has been disparaged as a puppet of the US. Egypt’s widely publicised sale of natural gas to Israel at rock bottom prices has featured in many refrains emanating from the crowds.
The widespread view among Egyptians that the regime has served the interests of the West has not been helped by Israel’s call for world leaders to support Mubarak, or the apparent unwillingness by American officials to give the protests their full backing.
Plummeting status
In the shadow of the current cries to topple the Egyptian regime, the Mubarak government has had a tough time keeping its role in international affairs out of public view.
In the area where Egypt’s foreign policy apparatus has served US interests most directly, Israel’s security, the Mubarak regime’s complicity in the failure to establish a Palestinian state has become widely publicised in recent years. Its role in placing the stranglehold on the people of Gaza, in conjunction with Israel, has seen Egypt’s status in the region plummet to a level it has not reached in decades.
The Palestine Papers, the leaked internal documents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that were recently exposed by Al Jazeera, provide further confirmation of Egypt’s role in the impasse between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
While much of the coverage of the Palestine Papers has focused on the unprecedented concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, and how swiftly they were spurned by Israeli and American representatives, Egypt’s role as an instrument for added pressure stands out from the internal records.
As the peace process broke down over the past decade, Egypt was a party to many of the discussions and central to the security arrangements made between the PA and Israel.
Egyptian duplicity
Throughout the documents, Suleiman in particular is singled out as the point person whom Israeli and American officials could count on to execute their agenda of dividing the Palestinian factions or pressing the PA for greater concessions.
Barely a few months after the January 2006 Palestinian elections that resulted in a Hamas victory, PA leaders were already appealing for assistance in fending off their political opponents. At a meeting between leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat and US General Keith Dayton, the latter assured the Palestinians that the American administration is committed to reinforcing the PA’s Presidential Guard to maintain Mahmoud Abbas’ authority in the face of the newly elected Hamas government.
In support of his pledge, Dayton referred to discussions with Suleiman, who committed Egypt, along with Jordan, to providing training and equipment, “even at their own expense”.
Later in the year, as the Palestinian factions were engaged in negotiations over the formation of a unity government, a European diplomat told Erekat that the American position on unifying the Palestinians was “prematurely negative”. Erekat agreed, adding that Suleiman had also been discouraging of those efforts, saying that they would not work.
In early 2007, as the siege on Gaza had crippling consequences on the lives of Palestinians, negotiators complained that Egyptian leaders were duplicitous, speaking publicly in support of allowing goods into Gaza, but in reality, “it remains blocked on the ground …. This is a general problem with the Egyptians”.
An internal report from April 2007 confirms these suspicions. The Agreement on Movement and Access states: “Although there has been political agreement by Omar Suleiman and President Mubarak on allowing exports through, this agreement has never been translated into operational reality.”
Conditions in Gaza only worsened in the months ahead, thanks in large part to the stranglehold imposed by Israel and Egypt. As Hamas assumed sole control of Gaza by preventing a coup attempt by US-backed PA forces, Egypt determined to seal off the border.
In a February 2008 meeting between Ahmed Qurei, a high-ranking PA official, and Tzipi Livni, the then Israeli foreign minister, Qurei relayed the Egyptian position conveyed to him by their leader. “President Mubarak said they’ll close down the borders after Sunday and whoever is caught on Egyptian territories will be considered illegal.”
The situation came to a stalemate in the months leading up to Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza that resulted in the deaths of 1,500 Palestinians, most of them civilians. As tensions were heightened, Erekat lamented to his Israeli counterpart that Suleiman was forced to cancel a meeting in the occupied territories. Amos Gilad, the director of Israeli military intelligence, speculated: “Regarding Omar Suleiman, maybe he delayed because he is afraid we will attack while he is here. It will hurt him. He will look like a collaborator.”
A tool to pressure Palestinians
The image of Egyptian officials as tools to pressure the Palestinians also emerges out of conversations between US and Palestinian officials. In late 2009, George Mitchell, Barack Obama’s envoy to the region, told Erekat that he had spoken with Suleiman and the two agreed that the PA could unilaterally declare new elections without any input from Hamas.
Furthermore, Mitchell and Suleiman agreed that any agreement would have to permanently eradicate any Hamas presence in the West Bank, while at the same time allowing the PA to resume control of Gaza, terms Hamas was sure to reject. But as Egypt was preparing a document on how the PA should proceed, Erekat assured Mitchell that: “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] won’t say no to whatever the Egyptians present to him”.
