The Neoconservative Echo Chamber 2.0
Ali Gharib & Eli Clifton | IPS | September 09, 2010
One of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, was once quoted as saying: “If there’s a problem you want to solve, start a magazine.”[1] His words were taken to heart by the most recent generation of neoconservative leaders—including his son, William, who founded the Weekly Standard. The strategy was simple: With the right audience of elites, and a targeted message that captures their imagination, the limits of what you can do are nearly boundless. “With a circulation of a few hundred,” the elder Kristol once remarked, “you could change the world.”[2]
The embodiment of this neoconservative modus operandi, however, has not been small-circulation magazines, but the proliferation of so-called “letterhead organizations”—committees of eminent persons who, though they never actually meet to discuss issues, sign their names to letters addressed to the powers that be, often sitting U.S. presidents. That such letters could make splashes in the elite media is a reflection of the way neoconservatives have embedded themselves in the Washington establishment—their opinions mattered and, most importantly, sometimes ended up becoming policy.
Indeed, one of the best-known neocon letterhead groups, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), led by Bill Kristol, helped launch the campaign for militarily removing Saddam Hussein from power with a 1998 letter to then-President Bill Clinton. The letter garnered only 18 signatories,[3] but within five years, and under a new president, it had achieved its goal.
But neoconservatives’ methodology in the new millennium has undergone a transformation. As much of their rhetoric has been discounted or rejected—including touting the Iraq War as a success; defending a territorially-maximalist Israel; and lobbying for a strike on Iran—neoconservatives are broadening the movement’s horizons. They seem determined to expand beyond a strictly elite audience and appeal directly to the masses. The magazines with a circulation of a few hundred have given way to appearances on Fox News, CNN, newspaper editorial pages, and, most recently, the internet. The new neocon mantra might be: “If there is a problem you want to solve, start a YouTube channel.”
The new expansion of neoconservatives’ messaging reflects shifts in both the personnel and personalities of neocon groups and publications—younger neocons tend to be bloggers or public relations specialists, not intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals)—as well as the changing landscape of U.S. political support for policies that neocons espouse, most notably, a far-right Likudnik take on Israel and its relationship to the United States.
Support for right-wing Israeli policies is slipping from its demographic foundation, the otherwise-liberal American Jewish Zionists. This development was highlighted by Peter Beinart in a June 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” The provocatively titled article questioned whether unstinting support for figures like Israel’s über-nationalist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman turn off rank-and-file liberal American Jews from the Zionist project and, therefore, Israel.[4]
The trend appears to be especially prevalent among young American Jews[5]—a point that surely has set off alarms in the “Israel Lobby” as attendees at conferences grow grayer year after year. As a result, neocons and other Likudniks in the United States are increasingly turning to those who will uncritically support their policies. Disdain for Palestinian aspirations (and, apparently, Muslims in general) coupled with the aging of the old guard has spurred neocons to turn to the country’s ever-swelling ranks of Christian Zionists, who represent tens of millions of voters.[6]
The Emergency Committee
This past July, Bill Kristol, Christian Zionist heavyweight Gary Bauer, a handful of right-wing luminaries and up-and-comers formed the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI).[7] Rather than drafting letters in policy-speak to advocate directly to the president (as Kristol had done with PNAC), ECI produces ad campaigns in local congressional races, publishing fear-mongering adverts on YouTube and local TV slots, which are quickly disseminated through right-wing channels. But like their predecessors, these new groups have little or no grassroots support—meaningful participation is limited to board members, a few advisers, and staff—qualifying them as archetypal astroturf organizations.
ECI launched with a 30-second television commercial targeting Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), a Senate candidate, for being insufficiently pro-Israel. The commercial—which began to air on July 13 in the Philadelphia area on CNN, FOX, and during two baseball games[8]—claimed that Sestak helped fundraise for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a charge he has denied,[9] and signed a letter accusing Israel of participating in “collective punishment” in its blockade of Gaza.
Ironically, Sestak is far from being anti-Israel. He has described Israel as a “vital ally of the U.S.” on many occasions. Katharine Seelye pointed out in the New York Times that the ECI spot was misleading and factually inaccurate. Sestak never fundraised for CAIR. Further, the congressional letter mentioned was signed by numerous liberal pro-Israel groups and did not call the Gaza blockade “collective punishment.” Rather it said that humanitarian concerns “must be addressed without resulting in the de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.”[10] Seelye also pointed out that, “in fact, Mr. Sestak supported the blockade.”[11]
It seems that ECI was attacking Sestak for being too supportive of the Barack Obama administration’s Middle East policy and for receiving campaign contributions from a progressive Zionist group—the self-proclaimed “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” organization J Street PAC. Indeed, the attacks were so aggressive and baseless that many observers questioned whether the commercial was even targeted at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.
“The target audience is not really Jewish voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs—they tend to be a reliable Democratic constituency and an important source of campaign donations. Rather, the ad is aimed more at mobilizing the right and evangelicals in support of Mr. Sestak’s Republican opponent, former Representative Pat Toomey,” wrote Seelye.[12]
The cyber battle ground
The television ads certainly played a role in calling attention to ECI and its attack on Sestak. But the ad’s launch on YouTube, on the same day that ECI’s website went live and their doors opened for business, also says a lot about how neoconservative letterhead organizations operate in the age of the internet.
Sestak unsuccessfully tried to keep the ad off television because of its errors and exaggerations.[13] But once these genies are out of the bottle on the internet, their momentum is difficult to undo. Some news organizations reported ECI’s claim about the congressional letter as fact. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, for example, described the letter Sestak had signed as “calling the Jewish state’s maritime blockade ‘collective punishment’.”[14]
The cyber battle ground has been a major recent focus of neocons and other groups affiliated with the Israel Lobby, possibly because of the gains of J Street, which promotes more robust U.S. pressure in the peace process. J Street has a strong presence on the internet, with a sleek website that seems aimed at young American Jews disillusioned with the rightward stance of many of the groups that comprise the lobby. Indeed, all the candidates attacked by ECI have either been endorsed by J Street’s political action committee or signed letters along with J Street. Kristol even took a thinly veiled swipe at J Street when discussing the launch of ECI with Politico’s Ben Smith, describing his new group as “the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community,”[15] a play on J Street’s “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” slogan.
By premiering its commercials on YouTube, ECI enables right-wing blogs and mainstream news outlets to embed the short clip on their websites and discuss the emergence of the new group and its mission to attack insufficiently pro-Israel candidates. In a very noticeable trend, ECI’s videos—there have been four to date, attacking Sestak, Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, Virginia Rep. Glenn Nye, and, most recently, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes—have all been publicly announced and received early promotion on the blog of the Weekly Standard.
Tactical shift
With their long track record of elite-focused organizing—a trend dating back to the 1970s-era Committee on the Present Danger—the neoconservatives’ shift to more tech-savvy public relations campaigns seems to be a calculated decision. Nowhere has this new approach been more evident than in Kristol and Bauer’s decision to select an up-and-coming neoconservative, Noah Pollak, to be the group’s executive director.
Pollak was a surprising choice given that former political appointees or other high profile individuals with established credentials and connections to policymakers have headed up other recent neoconservative letterhead groups, such as the Foreign Policy Initiative or PNAC. Pollak represented a sharp change in direction: Rather than being an intellectual or eminent D.C. character making a foray into journalism and advocacy, Pollack is a journalist-turned-activist who has no intellectual or high-profile government accomplishments to speak of.
Other neocons seemed to appreciate the shift: Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said, of ECI, that “the real news is the group’s director: Noah Pollak, a friend of mine, and a brilliant advocate for rethinking Israel’s self-defense in a new media era.” It’s notable that Frum did not tout any book by Pollak (he has none, while many of his elder ideological comrades are prolific authors) or even any grand strategic idea beyond a public relations scheme based on updating nineteenth century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s clichéd assertion that war is “political relations… by other means.” Frum cited Pollak’s contribution to the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) effort in Gaza in the winter of 2008 and 2009, crediting Pollack with the initial idea behind the IDF YouTube channel.[16] The channel was a vital tool for Israeli public diplomacy after the May 2010 Israeli naval raid on the Mavi Marmara.
After graduating from the University of Vermont in 2003, Pollak launched a career working for numerous neoconservative publications, including Azure, an Israeli magazine published by the Likudist Shalem Center (which also launched a think tank funded by rightwing billionaire Sheldon Adelson); Commentary, a flagship of the neocon movement where Pollak wrote both for the print edition and the “Contentions” blog; and Middle East Quarterly, the journal of Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, where Pollak was an assistant editor.
Pollak’s resume hints at another characteristic of these cyber-savvy versions of letterhead organizations: Their staffs are not much different from their earlier incarnations. Indeed, as Frum says, the significant point is not that Kristol and Bauer hired Pollak, who is obviously a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative, but that they made him director of the group. Neoconservatives are relatively few in numbers, so the pool of potential employees was never large—it’s Pollak’s position that’s news. In an earlier era, the blogger among the book authors would have a less celebrated position in the letterhead group—former Weekly Standard blogger and online editor Michael Goldfarb was a mere research assistant during his early-career stint with PNAC.
These days, as a senior vice president of Orion Strategies, Goldfarb is advising ECI as well as other new-school letterhead groups, such as the Kristol-Liz Cheney founded Keep America Safe. Like ECI, Keep America Safe makes short internet videos and television commercials attacking Obama’s policies in the Middle East and in the so-called “war on terror,” drawing on familiar supporters like Mel Sembler, a Republican party donor and financial benefactor of the American Enterprise Institute and the Adelson-funded Freedom’s Watch.
But the web of neoconservative connections at ECI doesn’t stop there: in addition to Bauer and Kristol, the third member of the group’s board is Rachel Abrams[17], daughter of Midge Decter, step-daughter of neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz (therefore step-brother of Commentary editor John Podhoretz), and wife of arch-neoconservative hardliner and former George W. Bush administration official Elliott Abrams.
Also, ECI initially shared a physical office address (918 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003) with a letterhead organization that played a key role promoting the invasion of Iraq, the Committee to Liberate Iraq (CLI).[18] In an e-mail exchange with Salon’s Justin Elliot, Goldfarb dismissed the shared address: “I’m on the record as an adviser to ECI and its no secret that I work at Orion, where the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq sign is still proudly displayed on the front of the building.”
But the revelation does demonstrate, as Elliot pointed out, “just how small a world the still-influential neocon foreign policy community occupies.”[19] Goldfarb’s employer Orion, for instance, is the lobbying outfit of Randy Scheunemann, a top foreign policy adviser to Bob Dole’s and both of John McCain’s presidential runs, and the former director of both PNAC and CLI.
Letterhead proliferation
Gary Bauer is a perennial link between neocons and the Christian right: Bauer was a founding member of PNAC and sits on the boards of Cliff May’s Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Christians United for Israel. The onetime religious right presidential hopeful and his family even take an annual beach vacation with Bill Kristol’s family. (At a Christians United for Israel confab, Kristol once jokingly refused to comment on whether Bauer removed his trademark dark business-suit to go into the ocean.[20])
Most recently, Bauer launched his own letterhead/attack-ad organization, Keep Israel Safe, with Weekly Standard contributing editor Tom Rose. They modeled the group on Cheney’s Keep America Safe (right down to the name) and, as one might expect, the Weekly Standard was instrumental in the group’s launch, getting an exclusive by “obtain[ing] an advance copy” of the first attack ad on Obama even before the group’s website was up.[21]
Keep Israel Safe has since released two more videos distorting Obama’s record and condemning his approach to Middle East peace.[22] Keep Israel Safe’s namesake—Cheney’s Keep America Safe—also focuses on internet videos, creating four original videos since its launch last year.[23] 2009 tax filings from Keep America Safe reveal just how cheap it is to produce these internet videos: while the group raised nearly half a million dollars and spent only a quarter of that, the four videos cost only $12,154 to produce – that’s just over $3,000 per video.
No wonder, then, with the price tag of these videos so low and distribution costs at zero, that the YouTube advertisement has proliferated among advocates of hardline militarist policies.
Another group that has produced a short internet video is Stop Iran Now, which focuses less on Israel and more on the other neocon obsession du jour—promoting the idea of a military attack on Iran.[24] Naturally, this ad, too, was run on the Weekly Standard’s blog.[25] Like Keep Israel Safe, Stop Iran Now’s website is only a video portal and a space to sign a petition against Obama.
ECI also seems to be keeping costs low while producing lots of videos. The three videos targeted at House races all follow the same template and, indeed, run through the same introductions. The voice-overs are amended to mention the specific member of Congress, and that member’s signature is highlighted on a copy of the “collective punishment” letter, then a picture of the specific member pops up on screen just before the end of the spot. The cost of editing these videos to fit the different races is likely minuscule. (Because the group is so new, tax filings for ECI are not yet available.)
As Salon’s Elliot noted, making internet videos updates perfectly the old model of letterhead organizations with a “low-budget, high-impact model that was used so successfully by the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. It’s a model that involves a very small staff and physical footprint coupled with the ability to get lots of free coverage from a hungry political media.”[26] Indeed, whenever a member of one of the groups behind the videos shows up on a cable news show, the short clips tend to be aired in full.[27]
Desperate times?
