Israeli request for more arms from US raises fears of regional violence
By Catrina Stewart in Jerusalem | The Independent | 9 June 2010
Israel has approached the United States for more bombs and asked Washington to increase an emergency arms cache stowed on Israeli soil by 50 per cent, according to the leading newspaper Ha’aretz.
The approach, made by Defence Minister Ehud Barak during a recent visit to Washington, reflects the heightened tensions in recent months between the Jewish state and its neighbours that have given rise to widespread fears within Israel of an imminent regional conflict.
News of the request emerged as members of the international community stepped up the pressure yesterday for a thorough and impartial probe of last week’s Israeli raid of a Turkish vessel bound for Gaza with humanitarian aid that ended in a bloodbath.
The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, who was attending a regional security summit in Turkey, added to the criticism of Israel and said he would raise the question of who would conduct an inquiry with the United Nations.
Israel has agreed to carry out an investigation, which could be overseen by two international observers, but would be limited to a theoretical debate of the merits of the raid and the blockade. The commandos who led the raid would not be questioned.
Israel has defended its land and sea blockade of Gaza, arguing that it prevents the flow of weapons to Hamas, the Islamist group that governs the strip. Critics say it constitutes collective punishment that has led to a humanitarian crisis.
Fearing that its enemies are rearming along its borders, Jerusalem has asked Washington to increase the emergency stores by $400m (£278m) to $1.2bn and is also seeking to buy more Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs from the US, the liberal newspaper Ha’aretz reported, citing unnamed sources.
The JDAM is a sophisticated satellite-guided bomb used extensively by Israel in the Lebanon War in 2006 and in its Gaza offensive at the end of 2008.
The Israeli Ministry of Defence refused to comment on the report and the US State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Washington agreed in December to double stores to $800m worth of arms, including rockets, bombs and armoured vehicles, allowing the Israeli forces to use the equipment with US approval in the case of an emergency.
Israel has already done so in the past, falling back on the US munitions during the Lebanon War in which at least 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were killed… Full article
The Outrage at Helen Thomas
While Israel Kills and Maims …
By ALISON WEIR | June 9, 2010
Whenever Israel commits yet another atrocity, its defenders are quick to redirect public attention away from the grisly crime scene.
Currently, there are headlines about allegedly anti-Semitic comments made by senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Pundits across the land evince outrage at her off-the-cuff 25-second statement made to a man who appears to be holding a camera right in her face.
Thomas issued a public apology for her words, but this was insufficient to assuage the wounded feelings of powerful antagonists, and she has now retired from a long and distinguished career.
Before we examine her comments and evaluate their possible validity, let’s look at other recent events having to do with Israel.
On May 31st Israeli commandos killed at least nine unarmed volunteers attempting to take humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
According to eyewitness reports and forensic evidence, many of these aid volunteers were shot at close range, including a 19-year-old American citizen killed by four bullets to the head and one to the chest fired from 18 inches away.
Israel immediately imprisoned eyewitnesses and hundreds of other aid participants, confiscated their cameras, laptops, and other possessions, and prevented them from speaking to the press for days. Among the incarcerated were decorated U.S. veterans and an 80-year-old former ambassador who had been deputy director of Reagan’s Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism.
When they finally emerged and were able to tell their stories, many described horrific scenes of Israeli commandos shooting people in the head, of those tending the injured being shot in the stomach, of people bleeding to death while flotilla participants waved white flags and pled for help.
They also described being beaten brutally by Israeli forces, again and again – including those on ships that, in the U.S. media’s judgment, experienced “no violence.” A 64-year-old piano tuner from California, Paul Larudee, described hundreds of Israeli commandos boarding his ship. When he refused to cooperate with them, soldiers then beat him numerous times both on board the ship and after he was imprisoned on land.
Eventually he was taken by ambulance to an Israeli hospital. He wasn’t treated, however, and Larudee believes he was taken there because Israel didn’t want media to see his black eye, pronated joints, bruised jaw and body contusions.
Marine veteran Ken O’Keefe described similar beatings while in Israeli custody. In his case, the public was able to see his bloodied, battered face in video clips and still images – but only on the Internet, since American mainstream media failed to report on his press conference or to publish the many still photos of his injuries.
Other gruesome photos available to the American public only on the Internet are of Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old American student whose eye and eye socket were recently shattered by Israeli forces. She has since had her eyeball removed, three metal plates inserted in her face, and her jaw wired shut.
Henochowicz was not on the flotilla; she was taking part in a nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli assault when an Israeli soldier shot a high-velocity teargas canister into her face.
A Swedish citizen standing with Henochowicz said, “They clearly saw us. They clearly saw that we were internationals and it really looked as though they were trying to hit us. They fired many canisters at us in rapid succession. One landed on either side of Emily, then the third one hit her in the face.”
Henochowicz is not the first to have been shot by such a canister.
Thirty-year-old Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahmeh died when an Israeli soldier shot one at him at close range while Abu Rahmeh participated in a demonstration against Israeli confiscation of Palestinian farmland. A video of this is also available on You Tube; U.S. networks have also chosen not to broadcast this.
Californian Tristan Anderson was shot in the head by a similar canister while he was taking photographs following another demonstration. Part of Anderson’s brain was removed and he was in a “minimally responsive state” for 6-7 months.
He is now in a wheelchair, has almost no movement in his left arm and leg, is blind in one eye, and his mental functioning is significantly reduced. Photos of the shooting are also available on the Internet.
Since at least 2006 Israeli forces have closed off Gaza to the outside world, essentially imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, and denying them foodstuffs, medicines, and building materials, as documented by such agencies as Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Christian Aid, which said that Israel was using food and medicine as weapons.
One of the multitudinous victims of this illegal siege is five-year-old Taysir Al Burai, who suffers from an acute neurological disorder and requires round-the-clock care. According to the UK Guardian, he could be cured if Israel would allow him to leave Gaza, but to date his parents’ repeated requests have been denied.
Another victim is 7-month-old Mohammad Khader, whose swelling in the brain required specialized treatment unavailable in Gazan hospitals depleted by the Israeli siege. His distraught parents’ applications asking Israel to allow them to travel abroad were similarly denied. Their tiny son died a few days ago.
Such stories go on and on.
Thomas’ “outrageous” statement
Yet, the rage we see in the U.S. media is directed against none of this. People shot in the head, eyes and brain parts destroyed, the elderly beaten, small children and infants caused to suffer and die, parents to grieve – none of this has caused a hint of anger. In fact, most of it has been considered of too little importance even to report.
Instead, media reports are filled with outrage at “anti-Israel” words spoken by 89-year-old Helen Thomas.
In Thomas’s lifetime Israel has ethnically cleansed over a million people, replaced them with colonists from around the world, committed dozens of massacres, tortured thousands of people, killed and maimed untold numbers of children, mangled limbs, and committed outrages on women, old people, the weak and the infirm.
It has assassinated people throughout the world, invaded numerous countries, spied on the U.S., killed and injured 200 American servicemen (the anniversary is this week), and tortured and imprisoned Americans. All while receiving more American money than any other country on earth.
For years, long before her recent words, Thomas has been the target of Israel’s vicious American volunteers, the Zionist blogosphere abounding with nasty slurs on her looks and her Lebanese ancestry, this latter also consistently emphasized by the media, despite her Kentucky birth and upbringing.
One of the reasons for the ferocious animosity toward her is the fact that Thomas is one of the very few mainstream reporters to challenge the neocon engendered lies that led the U.S. into wars that have caused massive death, destruction and tragedy and to continue to expose ongoing policies of violence and cruelty.
As the same groups and individuals who pushed the US into attacking Iraq have in recent years been escalating their efforts to push the U.S. to now similarly decimate Iranians under the pretext that Iran might be developing nuclear weapons, Thomas’s questioning attempted to elicit from Obama the fact that Israel already possesses nuclear weapons. While the rest of the press corps has conspired in the cover-up of this fact and others, Thomas worked to expose them.
Not surprisingly, the many people complicit in these manipulations, such as former Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer, have led the charge against her.
It is useful to examine the video and context of Thomas’s allegedly “anti-Semitic” comment.
A man, apparently holding a camera right in her face, asks for her comments about Israel. She says, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land…” He interrupts her and asks where they should go. She responds, “They should go home. To Germany, Poland, America, and everywhere else.”
While Thomas has since apologized for her hasty words and many Israelis have the right to continue living where they are, the reality is that Israeli settlers did, indeed, come from elsewhere; they are, in fact, illegally occupying Palestinian land (a fact acknowledged even by the U.S. State Department); and international law does require that they leave.
Many commentators evince particular anger at Thomas’s inclusion of Germany and Poland as places to which Israeli colonists should return, suggesting that Hitler is still in control and waiting to pounce.
The happy fact is, however, that World War II and the Nazi holocaust ended well over half a century ago. In Poland today there is a vibrant Jewish revival with a 10-foot tall Menorah being lit in the center of Warsaw during Hanukah, and Germany has become, according to the New York Times, “a country where Jews want to live.” In fact, in recent years more Jews have chosen to immigrate to Germany than to Israel.
Thomas’s call for colonists to return to America (this destination was left out of many articles) is far from outrageous given that a great many West Bank settlers are from the U.S.
Overall, reporting on the incident has largely departed from the standard journalistic practice of quoting people from both sides of an issue. Quotes from Thomas supporters are missing, even though the You Tube page featuring the infamous video contains a large number of comments supporting her. In contrast, quotes from Thomas’s detractors, almost all of them Zionists, are ubiquitous, but generally fail to divulge the speakers’ frequent conflicts of interest.
For example, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz quotes Jeffrey Goldberg without mentioning that Goldberg is an Israeli citizen who served as a prison guard at an Israeli prison that held hundreds of Palestinians without charge, some killed in cold blood by the prison commander.
Mainstream media organizations do not seem to have investigated reports that the man who videotaped Thomas, Rabbi David Nesenoff, also made an offensive video featuring himself and another man impersonating a buffoonish Catholic priest and Mexican immigrant.
Similarly, news reports that a high school had disinvited Thomas as a graduation speaker almost never inform readers that many of the school’s parents and students wished Thomas to remain, even though this unreferenced group may represent a majority of the school. Members of this group have created a Facebook page, “Helen Thomas should have been our graduation speaker,” that states:
“The purpose of this group is to quietly but firmly protest the ability of a small minority to impose its will on the larger group through engaging or threatening to engage in disruptive discourse. This group affirms a belief in reasonable discussion and feel that in this scenario, a clear minority was able to override a larger majority by distorting the issues and discussion.”