Even when it appeared that the Egyptians were attempting to display some degree of autonomy, it became more evident in the documents that external pressure was never too far behind. Only a few weeks later, Erekat complained to US negotiators that Egypt’s latest efforts to reconcile the Palestinian factions were straying from the official line. Daniel Rubenstein, the US consul general and chief of mission in Jerusalem, responded: “I can tell you, we did put pressure on the Egyptians. I read the document. It was a disaster.”
As Erekat continued to grumble about the PA’s weakened position and Egypt’s lack of cooperation, General James Jones, the US special envoy for Middle East security, abruptly ended the meeting with his words: “It’s insulting. We’ll take care of this.”
Jones appeared to have lived up to his promise. Only three months later, in January 2010, US negotiator David Hale assured Erekat that in recent talks with Suleiman: “The Egyptians brought ideas similar to our thinking.”
In this instance, the US appeared to put pressure on the PA to accept the latest proposals by giving the impression that the US and its allies in the region were unified in their position. Hale further added of the Egyptians: “They talked with Netanyahu and think he is serious.”
‘Egypt’s number two’
Given the critical role that Suleiman has played in advancing US and Israeli objectives, it was no surprise that Mubarak chose to appoint him as vice-president on January 29, a move rejected by protesters, but reassuring to Egypt’s Western patrons. In the leaked documents, Israeli officials were already referring to Suleiman as “Egypt’s Number Two” at a time when most observers believed that Mubarak was grooming his son to be succeed him.
Among Western policymakers, it seems Suleiman remains a popular choice to replace Mubarak, as the candidate uniquely suited to maintaining Egypt’s current foreign policy, while also addressing domestic grievances expressed by protesters. That remains a distant prospect, given the unlikelihood that the Egyptian opposition would abandon its call to determine the nation’s role in regional affairs. But it also demonstrates that, unlike Tunisia, Egypt is far too critical to US objectives in the Middle East to be left to its own devices.
Whatever the outcome in Egypt, it is clear that the recent revelations will have a dramatic impact on the settlement of the Palestinian question. Already weakened by the scandal of the Palestine Papers, Erekat may now have to do without the support of an Egyptian regime he termed, “our ally, our backbone”.
In his first interview as vice-president, Suleiman decried as “unacceptable” what he called “foreign interference” in Egypt’s current turmoil. Coming from a regime whose ability to endure through the decades is owed largely to foreign interference, the irony of those words will not be lost on the Egyptian people.
Abdullah Al-Arian is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at Georgetown University.
February 6, 2011
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The greatest danger to the Egyptian revolution and the prospects for a free and independent Egypt emanates not from the “baltagiyya” — the mercenaries and thugs the regime sent to beat, stone, stab, shoot and kill protestors in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities last week — but from Washington.
Ever since the Egyptian uprising began on 25 January, the United States government and the Washington establishment that rationalizes its policies have been scared to death of “losing Egypt.” What they fear losing is a regime that has consistently ignored the rights and well-being of its people in order to plunder the country and enrich the few who control it, and that has done America’s bidding, especially supporting Israel in its oppression and wars against the Palestinians and other Arabs.
The Obama Administration quickly dissociated itself from its envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner, after the latter candidly told the BBC on 5 February that he thought President Hosni Mubarak “must stay in office in order to steer” any transition to a post-Mubarak order (“US special envoy: ‘Mubarak must stay for now’,” 5 February 2011).
But one suspects that Wisner was inadvertently speaking in his master’s voice. US President Barack Obama and his national security establishment may be willing to give up Mubarak the person, but they are not willing to give up Mubarak’s regime. It is notable that the US has never supported the Egyptian protestors demand that Mubarak must go now. Nor has the United States suspended its $1.5 billion annual aid package to Egypt, much of which goes to the state security forces that are oppressing protestors and beating up and arresting journalists.
As The New York Times — always a reliable barometer of official thinking — reported, “The United States and leading European nations on Saturday threw their weight behind Egypt’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, backing his attempt to defuse a popular uprising without immediately removing President Hosni Mubarak from power.” Obama administration officials, the newspaper added, “said Mr. Suleiman had promised them an ‘orderly transition’ that would include constitutional reform and outreach to opposition groups” (“West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition,” 5 February 2011).
Moreoever, the Times reported, the United States has already managed to persuade two of its major European clients — the United Kingdom and Germany — to back continuing the existing regime with only a change of figurehead.
Suleiman, long the powerful chief of Egypt’s intelligence services, has served — perhaps even more so than Mubarak — as the guarantor of Egypt’s regional role in maintaining the American- and Israeli-dominated order. As author Jane Mayer has documented, Suleiman played a key role in the US “rendition” program, working closely with the CIA which kidnapped “terror suspects” from around the world and delivered them into Suleiman’s hands for interrogation, and almost certainly torture (“Who is Omar Suleiman?,” The New Yorker, 29 January 2011).
