Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Liberal Except for Palestine

Jewish groups manipulate the message

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • December 15, 2020

It is remarkable how leading Jewish organizations manage to play both sides on so-called “humanitarian” and “human rights” issues. It is, of course, well established that Jewish voters lean heavily “liberal” or “progressive” and constitute perhaps the most solid of all Democratic Party constituencies, so it is almost instinctive on their part that they would want to seize what they perceive to be the moral high ground. More to the point, in terms of their relationship with the Democrats and their various grievance factions, they are also generally cited as the source of the majority of the party’s campaign funding. This has resulted in the Democratic Party establishment’s particularly sensitivity to the needs of that key constituency, invariably carefully avoiding any criticism of Israel while also tending to appoint Israel-first bureaucrats and politicians to senior positions in the government. The Jews in return support the “progressive” politics of the Democrats, both to satisfy their own tribal inclinations, and to assuage any guilt relating to the party’s history of warmongering.

Jewish groups have expressed their pleasure with the appointments so far made by Biden, most particularly Ron Klain as Chief of Staff and Jake Sullivan as National Security Adviser. But the Jewel in the Crown is Tony Blinken as Secretary of State. The Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), which is the Israel support group within the party, has sent out an announcement saying it’s thrilled by the number and quality of “pro-Israel allies” who will be in the upcoming government. Other pro-Israel groups to include the Washington Institute for Near East Peace (WINEP) and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) have been similarly enthusiastic.

Jewish members of Congress are grossly disproportionate to their numbers in the general population (27 in the House and 9 in the Senate). Israeli Lobby power influencing Congress and the White House is clearly visible. Up until the last election Eliot Engel chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Adam Schiff headed the House Intelligence Committee, two key posts firmly in the hands of politicians who had regularly put Israel’s interests first. Schiff’s son has been featured wearing a Mossad T-shirt, without any negative comment apart from folks like myself. One wonders what “liberal” Democrats would have thought if the lad had been wearing a shirt featuring CIA?

Engel is mirabile dictu out of office, but he has been replaced by black New York congressman Gregory Meeks, who obedient to orders did what Jeff Blankfort describes as a “full Uncle Tom,” immediately pronouncing that Israelis have a “right to defend themselves” and Palestinians need to return to the negotiating table and stop “fighting.” Three days earlier, Israeli soldiers had shot dead a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy, something that Meeks apparently regards as “self-defense,” but, more to the point, consider for a moment the supreme ignorance of Mr. Meeks and the power he will wield over the nation’s foreign policy.

Nancy Pelosi is herself committed to the cause of Israel, having said that “If this capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid –and I don’t even call it aid– our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are,” while president-elect Joe Biden has proudly declared himself to be a Zionist and House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer has proudly declared himself to have “dual loyalty.” Add to that the appointment of Tony Blinken as Secretary of State presumptive for confirmation that the Biden White House will be the usual hotbed of pandering to Israel along the lines of the precedent set by Donald Trump.

Recently, groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have pledged their support for organizations like Black Lives Matter, partly due to their own membership base’s liberal inclinations and also to establish their fictional bona fides as honorable gentlemen and ladies seeking to take steps that are good for American democracy as they see it. They have stated that “We mourn for George Floyd, who was horrifically murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. There are many marching in the streets across the country and around the world chanting, ‘I can’t breathe’ in tribute to his memory and to demand justice. We mourn for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and Rayshard Brooks among countless others whose lives were cut short as a result of systemic racism in policing. As an organization committed to fighting all forms of hate, ADL knows that these brutal deaths follow an explosion of racist murders and hate crimes across the U.S. Systemic racism, injustice, and inequality call for systemic change… Join us in combatting the bigotry, racism and discrimination that targets marginalized communities today.”

As a side benefit to all that hail-fellow-well-met conviviality, there is, of course, also a tactical consideration, which is that if Jewish groups can demonstrate such marvelous fellowship with poor downtrodden black folk in the United States, perhaps no one will notice how they look the other way while their co-religionists in Israel practice genocide on the Palestinian Arabs. The ADL statement is pure, unadulterated bullshit, ironical because Jews are by far the wealthiest and best educated demographic in the United States, powerful at all levels and hardly victims of anything. And they work hard to hide the fact that the Israel Lobby exists to serve the Jewish state’s interests, including making sure that the American public is led to believe that nothing is happening when Arab children are shot dead, when the livelihoods of Palestinians are destroyed, and when Israel operates with impunity to assassinate foreign officials and kill innocent civilians en masse in places like Iran, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon.