The zeal with which the right-wing promotes the videos may point to growing desperation. While neoconservatives have made gains—for instance, in their campaign for escalating measures against Iran—the operative consensus in Washington seems to be that Obama is not yet ready to carry out the hawks’ ultimate goal of bombing the Islamic Republic.[28]
Their efforts to keep the U.S. public uncritically supportive of Israel is in even more dire straights. Beinart’s article is emblematic of a rising consciousness about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. While the Weekly Standard predictably takes a hard line, a growing number of outlets and blogs have arrived at more nuanced editorial positions about the transgressions of the Jewish State.
Take Andrew Sullivan who, like Beinart, is a one-time editor of the New Republic, a liberal magazine with a neoconservative foreign policy. Sullivan’s popular Daily Dish blog now routinely runs items critical of Israel’s expansionist streak (a prominent feature of the Likud party),[29] policies in the Occupied Territories,[30] and—most notably—Israeli intransigence in the peace process[31] (not to mention neoconservative promotion and complicity in these[32] and other hardline notions[33]).
Even the New York Times, which since the early 1970s has espoused what many critics charge is an Israel-centric bias, runs items critical of Israel both occasionally in the newspaper and more regularly on its blogs, such as Robert Mackey’s the Lede blog.[34]
Recent shifts in both public discourse and the political leanings of the country have made positions taken by neoconservatives increasingly untenable. The invasion of Iraq has become something of an albatross around the necks of those who lobbied for it, and the failure to find the promised weapons of mass destruction has seriously tainted those hawks who promised that Saddam Hussein was developing stockpiles of chemical, biological, and possible nuclear weapons. The neocons, while retaining their perches in the media and some think tanks, are largely discredited—especially given the current occupant of the White House.
The Obama challenge
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 has left the neoconservative community in Washington increasingly isolated from policy elites. Obama’s stated willingness to meet with leaders like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,[35] his emphasis on repairing the U.S. image in the Middle East, and his preferences for dialogue over bombastic rhetoric have put neocons and their allies on the defensive. Where Democrats are concerned, Bill Clinton’s liberal interventionist foreign policy was more susceptible to the overtures of moralistic pleas from neocons than is Obama’s calculating realist-heavy approach.
Thus, it was logical that neoconservative activists would turn to a populist strategy of engaging congressional races, promoting “security” issues in local political campaigns, and reaffirming their movement’s ties with the Christian right—a far larger voting bloc than the Jewish, right-wing pro-Israel constituency. But while the lowering costs of technology have given Bill Kristol, Gary Bauer, Liz Cheney, and their fellow travelers an ability to speak directly to the U.S. public, serious questions should be asked about how successful their movement can be as they shift from elite-centered advocacy to populist messaging focused on Christian Zionists and the Tea Party Movement—a movement which Bill Kristol has suggested is comprised of the “pro-American wing” of the U.S. public.[36] While neoconservative influence on the young Tea Party movement is up for debate, it’s clear that the new outraged populists do owe something to neocons—it was Kristol, after all, who discovered Tea Party darling Sarah Palin during a Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise in 2007.[37]
But perhaps more telling are the sagging public approval numbers for the ongoing war in Afghanistan. According to a recent Gallup/USA Today poll, 43 percent of respondents thought it was a mistake to go to war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.[38] This marks a dramatic drop from the 93 percent of Americans who supported U.S. military action in Afghanistan in November 2001.[39] The public’s taste for war and a militarized foreign policy is quickly fading.
War fatigue, the changing demographics of the Israel Lobby, and new political realities in the United States are forcing hawks to reinvent their advocacy methods. The movement has fallen far, but with allies on the populist fringe of U.S. politics, the neoconservatives seem to have found fertile ground for their fear-mongering messages, which could have profound repercussions in the months and years to come.
While the switch from elites to grassroots represents a sort of demotion for those men and women who used to have the ears of diplomats, presidents, and cabinet members, they are nonetheless achieving a level of recognition and acceptance in the mainstream which the elder generation—not the least of them Irving Kristol—would have found hard to imagine.
To see William Kristol make his weekly appearances on Fox News or Noah Pollak head up the ECI’s ad campaign in congressional races, it’s hard to miss the obvious irony. While suffering losses in their influence over policy elites in Washington, the neoconservatives have become an ingrained and accepted component of the American right-wing. And while Clinton was easier to pressure, it took the unstinting support of President Bush for the neoconservatives to see their goals in Iraq fulfilled. In the post-Obama era, which may arrive sooner than many expect, it is frightening to contemplate what sort of policies the next president—propped up by Christian Zionist zealots—will pursue vis-à-vis the United States’ engagement with the world.
Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton are independent journalists who write for the Inter Press Service blog Lobelog (http://www.lobelog.com/) and are contributors to Right Web (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/).
[1] Chester E. Finn Jr., “Remembering Irving Kristol,” Education Next, September 21, 2009, http://educationnext.org/remembering-irving-kristol/
[2] Barry Gewen, “Irving Kristol, Godfather of Modern Consveratism, Dies at 89,” The New York Times, September 18, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/us/politics/19kristol.html
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20070810113947/www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
[4] Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/
[5] Alex Magnet, “Support of Israel Declining Among Young Jewish Americans, Poll Says,” The New York Sun, December 2, 2005, http://www.nysun.com/national/support-of-israel-declining-among-young-jewish/23870/
[6] Ron Kampeas, “Religious Passion Combines with Politics at CUFI Parley,” The Jewish Telegraph Agency, July 25, 2010, http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/07/25/2740190/religious-passion-combines-with-politics-at-cufi-parley
[7] Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib, “Familiar Neocons and Christian Zionist Head up New Emergency Committee for Israeli”,” LobeLog,July 13, 2010 http://www.lobelog.com/familiar-neocons-and-christian-zionist-head-up-new-emergency-committee-for-israel/
[8] Katharine Q. Seelye, “A Punch and a Counterpunch in Pennsylvania Senate Race, The New York Times, July 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/us/politics/21adbox.html
[9] Greg Sargent, “War Escalates Between Joe Sestak and Right-Wing Pro-Israel Group,” The Washington Post, July 19, 2010 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/07/war_escalates_between_right-wi.html
[10] Nathan Guttman, “Congressional Letter to End Gaza Blockade Splits Activists,” The Forward, February 3, 2010, http://www.forward.com/articles/124917/
[11] Katharine Q. Seelye, “A Punch and a Counterpunch in Pennsylvania Senate Race, The New York Times, July 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/us/politics/21adbox.html
[12] Katharine Q. Seelye, “A Punch and a Counterpunch in Pennsylvania Senate Race, The New York Times, July 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/us/politics/21adbox.html
[13] Ben Smith, “Lawyer: Sestak ‘Willing to Put His Life on the Line to Defend Israel’,” Politico, July 15, 2010, http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0710/Lawyer_Sestak_put_his_life_on_the_line_to_defend_Israel.html
[14] Ron Kampeas, “Pa. Senate Race Turning into Israel Proxy Fight,” The Jewish Telegraph Service, July 20, 2010, http://jta.org/news/article/2010/07/20/2740128/pa-senate-race-seen-as-national-test-for-j-street
[15] Ben Smith, “Group to Oppose President Obama’s Mideast Policy,” Politico, July 12, 2010, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39613.html
[16] David Frum, “Emergency Committee for Israel,” The Daily Dish, July 13, 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/07/emergency-committee-for-israel.html
[17] Eli Clifton and Ali Gharib, “Familiar Neocons and Christian Zionist Head up New “Emergency Committee for Israel”,” LobeLog, July 13th, 2010, http://www.lobelog.com/familiar-neocons-and-christian-zionist-head-up-new-emergency-committee-for-israel/
[18] Eli Clifton and Jim Lobe, “Emergency Committee Based at Old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” Lobelog, July 15th, 2010, http://www.lobelog.com/emergency-committee-based-at-old-committee-for-the-liberation-of-iraq/
[19] Justin Elliot, “Bill Kristol’s New Israel Group Using Officees of Old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” The War Room, July 16, 2010, http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/16/liberation_of_iraq_and_committee_for_israel/index.html
[20] Ali Gharib, “Going Undercover at Mad Pastor Hagee’s Christians United for Israel Summit,” AlterNet, July 26, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/rights/92860/going_undercover_at_mad_pastor_hagee%27s_christians_united_for_israel_summit/
[21] John McCormack, “New Group, Keep Israel Safe, Launches with Hard-Hitting Ad,” The Weekly Standard, April 29, 2010, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/exclusive-keep-israel-safe-launch-hard-hitting-ad
[22] Keep Israel Safe, Accessed: August 14, 2010, http://www.keepisraelsafe.com/
[23] “Video Archive”, Keep Israel Safe, Accessed: August 14, 2010, http://www.keepamericasafe.com/?page_id=1347
[24] Stop Iran Now, Accessed: August 14, 2010, http://www.stopirannow.com/
[25] Daniel Halper, “Stop Iran Now Debuts New Ad,” The Weekly Standard, July 6, 2010, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/stop-iran-now-debuts-new-ad
[26] Justin Elliot, “Bill Kristol’s New Israel Group Using Offices of Old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” War Room, July 16, 2010, http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/07/16/liberation_of_iraq_and_committee_for_israel/index.html
[27] MSNBC, “Morning Joe”, July 13, 2010, as posted to YouTube by the Emergency Committee for Israel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIv_wfGyD4w
[28] Steve Clemons, “Stop Hyperventilating: Obama Will Not Choose War with Iran,” The Huffington Post, July 23, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/stop-hyperventilating-oba_b_657096.html
[29] Andrew Sullivan, “Did Netanyahu Know?” The Daily Dish, March 11, 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/03/did-netanyahu-know.html#more
[30] Andrew Sullivan, “Israel’s Long Campaign to Punish Gazans,” The Daily Dish, June 25, 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/gazas-economy.html
[31] Andrew Sullivan, “Petraeus on Israel,” The Daily Dish, March 14, 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/03/petraeus-vs-netanyahu.html
[32] Andrew Sullivan, “The Real Neocon Line: Disproportion as Policy,” The Daily Dish, June 1, 2010, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/the-real-neocon-line-disproportion-as-policy.html
{33] Andrew Sullivan, “Neocons for Ahmadinejad,” The Daily Dish, June 17, 2009, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/neocons-for-ahmadinejad.html
[34] Alex Kane, “These ‘Times’ Demand Robert Mackey,” Mondoweiss, June 11, 2010, http://mondoweiss.net/2010/06/these-times-demand-robert-mackey.html
[35] Caren Bohan, “Obama Qualifies Position on Talking to Enemies,” Reuters, May 27, 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2635405920080527
[36] William Kristol, “Collapse: The Left is Unpopular, Undisciplined, and Ill-Tempered,” The Weekly Standard, August 23, 2010, http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/collapse
[37] Jane Mayer, “The Insiders: How John McCain Came to Pick Sarah Palin,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/27/081027fa_fact_mayer
[38] Richard Wolf, “Poll: Waning Support for Obama on Wars,” USA Today, August 3, 2010, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-08-02-afghan-poll_N.htm
[39] “America and the War on Terrorism,” p. 57, The American Enterprise Institute, July 24, 2008, http://www.aei.org/docLib/20050805_terror0805.pdf
Zionist False Flag Terror and Deceptions
Timeline
1946: July 22. Menachem Begin’s Irgun Jewish terrorists dress as Arabs and bomb the King David Hotel, killing 92 people. The Irgun also plot to assassinate British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin; fortunately, this conspiracy is foiled by MI6.
1948: May 14. David Ben-Gurion declares the independence of the new Zionist State of Israel, born from deception and from the blood of victims of Jewish terrorism hours before the British Mandate is due to expire. It takes effect at midnight, Tel Aviv time. May 15. Eleven minutes after midnight, U.S. President Harry Truman officially recognises the proclaimed Jewish state in Palestine.
1954: July. An Israeli spy ring is arrested in Egypt. These Israeli secret service agents have been assigned to attack U.S. and British interests in Egypt. “Operation Susannah” is a typical example of false-flag terrorism in which the perpetrators pin the blame on another party – in this case, Egypt and “the Arabs” – for political gain. The operation is unsuccessful, the Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon is forced to resign as a result of the scandal, and the incident becomes known as the Lavon Affair.
1967: June 8. Israel carries out a sustained air and naval attack on the USS Liberty for over an hour, employing torpedoes, machine guns and napalm rockets, even to the extent of machine-gunning lifeboats launched to save the most seriously wounded. 34 men are killed and more than 170 wounded.
1987: Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, is convicted of spying for Israel. It is not the only case.
1991: Israeli security officials inspect the garage of Zim American Israeli Shipping in the WTC, and conclude that the WTC garage is vulnerable to a car bomb.
1993: February 26. The WTC garage is hit by a car bomb. The FBI has been aware of the plot via their informant Emad Salem yet let it go ahead, killing six and injuring more than a thousand in the resulting fires after a plan to substitute harmless powder for the explosives was called off by an FBI supervisor. According to Israeli intelligence sources, Ahmad Ajaj, involved in the early stages of the plot, was a Mossad mole. There now exists a pretext for subsequent “fireproofing upgrades”.