High praise for Suleiman’s work has also come from top Israeli military brass. “I always believed in the abilities of the Egyptian Intelligence service [GIS],” Israeli General Amos Gilad told American, Palestinian Authority and Egyptian officials during a secret April 2007 meeting whose leaked minutes were recently released by Al Jazeera as part of the Palestine Papers. “It keeps order and security among 70 millions — 20 millions in one city [a reference to the population of Egypt, actually closer to 83 million, and to Cairo] — this is a great achievement, for which you deserve a medal. It is the best asset for the Middle East,” Gilad said.
The notion that anyone, let alone US officials, could believe that Suleiman would lead an “orderly transition” to democracy would be laughable if it were not so sinister. Much more likely, the strategy is to try to ride out the protests and wear out and split the opposition, consolidate the regime under Suleiman’s ruthless grip with the backing of the Egyptian army, and then enact cosmetic “reforms” to keep the Egyptian people politically divided and busy while business carries on as usual. Under any Suleiman “transition” political activists, journalists and anyone suspected of being part of the current uprising would be in grave danger.
From the American perspective, the strategy can be likened to what happened in the summer of 2008 when the house-of-cards international financial system started to collapse. Think of the Tunisian regime of deposed dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as the investment bank Lehman Brothers. When a run on the bank began, the United States government refused to provide it with financial guarantees to bail it out, and it quickly went bankrupt.
But when the panic spread and even larger “too big to fail” financial firms including massive insurance company AIG began to see their positions suddenly deteriorate, the United States government stepped in to bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Egyptian regime is the AIG of the region and what we are seeing now is an American attempt to bail it out. If Egypt goes under, the United States fears that the contagion would spread as Arab publics realize that the US-backed despots who rule them can be replaced. The toppling of these regimes whose only promise to their people has been “security” is not the end of the world but the start of renewal.
Of course, no analogy is exact. Whereas, allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse was a calculated decision, the United States did not see the revolution in Tunisia, or the uprising in Egypt coming. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton infamously declared on 25 January, the day the anti-regime protests broke out (“US urges restraint in Egypt, says government stable,” Reuters, 25 January 2011).
Clinton’s cluelessness is reminiscent of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice’s famous words (“didn’t see it coming”) in relation to Hamas’ victory in Palestinian legislative council elections in 2006.
According to The New York Times, Obama himself is unhappy with US intelligence failures in the Arab world (“Obama Faults Spy Agencies’ Performance in Gauging Mideast Unrest, Officials Say,” 4 February 2011). For close watchers of the United States, this obliviousness is no mystery.
As Helena Cobban has observed, the Israel Lobby, “AIPAC and its attack dogs,” have conducted such a thorough “witch-hunt” over the past quarter century “against anyone with real Middle East expertise that the US government now contains no-one at the higher (or even mid-career) levels of policymaking who has any in-depth understanding of the region or of the aspirations of its people” (“Obama’s know-nothings discuss Egypt,” 28 January 2011).
But it is even worse than that. The US “policy” establishment seems only capable of viewing the region through Israeli eyes. This is why for so many officials and commentators the concerns of Israel to maintain a brutal hegemony trump the aspirations of 83 million Egyptians to determine their own future free from the shackles of the regime that has oppressed them for so long.
And different futures are possible. On the minds of many observers is the “Turkish model” of constitutional democracy, economic resurgence and foreign policy independence, all under the rule of a “moderate” Islamist party. Turkey, once closely in the orbit of the United States, started to break out with its refusal to allow the US to use the country’s bases for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In recent years, Turkey has developed a deliberate “360 degree” foreign policy doctrine which includes maintaining relations with Europe and the United States, while restoring close ties with all its neighbors among them Iran and Arab countries, and assuming a greater regional mediating role. Since 2009, Turkey’s once close alliance with Israel has deteriorated sharply, even though ties have not been cut. These shifts, along with its ubiquitous consumer and cultural products have given Turkey enormous regional influence and appeal.
Turkey has its own specific history and is no more perfect than any other country. But the bigger point is that subservience to the United States and Israel is not Egypt’s only option. The worst case scenario from the American viewpoint is to have three major regional powers, Iran, Turkey and Egypt, that are not under Washington’s control.
Of course Turkey is carving out its own path and Egyptians are struggling to go their own way which may be very different. There’s no reason either to believe that Egypt would become “another Iran” as ceaseless Israeli propaganda suggests. But given a free choice, Egypt is not likely to serve the “interests” of the United States and Israel the way the Mubarak regime has.