The hysteria on the part of some Jewish groups to identify with the grievances of black Americans is quite amazing to behold. It now includes memorials to the martyred Floyd George of Minneapolis, whose death triggered last spring and summer’s rioting, in so-called holocaust remembrance sites. The first such George Floyd exhibit has opened within the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center in Orlando, Florida. The intention of the exhibitors is not completely clear, but the identification of Jewish suffering with the black counterpart is intended to suck in the inevitable critics who can conveniently be described as racists, putting both Israel/Jews and American blacks on the side of the angels even though the two have functionally nothing at all to do with each other. So, anyone who might want to argue that the Floyd-holocaust joint commemoration is both ridiculous and a political contrivance might just as well button his or her lip and in so doing avoid the sanctimonious backlash that would be generated from the Jewish managed media no matter how one spins it.

In a recent article in the Jewish publication Forward, Dr. Mia Brett examines Critical Race Theory (CRT), the educational and cultural fraud that is being used to delegitimize Western civilization and comes to the conclusion that “Rather than a tool to oppress Jews, CRT is a critical tool in fighting white supremacy — the gravest threat we face.” “We,” means of course, Jews and blacks together as perpetual victims of a malicious Caucasian kleptocracy. There is no mention of Israel in the article, nor of the Palestinian genocide, but it inter alia reveals what Dr. Brett and others like her think about the rest of us.

Indeed, the claim that some Jewish groups and leaders do not regard themselves beholden to American interests at all has a certain cogency, as does the argument that they do not consider their fellow U.S. citizens to be quite their equal given their Chosen status. Religious leader and Grand Rabbi of the Satmar Hassidim community of Williamsburg, New York, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, recently declared that his numerous followers should not consider themselves as American but rather as Jews in exile.

Teitelbaum’s views are not unique. There exists an International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, which is based in Israel. It exists to support Israel and to “To promote an ongoing dialogue and a sense of fraternity among Jewish legislators and ministers.” One might well ask why a parliamentarian representing the people in a country should identify with and, let’s face it, conspire with foreign representatives of other nations based on religion? And support the interests of a foreign country, Israel, also due to religious affinity? One might suggest that that is what charges of “dual loyalty” are all about, though it might indeed be better described as “singular” or primary loyalty.

There should be little doubt that American Jews have by hook and by crook come to occupy the driver’s seat in many key sectors of both the economy and in political life. The trick of lining up with those oppressed both to demonstrate one’s ethical superiority and to avoid having one’s interests scrutinized through assertion of having suffered a similar victimhood has been played again and again. Floyd George in a holocaust memorial? Sure, why not. The reality of George does not exactly fit in with the hagiography that has grown up around him since his death just as Israel and American Jews constantly claiming victimhood so that their own behavior and that of Israel cannot be subject to accountability is also a hypocritical political ploy that does not reflect reality.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org

December 15, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Antisemitism claims mask a reign of political and cultural terror across Europe

By Jonathan Cook | December 11, 2020

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.

The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.

The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.

The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offence at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offence at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.

Guilt by association

This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.

If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.

In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.

The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalised” in Germany.

Jewish organisations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponising antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics, but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.

Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks, museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organisations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.

But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.

A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognised the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.

He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s rightwing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”

Schäfer observes:

The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.

Another prominent victim of these Jewish organisations tells Haaretz :

Sometimes one thinks, “To go to that conference?”, “To invite this colleague?” Afterward it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of “anticipatory obedience” or “prior self-censorship”.

Ringing off the hook

There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:

Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:

The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.

He observes further:

The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.

Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.

No free speech on Israel

It was this same mobilisation of Jewish organisational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.

It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organisational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.

It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.

Two types of Jews

But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicising antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticise Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.

Israel and Jewish organisations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).

Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.

Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.

When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.