It is not known who will take over Thomas’s front-row seat at White House briefings. Given the record of the current press corps, it is likely that Israel partisans are breathing a sign of relief.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew. Photos and videos referenced in the article can be viewed on the website (http://ifamericansknew.org) She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org
The USS Liberty, a flubbed-up false flag
By Deanna Spingola | RenewAmerica | June 8, 2010
By 1948, under David Ben Gurion’s direction, the Israeli government developed the Israeli Terrorist Cell, Unit 131. In the mid 1950s, the U.S. was friends with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Egypt. Ben Gurion, an avid Zionist and the Israel’s first Prime Minister, envisioned an Egyptian terrorist attack against the U.S. in order to destroy that alliance. However, that wasn’t a probability, given the relationship between the two countries. So the Israeli government developed a pattern of using young Israelis who disguised themselves as terrorists of whichever country they were attempting to implicate. This concept would be applied during Operation Cyanide, involving the USS Liberty, in an attempt to initiate World War III.
On May 23, according to instructions from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Cyrus R. Vance, the Liberty, commanded by William L. McGonagle, was directed to the eastern Mediterranean via Rota, Spain and placed under the direction of the Commander-in-Chief, Europe upon its arrival at Rota. [1] Frank Raven, the G Group Chief resisted such a risky move, “The ship will be defenseless out there. If war breaks out, she’ll be alone and vulnerable. Either side might start shooting at her…I say the ship should be left where it is.” [2]
Army General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, of Northwoods fame, put Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. (father of Senator John McCain), the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Navy in Europe in charge. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, per President Johnson’s instructions had advanced Admiral McCain to a four-star commanding position in February 1967. [3] Admiral John McCain directed operations from his office in London. [4] Johnson promised continued support and help in re-opening the Straits of Tiran, previously closed to Israel by Egypt. Israel was already developing a nuclear program in the Negev desert, but also wanted additional military assistance including — 100 Hawk missiles, 140 Patton tanks, and 24 Skyhawk jets. [5] John P. Roche, an avid supporter of Israel, wrote Johnson’s speech regarding the Straits of Tiran which was delivered in May 1967. [6] Johnson had many Jewish advisors and friends including Mathilde Krim.
Mathilde Krim’s first husband was David Danon, a Bulgarian Jew and member of the Irgun, a terrorist group. She converted to Judaism and associated with many of Israel’s future leaders, as she had been a dedicated gunrunning member of Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, prior to 1948. She was also friendly with the Stern Gang, another Zionist terrorist group founded by Avraham Stern and headed by Yitzhak Shamir. In 1958 she married Arthur B. Krim, a New York attorney and head of United Artists and a close advisor to Johnson and an avid Zionist. Krim was the finance chairman for the Democratic national committee and ran the President’s Club, Johnson’s fund-raising apparatus that held a $1,000 a plate dinner in New York on June 3, 1967. Arthur Krim built a huge vacation mansion next door to Johnson’s Texas ranch. [7]
On June 3, 1967, the USS Liberty was trolling in international waters off the coast of the Gaza Strip where the ship was to engage in an “extended independent surveillance operation in the eastern Mediterranean.” [8] Israel launched a long-planned war against her Arab neighbors at 7:45 a.m. Sinai time on June 5, 1967. In 1982, Menachem Begin, then Israel’s Prime Minister, admitted, “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” [9] Mordechai Bentov, a member of Israel’s coalition cabinet during the war, said, “All this story about the danger of extermination has been a complete invention and has been blown up a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territories.” [10]
President Johnson, an apparently energetic philanderer given the number and notoriety of his sexual exploits, was in Texas until June 1 when he returned with his “friend” Mathilde Krim who remained at the White House with Johnson for the next week. When Johnson, who was absolutely dazzled by Mathilde’s blonde beauty and intelligence, was informed of the beginning of the war on the morning of June 5. The very first person he informed was Mathilde Krim. Official records indicate that Mathilde passed documents from Israel directly to Johnson over the duration of the crisis. Johnson didn’t meet with his advisors, except Walt Rostow, nor any Israeli or Arab officials during the duration of the very short war, he knew exactly what was going on with the Israelis due to his intimate relationship with Mathilde Krim. [11]
It was evident, as that first day progressed, that Egypt was unprepared and inundated by Israel’s aggressiveness. Ambassador Michael Hadow, a British expert on Israel and the Middle East didn’t believe that war was inevitable. [12] Yet his advice, as well as negotiation possibilities were ignored. He sent a telegram to the British Foreign Office, “It looks as if the Israelis started it. We have been led up the garden path.” [13] Abba Eban, Israel’s Foreign Minister, told U.S. Ambassador Walworth Barbour that his government was going to protest Egypt’s actions to the U.N. Security Council. [14] Eban, along with other dignitaries, misled the entire world but never offered any apologies for his deception about Egypt initiating the war. The Western media characterized Israel as a vulnerable country threatened with extinction by its Arab neighbors. Rather than a war of land seizure, it was portrayed as a defensive war of survival. However, Israel kept the land her military grabbed. [15]
Of course it was all over the news and millions of Americans believed that the Arabs had started the war and attacked the poor defenseless state of Israel, an act that could have erupted into World War III. Although both parties, the Arabs and the Jews had participated in the warfare, the Israelis were the only people who had immediate access to President Johnson any time they wanted. Conversely, the Arabs were silenced by their inaccessibility to the White House and the U.S. media. [16]
Yitzhak Rabin, former Chief of Staff and then Ambassador to the United States, said, “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war…The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” Rabin recognized that any country with good intelligence, like Israel, could ascertain that Egypt had no plans to wage war against Israel. The CIA, before the war, embraced Israel’s views about Egypt’s intentions. Israel would have won any war, a veritable turkey shoot, in a week. [17] Further, Israeli intelligence had broken the Arab codes as soon as the fighting started. The Israelis also had the ability to block and alter all communications between King Hussein in Cairo and Egypt’s military. Israel, with military and tactical superiority, altered the communications to give the Arabs the impression that they were winning when in fact they were being ambushed and summarily slaughtered. [18]
Israel had air supremacy immediately after their surprise attack on Egypt. Within hours, Israeli jets pummeled twenty-five air bases from Damascus, in Syria to Luxor. They used machine guns, mortar fire, tanks and air power in their assault against the Jordanian section of Jerusalem and the Jordan River’s west bank. Israeli tanks and auxiliary personnel transporters assaulted the Sinai moving towards the Suez Canal. They transformed the area into a “massive killing field” as Egyptian deaths, according to one Israeli general, amounted to between 7,000 to 10,000 people. His losses were only about 275 soldiers. Indian peacekeeper soldiers, flying the U.N. flag, were also attacked on their way to Gaza. Fourteen peacekeeper soldiers were killed in what one Indian officer called the “deliberate, cold-blooded killing of unarmed U.N. soldiers.” [19]
The Israelis had captured some Egyptians and held them in the town of El Arish. By June 8, the prisoners had become annoyances as the Israelis had no place to house them and insufficient forces to guard them and too few vehicles to move them to regular prison camps. Consequently, the Israelis transformed the town into a “slaughterhouse” by methodically “butchering” their Egyptian prisoners. They lined up sixty unarmed Egyptians with their hands tied behind their backs and, with machine guns, slaughtered them in cold blood. Another group of thirty prisoners were killed nearby. The Israelis directed some Bedouins to bury those victims. In another incident, the number of Egyptian prisoners killed totaled about 150, as witnessed by an Israeli journalist, Gabi Bron. Some prisoners were forced to dig graves for the dead and then they were shot. Aryeh Yitzhaki, an Israeli army historian, and other officers collected testimony from dozens of soldiers who admitted killing Egyptian prisoners. According to Yitzhaki, Israeli soldiers murdered about 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, including about 400 in El Arish. Ariel Sharon was close to El Arish at the time of the incidents. Yitzhaki said that the Israeli leadership, Dayan, Rabin and others knew about the slaughter. [20]
The Liberty, close to El Arish at the time, and loaded with $10.2 million of sensitive equipment eavesdropped on Israel’s Six-Day War with Egypt, then known as the United Arab Republic. The Israelis were aware by 10:55 the morning of June 8 that a clearly-marked U.S. ship was off the coast and unmistakably visible from El Arish. [21] On that day, June 8, 1967, without any warning and apparently without reason, the Israeli Navy and Air Force attacked the ship with torpedoes, rockets, white phosphorous, cannons and armor-piercing bullets. The Israelis used napalm, a flammable liquid or jellied gasoline to turn the Liberty’s deck into a 3,000-degree holocaustic firestorm. Thirty-four Americans were killed and 171 others were wounded, one of which died later from his wounds. [22] Napalm is designed to kill and maim, generate panic and cause confusion. [23]
The first wave of attacks, comprised of as many as eight planes using heat-seeking missiles, destroyed the transformers (miraculously, all except one) which fed the aerial systems. This was a well-planned, premeditated strategy to prevent the USS Liberty from alerting the world of this murderous attack. The surveillance ship was no longer able to listen in to the war or send messages. If that was the objective of the attack, then the goal was met and the attack should have subsided. However, the real objective was to slaughter the crew and send the ship to the bottom. [24] Finally, the planes left only to be followed up by three surface craft which fired torpedoes. One hit below the water line and made a hole which measured 45 feet by 34 by 37. Amazingly, the ship didn’t sink but listed eleven degrees. When the crew inflated the lifeboats, the torpedo boats even destroyed those boats. [25]
The war was over by June 8 and Egypt had lost. The men on the Liberty first assumed that the Arabs, in unmarked planes and ships, were attacking their ship in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel. [26] There were 294 survivors from the premeditated Israeli attack, directed by Moshe Dayan. The remains of five men were never found and body parts were put into sacks for burial. [27]
Vice Admiral William I. Martin, a former World War II test pilot and “Pentagon loyalist,” had assumed command of the Sixth Fleet in April 1967. [28] During Israel’s assault there were several U.S. ships in the area, the aircraft carrier Saratoga commanded by Captain Joseph Tully, the Flagship commanded by Vice Admiral Martin, a Cruiser commanded by Rear Admiral Roger Payne, the USS America, a new aircraft carrier was under the command by Captain Don Engen. Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis was the Sixth Fleet carrier Division Commander. Additionally, there were approximately a dozen escorting destroyer ships. The Saratoga’s Communications Officer received a message from the Liberty, addressed to any or all U.S. ships or stations, “Liberty is under attack by unknown enemy air and surface units. Request Assistance.” [29]
Help was only about 15 to 20 minutes away from the Liberty. Captain Tully notified Vice Admiral Martin and said, “Unless otherwise directed, I plan to launch my Ready Strike Group in support of Liberty.” Martin approved and directed the USS America to launch their Ready Strike Group. However Rear Admiral Geis of the USS America recalled his aircraft which created a dilemma for Captain Tully. Vice Admiral ordered another strike to give aid to the Liberty but it was again recalled by Rear Admiral Geis. [30] [31] According to an independent, unofficial study, the “The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack…” [32] McNamara recalled the aircraft that had been launched from the Saratoga within minutes. Certainly, he would not have made such a move without Johnson’s approval. [33]
Secretary McNamara ordered the aircraft recalled a second time. Admiral Geis was told that President Johnson had ordered the aircraft to be returned, “He would not have his allies embarrassed, he didn’t care who was killed or what was done to the ship.” [34] According to Admiral Geis, President Johnson, known for his ruthlessness and vile profanity told Geis, “I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help — recall the wings.” [35] Tony Hart, a Navy communications technician stationed at the U.S. Navy Base in Morocco in June 1967 reported that McNamara responded, “We are not going to war over a bunch of dead sailors.” [36] If the Liberty had sunk, as Johnson wanted, Egypt would have been blamed. Government officials, including the McCains have maintained absolute silence about the Liberty’s assault.