One example is that Egypt might dispense with US aid and still come out ahead by simply selling its natural gas on international markets rather than to Israel at what is reported to be a deep discount. Another is that a truly independent Egypt would eschew serving as Israel’s proxy in enforcing the criminal siege of Gaza and stoking intra-Palestinian divisions.
By coming to the streets in their millions, by sacrifing the lives of some of their very finest, the Egyptian people have said that they and they alone want to decide their nation’s future. Mubarak as a person is already irrelevant. The confrontation is now between the Egyptian people’s desire for democracy and self-determination on the one hand, and, on the other, US insistence (along with its clients in Egypt and the region) on continuing the old regime. Let us offer whatever solidarity we can from wherever we are to help the Egyptian people to win.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
February 6, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Minimally explored in all the coverage of the momentous Egyptian uprising taking place over the last 10 days are the Israeli connections.
A central and critical reality is that it is US tax money that has propped up Hosni Mubarak’s despotic regime over the past 30 years, and that this money has flowed, from the beginning, largely on behalf of Israel.
Israel is generally a significant factor in events in the Middle East, and to understand ongoing happenings it is important to understand the historic and current Israeli connections.
The violent creation, perpetuation, and expansion of a state based on ethnic expulsion of the majority inhabitants has been central to Middle East dynamics ever since Israel was created by European and American Zionists in 1948 as a self-identified “Jewish State.”
Israeli leaders and outside observers realized from the very beginning that the only way to maintain such a violently imposed, ethnically based nation-state was through military dominance of the region. For Israel to achieve this military dominance required two things:
(1) The creation of a military more powerful than all the others in the region combined. Israel has achieved this through a uniquely massive influx of US tax dollars and technology, occasionally purloined but largely procured through the machinations of its lobby. (Among other things, Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, a fact almost never mentioned by American media or the American government.)
(2) The prevention of any other nation in the region from becoming a threat. Israel has attained this goal through several strategies: divide and conquer techniques, direct invasions and attacks (or pushing the U.S. to carry out attacks), and the propping up of despots who would openly or tacitly agree (sometimes in return for similarly large influxes of American tax money) not to support the rights of those oppressed and ethnically cleansed by Israel.
For the past 30-plus years, Egypt has been among those despotic regimes supported by the U.S. and Israel in return for turning its back on Palestinians.
The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 has occasionally been mentioned in news reports on the current uprising. That treaty was an arrangement in which the Egyptian leader of the time, Anwar Sadat, stopped opposing Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing of close to a million indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians (at least 750,000 in 1947-49 and an additional 200,000 in 1967). This removed the most populous and politically significant country from the Arab front opposing Israel’s illegal actions and led the way for other nations to “normalize” relations with the abnormal situation in Palestine.
In return, Israel gave back to Egypt the Sinai, Egyptian land it had illegally annexed in its 1967 war of aggression. (Egypt had almost managed to re-conquer this land and more in 1973, but the most massive airlift in American history, engineered by Henry Kissinger under pressure from the Israeli lobby, was sent to Israel, preventing this outcome.)
Also in return, the United States agreed to give Egypt more US tax money than any other nation, with the exception of Israel. Since 1979, Egypt has received an annual average of close to $2 billion in economic and political aid /a/ from American taxpayers (most of whom have known nothing about this use of our money). /3/ The arrangement has allowed Mubarak to stay in power for decades despite periodic attempts by Egyptians to free themselves from his ruthless rule.
At the same time, it’s important to note that the U.S., as broker of the peace treaty, gave Israel even greater rewards: guaranteeing Israel’s oil supplies for the next fifteen years; assuring Israel of American support in the event of violations; committing to be ‘responsive’ to Israel’s military and economic requirements; and promising a variety of major transfers of technology and aid, including $3 billion to relocate two Israeli air bases out of the Sinai, where, as journalist Donald Neff noted, they had no right to be in the first place.
In fact, the American financial arrangement with Israel, which had begun years before Egypt’s, has been far cozier than Egypt’s: Israel gets considerably more money from the US, even though its population is one-tenth of Egypt’s; there is little U.S. oversight of how it uses that money; and, unlike Egypt, which receives its allotment monthly, Israel receives its handout in a lump sum at the very beginning of the fiscal year (which means that Americans then pay interest for the rest of the year on money that the government has already given away, while Israel makes interest on it).
In the cases of both Israel and Egypt, the Israel lobby’s role in procuring this U.S. tax money has been central. While this fact is largely missing from US media reports and many liberal/left analyses, it is frequently referred to in Israeli and Jewish media. For example, a current Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report states: “The question of whether to stake a claim in the protests against 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy is a key one for the pro-Israel lobby and pro-Israel lawmakers because of the role they have played in making Egypt one of the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. aid.”