1995: Benjamin Netanyahu, former unit team leader in the IDF’s elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal and future Israeli Premier (1996-9 and 2009-), writes about “militant Islam” bringing down the World Trade Center. Benjamin’s father Benzion was secretary and pallbearer to Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky who founded the Revisionist Zionist Alliance, a militant faction within Zionism. Benzion Netanyahu’s mentor was Abba Ahimeir, Jabotinsky’s lieutenant, who wrote a column in the Revisionist Zionist magazine Doar Hayom. Under the title “From the Notebook of a Fascist”, Ahimeir would praise Mussolini and refer to Jabotinsky as “our Duce”, and said that Hitler is on the right track but for his “excessive anti-Semitism”. The Irgun Zvai Leumi was one of several Jewish terrorist organizations inspired by Jabotinsky’s movement. Menachem Begin was, like Benzion Netanyahu, another close disciple of Jabotinsky. Begin was the final commander of the Irgun in 1946 when its Jewish terrorists dressed as Arabs and blew up the King David Hotel.
1996: After Netanyahu is “unexpectedly” elected Israeli Prime Minister in the wake of a wave of so-called “suicide bombings”, the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies publishes a paper for him entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
1997: September 24/25. Members of the Mossad’s Kidon (bayonet) unit arrive in Jordan. Two of them travelling with fake Canadian passports have been assigned to execute Hamas leader Khaled Mashal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chaired the Israeli “Committee X” that decided on the assassination. As in Operation Susannah, the plan goes badly wrong. The attempt to poison Mashal with nerve gas is interrupted before he is killed outright, the two Mossad assassins are arrested, and four of their teammates end up trapped in the Israeli Embassy in Amman. Israel has to bargain for their release by providing an antidote to save Mashal and by freeing another Hamas leader and other prisoners. Netanyahu only agrees to provide the antidote after pressure from Bill Clinton. Efraim Halevy is sent in to defuse the situation and get the Israelis out. For his handling of the affair, Halevy is awarded the job of Director of the Mossad.
1998: January 17. News breaks via the Drudge Report of a sexual relationship between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, who is of Russian Jewish descent. Clinton would have been vulnerable to blackmail by, for example, a “foreign embassy” that was tapping his telephones. January 20. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is in a weak position domestically but who has a few more aces up his sleeve, arrives in Washington for talks with Bill Clinton. November / December. Philip Zelikow, a Jewish American writer and historian, co-authors an article which describes a “transforming event” rather like “Pearl Harbor”, which would “divide our past and future into a before and after”. In another few years, Zelikow will be the executive director of the “9/11 Commission”.
1999: May 28. The website domain emperors-clothes.com is created by Jared Israel. September 16. Jared Israel posts a fairly lengthy article at the Emperor’s Clothes website, taking a position that is critical of the U.S. government and of the New York Times‘ bias towards U.S. government policy. The article Credible Deceptions has no less than 35 references to “bin Laden”, and is rightly skeptical of the notion that “CIA employees” Osama bin Laden et al would have suddenly transformed from employee to enemy. Israel suggests that bin Laden is “an enemy in fiction”. Credible Deceptions is said to have been written as early as August 28, 1998, revised September 16, 1999, and reposted February 18, 2001. October 31. Rabbi Dov Zakheim is CEO of SPC International – a world leader in aircraft remote control technology incorporating a “Flight Termination System” capable of simultaneously taking over a number of in-flight aircraft and issuing commands via a “Command Transmitter System“. EgyptAir Flight 990 (a Boeing 767) plunges into the Atlantic, killing all 217 on board including 33 Egyptian army officers. No mechanical cause for the crash is ever found, and it is blamed on a “suicidal Muslim” co-pilot, a claim that is publicised by the New York Times, which has been under Jewish ownership since 1896. A few weeks later, bioterrorism “expert” Jerome Hauer announces he will step down from his position as Director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management early in 2000, having successfully conducted an emergency operation from the OEM, based on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building Seven (WTC7), in response to the outbreak of West Nile Fever in the city which occurred the year after he persuaded Mayor Giuliani to develop a vaccine against it. As of 1999 – 2000, the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, MD (NSWC-IH), is the “only reliable source of aluminum nanopowders in the United States“.
2000: January. More than a hundred Israelis pose as “art students” (January 2000 – September 2001) and attempt to penetrate U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) offices and other federal buildings including 36 sensitive Department of Defense (DoD) sites. September. Rabbi Zakheim of SPC is amongst the signatories to Rebuilding America’s Defenses, a report published by The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which wrote of the advantages of a “new Pearl Harbor“.
2001: Fireproofing “upgrades” are being carried out at the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, as also occurred over several years pre-2001. The contract holder is Turner Construction, whose CEO is Tom Leppert. WTC tenants have been completing various modifications throughout the leased spaces. January 20. George W. Bush is sworn in as president, and says, “We will confront weapons of mass destruction…”. A clique of warmongers with strong attachments to Israel and PNAC are to achieve power in the Bush administration. February 15. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV network broadcasts a documentary entitled “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” This weak conspiracy theory has plenty of evidence against it, and very little to support it. The broadcast would help to deflect attention from any actual major criminal conspiracy that might be imminent, by branding those who exposed the crime as “conspiracy theorists” – particularly if someone were to conflate the “Apollo hoax” theory with the real conspiracy. March 4. Fox TV, owned by Rupert Murdoch, a long-time friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, broadcasts the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen TV series, an episode about a plot by a secret cabal within the U.S. government to electronically hijack by remote control a Boeing heading for Boston and divert it to crash into the World Trade Center. The broadcast would help to deflect attention from any imminent false-flag attack by Israel by: (i) Diverting suspicion to the Bush administration. (ii) Reinforcing the concept of an attack based on remote-controlled planes as “fiction” or “conspiracy theory”. March 19. Fox TV rebroadcasts its “Moon hoax” conspiracy theory. April. Real estate developer Larry A. Silverstein is still in the running as one of three bidders for the 99-year lease on the World Trade Center, after having been viewed as a “dark horse” who was unlikely to win the deal. However, Port Authority chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg is in charge of negotiations. Eisenberg was a partner of Goldman Sachs for many years, and is on the planning Board of the UJA / United Jewish Federation “charity”. Silverstein served as Chairman of the Board of the United Jewish Appeal. July. Six weeks before the WTC is destroyed in terror attacks involving Boeings that, evidence suggests, are electronically hijacked by remote control, Benjamin Netanyahu’s friend Larry Silverstein, in partnership with billionaire Australian Frank Lowy who fought “in the Jewish underground”, takes control of the WTC lease, and insures the buildings against terror attacks for billions of dollars, with a clause stating that in the event of a terrorist attack, the partners could not only collect the insured value of the property, but would also be released from all of their obligations under the 99-year lease. August 26. New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik leaves for a four-day trip to Israel, where he is to meet government officials to discuss terrorism. The trip has been approved by Mayor Giuliani, with New York taxpayers picking up the tab. August 29. In Jerusalem, Bernard Kerik assures Israeli leaders that the NYPD is “on top of” all potential terrorist threats. See September 16, 2001 and November 8, 2007 for more on Kerik. September 4. The Zim-American Israeli Shipping Co. moves out of the WTC, transferring their HQ to Norfolk, Virginia. September 6. In the U.S. stock options market, an extraordinary proportion of trades are betting that the United Airlines price will fall. The put / call ratio is 25, i.e., “puts” are about 96.154 percent of the volume, and “calls” only 3.846 percent, as opposed to a typical 50:50 ratio. September 10. The Washington Times publishes details of a study by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), which has this to say of Israel’s Mossad: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.” San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown is warned not to fly the next day. An internal memo is sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack against American buildings. Goldman Sachs is a Jewish investment banking firm, with headquarters in Lower Manhattan close to the World Trade Center. In the U.S. stock options market, an extraordinary proportion of trades are betting that the American Airlines stock price will fall. The proportion of “put” options, at more than 80 percent, (85.79 percent at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, according to this source) far exceeds the proportion of “call” options. September 11. Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudy Giuliani are in New York. Odigo, an Israeli instant messaging company with offices in Herzliya, Israel, provides two hours’ advance warning of an attack on the World Trade Center. At 9:00 a.m., officials at the National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, VA, start to run an exercise involving a plane crashing into a tower. Another drill is scheduled at the 97th floor of the WTC South Tower where Fiduciary Trust has offices, and numerous other war games and exercises distract NORAD so that any truly hijacked (electronically or otherwise) planes cannot be intercepted in time. A group of Israelis, some of whom are Mossad agents, park their van and set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers. Uncharacteristically, Larry Silverstein does not breakfast at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower that day since he has a “dermatologist’s appointment”, and another consequence is that his two children, who work at Silverstein Properties, are running late. Silverstein’s lucky streak is compounded when each Tower of the WTC complex – which he insured for $billions against terror attacks a mere six weeks ago – is struck by an aircraft in synchronized terror attacks. A group of Israelis dance and celebrate with high fives and cries of joy and mockery, even prior to the second impact as most onlookers still believe it has been a terrible accident rather than terrorism. George W. Bush is informed by Andrew Card that a second plane has hit the WTC, and continues to read a story about a pet goat to schoolchildren as if nothing has happened. Each Tower completely collapses, mostly into its footprint. There is a remarkable correlation between the impact floors of each Tower that supposedly failed due to “fires”, and those floors that had received fireproofing “upgrades”, particularly in the case of the North Tower (WTC1). The steel was certified to ASTM E119 by Universal Laboratories. In subsequent tests to be sponsored by NIST on corresponding floor assemblies subjected to greater heat exposure and protected with less fireproofing than at the WTC on 9/11, it will be found that the test specimens “were able to sustain the maximum design load” without collapsing for as long as the tests were run: 2 to 3 1/2 hours). Within hours, Jerome Hauer goes on TV to tell everyone that “It… certainly has the fingerprints of somebody like bin Laden”, and that the World Trade Center collapsed because of “the velocity of the plane” and “intense heat probably weakened the structure as well”. Hauer reportedly advises the White House to start taking Cipro, an effective antibiotic against anthrax. Five Israelis are arrested that afternoon after tie-ins to the 9/11 attacks are found in their van, such as maps of the city with certain places highlighted. Bomb-sniffing dogs react as if the van has traces of explosives. Another team is caught attempting to blow up the George Washington Bridge with a truck packed with tons of explosives. A “panel truck with a painting of a plane flying into the World Trade Center” is stopped, and found to contain yet another team of “ethnic Middle Eastern people” – i.e., Israelis. There is evidence to suggest that this van exploded. Bush is whisked away to the United States Strategic Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, where Warren Buffett is hosting his annual golf charity event. Ann Tatlock, the CEO of Fiduciary Trust Co. International, having been invited to this charity event, is, like the Silversteins, spared a fiery fate as a plane smashes into her company’s offices right where 650 of her employees work, killing 87 of them. Building 7, which was never struck by a plane, completely collapses into its footprint despite the fact that any structural damage or weakening from fires would have been asymmetric. The initial WTC7 collapse is very close to free-fall speed. There are many, many more “coincidences and oddities“.
Running in parallel with the above timeline going up to the WTC demolitions is another, shorter timeline relating to the Pentagon attack:
2000: March 3. It is reported that the Pentagon’s finances are “in disarray”, and that in 1999 the Defense Department’s accountants had to make almost $7 trillion in “adjustments” to try to reconcile bookkeeping discrepancies. They cannot show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those corrections. There are hundreds of computer systems running various military accounts, but these are not integrated, and the financial records are not up to accounting standards or capable of even facing an audit. It follows that the Pentagon would be vulnerable to a “terror attack” that destroyed the relevant computers and documents, also killing dozens of accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts. A percentage of $2.3 trillion is still an inordinate amount of cash, and if a proportion went missing, the Pentagon Comptroller would be able to say, “We tried our best, but sadly, due to the terror attacks, we will never know exactly how much money is missing – or where it went”.
2001: February. George W. Bush nominates Rabbi Zakheim to serve as Comptroller at the Pentagon and Under Secretary of Defense. May 4. Dov Zakheim is sworn in as Pentagon Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Defense. May 31. Thomas E. White – who went on JINSA trips to Israel and who as former CEO at Enron is linked to the massive fraud there – is sworn in as Secretary of the Army, thirty days after being nominated by George W. Bush. September 10. A group of top Pentagon officials are warned not to fly the next day. Donald Rumsfeld confirms that $2.3 trillion of transactions cannot be accounted for. September 11. Thomas White, Paul Wolfowitz, Randy “Duke” Cunningham and others are at a breakfast meeting with Donald Rumsfeld, in which the latter predicts that some kind of “shocking” world event will occur in the near future. The meeting is about to break up as the first plane slams into the North Tower. As the alleged Flight 77 is ten miles out from the Pentagon, a young man asks Vice President Cheney, “Do the orders still stand?” Cheney turns and whips his neck around and replies, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” Since there are no shoot down orders in effect at 9:37:45 – the time of the Pentagon strike – or earlier, “the orders” seem to be stand down rather than shoot down. Thomas White is at the Army Navy Country Club when, as he says, “the plane that hit the Pentagon came right over the top of the Army Navy Club and bounced down the hill and hit the side of the Pentagon”. Steve Riskus allegedly sees a Boeing 757 featuring an “AA” logo with the eagle in the middle on the tail crash into the Pentagon after screaming overhead at 530 mph and knocking over a few light poles on the way. The domain criticalthrash.com subsequently carries Riskus’ photos and other reports consistent with an AA jetliner, although most of these witnesses are employed in defense or in the media. In the afternoon, Donald Rumsfeld says, “My interest is to hit Saddam Hussein“, and orders his aides to plan for striking Iraq.