The attack ended at about 3:15 pm. A while later, Israeli helicopters circled the ship. Some of the crewmembers, not yet realizing that Israel was the perpetrator of the attack, were glad to see their friendly ally. Then one crewmember shouted, “They’ve come to finish us off.” The copters just hovered as the Israeli troops watched without signaling and then soared away as if the attack had finally been called off. The survivors were stunned by what had happened and by the total lack of response from U.S. rescue planes. The ship generated sufficient steam to start moving from the area. There were 851 rocket hits and it was estimated that there were at least fifteen planes that had targeted the USS Liberty. One hit could be rationalized as an accident but not 851. [37]
Captain Ward Boston, the chief Navy attorney for the 1967 U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry, revealed that the clear-cut evidence demonstrated that the ship was clearly marked as an American ship. On October 9, 2003, Captain Boston said, “Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack…was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.” Captain Boston stated that Admiral Kidd had, in 1967, concluded that the attack was “a case of mistaken identity” because he was “under direct orders to do so by Defense Secretary McNamara and President Johnson.” [38] At the time, Congress, failing in their check and balances responsibility, opted not to convene a formal investigation of the situation. Israel was not held accountable and no one was punished or reprimanded. [39] The U.S. Navy prohibited its investigators from going to Israel to question Israeli pilots and boat captains. The Navy conducted an eight-day inquiry and issued a top-secret final report. [40]
Prior to the attack, Petty Officer Phil Tourney had determined that there had been at least thirteen over flights by Israeli planes. Two of the over-flights were by planes that had the prominent Star of David plainly visible. One plane got so incredibly close that Tourney waved and smiled at the pilot or co-pilot and he smiled and waved back. [41] The survivors knew that the attack was not the result of an identification error. On the fourth day of the war the men on the USS Liberty who were monitoring radio traffic during the war between Israel and Egypt could see the smoke of the fighting even though the ship was thirteen miles from land within international waters. The militarily superior Israelis were decidedly victorious over Egypt. [42]
Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, concluded that Israel was not to blame for the attack on the USS Liberty but said, “In any event, to express our goodwill and humanitarian concern, the Israeli Government paid $13 million in compensation to the families of the Americans killed or wounded in the attack.” [43]
On June 19, 1967, Abba Eban, Israel’s Foreign Minister, delivered a speech to the Special Assembly of the United Nations in which he claimed, “The danger to his country was great.” He said, “The military build-up in Egypt proceeded at an intensive rate. It was designed to enable Egypt to press its war plans against Israel while maintaining its violent adventures elsewhere. In the face of these developments, Israel was forced to devote an increasing part of its resources to self-defense.” Eban claimed he heard the following on a Cairo broadcast on May 25, 1967, “The Arab people is firmly resolved to wipe Israel off the map and restore the honour of the Arabs of Palestine.” Levi Eshkol, Israel’s Prime Minister, in a newspaper article in October 1967, “The Egyptian layout in the Sinai and the general military build-up there testified to a military defensive Egyptian set-up south of Israel.” Ezer Weizman, chief of the operations staff under Rabin, told an Israeli newspaper that there was “no threat of destruction.” He admitted that the attack against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria was intended to allow Israel to “exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies.” [44] Rabin’s deceptive claims were designed to win the world’s support and ultimately blame the war on Nasser. [45]
Operation Cyanide was the reason that the USS Liberty was sent to the war zone without protection. Yet, thirty years after the attack, there isn’t a single reference to Operation Cyanide despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests regarding the attack. The Government archives for this period are kept at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. Among all of the papers about the Liberty there is one dated April 10, 1967 stamped — SECRET — EYES ONLY. That document was “sanitized” in December 1988. It was apparently the minutes from a meeting on April 7, 1967 that included Walt Rostow (National Security Advisor), Ambassador Foy Kohler (Deputy Under Secretary of State), Cyrus Vance (Deputy Secretary of Defense), and Admiral Rufus Taylor (CIA Deputy Chief). [46]
Apparently, Operation Cyanide included an Israeli war against Egypt in order to depose Gamal Abdul Nasser, a purported Soviet puppet. U.S. intelligence and military specialists were sent to Israel months before to plan and prepare for the operation. The operation was an agreement between Johnson and Israel during which the USS Liberty was supposed to be sunk, along with all of her crew. When Israel’s attack failed to sink the ship, the game plan changed which included an apology from Israel and a phony cover story. [47] According to author Peter Hounam, a U.S. intelligence agent claimed that Captain McGonagle was aware of the pretext and the intentions of the U.S. to attack Egypt and had been briefed to anticipate a superficial strafing attack on the USS Liberty. [48] The attack unexpectedly accelerated, perhaps because what the Liberty’s surveillance revealed about Israel’s terrorism against the Egyptians.
Ephraim Evron, the Minister of the Israeli Embassy in Washington in 1967 and an avowed Socialist, served with Ambassador Avraham Harman. Evron, who viewed Johnson as a hero, was frequently invited to Johnson’s Texas ranch. In addition to Evron and Harman, Harry McPherson, Special Counsel in the White House, served as a link between Johnson and the country’s Jewish population and represented their interests. Evron greatly admired Johnson and regarded him as the greatest thing that had ever happened to America for the “social revolution” that Johnson was “going to achieve.” He believed that Johnson, Israel’s best friend, would never do anything that would hurt Israel. Johnson’s affection for Jews and Israel had more to do with their votes and financial support than sentimentality or principles. The very generous U.S. Jewish community, amounting to 5.5 million, supported Johnson’s divisive Vietnam policies. [49]
In the mid 1990s Rabin attempted to achieve peace with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with the U.S. acting as the mediator. Some of the other Zionists saw this as a hindrance to their plans of expanding Israel’s control of the area for an ultimate “greater Israel.” Consequently, whether acting on his own or as an agent, Yigal Amir, a young law student, shot five bullets into the Prime Minister when he was attending a 1995 peace rally. He later told investigators that he had absolutely no regrets. In the New York Times, dated November 27, 1995, Rabin’s assassin reportedly claimed, “According to Jewish law, the minute a Jew betrays his people and country to the enemy, he must be killed. No one taught me that law. I’ve been studying the Talmud all my life, and I have all the data.” [50]
Senator John McCain, backed by William Kristol in the 2000 presidential race, has always supported Israel. Representative Vin Weber, a pro-Israel member of the CFR, helped found William Kristol’s Empower America. Weber backed McCain in the 2000 and advised McCain during his campaign. Representative Weber sabotaged “an effort to force a congressional investigation of Israel’s terroristic 1967 attack on the U.S.S. Liberty.” [51] Robert S. McNamara later claimed, in his memoirs, that he didn’t know what happened and didn’t “take the time to find out.” The attack on the USS Liberty, part of Operation Cyanide, had to be concealed and all evidence had to be whitewashed. [52]
It took another false flag, 9/11, to get the U.S. embroiled in the Middle East. A 9/11 Commission was convened despite Bush and Cheney’s efforts. But, it took time to gather the right people to staff the commission which predictably failed to reach accurate conclusions because essential evidence was withheld by the government. One member, Bob Kerrey, admitted that 9/11 was a thirty- year conspiracy. [53] Shortly after 9/11, Eckehardt Werthebach, the former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz said, “the deathly precision” and “the magnitude of planning” behind the attacks would have required “years of planning.” [54] Was 9/11 another false flag, with blame again placed on the Arabs, to compensate for the flubbed-up false flag on June 8, 1967? And if that is the case, did the planning begin shortly after the first failure? Benjamin Netanyahu, the day after the horrific event, said that the 9/11 terror attacks were good for Israel. [55] The five Israelis who were in the U.S. prior to 9/11 and were caught photographing the event admitted, “Our purpose was to document the event.” [56]
© Deanna Spingola
Report: Israeli Government Asked The US For More Weapons
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – June 08, 2010
During his most recent visit to the US, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu requested that the US provide him with Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs, rockets, aircraft ammunition and other weapons to vastly increase the “emergency stores” of weapons held by the US in Israel.
Israeli forces used Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and its 2009 assault on Gaza. In both of these invasions, the Israeli use of these U.S. supplied weapons resulted in heavy civilian casualties among those attacked by the Israeli army.
The Joint Direct Attack Munition bombs are constructed by the US weapons manufacturer Boeing, which claims that the bombs are free-fall bombs converted into guided missiles. Israeli officials say the bombs are needed for an upcoming prolonged, protracted war that would extensively utilize the Israeli airforce, according to Israeli sources.
The Israeli sources also claimed that Netanyahu, along with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Defense Ministry Director-General Udi Shani, have requested on multiple occasions in recent months that the US government double its so-called ’emergency stores’ of weapons inside Israel in order to prepare for this planned protracted war. Although the report did not name any country, Israel’s recent threats against Iran make it clear that this is the potential ‘protracted war’ that is referenced in these requests.
Currently, the US stores of weapons in Israel are estimated at around $800 million worth of weapons, but Israel would like the US government to increase the store to $1.2 billion worth of weapons. These weapons stores were created by the Obama administration in December 2009, in preparation for a potential war, or to assist US forces currently fighting other wars in the Middle East. The US military is free to use the weapons from these stores as needed, and Israeli forces can use them with U.S. government permission.
Israel Derangement Syndrome
By Andrew Sullivan | The Atlantic Monthly | 04 June 2010
To read Charles Krauthammer today is to enter a twilight zone of an alternate reality. A country permanently occupying and colonizing a neighboring region, and treating its original inhabitants as dangerous interlopers, is the victim. An elite commando unit attacking a ship carrying toys and wheelchairs in the hours before dawn are those we should feel pity for. A country with 150 nuclear warheads and the strongest military in its region, the victor in every conventional war it has always fought, is somehow also always fighting for its very existence. A country backed by the sole superpower, supplied with aid by huge majorities in the US Congress, is facing extinction. Self-defense requires not civilly disabling and inspecting the cargo of an unarmed ship but raiding it at dawn and killing nine and injuring dozens. Basic human revulsion at a military that can kill over a thousand people – including scores of women and children in a trapped, impoverished enclave – can only be a function of anti-Semitism. A territory that is being systematically populated with Israelis in illegal settlements in contravention of the Geneva Conventions is merely a “buffer zone”. You need to colonize buffer zones?