Described as ‘kapos’

So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:

The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working “in synergy with the Israeli government” in an effort “to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies” and is abetting the “instrumentalization” that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.

Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.

Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using anti-semitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.

Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organisations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, leftwing Jews.

 

Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.

In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offence”.

Boy who cried wolf

The Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.

Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.

If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponised) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

Or as Haaretz notes:

The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.

The Antisemitism Industry

It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.

In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.

Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.

In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.

In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.

‘Get out of jail’ card

This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.

Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.

In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.

What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.

This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.

Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponised antisemitism provides.

An empty space

The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.

Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.

Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.

There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.

December 15, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

New Documentary Sheds Light On Israel’s Strict Prohibitions On Interracial Marriage

By Eric Striker – National Justice – December 9, 2020

In 1967 Jewish activists sued to overturn bans on interracial marriage in America, yet in 2020, the Jewish state retains the strictest miscegenation laws in the world.

This is the subject of a new Press TV documentary on Israelis who are not allowed to marry by the country’s Rabbinate. Some couples use a loophole that allows them to marry abroad, but with COVID travel restrictions this has become impossible.

The Zionist state does not allow its citizens to obtain a civil marriage. Jewish apologists will often assert that Israel’s marriage laws are primarily motivated by the population’s concern with religious tradition, but a Gallup survey has found that Israel is one of the least religious countries in the world.

Under the rules set by the Rabbinate, a Jew who seeks to marry an individual who might be racially impure under Halakhic law must subject their spouse to DNA tests in order to prove their “genetic Jewishness.” Converts to Judaism and communities such as Ethiopian Jews are also largely banned from wedding.

Though Israel’s population is 75% Jewish and the country is highly secular, 98% of Jews say their friends are mostly or only Jewish. 89% of Jews also say they would not accept their child marrying a Gentile, going as high as 97% were the theoretical partner a Muslim.

While mixing in general is rare, the Israeli state funds initiatives every year intended to discourage Jews from dating outside their race. A street organization composed of Jewish men called Lehava patrol more cosmopolitan neighborhoods in Jerusalem and beat up interracial couples.

Jews in the United States are also known as the people who pioneered gay marriage, but in Israel same-sex marriage is prohibited.

In Israel marriage is a respected institution that enjoys fierce government protection. 50% of Jews marry by the age of 25, while in America only 29% of people between the ages of 18 to 34 are married.

With 95% of American Jews affirming support for the state of Israel, the sincerity of our country’s vanguard of “tolerance,” cosmopolitanism and social liberalism ought to be brought into question.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Remembering the Intifada and its prisoners of freedom: “Ansar III: The Camp of Slow Death”

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | December 9, 2020

The great Palestinian popular intifada (uprising) that mobilized, organized and unified the Palestinian masses – especially inside occupied Palestine, but also in the refugee camps, in exile and in diaspora – launched in December 1987. As we recall its 33rd anniversary, we note that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – some estimates reaching up to 600,000 – were arrested, detained and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the Intifada.

There, they experienced severe torture under interrogation, harsh conditions of confinement, medical neglect and abuse, collective punishment and home demolitions targeting their families, brutal beatings and mistreatment and the widespread and systematic use of administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. Inside the prisons, however, despite all forms of repression, generations of Palestinian organizers developed “revolutionary schools” of politics, literature and organizing, developing powerful young activists to return to the streets embroiled in a great popular uprising.

In a failed attempt to suppress the Intifada, the Israeli occupation launched new prison camps and detention centers to hold the thousands of Palestinians detained in mass arrests throughout occupied Palestine. The following historical booklet, published in English in 1988 by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian Prisoners, focuses on one such prison camp: Ansar III, “a barbed wire compound in the heart of the Negev desert.” At the time of the booklet’s publication, Janet Jubran of the Friends of Palestinian Prisoners noted in her introduction, “In one year, since the Intifada began, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been arrested. At this moment, nearly every family has one or more of its members in prison.”

This powerful booklet, including documentation, testimony and facts about Ansar III and its Palestinian prisoners – including many labor leaders, human rights defenders and journalists – was a part of the burgeoning organizing of Palestinian communities in exile and diaspora (in this case, in the United States) and the growing movement of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is republishing this booklet today, on the 33rd anniversary of the Intifada, to bring this important historical document to new audiences, continuing to build upon this legacy of struggle, standing with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and return. 