Looking beyond 9/11/2001, events unfolded like this:
2001: September 12. U.S. officials say they have identified “all of the hijackers“, who very obligingly are found to have left numerous clues such as a copy of the Koran, a flight training video and a fuel consumption calculator in luggage that supposedly failed to make the connection to the alleged Flight AA11, and Arabic language flight training manuals in a rented white Mitsubishi Mirage found at Boston’s Logan airport late Tuesday the 11th. It is estimated that the conspiracy must have involved hundreds if not thousands, and, in an attempt to explain why Western intelligence was “oblivious” to the plot, it is suggested that Osama bin Laden planted agents inside the U.S. military and intelligence services. September 13. U.S. officials say they have identified “most of the hijackers“, believed to number eighteen. Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari, originally thought to be brothers, were suspected, but Adnan was found to be alive and living in Florida, and Ameer died in a small plane crash on September 11, 2000. Yet if those identities were stolen and were on the flight manifests, it would be remarkable if the authorities were able to trace the real identities of the individuals involved within, say, three days. For anyone in need of “Saudi suicide pilots” to frame as patsies, the deceased pilot Ameer Bukhari, a Saudi Arabian national of Vero Beach, Florida, would be an ideal choice provided they could keep the lid on the fact that he had died in the “wrong” year. It is reported that the Bukhari “brothers” rented a silver-blue Nissan Altima and drove from Boston to Portland, bizarrely only to fly back to Boston. Atta rented the Mitsubishi sedan found at Logan airport, and also had a red Pontiac registered in his name. There is a general ban on flights, which must be approved on a case-by-case basis. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the U.S., meets George W. Bush. The authorities give permission for a private jet to fly around the U.S. picking up members of the bin Laden family, which has business ties with the Bush family through the Carlyle Group. About 140 top Saudi officials are on the plane. The Emperor’s Clothes website runs a couple of articles skeptical of the official 9/11 story, including an interview between editor Jared Israel and Rudi Dekkers of Huffman Aviation. Don Radlauer, of the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya, Israel (and formerly – until 1997 – of Weybridge, Surrey, UK and of New York), publishes a report detailing the flight paths of the alleged four hijacked planes. The report attempts to lend credibility to the official story with suggestions that hijacking and steering the planes would be an easy task – even though a rather diminutive non-pilot was said to have wrestled control of Flight 77 from the tough, highly trained, weightlifting former Navy fighter pilot Charles Burlingame and steered a Boeing 757 to hit the Pentagon at 530 mph as its engines cleared the lawn by a couple of feet. Radlauer’s “take off” times correspond to the “pushed back from the gate” times, with Flight 93 for example being delayed for 41 minutes due to congestion. The 41-minute delay could explain why Flight 93 failed to hit its intended target, as the Air Force stand down could not be maintained indefinitely. September 14. U.S. officials say they have identified nineteen “hijackers“, with Hani Hanjour now included. Evidently the scriptwriters had pilots and Saudis available for the frame-up, but were short of credible “Saudi pilots”. Dominick Suter of “Urban Moving Systems Incorporated” or urban MOving SyStems incorporAteD, the Mossad front that the joking, celebrating, dancing Israelis ostensibly worked for, flees the U.S. for Israel. September 16. Osama bin Laden denies responsibility for the attacks, but according to Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, the passport of “hijacker” Satam al Suqami has been discovered several blocks from the WTC crash site. Kerik’s claim is not credible since, given the physical characteristics such as mass, cross-section and drag coefficient of a passport, even if it had survived the fireball, flying over rooftops for several blocks would be in contravention of the laws of aerodynamics. In another attempt, the passport is said to have been found “in the vicinity of Vesey Street”, to the north of the Twin Towers. Unfortunately, the scriptwriter forgot that Suqami was supposed to be on Flight 11, said to have approached from the north. The “Bukharis drove the rented Nissan Altima to Portland” story has evolved into “Mohamed Atta and Abdul Alomari drove the rented Nissan Altima to Portland”, which necessitated abandoning the previous claim of “Atta rented the Mitsubishi found at Logan” since that would make even less sense. However, the “Abdul Alomari hijacker” was originally Abdul Rahman Alomari, a pilot, friend and neighbor of Adnan Bukhari. When Alomari was found to be alive, as was Adnan Bukhari, the hijacker was said to be Abdulaziz Alomari. Problem is, he is alive too. And he’s a non-pilot. September 18. Terrorists launch an anthrax letters campaign targeting Democratic U.S. Senators and news media offices, seven days after the 9/11 attacks, and seven days after Jerome Hauer had advised the White House to begin taking Cipro. For an excellent timeline of the anthrax attacks and a subsequent spate of deaths amongst microbiologists, see here. September 19. Don Radlauer, of the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya, Israel, publishes a report on pre-9/11 insider trading involving surges in volume of put options for American Airlines, United Airlines, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch over the trading days before the attacks. He confirms that there was no news at that time to justify such an imbalance of trades, calculates the potential profit for the insiders at over $15 million, suggests that “Osama bin Laden” was behind it, and says, “we are dealing with an expert in masking ownership of corporations and making covert deals”. See here for some more clues as to the identity of those skilled in masking ownership of corporations. September 25. Rudy Giuliani bans photography at the World Trade Center ruins. September 28. Osama bin Laden again denies having anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, but suggests some possible suspects: Those within the American system who rebel against it and work for some other system, those who want to stir up conflict between Islam and Christianity, American Jews, or U.S. intelligence agencies. Before the month is up, nearly half of the alleged “suicide hijackers” have turned up alive and well. And that’s from the new, improved list, excluding Abdul Rahman Alomari and the Bukharis. No less than three of the alleged “suicide pilots” – Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad al-Jarrah – had reported their passports stolen in late 1999. Jarrah’s uncle Jamal explains in a five-minute interview that his nephew was not a radical, had no interest in politics, and did not change his appearance or behavior. Within a month of 9/11 it is quite evident that the alleged hijackers’ drinking, cocaine snorting, gambling, trysts with hookers and frequenting of strip joints does not square with religious extremists with such hatred of Western culture that they are prepared to kill themselves and thousands of others. October 8. Edward A. Coburn, 31, of Fresno, California, is arrested after bursting into the cockpit of an American Airlines jetliner bound for O’Hare airport, screaming, “We’re going to crash into the Sears Tower” and that terrorists are “steering” the plane towards the Sears Tower. Coburn, who works for a Silicon Valley company, is described as “intelligent, decent and immaculate”, “polite”, a “mellow type” who was “very kind and very nice”, a “real good guy”, etc. October 10. Three days after the launch of the war in Afghanistan, Mossad agent Salvador Guersson Smecke and Israeli illegal immigrant Saur Ben Zvi are caught and arrested inside the Mexican Congress chamber in possession of guns, grenades, dynamite, detonators and wiring while posing as “press photographers”. October 11 (assuming the Thursday prior to October 17). Moshe Elmakias, 30 and Ron Katar, 23, described as “Middle Eastern”, are arrested by Plymouth Police in Pennsylvania after being found with a Sony video camera and tape with detailed video footage of Chicago’s Sears Tower, days after a bizarre incident in the cockpit of a jetliner bound for Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Elmakias’ tractor-trailer, which has a Florida registration and a sign posted on the side reading “Moving Systems Incorporated”, was seen by a Pizzeria Uno manager backed up to the Dumpster at the rear of the restaurant with a freshly dumped pile of furniture adjacent to the Dumpster. Also observed with Elmakias is a female, Ayelet Reisler, 23. Elmakias is a Jewish name, as is Katar, Reisler and the forenames Moshe, Ron and Ayelet. Although Elmakias claims to be in Plymouth to make a pick up, he cannot provide a name or telephone number of the customer. The President of Moving Systems Inc. is Simo Elbaz of Florida, aka Simon Elbaz aka Simon Miller aka Jonathan Miller, as subsequently shown in a February 2003 indictment naming Elbaz, Elmakias and several others on charges of wire fraud, extortion, and making a false bill of lading. October 26. A mere 45 days after the 9/11 terror attacks, George W. Bush signs the “Patriot Act” into law. The US government has awarded itself additional powers, e.g. the power to break into its citizens’ homes and conduct secret searches without telling them for months or indefinitely, and to spy on people’s choice of books. These powers are subsequently exploited so that the government can eavesdrop on private communications even when there is no evidence of involvement with a foreign country or a terror group. October 27/28 (last weekend in October). Six men with Israeli passports are stopped by police in the Midwest and found to have photos and descriptions of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska pipeline. They also have “box cutters and other equipment”. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller are said to be “furious” that the Immigration and Naturalization Service let them go without consulting the FBI. The incident is later reported in the Israeli press, although Ashcroft denies that he and Mueller were “furious”. November 14. The Emperor’s Clothes website, which was so quick to recognize that the “bin Laden turned from employee to archenemy” story was bogus, posts an article Guilty For 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers. Unfortunately, it studiously ignores all the evidence of Israeli involvement. November 23. The Washington Post runs an article entitled “60 Israelis on Tourist Visas Detained Since Sept. 11“, saying that employees of Quality Sales, Inc. in Toledo, Ohio and other Israelis in the U.S. have been detained. The Israelis worked at malls selling trinkets and toys such as rubber band-propelled helicopters. Israeli mall kiosks are suspected Israeli intelligence fronts. The Post reports that this week, the authorities began to release the five detained “moving company” Israelis, young Israeli army veterans, who were observed celebrating with cries of joy and mockery as they trained their cameras on the burning WTC. They are being returned to their homes in Israel. December 13. An “Osama confession video” is conveniently “found”, out of all the buildings in Jalalabad (population estimated at roughly 250,000 as of 1999) in occupied Afghanistan within 5 weeks of it allegedly having been made, in which the only similarities between the “confessor” and OBL are that both of them wear a turban and have a beard. Before the year is out, it is evident that the weapons-grade Ames strain of anthrax found in letters sent to media outlets and senators in September and October originated at a U.S. government lab, despite a feeble attempt to frame Arab Muslims for the crime. Structural engineers say that the decision to rapidly recycle the WTC steel was a “serious mistake” that is handicapping the investigation. Dr. Frederick W. Mowrer, an associate professor in the fire protection engineering department at the University of Maryland, says, “I find the speed with which potentially important evidence has been removed and recycled to be appalling.” Mayor Rudy Giuliani is suspected of being behind the decision, but officials in the mayor’s office do not reply to written and oral questions about who decided to recycle the steel.
2002: January 11. The first prisoners arrive at “Camp X-Ray“, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Detainees arrive shackled in orange jumpsuits with blacked-out goggles and earplugs, and are made to kneel in a “holding area”. They are housed in 8 feet square wire cages and have a mattress, a sheet, a blanket, two towels, soap, shampoo, a copy of the Koran and two buckets. Jamal al Harith is just one example of an unfortunate who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: a country that was invaded and occupied under a false prospectus, a person who was seized and transported thousands of miles to be imprisoned and abused without trial simply to maintain the fiction that the invasion of Afghanistan was to save the world from “terrorists“. March 11. Rabbi Dov Zakheim delivers a commemorative sermon on the Pentagon lawn to hundreds of co-religionists from 40 countries. Chabad Lubavitch rabbis have gathered ostensibly to launch the centenary commemoration of their spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, yet the rabbis sing “Oseh Shalom” at 9:38 a.m. at the crash site, exactly six months after the extremely lucrative Pentagon attack. March 25. Sixteen microbiologists have died, in a mysterious spate of deaths that started less than five months ago. Back in the 1980s, a series of “suicides” amongst scientists working in the defense industry had prompted Doug Hoyle to raise the issue in Britain’s Parliament with a question to the Under-Secretary of State for Defence. April 28-29. Guantanamo Bay prisoners are transferred from the temporary Camp X-Ray to the larger Camp Delta, construction of which officially began on February 27. May 7. A group of Israelis are caught with a rental truck that tested positive for TNT and RDX plastic explosives shortly after midnight, very close to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Oak Harbor, Wash., where the Navy conducts explosive ordnance training for bomb disposal mobile units. September 10. Philip Zelikow admits that Iraq poses a threat to Israel, but not to the USA. October 12. In the deadliest terrorist atrocity to hit Indonesia, bombs are detonated on the island of Bali. 202 are killed, none of whom are Israelis. Australia suffers the highest number of casualties at 88, consistent with a goal of inducing Australia to increase its contribution to the “war on terror” and bring in “anti-terror” legislation. The second bomb, in a Mitsubishi van, causes much more damage than the bombers expect. The official story is initially that the Mitsubishi bomb consisted of the high explosive C-4, and this is subsequently revised to a low explosive improvised potassium chlorate, aluminum powder and sulfur composition which is inconsistent with the damage. The ringleader of the bombers suggests that an intelligence agency – “the CIA or KGB or Mossad” – had tampered with the bomb. In the February 1993 WTC bombing, the FBI’s plan to substitute a harmless powder for the real explosives was called off by an FBI supervisor; in the Bali 2002 bombing, intelligence operatives could have substituted a more powerful explosive.