Invasion and occupation of neighboring countries is “forward defense”. And asking that a two-state solution be moved forward by freezing illegal settlement construction and allowing a blockade that, while interdicting arms, doesn’t seek to kill civilians and restrict the import of basic necessities is to deprive a country with 150 nuclear warheads of any legitimate form of self-defense.
This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned. And you will notice one thing as well: no regret whatsoever for the loss of human life, just as the hideous murder of so many civilians in the Gaza war had to be the responsibility of the victims, not the attackers. There is no sense of the human here; just the tribe.
Something has been wrong here for a very long time, and now it is inescapable. Until the discourse is rescued from the victims of Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israel and America will slowly be drawn into wars they cannot ultimately win, lose every other ally they ever had, and embolden and fortify the very Islamist forces we are seeking to defuse and defeat.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly
Rep. Sherman: Prosecute U.S. Citizens involved with Gaza Flotilla
Ali Gharib | Lobe Log | June 4th, 2010
On a press call hosted by a pro-Israel organization, Rep. Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, told reporters that he intends seek the prosecution of any U.S. citizens who were aboard or involved with the Freedom Flotilla.
“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [PDF] makes it absolutely illegal for any American to give food, money, school supplies, paper clips, concrete or weapons to Hamas or any of its officials,” Sherman said on the Israel Project call, conflating Hamas and Gaza’s civilian population. “And so I will be asking the Attorney General to prosecute any American involved in what was clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization.”
Sherman also said that he plans on working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that any non-U.S. citizen involved with or aboard the Flotilla are excluded from entering the U.S.
Hamas, considered a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and has held de facto rule over the Gaza Strip since it took the area by force in 2007 in anticipation of an impending U.S.-backed coup d’etat by the rival Fatah faction.
The Freedom Flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza — in place since Hamas’s takeover — and deliver tons of food aid, medical and school supplies and building materials to repair buildings damaged in the month-long Israeli assault of Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan. 2009. The Flotilla was raided by Israeli commandos in international waters during the early hours of Monday morning, leaving at least nine people, including one U.S. citizen, dead.
Though the nine were killed by the IDF, Sherman criticized the Obama administration for not directly blaming Hamas, using the logic that the militant movement brought the blockade on itself: “I think the U.S. could be better now about condemning Hamas as responsible for those nine deaths.”
The blockade and the land siege (by Israel and Egypt) have, by international consensus (leaving out Israel and its hard-line American allies) caused a humanitarian crisis among Gaza’s civilian population.
The Congressman, known as a pro-Israel stalwart who has, in the past, joined as the sole Democrat on Republican criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy toward Israel, denied that there was a “hunger crisis” or “humanitarian crisis” in the Gaza Strip. “The health circumstances in Gaza are better than they are in many American cities,” he added later.
Questions about the legality of the Israeli blockade and its enforcement in international waters were quickly dismissed by Sherman, who said that the U.S. had itself blockaded Germany in both World Wars, Japan in the Second, Cuba during the missile crisis, and, curiously, the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The irony of the last example was, I’m sure, lost on Sherman. It was in that war, of course, that another man named Sherman, a Union officer, led a scorched-Earth campaign against the blockaded Confederacy. There are similar examples from the recent Gaza War, which I’d bed Rep. Sherman also had no problem with. (And are we really reduced to using a conflict from 150 years ago to justify military actions of the IDF?)
While Israel alleges ties between IHH, a Turkish relief organization involved in the Flotilla, and terror groups, many credible doubts have been raised about that assertion (see LobeLog contributors Marsha Cohen and Max Blumenthal’s pieces on the subject). Nonetheless, Sherman insisted the group has “clear terrorist ties.”
The California Congressman also blamed the media for the harsh criticisms of Israel since the incident on the Med (even from tiny Central American countries). Sherman employed what he called the “Kent State Rorschach Test” — referring to a generation of journalists who grew up in the Vietnam War-era and viewed Western governments critically because of incidents like the 1970 Kent State massacre.
“The liberal media is misled by that Kent State Rorschach Test that is a belief that those who are poorer, less technological, and more scruffy looking are right,” he said, alluding to skepticism of “Westerners, Europeans, and the U.S.”
All of Israel’s problems, said Sherman, are a distraction from Iran’s nuclear program, which he alleged is aimed at nuclear weapons. If Iran acquires those weapons, he said, the U.S. itself will be in danger: “You could smuggle one into the States in a bale of marijuana.”
“What really matters is the Iran nuclear program and we have a short amount of time to stop that program,” Sherman went on. “And our failure to take all the action to stop that program could force Israel to take an action far more controversial than what they’ve done this week.”
Shame behind the silence of America over Israeli crimes
By Paul J. Balles | 5 June 2010
The Gulf Daily News (2 June 2010) headlined a front-page article “The silence of America”. Questions were submitted to the American embassy, the White House, US State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The article concluded: THE RESPONSE WAS SILENCE. The questions posed in that article deserve a response, but not the twists provided by Israeli apologists or Zionist controlled Washington.
Why, after all the years of total blind US support for Israel, would anyone expect anything different? Here are the questions and my answers:
1. What will it take before the US even condemns Israel’s behaviour?
Answer: A provable catastrophe committed by Israel resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans. Israel’s behaviour has no judge other than Israel. Their behaviour will remain unchecked until a significant number of Americans suffer from the reality and become enraged.
2. How many people must die at the hands of Israelis before the US will take action against their behaviour? Ten people? 1,000? 10,000?
Answer: Consider how many Palestinian (6,348 between 2000 and 2009) and Lebanese (1,401 in two unprovoked raids) civilians have died unnoticed by America. Remember the provocation by Israel and the execution by America in Iraq; add another 1,366,350 innocents. To the Israelis, what’s another 10 murders in a humanitarian flotilla to Gaza?
3. Why is the US so against an independent inquiry into the flotilla incident?
Answer: The facts of such an inquiry, like the Goldstone inquiry into the carnage of Operation Cast Lead, would be ignored and the truth of its conclusions denied. Israel says “no independent inquiry”. America follows.
4. Any armed attack on any vessel in international waters would be deemed an act of piracy or war by most countries. Is the US definition of piracy and war different from the rest of the world?
Answer: If the pirates are Somalis, no. Pirates are pirates. If the pirates are Israelis, yes. Pirates become transformed into defence forces.
5. How would the US expect the crew or passengers of a civilian US ship to react if it was boarded by a foreign force in international waters? Would it expect them to defend themselves?
Answer: Bow, submit and genuflect if the foreign force is Israeli naval pirates. The victims of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty – an American military ship – were silenced even though the combined air and sea attack killed 34 (naval officers, seamen, two Marines and a civilian), wounded 171 and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters.
6. The US says it does not consider itself to be at war with Islam, but how can it possibly hope for trust from the Muslim world and elsewhere when it tacitly backs such acts?
Answer: If the American position was honest, we would say, “We’re not at war with Islam; we’re only at war with Muslims.” When is the Muslim world going to waken to the American double talk that’s convenient only for Israel and America?
7. Does the US condemn the detention of four Bahraini civilians and others onboard the flotilla in international waters?
Answer: Fortunately, the Bahraini humanitarians have been released and returned home. The US has not and never will condemn Israel for being what ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon described as “an inhuman murderous collective fuelled by a psychosis and driven by paranoia”.
The US response? President Obama expressed “deep regret at the loss of life”. Ultimately, Obama will follow Netanyahu’s attempt to justify the actions of the Israeli soldiers, saying they were “defending themselves” after being attacked. The same old political scam.
New liberal fans: Meet Anthony Weiner, ultra-hawkish backer of Israel
By Alex Pareene | June 1, 2010
Rep. Anthony Weiner’s completely non-measured, non-conciliatory remarks on the Israeli attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla are proof that he’d rather be a successful New York politician than a prominent national liberal.
It’s a little odd, actually. Weiner has spent the last year becoming the sort of unapologetic liberal Democrat that netroots activists and cable news bookers love.
After deciding not to run for mayor of New York last year, Weiner dedicated himself to being a relentless advocate for the Democratic healthcare reform plan. (He blogged on HuffPo and everything.) He’s great with a sound bite and he’s a born street fighter in a party full of timid moderates. He’s Jon Stewart’s old college roommate. He’s taking on Glenn Beck and sparring with Bill O’Reilly. He’s easily one of the most prominent liberal politicians in the nation.
But at the end of the day, he still wants to be mayor of New York, once billionaire Mayor-for-Life Michael Bloomberg finally grows bored and steps aside.
Will the liberals who only know Weiner from his feisty MSNBC appearances and his staunch support of the president’s domestic initiatives be put off when they hear him taking the “Israel can do no wrong” side in the debate over Israel’s botched raid, in international waters, of a humanitarian aid flotilla?
Weiner’s statement is comical. “Even if we are the only country on earth that sees the facts here,” Weiner says, “the United States should stand up for Israel.” That’s the statement of a man with whom there can be no reasoning.
And it’s not, by any means, outside the norm for Weiner. He’s precisely the sort of liberal establishment politician that Peter Beinart accused of failing young American Jews in the New York Review of Books recently. In the past, Weiner has matter-of-factly accused Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of being anti-Semitic. And not just them!
“I would argue that in many cases, the New York Times has” anti-Israel bias, Weiner told Amy Goodman in 2006. The idea of any elite, establishment newspaper in New York having an “anti-Israel bias” makes sense only if you consider any criticism of any action taken by the state of Israel to be out of line.
Also in 2006, Weiner introduced legislation banning aid to the Palestinian Authority and barring the Palestinian delegation to the U.N. (and kicking them out of the county). Weiner insisted that the PLO was a terrorist organization. And the delegation, he said, “should start packing their little Palestinian terrorist bags.”
His demagoguery on this particular issue largely stopped once he decided he couldn’t beat Bloomberg. But he’s hawkish enough that Ronn Torossian, a scummy publicist who once told a journalist that he wants a thousand Arabs to be killed for every Jew, threw Weiner a “breakfast reception” in January. I doubt Torossian (who’s represented right-wing religious cranks Benny Hinn and John Hagee) appreciates Weiner for his advocacy for single-payer Medicare for all Americans.