Download the PDF here: Download PDF

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Iranian scientist assassinated with help of SATELLITE-CONTROLLED hardware – IRGC

RT | December 6, 2020

The assassination of senior Iranian military researcher Mohsen Fakhrizadeh involved sophisticated electronic equipment controlled via satellite link, a senior official said. The scientist was gunned down in an ambush last week.

This piece of information comes from General Ramezan Sharif, spokesman for the powerful Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), whose remarks during a Saturday event commemorating Fakhrizadeh were reported on Sunday by Iranian media.

“The assassination of a scientist on the street with a satellite device can not undermine our security,” he was cited as saying.

Last week the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, said a remotely controlled weapon was used in the ambush that claimed the scientist’s life. The operation was “very complicated” and didn’t require human presence on the site at the time of the attack.

Iranian officials believe that Fakhrizadeh’s assassination was masterminded by Israel. Iranian media reported that the remains of the weapon that killed him, which was recovered from the scene, indicated that it originated from the Israeli military.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said his government had no idea who killed Fakhrizadeh, but added that whoever did made the world a safer place because the Iranian physicist took “an active part in creating a nuclear weapon.” Iran denies ever trying to militarize its nuclear research, saying it’s purely civilian in purpose.

December 6, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Mission Accomplished: Hezbollah Drone Flew over Galilee, Returned Safely

Al-Manar | December 3, 2020

A Hezbollah drone flew over the occupied territories’ Galilee and returned safely to Lebanon despite high alert among the ranks of the Israeli occupation army last October, a report said on Thursday.

Lebanese Daily Al-Akhbar reported that a Hezbollah drone managed to enter the airspace of occupied Palestine on October 26 as the Israeli occupation army was on high alert and waging the so-called “Lethal Arrow” maneuver.

“The maneuver was accompanied with high activity by the Israeli air force,” the Lebanese daily said.

“One of the maneuver’s goals was to prevent drones from getting into the Palestinian airspace,” Al-Akhbar said, highlighting the paradox.

The drone managed to capture photos and footage of the occupied region of Galilee and then returned to its base in Lebanon safely, the daily revealed.

Al-Manar will broadcast the photos and scenes captured by the drone in the last episode of “The Second Liberation” documentary series.

December 5, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

How Israel deployed an intelligence deception to justify killing scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

By Gareth Porter · The GrayZone · December 2, 2020

Israel’s Mossad has spent years on a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the world Iran possessed a nuclear weapons program – and legitimizing its assassinations of Iranian academics.

The Israeli assassination of Iranian defense official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is being treated as a triumph of Israeli intelligence, with ubiquitous references in the New York Times and other major media outlets to the killing of “Iran’s top nuclear scientist”. In fact, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency eliminated Fakhrizadeh, a defense official, despite the knowledge that its public depiction of him as the key architect of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was a deception.

For years, US media outlets have portrayed Fakhrizadeh as Iran’s equivalent to J. Robert Oppenheimer, marketing him to the public as the mastermind behind an Iranian version of the Manhattan Project. This image was developed primarily through a carefully constructed Israeli disinformation operation based on documents that displayed signs of fabrication.

Birth of a Mossad propaganda operation

The origin of the Mossad propaganda operation on Fakhrizadeh lies in the early 1990’s, when the US and Israel first developed suspicions of Iranian ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. U.S., British, German and Israeli intelligence analysts had intercepted telexes from Sharif University about various “dual use” technologies — those that could be exploited in a nuclear program but also be applied for non-nuclear use.

Many of the telexes contained the number of an organization called Physics Research Center that operated under the watch of Iran’s Defense Ministry. The CIA and its allied intelligence agencies interpreted those intercepts as evidence that the Iranian military was running its own nuclear program, and thus that Iran was covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability.

During the first term of the George W. Bush administration, the notorious militarist and Likud ally John Bolton took charge of Iran policy, prompting the CIA to issue an estimate concluding for the first time that Iran had initiated a nuclear weapons program. Israel’s Mossad apparently saw Washington’s new posture as a green light to set into motion a black propaganda campaign to dramatize and personalize the secret Iranian nuclear weapons program that was presumed to exist.