2003: February. Sixteen moving companies and 74 operators, owners and employees are indicted on charges of fraud and extortion. Many of the names involved are Jewish names. Included is Moshe Elmakias aka Moses Makias of Moving Systems Incorporated, who was caught in October 2001 with detailed video footage of the Sears Tower. March 16. Three heads of state – George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar – travel to an American airbase in the Azores for a “summit”, i.e., an hour-long meeting where deals can be done behind closed doors without the risk of hacked phones, days in advance of the impending “shock and awe” campaign to bring “democracy” to Iraq and rid it of its “WMDs”. March 27. The Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures is approved for immediate implementation. For example, if a prisoner is escaping beyond the perimeter fence and there is no other means to prevent escape, then the guard should “fire to make the person(s) unable to continue…” without warning shots. In a list of “offenses”, tampering with restraints is listed as “category III”. June. Biological weapons experts working for the British government prove the Iraqis are right and the British government is wrong, in that the trailers that Tony Blair, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell claim are “mobile biological weapons labs” are in fact hydrogen generators for inflating artillery balloons. July 18. Dr David Kelly, a biological weapons specialist and expert on Iraq’s weapons who knew that the claims about “WMDs” are a pack of lies, is found dead after failing to return from one of his regular walks in the woods yesterday. Officially, the death is ruled to be a “suicide”. However, no fingerprints have been found on the knife he allegedly used to kill himself, he was not wearing gloves and none were found at the scene, a full transection of a single ulnar artery – which will quickly retract and close down thereby promoting clotting – is highly unlikely to kill, as is ingestion of one-third of a lethal dose of the painkiller co-proxamol, very little blood was found at the scene, and it would have been very difficult for Kelly to cut through the tendons of his left wrist since his right hand was very weak due to an elbow injury and he favored his left hand for any task requiring strength. All the evidence points to murder. Other scientists have died in various circumstances, some suspicious and others not suspicious. October. In a speech before retiring as Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad shrewdly observes that Jews rule the world by proxy, and get others to fight and die for them.
2004: April 9. Eddie Guigui Shalev, an Israeli national who served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the paratroops regiment, says that based on his observations, Hani Hanjour was a “good” pilot, contrary to all available evidence. May 8. Shmuel Dahan, 22 and Almaliach Naor, 19, both Israelis, are arrested in Tennessee following a three-mile high-speed chase after their rental truck is seen speeding and they refuse to stop. Dahan, an Israeli military veteran, is found to have a “Learn to Fly in Florida” business card in his wallet. Florida flight instructor Nissan Giat says that he met Naor at a moving company where the Israeli man works and gave him one of his cards. The Israelis’ ID is fake, and a brown bottle which they threw from the truck whilst being pursued is found to contain a thick liquid like drain cleaner. Tests indicate the liquid is a mixture of Astromid 18 – a latex stripper/cleaner, gluconic acid and water. No explanation is provided as to why these were mixed. The nearby Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin is “the nation’s sole provider of fuel for the Navy’s nuclear subs“. Although the Israelis claim to be moving furniture, the Sheriff is skeptical, saying that the furniture is so old that it’s hard to see why anyone would want to move it. May 19. Rudy Giuliani says that officials never imagined that planes would be used as missiles, although they prepared for anthrax, smallpox and “dirty bombs”. May 21. Tamir D. Sason, 24 and Daniel Levy, 23, both of Metar, Israel, are caught attempting to get into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, Georgia, without proper identification, prompting a nearly 3-hour lockdown. They have supposedly been contracted by a moving company. Bomb-sniffing search dogs react positively to a briefcase in the cab of the truck, although no explosives are found. Submarines at Kings Bay are armed with nuclear ballistic missiles. July 15. Mossad agents Uriel Kelman, 30, and Eli Cara, 50, are convicted and jailed for six months for fraudulently attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport in the name of a tetraplegic man in order to create a false identity for Zev Barkan. July 22. The 9/11 Commission publishes its final report, the 9/11 Commission Report, which would more accurately be called the “9/11 Omission Report”. September 2. The FBI has a file of documents compiled in July and August showing that the Bureau is aware of various torture tactics at Guantanamo Bay that go back to 2002. Prisoners are shackled to the floor in the fetal position for 18 hours or more so that they urinate and defecate on themselves, subjected to extremes of temperature, threatened with dogs made to bark and growl, have their hair and beard wrapped in duct tape, deprived of sleep by the use of strobe lights and loud music, made to stand in stress positions, etc. One FBI agent heard banging sounds like thunder, but was perplexed by the fact that the weather was fine. On going to investigate, a prisoner was seen in an interview room kneeling on the floor with his forehead on the ground, holding his nose which appeared to be bleeding. The interviewers claimed that he “threw himself to the floor“. Another agent traveled to interview a prisoner, and found he had “a black eye, facial cuts around the nose, and his fingers on both hands were taped up”. October. A “close friend” of George W. Bush – identified as Tom Bernstein who, along with Bush and other businessmen, was a former owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club, a deal which netted Bush millions of dollars – sends him a copy of Natan Sharansky’s new book The Case for Democracy with a note urging him to read it. Bush does so – and so does Condoleezza Rice. Tom Bernstein is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was appointed by Bush in 2002 to serve as a Council Member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and from 2002 to 2005 has been Co-Founder and Chairman of the International Freedom Center, a cultural institution developed for the World Trade Center Site. He is connected to Natan Sharansky through the International Freedom Center, to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger through the Fresh Air Fund, and Elie Wiesel through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. November 2. President Bush ‘wins’ a second term with the aid of Diebold electronic voting machines. Where a paper trail exists, the divergence between exit polls and results is within the expected statistical margin of error. In contrast, results from the voting machines have almost consistently swung towards Bush. The National Election Data Archive demonstrates that, for Ohio, the probability of these discrepancies occurring due to chance ranged from 1 in 17,800 down to 1 in 867,205,500. Dr Stephen Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania calculates the odds at 250 million to one against for just three of the major swing states – Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania – to swing as far as they did from their exit polls. November 11. Bush meets with Natan Sharansky for more than an hour. He invites him into the Oval Office for a discussion of Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy and how it applies to the “war on terror”.
2005: January. One possible motive for the Iraq war becomes apparent when it is reported that $8.8 billion of Iraqi money has gone “missing” between October 2003 and June 2004 from the former UN Oil-for-Food fund, oil sales and seized assets. In a lengthy interview with the Washington Times, George W. Bush says, “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy read Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy.” July 7. Benjamin Netanyahu and Rudy Giuliani – who were in New York on 9/11 – are located in London on the morning of the 7/7 bombings. Netanyahu and the Mossad receive advance warning and, ironically, in a futile attempt to deflect from Israeli foreknowledge, former Mossad head Efraim Halevy demonstrates inside knowledge by revealing that he already knows the bombings were simultaneous when the authorities spend the next two days claiming that the three Tube explosions were spread over a period of 26 minutes from 08:51 to 09:17. The Israeli company Verint Systems, a subsidiary of Israel’s Comverse Technology, handles video security at the London Underground. In a CCTV-rich environment such as London, there ought to be numerous time-stamped images to prove that the alleged bombers were in London on 7/7, yet the authorities never release any such images. Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer, is listed on Verint documents as Chairman of the Board of Directors, e.g. as of April 2003. Dan Bodner, current CEO of Verint, was an Israeli Army officer. The official tale of “Muslim suicide bombers” is physically impossible, given the actual train times of the day, and the official scenario of exploding backpacks is contradicted by eyewitnesses and photos indicating the explosions originated underneath the carriages. Rudy Giuliani, friend of Bernard Kerik who announced the “discovery” of an alleged 9/11 suicide hijacker’s passport claimed to have survived the jet fuel fireball, was in Yorkshire the previous day. Miraculously, a till receipt obtained from a garden center at Tulip Retail Park in Leeds, Yorkshire is “found” to have survived one of the deadly Tube train blasts, and cited as ‘evidence’ for the official version of events. November 9 (9/11 by Israeli or European calendars). Israeli Jews staying at the Radisson hotel, Amman, Jordan, are evacuated in advance of terror attacks. According to the official story, “suicide bombers” are responsible, and even though the blast at the Radisson was caused by a bomb hidden in a false ceiling, it is still claimed to be the work of “suicide bombers“. There were no Jewish casualties, most of the dead were Jordanian Sunni Muslims, two Israeli casualties were both Arabs, and five Palestinians died including Major-General Bashir Nafeh, the head of military intelligence in the West Bank.
2006: July 31. Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, the Israeli-born founder and former CEO of Comverse Technology, is charged by U.S. authorities with multiple counts of fraud and related offenses. He was on vacation in Israel, but instead of returning to the U.S. to face indictment, travels to Germany and subsequently flees to Namibia. August 15. September 18. Benjamin Netanyahu, Warren Buffett, and Stef and Eitan Wertheimer attend a party at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, to celebrate Buffett’s $5 billion acquisition of an 80% stake in the Wertheimer family’s Iscar Metalworking Company. The Israeli government also receives $1 billion in taxes from the deal. Stef Wertheimer, founder of Iscar, is considered the wealthiest Israeli living in Israel. Eitan Wertheimer and Netanyahu are residents of Caesarea, the only town in Israel that is managed by a business, the Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Caesarea Development Corporation that has donated over 100 million shekels in recent years to organizations such as the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. September 27. Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, ex-CEO of Comverse Technology, is arrested in Namibia after an international manhunt. He is wanted by the U.S. authorities to face multiple charges including conspiracy, securities fraud, and money laundering. September 30. It is revealed that, whilst preparing to flee fraud charges in the U.S., Kobi Alexander transferred $57 million from his Citigroup account to bank accounts in Israel: Bank Leumi account 603401/78 and Bank Hapoalim account 131883. He was caught when it was found that tens of millions of dollars had gone into his Namibian accounts. October 7. October 11. Kobi Alexander is charged with offering millions of dollars as a bribe to David Kreinberg, former Chief Financial Officer at Comverse, in an attempt to induce him to take sole responsibility for the fraud scheme. Alexander first offered $2 million, then $5 million, and finally “name your price”, pleading that there was no reason why both of them “should go down”.
2007: January 2. As part of a lawsuit involving the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI releases its July/August 2004 documents detailing the mistreatment and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. February. Video footage is published demonstrating that the BBC reported WTC 7 had collapsed, some 20 minutes before it actually did so at 5:20 EDT. The BBC’s Jane Standley, on location in New York, said that the building had collapsed when it was clearly visible through the window behind her head. Times are confirmed by a timestamp, and the footage is subsequently confirmed as genuine by the BBC’s Director of Collections at its Internet Archive. February 7. Melbourne scientist Dr Gideon Polya calculates post-invasion excess deaths in occupied Iraq at one million. This compares with an October 2006 estimate of 655,000 from a survey overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Both of these figures exclude up to 1.7 million pre-invasion deaths, including half a million children under 5 by 2000, killed as a result of depleted uranium and 1990 – 2003 sanctions. March 6. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is convicted on four felony counts including obstruction of justice, giving false statements to the FBI, and perjury in relation to the Bush administration’s leaking of the name of a CIA agent to the press. The agent, Valerie Plame, is married to Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who served in Iraq and Africa. Wilson correctly reported in March 2002 that an Italian intelligence report that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium was based on bogus documents, yet George Bush repeated the yellowcake claim in January 2003 when making the case for war. The leaking of Plame’s name was in retaliation for Wilson’s honesty, and part of an attempt to deter any further critics – part of the vast body of proof that the administration’s invasion of Iraq was not simply a mistake based on “faulty intelligence”. March 10. The U.S. military conducts a tribunal at Guantanamo Bay ostensibly to determine if one of their prisoners, alleged to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is an “enemy combatant”. KSM was reportedly killed in a Pakistan Rangers paramilitary raid on his apartment in September 2002 and his identity confirmed by his wife and children. However, the “KSM” prisoner makes a statement at the tribunal admitting to being responsible for the “9/11 Operation, from A to Z”, the “1993 World Trade Center Operation”, the “Shoe Bomber Operation”, the “bombing of a nightclub in Bali”, “planning, training, surveying and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks” against skyscrapers including the “Plaza Bank, Washington state” and the “Sears Tower, Chicago”, being in charge of the “Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others”, and responsible for many other plots and operations. Whoever fabricated this ‘confession’ overlooked the fact that “KSM” was supposedly captured on March 1, 2003 but the Plaza Bank wasn’t founded until early 2006. And it isn’t a skyscraper. If they meant the Columbia Center, that isn’t referred to as “Plaza”; Bank of America Fifth Avenue Plaza is only the 9th tallest building in Seattle, and 1001 Fourth Avenue Plaza was down to 5th tallest by 1990. And the anthrax strain was traced to the US military, and it was Israeli “movers” who were caught with a video camera and detailed video footage of the Sears Tower. It was reported back in November 2005 that KSM’s interrogators said he’d held out for more than two minutes against the waterboarding, and use of waterboarding was subsequently confirmed by Dick Cheney. November 8. Bernard Kerik – who announced Sunday September 16, 2001, that a hijacker’s passport had been “discovered” – is indicted on 16 counts including lying, conspiracy, fraud, and taking and failing to report a $250,000 loan that originated with Israeli billionaire industrialist Eitan Wertheimer, with Brooklyn marble and stone merchant Shimon Cohen serving as intermediary in the transaction. Kerik and Wertheimer spent time together during Kerik’s trip to Israel at the end of August 2001. The Wertheimer family’s vast holdings include companies with United States Defense Department contracts.