Support for Israel in all its conflicts is still the bipartisan norm in Congress, but the rise of the neocons in the Republican Party has made unquestioning support of Israel’s current right-wing government increasingly a right-wing concern in the U.S. Democrats face pressure from the young, activist base to be more critical of Israeli actions than they were expected to be a generation ago.
But Weiner needs the support of New York’s Orthodox and Hasidic communities if he wants to be mayor. And it’s bad enough that he recently married a Muslim woman! (Check out the comments here if you want to see how quickly some right-wing Israel supporters can turn on one of their most steadfast political allies.) Philip Weiss says Weiner just repeats the talking points of the Israel lobby because that’s what his constituency wants to hear. If that’s true or not, he’ll continue repeating the far-right line on Israel.
It will be interesting to see what sort of statement Sen. Chuck Schumer makes, if he makes one. Schumer’s untouchable in New York, and he’s been, like his protégé Weiner, a staunch ally of Israel throughout his carer. But Schumer wants to be the Senate majority leader. And a good portion of the senators who might support Schumer want an unapologetic liberal leader. I imagine Schumer will put out something equally uncritical of Israel, but way less confrontational than Weiner’s statement.
Israeli Murders, NATO and Afghanistan
By Craig Murray on 02.06.2010
I was in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for over 20 years and a member of its senior management structure for six years, I served in five countries and took part in 13 formal international negotiations, including the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and a whole series of maritime boundary treaties. I headed the FCO section of a multidepartmental organisation monitoring the arms embargo on Iraq.
I am an instinctively friendly, open but unassuming person who always found it easy to get on with people, I think because I make fun of myself a lot. I have in consequence a great many friends among ex-colleagues in both British and foreign diplomatic services, security services and militaries.
I lost very few friends when I left the FCO over torture and rendition. In fact I seemed to gain several degrees of warmth with a great many acquaintances still on the inside. And I have become known as a reliable outlet for grumbles, who as an ex-insider knows how to handle a discreet and unintercepted conversation.
What I was being told last night was very interesting indeed. NATO HQ in Brussels is today a very unhappy place. There is a strong understanding among the various national militaries that an attack by Israel on a NATO member flagged ship in international waters is an event to which NATO is obliged – legally obliged, as a matter of treaty – to react.
I must be plain – nobody wants or expects military action against Israel. But there is an uneasy recognition that in theory that ought to be on the table, and that NATO is obliged to do something robust to defend Turkey.
Mutual military support of each other is the entire raison d’etre of NATO. You must also remember that to the NATO military the freedom of the high seas guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is a vital alliance interest which officers have been conditioned to uphold their whole career.
That is why Turkey was extremely shrewd in reacting immediately to the Israeli attack by calling an emergency NATO meeting. It is why, after the appalling US reaction to the attack with its refusal to name Israel, President Obama has now made a point of phoning President Erdogan to condole.
But the unhappiness in NATO HQ runs much deeper than that, I spoke separately to two friends there, from two different nations. One of them said NATO HQ was “a very unhappy place”. The other described the situation as “Tense – much more strained than at the invasion of Iraq”.
Why? There is a tendency of outsiders to regard the senior workings of governments and international organisations as monolithic. In fact there are plenty of highly intelligent – and competitive – people and diverse interests involved.
There are already deep misgivings, especially amongst the military, over the Afghan mission. There is no sign of a diminution in Afghan resistance attacks and no evidence of a clear game-plan. The military are not stupid and they can see that the Karzai government is deeply corrupt and the Afghan “national” army comprised almost exclusively of tribal enemies of the Pashtuns.
You might be surprised by just how high in NATO scepticism runs at the line that in some way occupying Afghanistan helps protect the west, as opposed to stoking dangerous Islamic anger worldwide.
So this is what is causing frost and stress inside NATO. The organisation is tied up in a massive, expensive and ill-defined mission in Afghanistan that many whisper is counter-productive in terms of the alliance aim of mutual defence. Every European military is facing financial problems as a public deficit financing crisis sweeps the continent. The only glue holding the Afghan mission together is loyalty to and support for the United States.
But what kind of mutual support organisation is NATO when members must make decades long commitments, at huge expense and some loss of life, to support the Unted States, but cannot make even a gesture to support Turkey when Turkey is attacked by a non-member?
Even the Eastern Europeans have not been backing the US line on the Israeli attack. The atmosphere in NATO on the issue has been very much the US against the rest, with the US attitude inside NATO described to me by a senior NATO officer as “amazingly arrogant – they don’t seem to think it matters what anybody else thinks”.
Therefore what is troubling the hearts and souls of non-Americans in NATO HQ is this fundamental question. Is NATO genuinely a mutual defence organisation, or is it just an instrument to carry out US foreign policy? With its unthinking defence of Israel and military occupation of Afghanistan, is US foreign policy really defending Europe, or is it making the World less safe by causing Islamic militancy?
I leave the last word to one of the senior NATO officers – who incidentally is not British:
“Nobody but the Americans doubts the US position on the Gaza attack is wrong and insensitve. But everyone already quietly thought the same about wider American policy. This incident has allowed people to start saying that now privately to each other.”
Flotilla fallout
By Kevin MacDonald on 02.06.2010
Jake Tapper, a reporter for ABC News writes that “there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel.” The rationale? A senior administration official says “The president has always said that it will be much easier for Israel to make peace if it feels secure.”
Of course, that’s nonsense. Israeli security has nothing to do with it. The reality is that Israeli aggression is possible only because Israel understands that the US is its poodle and that the US will work on its behalf in the UN and elsewhere, no matter what Israel does. The Israel Lobby is ultimately to blame, meaning ultimately the influence of Jewish money on the political process.
AIPAC’s spin on this is an amazing piece of propaganda. AIPAC’s article is headlined, “Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers“–a breathtaking lack of context. The ADL said pretty much the same thing, calling the flotilla “a deliberate provocation against Israel.”
From Israel’s point of view, “the government appeared anxious to make an example of this six-ship flotilla — the largest effort to date to break the blockade of Gaza — to show the world that it would not tolerate efforts to break the blockage, international condemnation notwithstanding.” The main Israeli talking point, apparent in the AIPAC press release and the ADL statement, is that they had offered to unload the cargo at the Israeli port of Ashdod where it would be shipped overland to Gaza.
But that doesn’t square with the common understanding that Israel has erected a barrier of red tape for getting supplies into Gaza. A 2009 Christian Science Monitor report pointed to delays and arbitrary exclusions and stated that around 25% of the pre-blockade supplies were getting into Gaza. Another CSM article from June 2009 pointed to growth stunting in Palestinian children.
Despite Israel’s claims, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Israel’s actions will likely make it far more difficult to develop a consensus against Iran, and that’s all to the good. It will also greatly increase the cost of the Israeli-American alliance, as the US attempts to shore up support for Israel in the teeth of moral outrage around the world. That may well result in some push back here, as happened recently with the statement by General David Petraeus that Israeli policies oppose vital US interests in the Middle East. (He later denied it, doubtless under pressure.) Even Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, acknowledges that Israel is becoming more and more of a burden to the US.
Israel’s supporters in the US never tire of playing the role of innocent victim. They will continue to do so, as indicated by the statements of AIPAC and the ADL. But such rhetoric is so far out of touch with reality that at some point politically aware Americans must realize that US support for Israel is based on nothing more than Jewish power with no moral justification at all. That doesn’t mean that the lobby will lose its power, but at least we will all know that it’s about power, and can’t be intellectually justified… Full article
Mashaal to US: Give Us Advanced Missiles to Target Israeli Military Accurately
“I think that the United States of America should have direct dialogue with Hamas without mediators, because the United States is a major state, and it shouldn’t fear Israel” – Khaled Mashaal
Al-Manar TV – 29/05/2010
Hamas politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal spoke out on Friday against American support of Israel and said that the Hamas was not against the United States but rather against its bias in favor of Israel, and stated Israel as the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
“We don’t have a problem whatsoever with the United States, nor with the American interests,” Mashaal told U.S. broadcast journalist and acclaimed interviewer Charlie Rose. “America is a great state; it is a superpower and its right to keep its interests, but its interests shouldn’t be at the expense of others and the people of the region.”
“Israel is the obstacle in the face of peace in the region and the United States of America, morally and politically, has to deal with this reality and not put pressure on the Palestinian or the Arab side,” Mashaal argued.
Mashaal also criticized the U.S. for not holding direct talks with the Hamas and questioned whether U.S. special Mideast envoy George Mitchell could succeed in his mission to bring peace to the region without the resistance movement.
“I think that the United States of America should have direct dialogue with Hamas without mediators, because the United States is a major state, and it shouldn’t fear Israel, and it should have dialogue with all concerned parties in the region,” Mashaal said. “Why does he [George Mitchell] believe that he will succeed in the Palestinian issue without dialogue with Hamas?”
“Why did the American administration accept the Israeli election regardless of the results, it accepted [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, it accepted extremists like [Foreign minister Avigdor] Lieberman, to be the head of the diplomacy, and did not accept Hamas,” he added and called this a “double standard.”
Hamas was democratically elected into power in the Gaza strip in 2007. The Palestinian secular Fatah movement, headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, did not accept the religious party’s rule.
Mashaal told Rose that he condemned any violence against citizens all over the world, and stated that once the occupation of Arab land around the world ceased and Israel withdraw back to 1967 borders, so would the attacks.
“There is an outrage in the Arab world and the Muslim world about the Israeli crimes and the Israeli occupation, and about the American biased politics in favor of Israel and the American and European policies against the interests of the Arabs and in favor of Israel,” Mashaal said.
“The overall feeling in the Muslim world is that the Americans are supporting Israel,” he added. “If we are to really stop such operations we have to have a just solution for the cause of Palestine and to stop the occupation in Iraq and in Afghanistan.”
The Hamas leader urged the U.S. to provide his resistance movement with technologically advanced missiles “so we can use them very accurately against military targets and not civilians,” and denied that Hamas hides its rockets amongst civilians.
With regard to the captured Israeli occupation soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held captive by Hamas since 2006, Mashaal shifted the blame for the standstill in the talks for his release onto “Netanyahu and his smaller government,” and the U.S.
“Unfortunately, the American administration had a negative influence in delaying the exchange agreement because it requested Netanyahu not to have the agreement in order not to make Hamas stronger and weaken Mahmoud Abbas,’ he said, quoting Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father.
Bill Maher’s Cultural Supremacy and Religious Hierarchy
By Nima Shirazi | May 13, 2010
Bill Maher makes no secret of his contempt for religion. Via his comedy routines, his political commentary, his film Religulous, and his duties as host of Politically Incorrect and now HBO’s Real Time, Maher has long warned of the dangers and exploitation of organized religion and how incompatible dogma and doctrine are with the scientific enlightenment of modern society.