As conditions change in Egypt, U.S. lawmakers known for their allegiance to Israel are evaluating what to do about U.S aid. Many such Israel partisans have particularly powerful and relevant positions, such as Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the foreign operations subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee; Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Middle East subcommittee; Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Foreign Affairs committee and the author of last year’s sweeping Iran sanctions law; and Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev), member of the subcommittee on the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. A person close to the Israel lobby notes: “No matter what happens, clearly one of the top criteria Congress is likely to use is Egypt’s approach to its peace treaty obligations with Israel.”
Through the years a variety of Egyptian groups have opposed the Egyptian regime, some using violence (while the regime has used greater violence against them). This is virtually always reported without context and in extremely negative terms, without noting that it is routine for resistance movements to use violence; the American Revolutionary War was not known for its nonviolence. Yet, Israeli-centric U.S. media rarely discuss this.
In recent years, Mubarak has collaborated with Israel in closing off the Gaza Strip, largely imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, resulting in a humanitarian disaster in which children suffer malnutrition, stunting, and trauma, and 300 Gazan patients have died through lack of essential medical supplies or being denied exit passes for medical care. Egyptian citizens, furious at their nation’s complicity in this cruelty, have been powerless to stop it.
Israel has long worked to create enmity between Egypt and the U.S. In the early 1950s the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, hatched a plan to firebomb areas in Egypt where Americans gathered — and to make these attacks appear to be the work of Muslim extremists. The plot was discovered and caused a scandal in Israel known as the “Lavon Affair,” but few Americans have ever heard of it. Some analysts suspect that other such plots succeeded and that the little-known Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy ship USS Liberty may have been a similar false-flag operation. (Certainly, there is little doubt that the U.S. would have attacked Egypt if Liberty crewmembers had not succeeded, against all odds, in getting a distress signal out before Israel succeeded in sinking the ship with all men aboard.)
Another little-discussed result of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty was the creation of an international peacekeeping force in the Sinai, known as the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), charged with mediating between Egypt and Israel. It is telling that this force was not placed on Israeli land but instead occupies Egyptian territory.
Its current head is Ambassador David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served extensively in the Middle East, was Senior Advisor on Iraq for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and held a number of other high positions in the state department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
In 2005 Satterfield was named as having provided classified information to an official of the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. According to documents, Satterfield had discussed secret national security matters in at least two meetings with AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen, who was subsequently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department (later quashed over the objections of the FBI.)
In 2004 Satterfield presided at a State Department conference on the 1967 war. A Washington Report on Middle East Affairs report on this conference stated that Satterfield repeatedly referred to Palestinian terrorism while failing to mention Israel’s brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians. The article reports “Satterfield’s remarks dampened audience expectations for an even-handed U.S. approach to peacemaking.”
Among those in the audience at the conference’s panel on the USS Liberty, though not on the panel itself were USS Liberty survivors, trying to tell their story. State Department moderator Marc Susser quickly cut them off, and his treatment of the survivors reportedly “bordered on abusive.”
Now, David Satterfield is heading up international forces occupying Egyptian land charged with being a “neutral” mediator between Egypt and Israel.
It is unknown whether his conversations with AIPAC continue.