2008: April. The Pentagon’s accounting process is said to be “so obsolete and error prone that it’s virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up“. July 29. FBI “suspect” for the 2001 anthrax attacks, Bruce E. Ivins, is found dead. Officially, it is alleged that he committed suicide after learning that the FBI was going to charge him and prosecutors would be seeking the death penalty. Ivins became the new scapegoat, after the FBI gave up attempting to pin the blame on Steven Hatfill because there was not a scintilla of evidence against him. However, Ivins had no reason to target media and opposition politicians in order to deter them from questioning the official 9/11 story. Embarrassingly for the FBI, they were forced to play the role of “idiots” who were “baffled” as to Ivins’ motive. August 19. Barry Jennings, an eyewitness whose explicit testimony of early explosions in WTC7 prior to collapse of either Tower contradicts the official version of events, mysteriously dies. August 21. NIST publishes the findings of its three-year ‘study’ into the collapse of WTC7. Not surprisingly, the conclusion that “fires” and “thermal expansion” of some fireproofed steel beams caused the total collapse of this 47-story building is based on political considerations rather than the empirical evidence – evidence that was studiously ignored when it did not support the desired conclusion. Also ignored was the testimony of eyewitness Barry Jennings, who died two days previously. NIST, whose top scientists and engineers have extensive knowledge of nano-thermites, say they have found “no evidence” of explosives at the WTC, but later admit that they did not bother to look for any. December. The bill for Bush’s “war on terror” is estimated to be approaching $1 trillion, excluding long-term health care for veterans and interest on federal borrowing.
Excerpted from Take Our World Back
WSJ-Asia Cheers Tightening Iran Sanctions
According to The Wall Street Journal Asia’s editorial board, newly announced cooperation from Japan and South Korea on enforcing UN sanctions against Iran “is worth cheering.”
The editorial board attributed South Korea’s cooperation on sanctions to its “growing up as a democracy,” and Japan’s acquiescence on the issue as a much needed about-face from its “needless tiff with the White House over a troop relocation agreement in Okinawa.”
While glossing over the complexities of both Seoul and Tokyo’s relationships with Washington — which, I think it’s fair to say, amount to a lot more than South Korea “growing up” and Japan’s mea culpa for a “needless tiff” — the seeming tightening of the sanctions regime on Tehran should be put in context.
Reports do seem to confirm that sanctions have had a measurable and noticeable effect on Iran’s trading relationships, but sanctions have also resulted in Iran expanding trading relationships in Latin America and Africa, and looking towards expanding trade with much bigger economies, such as China.
According to All Headline News:
Chinese Transport Minister Liu Zhijun is expected to visit Iran Sunday to sign a $2 billion contract to build a 360-mile-long railway linking key Iranian destinations that could later join to existing Iraq and Syrian railway networks and extending to the Mediterranean Sea.
Experts on U.S.-Iran relations Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett responded to the little-reported news item on China’s expanding trade relationship with Iran on their blog, The Race for Iran, writing:
None of the initiatives discussed in the news report cited above violate UN sanctions against Iran. In fact, we cannot see how these efforts would even violate U.S. or other unilaterally-defined national sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Nevertheless, there have been other indications in recent weeks that China is not going to let a U.S.-led push to maximize Iran’s international economic isolation get in the way of Sino-Iranian economic ties. India has taken a similar position, see here, and may, like China, be acting to strengthen its economic and strategic ties to Iran.
Indeed, a look at Iran’s trading partners clearly shows the importance of China’s huge economy to Tehran.
According to the CIA World Fact Book, Iran’s Export economy breaks down as follows:
China 16.58%, Japan 11.9%, India 10.54%, South Korea 7.54%, Turkey 4.36% (2009)
And its import economy is also worth examining.
UAE 15.14%, China 13.48%, Germany 9.66%, South Korea 7.16%, Italy 5.27%, Russia 4.81%, India 4.12% (2009)
No doubt Japan and South Korea’s implementation of sanctions will change those statistics, but China and India’s growing regional and global clout would indicate that Tehran’s trading relationships with these regional powerhouses will become an increasingly important component of the Islamic Republic’s foreign trade. As sanctions tighten on Iran’s economy, no one should be surprised to see Tehran turn to alternative, non-western aligned economies to fill the gaps.
The Misnomer of the Peace Talks
By John Chuckman | Palestine Chronicle | September 7, 2010
I don’t know how anyone given the task could draw a map of Israel: it is likely the only country in the world with no defined borders, and it actually has worked very hard over many decades to achieve this peculiar state.
It once had borders, but the 1967 war took care of those. It has no intention of ever returning to them because it could have done so at any time in the last forty-three years (an act which would have been the clearest possible declaration of a desire for genuine peace with justice and which would have saved the immense human misery of occupation), but doing so would negate the entire costly effort of the Six Day War whose true purpose was to achieve what we see now in the Palestinian territories.
As far as peace, in the limited sense of the absence of war, Israel already has achieved a kind of rough, de facto peace without any help from the Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing to offer in the matter of peace if you judge peace by the standards Israel apparently does.
Israel has the peace that comes of infinitely greater power, systematic and ruthless use of that power, the reduction of the people it regards as opponents to squatters on their own land, and a world too intimidated to take any effective action for justice or fairness.
Genuine peace anywhere, as Canadian physicist and Holocaust survivor Ursula Franklin has observed, is best defined by justice prevailing. But you can have many other circumstances inaccurately called peace; for example, the internal peace of a police state or of a brutally-operated colony.
Israel appears to have no interest or need for the kind of peace that the Palestinians can offer. What then can the Palestinians give Israel in any negotiation?
There are many “technical” issues to be settled between the Israelis and Palestinians, such as the right of return, compensation for property taken, the continued unwarranted expulsions from East Jerusalem, the Wall and its location largely on Palestinian land, but in a profound sense these are all grounded in the larger concept of genuine peace as Ursula Franklin defined it, something we have no basis for believing Israel is, or ever has been, interested in.
Israel wants recognition, not just as a country like any other, but as “the Jewish state,” whatever that ambiguous term may mean, given the facts both of Israel’s rubbery borders and the definition of Jewish, something which Israelis themselves constantly fight over – reformed, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, North African, observant, non-observant, and still other factions and divisions in what is quite a small population.
I very much think that the reasons Israel wants that particular form of recognition are not benevolent: it is the kind of term once put into a contract which opens the future interpretation of the contract to pretty much anything. After all, recognition of Israel as a state is something Arab states have long offered Israel in return for a just settlement, but Israel has never shown the slightest interest.
If recognition of Israel as “the Jewish state” were granted, what would be the status of any non-Jewish person in Israel? I think we can guess, given the awful words of Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, or the even more terrible words of Ovadia Yosef, founder of the Shas Party, a Netanyahu ally, and Israel’s former Chief Rabbi.
After all, about nineteen percent of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, mainly the descendants of Palestinians who refused to run from the terrors of the Irgun and Stern gangs in1948. They carry Israeli passports, but are not regarded as citizens in the same sense as Jewish citizens, and there are even laws and restrictions in place creating the kind of deadly distinction George Orwell wrote of in Animal Farm, “Some animals are more equal than others.”
The new talks do not include even the most basic requirement of a legitimate voice to represent the Palestinians, a desirable situation perhaps from Israel’s point of view, one Israel’s secret services have long worked towards with dark ops and assassinations. How do you negotiate with opponents you allow no voice?
Mahmoud Abbas, an almost pitifully shuffling character who is the man supposedly representing Palestinian interests, is now approaching two years of playing president without an election: he has zero legitimacy with the Palestinians and the outside world. Even at that, his assumed authority extends only to parts of the West Bank of the territories.
Hamas, despite the shortcomings found in any leadership of a heavily oppressed population is nevertheless the elected government of Gaza territory, but Israel has pressured the United States – and through it, effectively the world – to regard Hamas as a coven of witches, ready to unleash dark powers if only once Israel relaxes its stranglehold.
It would be far more accurate to talk of a settlement or an accommodation with the Palestinians than peace, but any reasonable agreement requires intense pressure on Israel, which holds all the cards, pressure which can only come from Washington. Accommodation involves all the difficult “technical” issues Israel has no interest in negotiating – right of return, compensation, the Wall, and East Jerusalem. Israel’s position on all of them is simply “no.”
But we know that Washington is contemptibly weak when it comes to Israel. The Israel Lobby is expert at working the phones and the opinion columns and the campaign donations. It even gets Washington to fight wars for it, as it did in Iraq, and as it now is attempting to do in Iran – surely, the acid test of inordinate influence on policy.
Most American Congressmen live in the same kind of quiet fear of the Israel Lobby as they once did of J.Edgar Hoover’s special files of political and personal secrets. Hoover never even had to openly threaten a Congressman or Cabinet Secretary who was “out of line.” He merely had a brief chat, dropping some ambiguous reference to let the politician know the danger he faced. It was enough to keep Hoover’s influence going for decades.
You never heard a thing in the press about the quiet power Hoover exercised in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, but it was there. Just so, the Israel Lobby today.
So where does the impetus for a fair accommodation come from?
Nowhere. Israel goes right on with its calculatedly-unfair laws taking the homes and farms of others, slowly but surely pushing out the people with whom it does not want to share space.
Anywhere else, this process would be called ethnic-cleansing, but not here, not unless you want to be called a bigot or an anti-Semite.
One says this about the impossibility of a settlement with a reservation. It is possible that the weak Abbas, locked in a room in Washington, could well be browbeaten and bribed into signing some kind of bastard agreement, giving Israel every concession it wants in return for a nominal rump Palestinian state composed of parcels Israel doesn’t want or hasn’t yet absorbed. It wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on, but Israel would then undoubtedly assume its perpetual validity and in future interpret it as it wished.
After all, the history of modern Israel involves agreements divvying up the land of others without their consent, but even those historical divisions – look at the maps attending the Peel Commission (1937) or the UN decision on partition (1947), and you see roughly equally divided territory – today are ignored by Israel or given some very tortured interpretation. So what will have changed?
There simply can be no genuine peace with justice where there is no will for it.
– John Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company.
Blair Reveals Cheney’s War Agenda
By Robert Parry | September 6, 2010
Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new memoir offers the expected rationalizations for his joining in an illegal, aggressive war against Iraq, even to the point of quibbling about the death toll. But Blair does reveal how much more war was favored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons.
In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with “rogue states that supported them” and that “the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.”
Cheney wanted forcible “regime change” in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.
“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”
Over the years, there have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s – and Israel’s – “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.
Usually, the scheme could be found only in obscure neocon policy papers or as part of Washington scuttlebutt. After the Iraq invasion, a favorite neocon joke was whether to next head west toward Damascus or east to Tehran with the punch line, “real men go to Tehran.”
Under this neocon plan, once “regime change” was achieved in Syria and Iran, then Israel’s front-line adversaries, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, would be left impoverished and isolated. Israel could dictate settlement terms to the Palestinians and incorporate the Jewish settlements on prime West Bank land into a Greater Israel.
A Clean Break
The early outlines of this aggressive concept for remaking the Middle East predated the 9/11 attacks by half a decade, when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his 1996 campaign for prime minister.
The neocon strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary “clean break” from the diplomatic standoff that had followed inconclusive peace negotiations.
Under the “clean break,” Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
The plan called Hussein’s ouster “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,” but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in the cross-hairs of “regime change.”
But what the “clean break” needed was the military might of the United States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too powerful to be defeated even by Israel’s highly efficient military. The cost in Israeli lives and to Israel’s economy from such overreach would have been staggering.
In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the “clean break” plan another step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century, which urged President Bill Clinton to seek the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq and enforcing a “no-fly zone” which involved U.S. aircraft conducting periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore, in the White House, a full-scale invasion appeared out of the question.
The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped engineer George W. Bush’s ascension to the presidency in Election 2000. However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind a political climate across America for war and revenge.
Though Hussein had no hand in 9/11 and rejected al-Qaeda’s religious extremism, Bush and Blair clambered onboard for an invasion of Iraq. Their differences were mostly tactical, such as whether to present the WMD case to the United Nations or to simply act unilaterally with the so-called “coalition of the willing.”
According to Blair’s memoir, hardliner Cheney opposed going to the UN at all, but Blair argued that the move was politically necessary and won over Bush during a visit to Camp David on Sept. 7, 2002.
“Once George declared he was in favour of going the UN route, the visit relaxed,” Blair wrote. “Dick Cheney had been there for part of the time, and made it clear he was not for going down the UN route. He was unremittingly hard line.”
Common Ground
But Blair explained that Cheney’s aggressive attitude differed from the Bush-Blair approach only by degree, not fundamentally. In that regard, Blair said he considered Cheney as unfairly maligned by progressives and many centrists.
“To those on the left, he is, of course, an uncomplicated figure of loathing,” Blair wrote. “Even for the middle ground, they tend to reach for the garlic and crucifixes. You have to go pretty far right to find Dick’s natural constituency.
“My take on him was different from that of most people. I thought he had one central insight which was at least worth taking seriously. He believed, in essence, that the U.S. was genuinely at war. … [And his response was] we’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”
Though acknowledging that Cheney’s “attitude terrified and repelled people,” Blair expressed a degree of solidarity with the former vice president, saying:
“I did not think [Cheney’s position] was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined. It is one struggle. Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom. It is even possible to conceive of this, in different language, as being a progressive position, certainly where removing someone like Saddam was concerned.