Inadvertently and less eloquently paraphrasing Voltaire, who once wrote that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities,” Maher has said that the belief in religion, which he calls “a neurological disorder,” in our society “stops people from thinking” and “justifies crazies.” In a 2008 interview with Larry King, Maher stated that religion is “the ultimate hustle.”
Maher’s critique (or outright bashing) of religious doctrine, dogma, and zealotry is admirable – or would be, if only he weren’t such an arrogant hypocrite. While Maher himself claims to be “an equal opportunity offender” who thinks that “all religion is stupid and dangerous,” he clearly believes that some faiths are more equal than others. Even though his condemnation of Christianity, notably Catholicism, has won him the animus of bible-thumping bigots like Catholic League head William Donahue and he has excoriated the intolerance of Pat Robertson and reveled in the death of Jerry Falwell, Maher has consistently saved his most virulent attacks for Islam and its followers.
While, in Maher’s estimation, Jews are somewhat quaint and silly and Christian dogma relies on outrageously absurd fairy tales, Muslims – as a rule – are all brainwashed and violent. Whereas other religions are sometimes co-opted by a minority of extremist elements that represent misguided fundamentalism, Islam, according to Maher, is inherently radical and terroristic. For example, during a February 2007 broadcast of Real Time, Maher stated,
“[Religions] are not all alike! [Islam] was extremist to begin with. Mohammad was a warrior. The big lie is that all religions are basically alike. They all preach the same thing. Well, of course the Bible is full of a lot of violence. I mean, God in the Old Testament is a psychopath – he just kills, kills, kills, for no reason, good reasons, bad reasons, he’s jealous, he just wants to kill…But he doesn’t seem to aim it so much at outsiders. He wipes out the Jews except for Noah because they were bad to him or whatever. But he doesn’t keep saying…it seems to me that in the Qur’an, God keeps saying, if you’re not one of us, you’re an infidel, and burning would be too good for you.”
With this unusual statement, Maher clearly demonstrates a striking level of ignorance about both the Qur’an and Judeo-Christian scripture, particularly the Old Testament, especially for someone who talks about religion all the time and then made a movie about it. The Old Testament manifestly overflows with divinely-mandated genocide and the deliberate ethnic cleansing of non-believers in the so-called Holy Land. Take the mythology of Exodus, which sees Yahweh deliver his people from Egypt and promise them a land “flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3.7-8) What is commonly left out of this uplifting tale of deliverance, freedom, and chosen-ness is the rest of Verse 8, which states plainly that this promised land was already “the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” As such, due to the inconvenient presence of a large and diverse indigenous population of non-Hebrew peoples, Yahweh declared to Moses and his followers:
“When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, or worship them, or follow their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in pieces.” (Exodus 23.23-24)
Unfortunately, for the native inhabitants of historic Palestine (or their modern counterparts, for that matter), things didn’t get any better. When the kingdom of Heshbon was conquered, the Bible states, the Israelites “completely destroyed every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children; we left no survivor; we left no one alive. Only the livestock we took as spoil for ourselves, with the plunder of the cities that we captured.” (Deuteronomy 2:31-35) The kingdom of Bashan fared no better, as Moses’ army devastated 60 walled towns, “totally destroying every inhabited city, and we killed all men, women and children. But all the cattle, all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves.” (Deuteronomy 3:3-7) As usual, Yahweh’s instructions were clear:
“When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites…and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you…you must utterly destroy them…Show them no mercy…For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”(Deuteronomy 7.1-11)
Moses certainly took God’s orders to heart, as he later told his followers:
“But as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as Yahweh your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against Yahweh, your God.” (Deuteronomy 20.16-18)
Furthermore, the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead, including “the women and the infants” were slaughtered by a 12,000-strong army of marauding Hebrews (Judges 21:10) and, as revenge for waylaying the Israelites as they returned from Egypt, Yahweh ordered his people to “go and strike the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them, but kill men and women, children, infants and suckling, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:2-3) Needless to say, there are many more examples of Hebrew aggression throughout the Bible (read about the exploits of Joshua, Aaron, David, Elijah, and Samson, for example), all of them commanded by the Lord Almighty, and all of them against non-Jews. So much for Maher’s contention that the Hebrew god “doesn’t seem to aim [his murderous wrath] so much at outsiders.”
(Incidentally, Maher also appears to be ignorant of certain Muslim rules of engagement, found within the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah, that expressly prohibit the killing of women, children, and the elderly, the cutting or burning of trees or orchards, the slaughter of livestock except for food, and the pillaging, plundering, or destruction of residential areas. Clearly, Yahweh’s own battle conventions were far less strict and more closely resemble the tactics of the Israeli military.)
Perhaps Maher’s decision to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the biblical Hebrews upon the indigenous people of the Levant, in favor of demonizing Islam and its adherents, should not be surprising considering his outspoken support for Zionism and the fact that he is a self-avowed “big supporter of Israel,” who believes not only that “Israel is a democracy in a part of the world that has none” but also that American blood and treasure should be spent in order to ensure the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Almost a decade ago, in the midst of the Second Intifada in late 2001, Maher hosted a panel to discuss Israel and Palestine on his round table talk-show Politically Incorrect. Rather than act as moderator, though, Maher wholly represented the Zionist perspective, complete with revisionist history and the constant invocation of Zionist mythology. After attempting to contextualize his first question by claiming that 4.5 million Jewish Israelis, armed with superior weaponry and a nuclear arsenal, are surrounded by a sea of 280 million hostile, bloodthirsty Arabs, Maher asked, “What if for one hour…the Arabs had the ability to annihilate the Jewish state? Do you think things would be different? Do you think they would show the restraint that Israel has for over 50 years?” One can only wonder what kind of “restraint” Maher was referring to considering Israel’s history of asymmetric aggression, apartheid-style oppression, disdain for international law and human rights, and settler-garrison ethnonationalist policy.
The rest of the show consisted mostly of Maher talking over his guests – the Arab ones anyway – and claiming that there really is no Israeli occupation of Palestine, that Palestinian rejectionism is to blame for statelessness, that Zionism is not a racist ideology, that Palestinians are better off under Israeli authority than under Arab rule, and that the forcible displacement and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Zionist colonialism and military expansion shouldn’t be a big deal considering that, in his view, there are plenty of other places for the indigenous people to resettle. “Here is Israel, this little bit of land,” Maher said, pointing to a map of the region. He continued,
“Here’s Syria. Here’s Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Sudan, Libya. Look at all this. Now, the Arabs purport to be brothers, that’s what we always hear. It’s one Arab nation divided into falsely drawn countries by the colonial powers. If this whole bit of land are all brothers, how come at the time of the partition when they refused to share the land with Israel, and there was only 600,000 Palestinian refugees, how come they couldn’t find any home in this whole area?”
Later, when confronted by one of the panelists, a Palestinian student at Georgetown University whose family was forced out of its home and into a refugee camp in 1948, who asks how such displacement and aggression can be justified by Israeli apologists, Maher stepped in to explain, “Because your people were offered half the land, and you said no and chose to try to annihilate them, instead.”
Aside from Maher’s awkward understanding of international law, the rights of refugees, and complete disregard for the illegality and immorality of both the annexation of land by conquest and the forcible transfer or deportation of populations, he demonstrates a distinct lack of historical knowledge and perspective required to speak on this matter with authority. He seems to either forget or simply not care that Israel was established in 1948 on land that was already inhabited by an indigenous population. In 1947, despite representing no more than 30% of the total population of Palestine – a percentage reached only after decades of illegal mass immigration to the region – Jews were to be given 56% of the land for their own state as part of the UN Partition Plan, which was accepted only as a non-binding recommendation with a vote of 33 to 13 (and 10 abstentions) after much international bullying by both the US and Russia. As part of the Plan, the “Jewish” state was to be granted control of much of the best land, notably the fertile coastal plain and the hilly northeastern Galilee and Jerusalem was to be an internationally-administered city populated by an equal number of Jews and Palestinians.
While Maher is correct that the Jewish leadership at the time accepted the UN proposal (albeit reluctantly), the Zionist intention was never to live side-by-side an independent Palestinian state. As Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote, “large sections of Israeli society…were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the [brewing 1948] war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN-earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” (Tikkun, March/April 1998.)
Zionist pioneers and Israel’s founding fathers were actually quite explicit in their goals. In 1937, before the horrors of Kristallnacht, Jewish pogroms and ghettos, and The Final Solution of Nazi-occupied Europe, Ben Gurion stated, “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them,” and elaborated elsewhere that, “if we have to use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places…then we have force at our disposal.”
The next year, Ben-Gurion, who would soon become Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated that “after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine.”
A decade later, Ben-Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948, “The war will give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.” This is the same Yosef Weitz who, in 1940, wrote in his diary, “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped.”
In 1948, after Jewish authorities had agreed to the UN Partition Plan (which was never internationally accepted or legally implemented) and Israel had declared “independence” with total disregard for international law and the self-determination of Palestine’s native population, leader of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun and later Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, Menachem Begin chimed in, declaring, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Maher expunges from his own truncated history lesson the fact that Israel achieved “legitimacy” with the backing of Western world powers and gained “independence” as a colonial state through violent transfer of the native inhabitants, systematic ethnic cleansing, and the massacres and intimidation of paramilitary death squads. Immediately after declaring its creation, Israeli militias fought a war of expansion and annexed an additional 22% of Arab land as its own.
Maher also declines to mention, probably due to his historical ignorance, that immediately following Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in May 1948, the United Nations reassessed its approach to the partition of Palestine and appointed a mediator, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, to come up with new proposal while taking into account “the aspirations of the Jews, the political difficulties and differences of opinion of the Arab leaders, the strategic interests of Great Britain, the financial commitment of the United States and the Soviet Union, the outcome of the war, and finally the authority and prestige of the United Nations.” While Bernadotte’s second proposal was produced in consultation with British and American emissaries, then-President Harry Truman undermined its progress in the UN due to pre-election Zionist influence in the United States. On September 17, 1948, the day after the second proposal was presented to the UN, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by members of the Zionist terrorist organization Lehi (also known as The Stern Gang).
For the next 17 years, Palestinians in Israel were subject to martial law. In 1967, Israel launched a unilateral, unprovoked, preemptive strike on its Arab neighbors and militarily conquered the remaining 22% of Palestine. It has brutally occupied the entirety of historic Palestine ever since.
Later in the program, Maher stated his support for continued Israeli occupation and Jewish colonization of the West Bank due to his incorrect impression that area conquered in warfare becomes property of the victor. When asked about what Israel’s responsibilities actually are under international law, Maher quickly changed the subject and blamed the Palestinians for their own victimization.