Alison Weir is President of the Council for the National Interest and Executive Director of If Americans Knew. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org
Partial sources:
1. A good short history available online is “The Origin of the Palestine Israel Conflict”
http://ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html
2. 3. FALLEN PILLARS by Donald Neff, cited online in
http://ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html
Richard Curtiss book review of “Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts About The U.S.-Israeli Relationship,” by Paul Findley: http://wrmea.com/component/content/article/148-1993-june/7184-deliberate-deceptions-facing-the-facts-about-the-us-israeli-relationship.html
3. Congressional Research Service:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:9S9P-1-foMsJ:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL32260.pdf+us+aid+to+egypt&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiYZf6s-uON3OR_ZGYkiPlJ4TIlyDdDsnYQXKYX1lGFMEAhzMGmVjJ_QerJrhSNE_EQVq5pYvmK70KlZgomEJ1lslnh3GvatY5uT_F1IeHxtPTwO4kGv2lLjbE16HAKGwTCUMNO&sig=AHIEtbSGseSWSsnE90jzlA3VbMCs9vjl9w
http://www.fas.org/search/index.html?cx=011272476961064978591%3Alx1cammk60s&cof=FORID%3A11&q=us+aid+to+egypt&siteurl=www.fas.org%2Fasmp%2Fprofiles%2Fegypt.htm#1506
4. “Sadat’s Jerusalem Trip Begins Difficult Path of Egyptian-Israeli Peace
Print E-mail,” Donald Neff, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 83-85:
http://wrmea.com/component/content/article/197-1998-october-november/8246-sadats-jerusalem-trip-begins-difficult-path-of-egyptian-israeli-peace.html
http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000466
http://www.ibiblio.org/sullivan/docs/Israel-EgyptPeaceTreaty.html
5. http://ifamericansknew.org/stats/usaid.html
6. “Dilemma of pro-Israel groups: To talk Egypt or not,” Ron Kampeas, JTA, February 1, 2011:
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/02/01/2742799/pro-israel-groups-dilemma-to-talk-egypt-or-not
7. “Health Ministry in Gaza Warns of Medicine Shortage,” IMEMC, Feb 3, 2011
http://www.imemc.org/article/60561
8. “Israel Honors Egyptian Spies 50 Years After Fiasco,” Reuters. Haaretz, March 30, 2005:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/honor.html
“The Lavon Affair: When Israel Firebombed U.S. Installations,” Richard H. Curtiss,
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1992, pages 41-42, 86:
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0792/92070041.html
9. http://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html
10. “U.S. Diplomat Is Named in Secrets Case,” David Johnston and James Risen, New York Times, August 18, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/politics/18inquire.html
“Lawyers credit Obama team for dismissing AIPAC case,” Ron Kampeas, JTA, May 1, 2009:
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/05/01/1004853/lawyers-credit-obama-team-for-dismissing-aipac-case
http://irmep.org/
11. Those Not Invited to Speak Steal the Show at State Department Liberty Discussion,” Delinda C. Hanley, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004:
http://www.ussliberty.org/washrj04.htm
February 4, 2011
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Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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A protesting Egyptian man against the government of Hosni Mubarak peeks between burned vehicles in the rubble of Tahrir Square after clashes overnight on February 3, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt.
Hundreds of pro-government snipers have been deployed on top of buildings in central Cairo amid growing clashes between plain clothes police and anti-government protesters.
Clashes and pitched battles between plain clothes police and anti-government protesters have intensified in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime is stepping up its crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, the focal point of the anti-Mubarak protests.
A hypermarket serving the Sheikh Zayed suburb of Cairo was also torched on Thursday, witnesses said.
Protesters attacked with sticks
According to a Press TV correspondent, most of the protesters have been killed as a result of stone-throwing and attacks with metal rods and sticks.
Egypt’s Health Minister Ahmed Samih Farid has admitted that several people have died in the fighting over the past 24 hours.
Reports say at least seven protesters have been killed and over 1,500 injured in clashes, which began on Wednesday.
According to the United Nations, at least 300 people have so far been killed and thousands more injured during nationwide protests in troubled Egypt.
More people march towards Tahrir
Thousands more are marching towards Tahrir Square, where anti-Mubarak protesters are currently camped, our correspondent said.
Main opposition figures have called for another mass rally on Friday, which they consider as President Hosni Mubarak’s day of departure.
A Press TV’s correspondent says pro-Mubarak vigilantes have broken into the journalists’ center in the capital Cairo.
Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq has apologized for the fatal clashes between plain clothes police forces and anti-government demonstrators, pledging that violence will not be repeated in upcoming days.
February 3, 2011
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Subjugation - Torture, Wars for Israel |
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There is debate about the precise role of Egypt in US Middle East “strategy”, if the word can be used. Stanford historian Joel Beinin, in an interview by Justin Elliott in Salon, claimed that the Arab states, including Egypt, shared equally the US-Israeli animus against Iran.
“And most recently, Mubarak, along with King Abdullah II of Jordan and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, has been gung-ho for attacking Iran. We know that from the WikiLeaks documents…”
But Historian Gareth Porter and journalist Jim Lobe argue that Saudi Arabia does not share Israel’s enthusiasm for military action. Commenting on the NYT coverage of the Wikileaks cables, they wrote, “Actual Wiki Cables Belie NYT’s Version of Saudi Gulf States’ Stance on Iran”:
“In fact, the cables show that most Gulf Arab regimes – including Saudi Arabia itself – have been seriously concerned about the consequences of a strike against Iran for their own security, in sharp contrast to Israel’s open advocacy of such a strike. They also show the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait expressing that concern with greater urgency in the past two years than previously”
They cite veteran diplomat Chas Freeman and journalist Thomas Lipman as saying that even an approval of military action would fit the pattern of Arab states telling the US what it wants to hear. This applies a fortiori to Egypt, which has no Shia population and is much farther from Iran.