“My problem with the way he put it and wanted to do it was that the manner of doing it was incomplete. Precisely because the war was based loosely around an ideology, the fight had to be waged and won at the level of ideas and in a way that would appeal not to us, but to those who had fallen or might fall prey to that ideology.
“In other words, it couldn’t be a hard-power strategy alone. It had to encompass more than military might. It had to engage the people out in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, and had to build alliances within that world.
“This wasn’t some namby-pamby peacenikery; it was a critical part of winning.”
In other words, Blair saw Cheney’s determination to overthrow U.S.-disliked leaders in the Middle East as more a problem of PR tactics than core strategy.
Despite the widespread impression that Cheney’s grandiose neocon scheme for remaking the Middle East through warfare represented an extreme vision, Blair indicated that he and other supposed moderates shared Cheney’s broader determination to replace anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli governments across the Middle East with more compliant regimes under the banner of “democracy.”
That, in turn, suggests the danger of a wider regional war has not fully abated.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com
Meet the Chernicks
By Philip Weiss on September 7, 2010
A few weeks back Juan Cole created a data point to explain the neocons:
They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side.
I am deeply grateful to Cole for that assertion. Even if it’s imprecise, even if it’s off, it’s obviously based on knowledge of how the discourse works and it’s got a large truth in it: it explains the fiendish persistence inside the political establishment of neoconservatism. I wish Chris Matthews would have Cole on and ask him why he believes this, ask him who gives money to Yale and why Yale wouldn’t have Cole but Yale would have a conference that attacked Palestinian identity formation and “self-hating Jews.”
Long preamble. Politico follows the money on the Islamic center opposition campaign, though it buries the neoconservative angle, the juicy one, deep in the story, who’s funding the opposition:
there’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch — the website run by Spencer “dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world” — and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.
Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, POLITICO has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.
A onetime trustee of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network that made its name partly with hawkish pro-Israel commentary and of late has kept up a steady stream of anti-mosque postings, including one rebutting attacks by CAIR against Spencer — who Pajamas CEO Roger Simon called “one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror.”..
The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings.
To its credit, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency then followed up that report:
Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, Politico reported, have over the years contributed to, among other groups, the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles; the Anti-Defamation League; the Zionist Organization of America; MEMRI, a group that distributes translations of inflammatory Arabic language material; the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a group that tracks what it depicts as the threat of radical Islam; the American Jewish Congress; CAMERA, a group that tracks what it says is anti-Israel bias in the media; the Central Fund for Israel, a clearinghouse for moneys directed to pro-settler groups; and a number of conservative think tanks.
Aubrey Chernick, additionally, was at one time a trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Finally, Laura Rozen also follows up on it, showing the Chernicks’ links to the Hudson Institute, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and…. inevitably… the Central Fund of Israel, which funds settlers in the West Bank, including their “urgent security needs,” and is administered by a 6th Avenue fabric store. Read Rozen’s list of Chernick contributions for her delicious twist on religiosity and secularism:
Similar donations in 2007 and 2006, including $190k in 2007 to the Hudson Institute; $200k in 2006 to the Zionist Organization of America, and $250k to ZOA in 2005; $60k in 2005 to the Central Fund of Israel, a U.S. nonprofit that funds settler security and other programs in Israel, and on whose board (listed in 2008 as vice president) is Itamar Marcus, who heads Palestinian Media Watch; $25k in 2005 to fund projects by Tariq Ismail at the Council for Secular Humanism (the funding for Islamic secularism contrasting with the foundation’s generous funding of Jewish religiosity, including Aish HaTorah of Los Angeles); $120k in 2005 to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, on whose board Chernick’s wife Joyce Chernick served.
Notice that Richard Silverstein has described Aubrey Chernick’s funding for StandWithUs, the Israel lobby group, and the neoconservative website Pajamas Media ($7 million, slightly more than the seed funding for this website) and pointing out that Jim Koshland of the Levi Strauss family was in on the deal– Silverstein speculates so that Koshland could get into the good business graces of the dynamic Chernick. Oh and Alex Kane posts on the Chernicks here.
Analysts: Iraq war ‘partly to blame’ for financial crisis
Stiglitz and Bilmes: Recession will be longer because of war
The financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008 and still reverberates today was “due at least in part” to the Iraq war, which also made it more difficult for the government to react when economic problems happened, argue two prominent policy makers.
In an article in Sunday’s Washington Post, former Clinton-era economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes say that the Iraq war forced the US to take on more debt than it had to, and caused in part the rising oil prices that resulted in large amounts of money flowing out of the US economy.
To counter the effects of those trends, fiscal policy makers had to keep interest rates unnaturally low, causing the securities and real estate bubbles that burst at the start of the recession, the authors say.
The authors also amended their assessment from several years ago that the Iraq war’s true cost is around $3 trillion, saying new information suggests that the cost goes “beyond” that estimate.
Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.
The Iraq war didn’t just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.
Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that about a quarter of the debt increase the US saw during the first five years of the war are attributable to the war — about $900 billion of a $3.6 trillion rise in the debt. They also estimate that the war added about $10 to the cost of a barrel of oil, amounting to a cost of $250 billion to the US economy.
In articles in the Times of London and the Washington Post two years ago, Stiglitz and Bilmes estimated that the cost of the war, including the costs to the US economy, amounted to $3 trillion. At the time, the Pentagon questioned their assertion.
“It appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low,” the authors state.
“Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America’s standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger,” the authors conclude.
JINSA: Road to Peace Runs Through Tehran
As noted in the September 2 Talking Points, the hard-line neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is pushing the old neocon meme that the ‘road to Middle East peace runs through’… well, anywhere but Jerusalem. This time, of course, it’s Tehran.
The latest JINSA Report, the organization’s policy e-newsletter, calls Iran the “elephant” in the room that went unmentioned in U.S. President Barack Obama’s Iraq address, as well as the “elephant” in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The JINSA Report says that prospects for long-term success in Iraq will be “short-lived” unless the U.S. figures out what the elephant is and “how to tame it or remove it.” JINSA’s description of Iranian involvement in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories makes clear this prescription applies to those strategic challenges as well.
This theme is of course familiar to anyone who has followed JINSA since the run-up to the Iraq War. Just after September 11, 2001 — on September 14, to be exact — the top U.S. policy priority listed in the JINSA Report was the provision of ”all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress, including direct American military support, to affect [sic] a regime change in Iraq.” (The Iraqi National Congress and its leader, the neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi, have since been revealed to have had extensive ties to Iran, with Chalabi even accused of spying for the Islamic Republic, making JINSA’s outrage at Iranian influence in Iraq somewhat ironic, to say the least.)
On March 19, 2002, just one year prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, JINSA made the exact same point about Iraq it is now making about Iran: in order to bring regional actors at odds with the U.S. to heel, the U.S. must remove their patron (in Iraq’s case, Saddam Hussein) from power. This 2002 JINSA Report warns:
…the Oslo process in the 1990s had shifted attention from the greater dangers posed by Iraq. We believed, then and now, that only after the regional situation was stabilized in America’s favor would the Palestinians be prepared to acquiesce to legitimate American and Israeli demands about security and legitimacy. It wouldn’t work the other way around.
This analysis should be of no surprise coming from JINSA, an organization funded by Irving Moskowitz, the bingo and gambling magnate who has had a close relationship with both the Likud party of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu and the most radical settler movements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Unsurprisingly, Moskowitz has also funded leading neoconservative institutions here — notably AEI, Center for Security Policy and Hudson — which connects him to figures instrumental in implementing the invasion of Iraq. Co-founded by Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Stephen Bryen, JINSA itself is advised by the likes of Anne Bayefsky (see Eli’s recent post), John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, and Jim Woolsey.
Dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives like the JINSA advisers have a known fondness for the policies of the Likud party. So it’s again no surprise to see that Netanyahu has long promoted the position that first solving the Iran problem will suddenly allow Israel some latitude in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. This notion, known as ‘reverse linkage’ rather than the militarily-accepted ‘linkage’ that says the opposite, was espoused by Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad, just they were coming into office. In March 2009, Arad told Reuters:
[T]he order of priority is: blunt Iran first, move vigorously on peace after, and based on that. Should you act in the wrong order…you will have a sterile, perhaps failed process with the Palestinians and at the same time you will end up with a nuclear Iran.
So now those same figures who brought us the Iraq war are using the same talking points — eerily echoing the Israeli right — to drum up support for escalating measures against Iran. We’ve seen this movie before.
Israel; Asset or Liability?
By Chas Freeman | July 20, 2010
Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States? Interesting question. We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it. In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well. Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.
American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this). Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products. Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement. Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when – as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles — the technology being developed is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements. In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel’s military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies. Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.
Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II. The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included. These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.
Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 — on a par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it. Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country.
These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story. The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or – most recently – on the high seas. The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg. We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the international community. The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.
Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it. As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel’s behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries. It matters also that America – along with a very few other countries – has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a state in the Middle East. Many more Jews live in America than in Israel. Resolute American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.
Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us. Yet it’s pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans. I can’t imagine why. Still, the question I’ve been asked to address today is just that: what’s in it — and not in it — for us to do all these things for Israel.
We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater. In 1973, for reasons peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt. The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly. And then there’s all the time we’ve put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct “peace process.”
Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences… Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship with Israel.
It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.
Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them. Perhaps it can’t. It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.
Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform. All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.
Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.
It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s. It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel. No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.
Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing. It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.
Against this background, it’s remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps it’s just that as someone once said: “people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship. Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous. It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States. These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home. To flourish over the long term, Israel’s relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.
The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America
By James Petras – September 1, 2010
Netanyahu –Speaking in New York to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
Introduction
Any serious effort to understand the extraordinary influence of the Zionist power configuration over US foreign policy must examine the presence of key operatives in strategic positions in the government and local Zionist organizations affiliated with mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders. There are at least 52 major American Jewish organizations actively engaged in promoting Israel’s foreign policy, economic and technological agenda in the US (see the appendix).
The grassroots membership ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors, activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban) and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history (Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010). New heavily funded Zionist projects designed to capture young Jews and turn them into instruments of Israeli foreign policy includes “Taglit-Birthright” which has spent over $250 million dollars over the past decade sending over a quarter-million Jews (between 18-26) to Israel for 10 days of intense brainwashing (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). Jewish billionaires and the Israeli state foot the bill. The students are subject to a heavy dose of Israeli style militarism as they are accompanied by Israeli soldiers as part of their indoctrination; at no point do they visit the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). They are urged to become dual citizens and even encouraged to serve in the Israeli armed forces. In summary the 52 member organizations of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations which we discuss are only the tip of the iceberg of the Zionist Power Configuration: taken together with the PACs, the propaganda mills, the commercial and University presses and mass media we have a matrix of power for understanding the tremendous influence they have on US foreign and domestic policy as it affects Israel and US Zionism.
While all their activity is dedicated first and foremost in ensuring that US Middle East policy serves Israel’s colonial expansion in Palestine and war aims in the Middle East, what B’nai B’rth euphemistically calls a “focus on Israel and its place in the world”, many groups ‘specialize’ in different spheres of activity. For example, the “Friends of the Israel Defense Force” is primarily concerned in their own words “to look after the IDF”, in other words provide financial resources and promote US volunteers for a foreign army (an illegal activity except when it involves Israel). Hillel is the student arm of the Zionist power configuration claiming a presence in 500 colleges and universities, all affiliates defending each and every human rights abuse of the Israeli state and organizing all expenses paid junkets for Jewish student recruits to travel to Israel where they are heavily propagandized and encouraged to ‘migrate’ or become ‘dual citizens’.
Method: Studying Zionist Power:
There are several approaches for measuring the power of the combined Zionist organizations and influential occupants of strategic positions in government and the economy. These include (a) reputational approach (b) self claims (c) decision-making analysis (d) structural inferences. Most of these approaches provide some clues about Zionist potential power. For example, newspaper pundits and journalists frequently rely on Washington insiders, congressional staff and notables to conclude that AIPAC has the reputation for being one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. This approach points to the need to empirically examine the operations of AIPAC in influencing Congressional votes, nomination of candidates, defeating incumbents who do not unconditionally support the Israeli line. In other words analyzing the Congressional and Executive decision- making process is one key to measuring Zionist power. But it is not the only one. Zionist power is a product of a historical context, where media ownership and wealth concentration and other institutional levers of power come into play and shape the current decision-making framework. Cumulative power over time and across institutions creates a heavy bias in the political outcomes favorable to Israel’s organized agents in America. Once again the mere presence of Jews or Zionists in positions of economic, cultural and political power does not tell us how they will use their resources and whether they will have the desired effect. Structural analysis, the location of Zionists in the class structure, is necessary but not sufficient for understanding Zionist power. One has to proceed and analyze the content of decisions made and not made regarding the agenda of Israel’s backers operating in the USA. The 52 major Zionists organizations are very open about their claims to power, their pursuit of Israel’s agenda and their subservience to each and every Israeli regime.
Those who deny Zionist power over US Mid East foreign policy are left-Zionists namely Noam Chomsky and his acolytes. They never analyze the legislative process, executive decision-making, the structures and activity of the million member Zionist grassroots and the appointments and background of key policy makers deciding strategic policies in the Middle East. Instead they resort to superficial generalizations and political demagogy, imputing policy to “Big Oil” and the “military-industrial complex” or “US imperialism”, devoid of empirical content and historical context about real existing policy making regarding the Middle East.