Before signing off for the evening, Maher also made sure to claim that the Palestinian use of suicide bombing had more to do with religious dogma than desperate resistance to illegal Israeli occupation maintained by American money, weapons, and equipment. “There is a big difference in the religions [Judaism and Islam], come on, between this life and the other life,” he declared. “Muslims are a little more like the Catholics, ‘It’s gonna happen after you die.’ The Jews are more like, ‘Let’s make the deal now.'”
Little has changed for Maher over the years. Anti-Muslim sentiment is a staple on Maher’s HBO show Real Time, as is easily evinced by looking at a list of his guests, which includes notables such as Ann Coulter, David Frum, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Jonah Goldberg, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Even though Maher’s Real Time panels include “liberal” and “progressive” guests to off-set the right-wing commentators, anti-Muslim rhetoric is rarely challenged, and is more often reinforced, especially when Maher’s guests include such notables as the Lebanese-born neoconservative Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz crony and Council of Foreign Relations board member Fouad Ajami, literary blowhard and ridiculous fatwa-victim Salman Rushdie, “Muslim refusenik” and author of “The Trouble with Islam Today” Irshad Manji, and Muslim-turned-atheist and fellow at the war-mongering, imperialist think tank the American Enterprise Institute Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In early 2007, when Maher hosted Hirsi Ali, whom he introduced as his “hero,” he asked her the extremely leading question, “Is Islam a religion of peace? You are one of the brave people who say it’s not really a religion of peace.” Hirsi Ali eagerly responded, “It’s not a religion of peace. Immediately after 9/11, they should have said, ‘it’s not a religion of peace, we’re up against Islam.'”
Strangely enough, less than three months later, Maher was seen advocating the words of his “new hero,” Congressman Ron Paul, who had impressed Maher during the recent Republican presidential debates. Maher praised Paul, saying, that he “spoke real truth about the war on terror, about 9/11, about Iraq. He said, ‘y’know what? They hate us because we’re over there. They don’t hate because of our freedom or any of those stupid slogans the Bush people put out.” Regarding Paul’s analysis of 9/11, Maher continued, during a satellite interview with Senator Chris Dodd,
“He [Ron Paul] wasn’t saying ‘We were asking for it.’ He was saying was ‘Maybe we should listen to our enemies. And maybe the reason they’re mad at us is because we have been meddling in the Middle East. We were in Saudi Arabia, that’s what Bin Laden was mad at us for. Now we’re in Iraq, and we’re screwing up that country. Maybe if we listen to them instead of just saying ‘We’re always the good people,’ we would actually make ourselves safer.”
Later in the same show, Maher repeated his agreement with the assessment that “They hate us ’cause we’re over there, we’re meddling in their affairs.”
Later that same year, however, Maher seemed to step back from this view during a conversation with the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, who suggested,
“America is fighting a war that doesn’t exist. We’re fighting because our leaders tell us that the Muslims hate freedom and hate liberty and hate women in the workplace, and that’s got nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world, what our policies are, and what our impact is there…”
Whereas Maher replied by saying, “I believe what you say and I think it’s more about our policy than our way of life,” he continued,
“but, would you grant me this, as long as there is an Israel in the world, and I’m a big supporter of Israel, as long as America backs it, the kind of Muslims that take their religion that seriously that they would strap on a suicide belt are always gonna be out for us and always gonna be trying to kill us?”
When Scheuer stated that he didn’t think Israel was “worth an American life or an American dollar,” Maher was flummoxed and almost speechless at the prospect. Unable to fathom how anyone could not support Israel, he just barely managed to respond by repeating Scheuer’s proposal in the form of a question, “You don’t think the existence of Israel in the world is worth an American life or an American dollar?”
Scheuer’s analysis was hardly radical. In fact, he was merely agreeing with an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, which found,
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.
“Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”
Nevertheless, Maher has long advocated the perspective that Judeo-Christian culture is superior to Islamic and Arabic culture and that Israel is a necessary “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” As such, any violations of human rights, war crimes, or crimes against humanity committed by “Western” countries against Muslims are not only justified, but also encouraged.
In 2003, during his comedy special “Victory Begins at Home,” Maher unabashedly supported the treatment that Middle Eastern abductees were suffering at the hands of the US government in the gulag of Guantanamo Bay. “I don’t feel bad for those 300 killers we’ve got down in Guantanamo Bay, always crabbing about how we don’t respect their religious practices,” Maher declared, as he strutted around the stage. “Y’know what? You lost, eat what we eat! Here’s a cheese-filled snausage, enjoy!”
Maher seemed not to care that the overwhelming majority of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay were not, in fact, “killers,” had absolutely no connection to the Taliban, let alone al Qaeda, all were being held as combatants in the Bush-manufactured “war on terror,” and some were subject to, not only torture, but murder at the hands of their American captors.
In case Maher’s central thesis was lost on his audience, he stated plainly, “You have to understand, you have to embrace the values of Western civilization. They’re not just different, they are better.”
More recently, in the wake of the much-hyped controversy over an episode of Comedy Central’s cartoon South Park which depicted the prophet Mohammad in a bear costume (sort of) and resulted in the show’s creators receiving veiled death threats posted on the internet by a group called Revolution Muslim, Maher felt the need to restate his case. As part of the “New Rules” segment that closed his April 30th show, Maher stated that the South Park controversy “served, or should serve, as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists, it’s better.”
What followed was a vitriolic and humorless tirade against all Muslims, not just so-called “extremists,” wherein Maher suggested that as bad as some elements of Western culture may be, nothing compares to the myopia and violence inherent in Islam. When he was finished, Zionist Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was a Real Time guest that evening, leaned over to Maher with a broad grin and could be seen saying, “That was great. That was great.”
Maher began by stating that, in reference to the threats levied at South Park, the developing world’s “religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours.” What Maher failed to point out is that the group on whose website “Islamists” made the threats is based in Brooklyn, New York, that the threats were made by 20-year-old Virginia-native Zachary Adam Chesser (a recent covert to Islam who now goes by the name Abu Talhah al-Amrikee), and that the group itself was founded by “American-born Jew formerly known as Joseph Cohen who converted to Islam after attending an Orthodox rabbinical school.” According to journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail, in 1998, Cohen moved with his wife and family from Brooklyn to the ultra-Orthodox Israeli development town of Netivot where he was a supporter of the ultra-racist Shas political party of Mizrahi Haredi Jews. After he became “disillusioned with Israeli secularism,” Cohen apparently embarked on a two year “theological dialogue” in a Jewish internet chatroom with a persuasive sheikh from the United Arab Emirates and was duly transformed from being a staunch Zionist to a “sudden admirer of al-Qaeda and Hamas” and changed his name to Yousef al-Khattab. Perhaps Maher didn’t feel this information was relevant.
Maher continued by urging his audience to “think about the craziest religious wackos we have here in America…take the worst, the worst is the Christians who bring their ‘God Hates Fags’ signs to soldiers’ funerals. Can’t get worse than that. Now multiply that by infinity and give it an army, that’s the Taliban.” Here, Maher’s comparison is spurious at best. While he rightfully condemns the recent suspected actions of the Taliban involving the poisoning of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, he claims that it’s closest Western analogy is some ignorant bigot holding an offensive sign?
Maher chose not to mention that there have numerous instances of Jewish settlers poisoning water supplies and grazing grounds of Palestinian towns, resulting in the deaths of livestock and illnesses such as liver infections in children. While Maher warns of the tactics of the Taliban, which at its height of power in 2001 boasted a strength of about 45,000 troops, including the elderly and children (a level which has been cut in half in the past decade), there are currently over 400,000 heavily-armed Jewish settlers, subsidized by the Israeli government (and therefore US tax dollars) living in illegal fortified colonies and garrison-outposts all over Palestinian land in the West Bank. These messianic settlers have repeatedly been known to burn Palestinian crops and mosques, throw rocks at Palestinian children on their way to school, and murder Palestinians in cold blood (and sometimes have monuments erected in their honor).
Incidentally, the number 400,000 is applicable elsewhere. The new Quadrennial Defense Review published by the US Department of Defense in February 2010 states, “Including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, approximately 400,000 U.S. military personnel are forward-stationed or rotationally deployed around the world.”
Furthermore, Maher’s claim that Christian fundamentalism only goes as far as waving stupid banners and pales in comparison to Islamic extremism is absurd. Perhaps his team of writers should have reminded Maher of Jim D. Adkisson who, on July 27, 2008, walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church with 76 rounds of buckshot and a shotgun in a guitar case, opened fire on the 200 member congregation as they watched a child performance of Annie, killing two. His stated motive was that “he hated the liberal movement” which, along with Democrats, African Americans and homosexuals, was destroying American institutions. Maybe Maher’s mention of anti-abortion, right-wing Christian Scott Roeder, who murdered doctor George Tiller in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009 because he felt “preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger” (and whose actions elicited praise from other American fundamentalists) was cut from his script due to time constrictions. Doubtful.
Additionally, Maher failed to address the fact that George W. Bush was a born-again Christian who often claimed his imperial foreign policy agenda was divinely inspired. Five days after the September 11 attacks, as plans to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq had already been drawn up, Bush declared that “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” Five months later, as he addressed American soldiers in Alaska, he spoke again of “this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom.”
In 2003, Bush even declared to then-Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath, “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
And what about the reports that Bush’s top-secret daily briefings, the Pentagon’s Worldwide Intelligence Update, prepared by US General Glen Shaffer, and delivered by hand by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, routinely had images of American military might and warfare juxtaposed with inspirational verses from the Bible?
But Maher was just warming up. He continued,
“Now, I’ve been known to make fun of Christians, but I have the perspective to know that they’re a lot more evolved than people who target girls for going to school…And that’s because Muslims still take their religion too seriously.”
It can only be assumed that Maher didn’t mean the “enlightened” Christians who subscribe to “biblical discipline,” a form of corporal punishment intended to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God, which recently resulted in a Montana couple beating their adoptive children to death. Obviously, Maher also meant to exclude “enlightened” Mormon fundamentalists like brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty who committed double murder or Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, all in the name of God.
Naturally, Maher also didn’t feel like telling his audience about the more than 280 kindergartens, schools, and universities that the “enlightened” Israeli military deliberately destroyed during the 22-day assault on Gaza or about Palestinian children like Abir Aramin who are murdered by “enlightened” Israeli soldiers on their way to school.
Maher also makes sure to clarify that he wholly endorses painting all 1.2 billion Muslims, one quarter of the world’s population, with the same brush, by declaring, “It should, in fairness, be noted that in speaking of Muslims, we realize that, of course, the vast majority are law-abiding, loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace.” With this statement, Maher reveals his true agenda. He is not simply talking about a fundamentalist approach or extreme interpretation of a religion; he is stating, quite plainly, that all those who practice that religion are themselves fundamentalist and extreme. (Perhaps Maher would think it fair to claim that all Catholics are child molesters or all Jews are Ariel Sharon?)