Sasan Fayazmanesh, US-Iranian economist and scholar of the US-Iran relationship, has also skewered the MSM for misconstruing the Wikileaks cables on Iran, and shown the degree to which the US anti-Iran animus is driven by and for Israel. Fayazmanesh writes:
According to this policy, the US would exert pressure on its client states in the Persian Gulf so that they would distance themselves from Iran and get behind Israel. Before becoming president, Barak Obama stated this policy in a speech delivered at the 2007 AIPAC conference (the speech was actually written by Dennis Ross, James B. Steinberg, who is currently the Deputy Secretary of State, and former American Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer). Obama stated: We have “to persuade other nations, such as Saudi Arabia, to recognize common interests with Israel in dealing with Iran.” Once Obama became president, this policy was enforced vigorously.
Gareth Porter feels that “The main function of the U.S. client state relationship with Egypt was to allow Israel to avoid coming to terms with Palestinian demands.” He argues that “the present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a…historical accommodation… with the ‘resistance bloc’ in the Middle East.”, that is, “Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.”
The sine qua non of that accommodation is a just settlement of the Israel-Palestine issue, which is simply inconceivable in US politics. While the Israel lobby and the costs to the US of the “special relationship” are more visible than ever, there is no indication that its grip on power is slipping. The US has advised Mubarak not to stand for re-election in September. This would keep the regime in place and give the US months to manipulate the outcome. It is a colossal insult to the Egyptian people, and does not remotely reflect the interest of the US, but only of Israel and its US supporters.
Overcoming the lobby will take a struggle in US politics like the Civil War. If it doesn’t materialize, instead of a “historic accommodation with the ‘resistance bloc'” we may see even more historic violence, in a collision of the resistance, now including the
people of Egypt, with the immovable object of US-Israel relations.
February 2, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel |
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Syria in the cross-hairs
The Obama regime has been using its Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations (GONGOs) close to the CIA like Freedom House and the NED to remove or threaten the ugly puppet dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. Further “color revolutions” in Yemen, Algeria and Jordan are in the making. The aim of this US policy is clearly to replace these dictators with less repugnant US-friendly puppet ‘democracies’. Now Washington is trying to use the momentum of this process to stage a color regime change in Syria.
Internet activists and organizers in academia have been financed with over half a billion dollars through the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) program. Mass media and well known hasbara institutions are directing this campaign. On Monday CNN, which is close to the US regime, together with the Zionist propaganda organization MEMRI, called for an uprising in Syria. The Wall Street Journal, which is also close to the US regime, continued this campaign against Syria. And later, the U.S. news agency UPI campaigned for a dubious “Syrian revolution” Facebook group advocating for protests in Syria on Friday.
There is a vast difference between the revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt and the protests planned in Syria. While the abolition of US-backed dictators like Ben Ali and Mubarak could be viewed as progress in the fight for justice, a color revolution in Syria would be a big step backward. Though less democratic than Iran – where a Mossad backed color revolution attempt failed in 2009 – Syria is also a key pillar of resistance against the hegemony of the Zionist dominated US policy of aggression in the middle east.
Like many other countries in the middle east, Syria has had a lot of problems in recent decades. But these problems in Syria were primarily caused by it’s strong stance for the resistance against Zionism, by not obeying the orders of Tel-Aviv.
Precisely because of his very effective support for the resistance, Syrian president Bashir al-Assad is one of the most popular politicians among the Arab people. Due to the achievements of the steadfast resistance of Syria – and it’s ally Iran – the US is now forced to dismantle it’s ugliest puppet dictatorships in the middle east and let them be replaced by regimes closer to the people.
Should the Zionist-dominated US propaganda succeed in creating a short-term wave of public anger that ousts Assad, the US would not only be able to control Syria, but also have a free hand in installing pro-US puppet regimes in the other newly ‘color’ revolutionized Arab countries. These pseudo democratic puppet regimes modeled after the German pseudo democracy could more easily be forced to submit to the kleptomaniac Zionist terror regime.
For these reasons, it is important for all those longing for real change in the middle east, and finally the world, to support Syria now and defend it against US sponsored soft war attempts. The only way to reach lasting and just peace in the middle east is to resist, until the Zionist apartheid state of Israel ends all occupation and is transformed into a state of all it’s citizens.
Update, March 29, 2011:
Elliot Abrams’ Plan For Syria
February 2, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt is an obvious moment for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy.
But those moments have been coming with increasing regularity in recent years, and the U.S. national security bureaucracy has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to giving it up. The troubled history of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of some powerful political forces at work in this society, as former NSC official Gary Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis.
Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S. administration has operated on the assumption that the United States, with Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position in the Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of unrelenting pressure on all those “rogue” regimes and parties in the region which have resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme expression of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United States and Israel could establish a pro-Western regime in Iraq as the base from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from any of their remaining adversaries in the region.