The Making of Zionist Power in the US Government
To understand US submission to Israeli war policies in the Middle East one has to look beyond the role of lobbies pressuring Congress and the role of political action committees and wealthy Zionist campaign contributions. A much neglected but absolutely essential building block of Zionist power over US foreign economic, diplomatic and military policy is the Zionist presence in key policy positions, including the Departments of Treasury and State, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the White House.
Operating within the top policy-making positions, Zionist officials have consistently pursued policies in line with Israel’s militarist policies, aimed at undermining and eliminating any country critical of the Jewish States’ colonial occupation of Palestine, its regional nuclear monopoly, its expansion of Jews only settlements and above all its strident efforts to remain the dominant power in the Arab East. The Zionist policymakers in Government are in constant consultation with the Israeli state, ensuring coordination with the Israeli military (IDF) command, its Foreign Office and secret police (MOSSAD) and compliance with the Jewish State’s political line. Over the past 24 months not a single Zionist policymaker has voiced any criticism of Israel’s most heinous crimes, ranging from the savaging of Gaza to the massacre of the humanitarian flotilla and the expansion of new settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. A record of loyalty to a foreign power which even exceeds the subservience of the Stalinist and Nazi fellow travelers in Washington during the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Zionist policymakers in strategic positions depend on the political backing and work closely with their counterparts in the “lobbies” (AIPAC) in Congress and in the national and local Jewish Zionist organizations. Many of the leading Zionist policymakers rose to power through a deliberate strategy of infiltrating the government to shape policy promoting Israel’s interest over and above the interests of the US populace. While a degree of cohesion resulting from a common allegiance to Tel Aviv can account for suspected nepotism and selection, it is also the case that the powerful Jewish lobbies can play a role in creating key positions in Government and ensuring that one of their own will occupy that position and pursue Israel’s agenda.
Stuart Levey: Israel’s Foremost Operative in the US Government
Stuart Levey, Department of the Treasury, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
In 2004, AIPAC successfully pressured the Bush Administration to create the office of Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (UTFI) and to name its protégé Princeton graduate Stuart Levey to that position. Before, but especially after his appointment, Levey was in close collaboration with the Israeli state and was known as an over the top Zionist zealot with unbounded energy and blind worship of the Israeli state.
Levey coordinates his campaign with Zionist leaders in Congress. He secures sanctions legislation in line with his campaigns. His policies clearly violate international law and national sovereignty, pressing the limits of extra territorial enforcement of his administrative fiats against a civilian economy. His violation of economic sovereignty parallels Obama’s announcement that US Special Forces would operate in violation of political sovereignty on four continents. For all intents and purposes, Levey makes US policy toward Iran. At each point he designs the escalation of sanctions, and then passes it on to the White House, which shoves it down the throats of the Security Council. Once new sanctions approved by Levey and staff are in place they are there to enforce them: identifying violators and implementing penalties. Treasury has become an outpost of Tel Aviv. Not a single leftist, liberal or social democratic publication highlights the role of Levey or even the terrible economic pain this Old Testament fanatic is inflicting on 75 million Iranian civilian workers and consumers. Indeed like Israel’s Judeo-fascist rabbis who preach a “final solution” for Israel’s enemies, Levey announces new and harsher “punishment” against the Iranian people (Stuart Levey, “Iran’s New Deceptions at Sea Must be Punished” FT 8/16/2010, p. 9). Perhaps at the appropriate moment the Jewish State will name a major avenue through the West Bank for his extraordinary services to this most unholy racist state.
Within the confines of his Zionist ideological blinders, Levey applied his intelligence to the singular task of turning his office into the major foreign policy venue for setting US policy toward Iran. Levey more than any other appointed official in government or elected legislator, formulates and implements policies which profoundly influence US, European Union and UN economic relations with Iran. Levey elaborated the sanctions policies, which Washington imposed on the EU and the Security Council. Levey, organizes the entire staff under his control at Treasury to investigate trade and investment policies of all the world’s major manufacturing, banking, shipping, petroleum and trading corporations. He then criss-crosses the US and successfully pressures pension funds, investment houses, oil companies and economic institutions to disinvest from any companies dealing with Iran’s civilian economy. He has gone global, threatening sanctions and blackballing dissident companies in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America which refuse to surrender economic opportunities. They all understood Levey operated at the behest of Israel, services Levey has proudly performed.
The Strategic Role of Local Power
The Israel Lobby Archive recently released declassified documents of the American Zionist Council (AZC) subpoenaed during a US Senate investigation between 1962-63. The documents reveal how the Israeli state through its American Jewish conduits – the mainstream Zionist organizations – penetrated the US mass media and propagated its political line, unbeknown to the American public. Stories written by a host of Jewish Zionist journalists and academics were solicited and planted in national media such as The Readers Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post among others, including regional and local newspapers and radio stations (Israel Lobby Archive, August 18, 2010). While the national Zionist organizations procured the journalists and academic writers and editors, it was the local affiliates who carried the message and implemented the line. The level of infiltration the Senate subpoenaed Zionist documents in the 1960’s reveal has multiplied a hundred fold over the past 50 years in terms of financing, paid functionaries and committed militants and above all in structural power and coercive capability.
While the national leaders in close consultation with Israeli officials receive instructions on which issues are of high priority, the implementation follows a vertical route to regional and local leaders, politicians, and notables who in turn target the local media and religious, academic and other opinion leaders. When national leaders ensure publication of pro Israeli propaganda, the locals reproduce and circulate it to local media and non-Zionist influentials on their “periphery”. Letter campaigns orchestrated at the top are implemented by thousands of militant Zionist doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They praise pro-Israel scribes and attack critics; they pressure newspapers , publishing houses and magazines not to publish dissidents. The national and local leaders promote hostile reviews of books not promoting the Israeli line, influence library decisions to pack their shelves with pro Israeli books and censor and exclude more balanced or critical histories. Local militants in co-ordination with Israeli consuls saturate the public with thousands of public meetings and speakers targeting Christian churches, academic audiences and civic groups; at the same time local Zionist militants and, especially millionaire influentials, pressure local venues (university administrators, church authorities and civic associations) to dis-invite any critic of Israel and their supporters from speaking. In the last resort, local Zionists demand that a pro-Israel propagandist be given equal time, something unheard of when an Israel apologist is scheduled to speak.
Local Zionist organizations make yeoman efforts to recruit mayors, governors, local celebrities, publishers, church people and promising young ethnic and minority leaders by offering them all expenses paid propaganda junkets to Israel and then to write or give interviews parroting what they were fed by Israeli officials. Local leaders mobilize thousands of militant activist Zionists to attack anti-Zionist Jews in public and private. They demand they be excluded from any media roundtables on the Middle East.
Local Zionist functionaries form rapid response committees to visit and threaten any local publisher and editorial staff publishing editorials or articles questioning the Israeli party line. Local leaders police (“monitor”) all local meetings, speaker invitations, as well as the speeches of public commentators, religious leaders and academics to detect any “anti-Zionist overtones’ (which they label “covert anti-Semitism”). Most of the major Jewish religious orders are lined up as the clerical backbone of local Israeli fund-raising, including the financing of new “Jews only” settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Local functionaries are in the forefront of campaigns to deny independent Middle East specialists and public policy academics, appointments, tenure or promotion, independently of the quality of their scholarship. On the other hand, academic hacks who toe the pro-Israel line, by publishing books with blanket attacks on Israeli critics among Christians and Muslims and countries like Turkey, Iran or whoever is a target of Israeli policy, are promoted, lauded and put on the best seller list. Any book or writer critical of Zionist Power or Israel is put on a local and national ‘index’ and subject to an inquisition by slander from a stable of Jewish Torquemadas.
Conclusion
The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence and leadership of powerful Washington based “pro-Israel lobbies”, like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers, professors and others, the “lobby” would be unable to sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of Americans outside the major metropolises. As we have seen from the Senate declassified documents, over a half-century ago, local Zionist organizations began a systematic campaign of penetration, control and intimidation that has reached its pinnacle in the first decade of the 21st century. It is no accident or mere coincidence that University officials in Northern Minnesota or upstate New York are targeted to exclude speakers or fire faculty members critical of Israel. Local Zionists have computerized data banks operating with an index of prohibited speakers, as the Zionists themselves admit and flaunt in contrast to “liberal” Zionists who are prone to label as “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorists” writers who cite official Zionist documents demonstrating their systematic perversion of our democratic freedoms.
Over the decades, the distinction between Zionist power exercised by a “lobby” outside the government and operatives “inside” the government has virtually vanished. As we have seen, in our case study, AIPAC secured the undersecretary position in Treasury, dictated the appointment of a key Zionist operative (Stuart Levey) and accompanies his global crusade to sanction Iran into starvation and destitution. The planting of operatives within key Middle East positions in government is not the simple result of individual career choices. The ascent of so many pro-Israel Zionists to government posts is part of their mission to serve Israel’s interest at least for a few years of their careers. Their presence in government precludes any Senate or Congressional investigations of Zionist organizations acting as agents of a foreign power as took place in the 1960’s.
As the major Zionist organizations and influentials have accumulated power and abused the exercise of power on behalf of an increasingly bloody racist state, which flaunts its dominance over US institutions, public opposition is growing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is gaining strength even in the US (see Harvard divestment in Israeli companies). US public support for Israel, by all measures, has dropped below 50%, while polls in Western Europe show a marked increase in hostility to Israel’s ultra-rightist regime. Anti-Zionist Jews are growing in influence especially among young Jews who are appalled by the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and assault on the humanitarian flotilla. Equally important the presence of anti-Zionist Jews on panels and forums has given courage to many otherwise intimidated non-Jews who heretofore were fearful of being labeled “anti-Semitic”.
The Zionist power configuration rests on a declining population base: most young Jews marry outside the confines of the ethno-religious Jewish-Israeli nexus and many of them are not likely to form the bases for rabid campaigns on behalf of a racist state. The Zionist leadership’s high intensity and heavily endowed effort to fence in young people of Jewish ancestry via private schools, subsidized “summer programs” in Israel etc. are as much out of fear and recognition of the drift away from clerical chauvinism as it is an attempt to recruit a new generation of Israel First militants.
The danger is that the US Zionist support for the ultra-rightist and racist regime in Israel is leading them to join forces with the far right in the US. Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan rednecks are fomenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called “Mosque controversy”) as a distraction from the economic crises and rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamophobia, so near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game. If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel’s operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued Jewish Motherland.
Appendix
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
Member Organizations
- Ameinu
- American Friends of Likud
- American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
- America-Israel Friendship League
- American Israel Public Affairs Committee
- American Jewish Committee
- American Jewish Congress
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
- American Sephardi Federation
- American Zionist Movement
- Americans for Peace Now
- AMIT
- Anti-Defamation League
- Association of Reform Zionists of America
- B’nai B’rith International
- Bnai Zion
- Central Conference of American Rabbis
- Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
- Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds
- Emunah of America
- Friends of Israel Defense Forces
- Hadassah, Women’s Zionist Organization of America
- Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
- Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
- Jewish Community Centers Association
- Jewish Council for Public Affairs
- The Jewish Federations of North America
- Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
- Jewish Labor Committee
- Jewish National Fund
- Jewish Reconstructionist Federation
- Jewish War Veterans of the USA
- Jewish Women International
- MERCAZ USA, Zionist Organization of the Conservative Movement
- NA’AMAT USA
- MCSK” Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia
- National Council of Jewish Women
- National Council of Young Israel
- ORT America
- Rabbinical Assembly
- Rabbinical Council of America
- Religious Zionists of America
- Union for Reform Judaism
- Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
- United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
- WIZO
- Women’s League for Conservative Judaism
- Women of Reform Judaism
- Workmen’s Circle
- World ORT
- World Zionist Executive, US
- Zionist Organization of America
Featured Video
No Vote, No Representation, No State: Democracy, Israeli Style
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- No Vote, No Representation, No State: Democracy, Israeli Style
- Zionist Bought Senate Blocks Information About American Citizens Killed By Israel
- While Gaza dominates the UN, these are the people keeping it alive
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- ‘THAAD Delusion’: Iran war exposes US missile shield limits – The Atlantic
- Moscow issues warning to NATO over Russian exclave
- Yes, the Iran war has destroyed Trump’s presidency
- The fallacy of US delusions about Iran’s economic collapse
- Hezbollah denies Syria cell link, warns of Israeli plan to sow discord
- The legacy of US sanctions, war, and occupation in Iraq
- If Americans Knew
- Mamdani releases plan to combat antisemitism and hate crimes in New York City
- Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Publish Letter to the American People
- DMFI launches $1 million ad campaign supporting Virginia’s Elaine Luria
- US Senate blocks resolution seeking report on Americans killed by Israel
- Israeli Attacks Kill Ten Palestinians in Gaza
- Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave
- Israeli media: The IDF Shows It Doesn’t Turn a Blind Eye; It Actively Emboldens Settler Havoc
- As settlers ravage West Bank, Israeli forces kill 10 in Gaza – Daily Update
- New Report: “Scholasticide and Genocide in Gaza: Assessment, Testimonies and Legal Analysis”
- Ex-Biden officials are desperate for a Gaza scapegoat
- No Tricks Zone
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