This narrow-minded approach to Islam and its followers proves Maher’s bigotry. Apparently, in Maher’s view, all Muslims are misogynistic men and a poor, brainwashed, and beaten women. To Maher, all Muslim majority countries are oppressive dictatorships and Muslim culture is a monolithic entity that remains identical across thousands of miles, different geography, countries, ethnic backgrounds, races, and traditions.
He seems to think that all Muslim women are forced against their will to wear burqas and veils by their domineering and repressive husbands and fathers. Disproving this assumption hardly seems worth the time; nowhere in the Qur’an does it say that women must cover their hair or wear a veil, only that women (and men, for that matter) should be modest in their dress and actions. Incidentally, both Judaism and Christianity preach the same. Some Orthodox Jewish women shave their hair and wear wigs. Depictions of the Virgin Mary invariably show her in hijab. Does Maher feel that Catholic nuns are unjustly subjugated?
Muslim women from Albania to Morocco to Indonesia to Palestine to Tunisia to Pakistan to Egypt to Jordan choose whether or not they want to wear hijab. Well over 50% of college students in Iran are female (women make up 70% of Azad University’s Applied Physics Department graduates) and women hold high level jobs in all kinds of professions; they are business owners, university professors, filmmakers, artists, writers, and Cabinet ministers.
Unfortunately, Maher’s image of Islam seems to stop short at the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Qutb-inspired fundamentalism of Al Qaeda, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It’s apparently irrelevant to him that many Muslim countries, from Azerbaijan to Bangladesh to Niger to Lebanon to Gambia to Turkey, are secular presidential republics and parliamentary democracies or that women in Muslim Kyrgyzstan were granted voting rights two years before women in the United States. Obviously, no mention need be made about the eighteen female MPs elected to the Turkish Parliament in 1935, at a time when women in a significant number of other European countries had no voting rights whatsoever, or that women in Switzerland (a country so enlightened it banned minarets) couldn’t vote until 1971, or that Benazir Bhutto was twice elected Prime Minister in the Islamic state of Pakistan while the United States has never had a female president or vice president.
Maher rightly insists that separation of church (or mosque) and state is integral for a free and democratic society to flourish, yet seems to promote the idea of legally banning Islamic dress in Western societies, as is the case in France and, soon, Belgium. Oh, the irony.
But Maher still wasn’t finished. “I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “Civilized people don’t threaten each other…Threatening, that’s some old-school desert shit.”
By “civilized,” Maher clearly meant “American” or, at least, “Western” people, as opposed to the backwards, savagery of the Islamic world. One can only assume he was preferring our civilized overthrow, both overt and covert, of dozens of sovereign nations by the United States in the past century. Maybe Maher meant our civilized practice of “enhanced interrogation,” waterboarding, and torture. Or our civilized indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassination, black sites and secret prisons, and inhumane SAMS detention practices.
If Maher is so worried about threats, perhaps he should have mentioned the harassment US Congressman Bart Stupak has received lately by anti-choice nutjobs disappointed in his support for the new health care bill (which, incidentally, offers absolutely no federal funding for abortions). “In the past few weeks,” Stupak recently wrote in Newsweek, “I’ve received so many death threats that I was advised to get a security escort around Washington. My wife, Laurie, has had to unplug our home phone to avoid drunken messages from people screaming, swearing, and generally acting profane… One day I got 1,500 faxes, all hate mail.” Maher could have talked about the cancellation of a Texas college production of the Terrence McNally play “Corpus Christi” (which features a homosexual Jesus character) after the school was inundated with “threatening calls and e-mail messages.” Glenn Greenwald reminds us that this is “same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of “anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally.”
He also could have discussed the medieval Hebrew curses hurled by Rabbi Mordechai Aderet at a household of Iranian Jews in Great Neck, Long Island, the invective spewed by those offended by Danish artists Surrend who recently posted maps of the Levant all over Berlin with the name “Ramallah” replacing “Israel” and a title reading “The Final Solution” at the top, the desecration of the graves of Muslim WWII soldiers in a French cemetary, or the death threats, hate mail, and defacing of the home of outspoken Israel-critic Rabbi Michael Lerner by right-wing Zionists who disagree with his vocal anti-occupation stance. Maybe Maher should warn his viewers of the dangers of Israeli Rabbis like Yitzhak Shapira and Yossi Elitzur of Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in Yitzhar near Nablus, who last year published a 230-page guide to Biblical laws governing the killing of non-Jews. Maher could point out that the yeshiva itself is funded by tax-deductible donations from America. He could also throw in some information about the Israeli Jewish Rabbinate which, during the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, indoctrinated young Israeli troops with pamphlets claiming that they were holy warriors fighting to expel the “murderers” (all Palestinians) who are “interfering with our conquest of this holy land.” The rabbis preached that showing mercy was “terribly immoral.”
One might think Maher would mention the ecstatic Jews in New York City, who danced in the street in support of the Israeli military’s slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza. Or the signs posted around the wealthy Riverdale section of the The Bronx which advertise “Camp Jabotinsky,” a self-described “Jewish Survival Camp” in Upstate New York where “Jewish youth learn how to shoot,” in addition to learning “karate, legal and proper weapons training, street fighting and how to be a proud Jew who can defend the Jewish people,” boasting that “the Nazi Scum better watch out.” It’s not a joke.
Neither is the fact that Maher’s beloved “only democracy in the Middle East” isn’t actually a democracy at all and that a recent Tel Aviv poll revealed that the democracy-loving Jewish Israelis (remember, the ones serving as a civilized vanguard against the barbarous Muslims of the Orient?) don’t care much for Maher’s much-touted Western values. The survey found that over 57% of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, the majority felt that “there is too much freedom of expression” in Israel, 43% said “the media should not report information confirmed by Palestinian sources that could reflect poorly on the Israeli army,” 58% “opposed harsh criticism of the country,” 65% thought “the Israeli media should be barred from publishing news that defense officials think could endanger state security, even if the news was reported abroad,” and 82% said they “back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the defense establishment.”
The poll also found that “most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.” Additiontally, of those polled who said they were right-wing, 76% said “human rights groups should not have the right to freely publicize immoral conduct on Israel’s part.” How “civilized.”
It’s true that the “civilized” people Maher praises sometimes don’t issue threats, as he claimed Muslims do. More often, they just drop bombs and shot bullets at the viciously brutal Muslims. For example, it may be difficult for Maher to pick out the most civilized massacre committed by US troops in Iraq when given a choice of so many, from the 1991 Amiriyah shelter massacre to the more recent massacres in Haditha (24 killed, ages 1 to 76 years old), Fallujah (over 600 killed), Ishaqi (11 killed, ages 6 months to 75 years old), and Nisour Square (17 dead), not to mention the rape/murder of a 14-year-old girl and the murders of her family in Mahmudiyah by US Army soldiers and the bombing and shooting of a wedding party in Mukaradeeb that killed 42 civilians. And that’s not all.
Maybe Maher was speaking of the “civilized” – dare someone say “righteous? – invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, where the enlightened US troops just can’t seem to stop murdering hundreds of civilians and then trying to cover it up.
Maybe the “civilized” thing to do is to murder hundreds of Muslims via remote-controlled Predator drones. Perhaps though, like US General Tommy Franks, Bill Maher doesn’t “do body counts.” Or maybe, like George H.W. Bush, Maher should just declare, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what the facts are!” Moral superiority in the face of genocide has been a staple for Western civilization for a while.
How else could all those “civilized” American soldiers bear to call their supposed adversaries japs, nips, gooks, ragheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers, and hajjis, or simply scum while they were busy killing journalists, women and children and using gruesome chemical weaponry like depleted uranium and white phosphorus against civilian populations? If the troops weren’t so “civilized,” how else would they be able to rape all those women in Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, and within their own ranks? Is it any wonder that, in our “civilized” nation, the unemployment rate for military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan has reached 14.7% (nearly 50% higher than the national rate), on any given night well over 100,000 veterans are homeless, and the chilling reality is 18 veterans commit suicide every day.
Maher must be aware that the “civilized” United States will have a military budget of over $767 billion next year, a staggering total that, if allocated elsewhere could single-handedly eradicate world hunger for our planet’s 1.02 billion undernourished and starving population for almost four years. But that obviously won’t happen since “civilized” people believe that murdering half a million children under five, that committing “genocide,” that “destroying a entire society,” through economic sanctions is the price some have to pay for the rest of us to remain “civilized.” As one of the leaders of “civilized” America declared on behalf of the Western world, “We think the price was worth it.”
In 2006, when the first free democratic elections in the Arab world brought Hamas to power in Gaza, democracy stalwarts Israel and the United States decided that they didn’t like the results and would place heavy economic sanctions on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the already besieged Strip to punish them for their brazen self-determination. The Israeli prime minister’s advisor reportedly joked to a team of government and military officials, “It’s like an appointment with a dietitian. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.” The crowd rolled with laughter. As a result, 95% of businesses have been shuttered, unemployment is over 60%, and more than 80% of Gaza’s residents are dependent on food aid when they’re not being murdered by Israeli soldiers with American weapons in their own homes. Is this the Western civility of which Maher speaks so fondly?
Perhaps Maher forgets that Fascism, Nazism, and Zionism are all Western – not Muslim – ideologies. Or that Muslims didn’t drop two atomic bombs on innocent Japanese civilians. Nope, superior American values did that.
Yes, Bill Maher is a comedian. He makes that clear whenever he derides Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, by quickly following up his jab by saying, “I kid, I kid!” But he doesn’t ever do that with Muslims. Why? Because he’s not kidding. Unfortunately, as a comedian, Maher should have more perspective and less invective.
It seems that Bill Maher’s major problem with Muslims is not so much that “they” are more inherently dangerous and violent based on their chosen religious affiliation, but rather that he is more scared of them. As a result, rather than being the clear-headed, out-spoken realist that he’s conjured himself to be, Maher winds up being more of a holographic torchbearer of truth, a peon of moral relativism rather than a champion of moral obligation.
As such, Maher is not the “equal opportunity offender” he claims to be since he clearly discriminates against one group of people and holds other groups of people – groups he belongs to – as superior. In this way, he is no better than the zealots that so offend him. Just last Friday, in response to the bogus justification for aggressive imperialism, We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here, Maher made sure to remark, “There’s already millions of Muslims in America. The problem is in their head.”
American literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “This whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.”
It is with this in mind that Maher’s insistence, addressing an audience on premium cable from a Los Angeles television studio, that “our system is better” rings hollow and shameful.
John Lennon once said, “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” As usual, John is right. Especially if that TV is tuned into Real Time.
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From the Archives
The great ADHD swindle
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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