Between 2003 and 2004, Mossad produced a large cache of alleged Iranian documents depicting efforts to mate a nuclear weapon with Iran’s Shahab-3 missile and a bench system to convert uranium.

The Mossad files contained multiple tell-tale signs of forgery. For example, the reentry vehicle depicted in the drawings had already been abandoned by 2002 – before these drawings were supposedly created, according to the documents themselves – in favor of a design that looked entirely different and which was first shown in an August 2004 test. So whoever was responsible for the drawings was clearly unaware of the single most important Defense Ministry decision affecting the future of Iran’s missile deterrent.

The CIA never revealed who spirited the documents out of Iran or how. However, former senior German Foreign Office official Karsten Voigt explained to this reporter in 2013 that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had been furnished with the collection by an occasional source whom the intel chiefs considered less than credible.

And who was this source? According to Voigt, he belonged to the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), the exile Iranian cult which had fought for Saddam’s Iraqi forces against Iran during the eight-year war and by the early 1990s was passing information and propaganda that Mossad did not want to have attributed to itself.

Painting Fakrhizadeh as nuclear mastermind

Those Mossad documents identified Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the manager of a supposedly top-secret Iranian project called the “AMAD Plan.” In reality, Fakhrizadeh was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer and official in the Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), who also taught Physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran.

To implicate him as a nuclear project mastermind, the collection of Mossad documents featured a directive supposedly signed by Fakhrizadeh. But since no one outside Iran had ever seen the previously obscure official’s signature, and given the lack of effort to show any official government markings on the documents, there was little to prevent Mossad from forging it.

In their 2012 history of Israel’s intelligence service, “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service”, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nisham Mishal pointed to Mossad as the culprit behind the appearance of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents. The writers recounted how Mossad gathered the personal information on Fakhrizadeh that was later released to the public through the MEK, including his passport number and his home telephone number.

“This abundance of detail and means of transmission,” Bar-Zohar and Mishal wrote, “leads one to believe that… ‘a certain secret service’ ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them on to the Iranian resistance [MEK].”

The documents also fingered Fakhrizadeh as the former head of the Physics Research Centre, thus deceptively linking him to the procurement efforts for “dual use” nuclear items in 1990-91 that were well known to CIA and other intelligence agencies. That accusation was reflected in the 2006 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 listing Iranian officials responsible for nuclear and missile proliferation in Iran. In the UN resolution, Fakhrizadeh was identified as a “[s]enior MODAFL scientist and former head of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC).”

But the Israeli identification of Fakhrizadeh as the head of the PHRC was proven to be a lie. Iran turned over extensive documentation to the IAEA in late 2004 or early 2005 on the PHRC and the procurement telexes, and the documents — which the IAEA did not challenge — showing that a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran named Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavari had headed the PHRC from its inception in 1989 until it closed in 1998.

Further, the documents provided to the IAEA revealed that the dual-use technology that Shahmoradi-Zavari helped the university procure through his PHRC connections was actually intended for the university faculty’s own teaching and research. In at least one case, the IAEA personnel found one “dual-use” item had been procured by the university.

These facts should have put an end to the Mossad-created myth of Fakrizadeh as the head of a vast underground nuclear weapons program. But the IAEA never revealed Shamoradi-Zavari’s name, and therefore avoided having to acknowledge that the documents the agency had embraced as genuine had misled the world about Fakhrizadeh.

It was not until 2012 that David Albright, the director of Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, acknowledged that Shahmoradi-Zavari — not Fakhrizadeh — had been the head of the Physics Research Center – although he avoided admitting that the IAEA had relied on documents that turned out be false.

Revving up the propaganda 

The Mossad got busy again after the CIA’s November 2007 assessment that Iran had ceased work on nuclear weapons. Determined to neutralize the political impact of that finding, the Israelis apparently began work on a new batch of Iranian top secret documents. This time, however, the Israelis provided the documents directly to the IAEA in late 2009, as then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs.