But since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare in one country after another.
- The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq merely empowered Shi’a forces to form a regime whose geostrategic interests are far closer to Iran than to the United States.
- The U.S.-encouraged Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 only strengthened the position of Hezbollah as the largest, most popular and most disciplined political-military force in the country, leading ultimately the Hezbollah-backed government now being formed.
- Israeli and U.S. threats to attack Iran, Hezbollah and Syria since 2006 brought an even more massive influx of rockets and missiles into Lebanon and Syria which now appears to deter Israeli aggressiveness toward its adversaries for the first time.
- U.S.-Israeli efforts to create a client Palestinian entity and crush Hamas through the siege of Gaza has backfired, strengthening the Hamas claim to be the only viable Palestinian entity.
- The U.S. insistence on demonstrating the effectiveness of its military power in Afghanistan has only revealed the inability of the U.S. military to master the Afghan insurgency.
And now the Mubarak regime is in its final days. As one talking head after another has pointed out in recent days, it has been the linchpin of the U.S. strategy. The main function of the U.S. client state relationship with Egypt was to allow Israel to avoid coming to terms with Palestinian demands.
The costs of the illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East have been incalculable. By continuing to support Israeli extremist refusal to seek a peaceful settlement, trying to prop up Arab authoritarian regimes that are friendly with Israel and seeking to project military power in the region through both airbases in the Gulf States and a semi-permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy has assiduously built up long-term antagonism toward the United States and pushed many throughout the Islamic world to sympathize with Al Qaeda-style jihadism. It has also fed Sunni-Shi’a tensions in the region and created a crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.
Although this is clearly the time to scrap that Middle East strategy, the nature of U.S. national security policy-making poses formidable obstacles to such an adjustment Bureaucrats and bureaucracies always want to hold on to policies and programs that have given them power and prestige, even if those policies and programs have been costly failures. Above all, in fact, they want to avoid having to admit the failure and the costs involved. So they go on defending and pursuing strategies long after the costs and failure have become clear.
An historical parallel to the present strategy in the Middle East is the Cold War strategy in East Asia, including the policy of surrounding, isolating and pressuring the Communist Chinese regime. As documented in my own history of the U.S. path to war in Vietnam, Perils of Dominance, the national security bureaucracy was so committed to that strategy that it resisted any alternative to war in South Vietnam in 1964-65, because it believed the loss of South Vietnam would mean the end of Cold War strategy, with its military alliances, client regimes and network of military bases surrounding China. It was only during the Nixon administration that the White House wrested control of national security policy from the bureaucracy sufficiently to scrap that Cold War strategy in East Asia and reach an historic accommodation with China.
The present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a similar political decision to reach another historical accommodation – this time with the “resistance bloc” in the Middle East. Despite the demonization of Iran and the rest of the “resistance bloc”, their interests on the primary issue of al Qaeda-like global terrorism have long been more aligned with the objective security interests of the United States than those of some regimes with which the United States has been allied (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).
Scrapping the failed strategy in favor of an historic accommodation in the region would:
- reduce the Sunni-Shi’a geopolitical tensions in the region by supporting a new Iran-Egypt relationship;
- force Israel to reconsider its refusal to enter into real negotiations on a Palestinian settlement;
- reduce the level of antagonism toward the United States in the Islamic world and
- create a new opportunity for agreement between the United States and Iran that could resolve the nuclear issue.
It will be far more difficult, however, for the United States to make this strategic adjustment than it was for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to secretly set in motion their accommodation with China. Unconditional support for Israel, the search for client states and determination to project military power into the Middle East, which are central to the failed strategy, have long reflected the interests of the two most powerful domestic U.S. political power blocs bearing on national security policy: the pro-Israel bloc and the militarist bloc. Whereas Nixon and Kissinger were not immobilized by fealty to any such power bloc, both the pro-Israel and militarist power blocs now dominate both parties in the White House as well as in Congress.
One looks in vain for a political force in this country that is free to press for fundamental change in Middle East strategy. And without a push for such a change from outside, we face the distinct possibility of a national security bureaucracy and White House continuing to deny the strategy’s utter failure and disastrous consequences.
January 31, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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There is a vast difference between the revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt and the protests planned in Syria. While the abolition of US-backed dictators like Ben Ali and Mubarak could be viewed as progress in the fight for justice, a color revolution in Syria would be a big step backward. Though less democratic than Iran – where a Mossad backed color revolution attempt failed in 2009 – Syria is also a key pillar of resistance against the hegemony of the Zionist dominated US policy of aggression in the middle east.
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