The documents supposedly revealed Iranian defense ministry activities related to nuclear weapons after the cessation of such work that the CIA. One of those documents, leaked to the London Times in December 2009, purported to be a 2007 letter from Fakhrizadeh as the chairman of an organization presiding over nuclear weapons work. But as ElBaradei recalled, the IAEA’s technical experts “raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity…”

Even the CIA and some European intelligence analysts were skeptical about the authenticity of the Fakhrizadeh document. Although it had been circulating among the intelligence agencies for months, even the normally unquestioning New York Times reported that the CIA had not authenticated it. Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, who had maintained contacts with active agency personnel, told this reporter CIA analysts regarded the document as a forgery.

A pattern of assassinations justified by disinformation

The killing of Fakhrizadeh was not the first time Mossad bumped off an Iranian it had baselessly accused of playing a leading role in a weapons program. In July 2011, someone working for Mossad — apparently an MEK member — gunned down a 35-year old engineering student named Darioush Rezaeinejad and wounded his wife in front of a kindergarten in Tehran.

The young man was targeted on the basis of nothing more than the research he had conducted on high-voltage switches and his publication of a scholarly paper about his scholarship. The abstract of the professional paper Rezaienejad had published made it clear that his work involved what is called “explosive pulsed power” involved in high-power lasers, high-power microwave sources and other commercial applications.

A few days after the assassination of Rezaienejad, however, an official of an unnamed “member state” provided Associated Press reporter George Jahn the abstract of Rezaienejad’s paper, successfully persuading Jahn that it “appeared to back” the claim that he had been “working on a key component in setting off the explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.”

Then, in September 2011, the Israelis provided Jahn with an “intelligence summary” advancing the ludicrous claim that Rezaeinejad was not an electrical engineering specialist at all, but rather a “physicist” who had worked for the Ministry of Defense on various aspects of nuclear weapons.

The deployment of absurd assertions backed by paper-thin evidence to justify the cold-blooded murder of a young electrical engineer with no record of nuclear weapons involvement illuminated a Mossad modus operandi that has reappeared in the case of Fakhrizadeh: Israeli intelligence simply gins up a narrative centered around fictional ties to a nonexistent nuclear weapons program. It then watches as the Western press uncritically disseminates the propaganda to the public, establishing the political space for cold-blooded assassinations in broad daylight.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

December 3, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

UN calls for probe into Israel’s use of armed force against children

Palestine Information Center – December 2, 2020

RAMALLAH – The UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner has called for a transparent investigation into the use of armed force by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank.

The UN Human Rights Office said that the Israeli forces critically injured at least four children with live ammunition and rubber-coated metal bullets in separate incidents across the West Bank in the past two weeks.

“All injuries resulted from the use of potentially lethal force in circumstances where available information suggests the children did not pose a threat to life or serious injury of the soldiers or to anyone else.”

“It thus appears the force used was not in accordance with international law,” the Human Rights Office said in a statement, pointing out that a 16-year-old boy was shot in the chest and critically injured in al-Bireh city on November 29.

“On 27 November, during protests in Kafr Qaddum village in the north of the West Bank, soldiers shot a 16-year old boy in the head with a rubber-coated metal bullet. The boy fell from the impact and is hospitalized with a fractured skull.”

“On November 17, a 15-year old boy on his way back from school lost his right eye after being hit by ricochet ammunition in Qalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem. Although there were clashes taking place between soldiers and residents of the camp, none of the available information suggests the boy would have posed a threat to anyone at the time he was shot,” the statement elaborated.

“UN Human Rights Office calls on Israel to promptly, transparently and independently investigate all instances of (Israeli army) use of force that have led to killing or injury and to hold those responsible accountable,” the statement said.

“In accordance with international law, use of lethal force is only allowed as a measure of last resort, in response to a threat to life or of serious injury. Stone-throwing does not appear to constitute such threat. In addition, force must always be used in a manner which causes the least possible harm. Shooting in the head or upper body does not appear to conform with this requirement.”

“Children enjoy special protection under international law and must be protected from violence at all times.”

December 3, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UN General Assembly adopts five anti-Israeli resolutions

Press TV – December 3, 2020

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has approved five anti-Israeli resolutions, which are part of a package of 20 pro-Palestinian texts that the 193-member body adopts on an annual basis.

One of the documents, passed on Wednesday, condemned Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights — a territory the Tel Aviv regime seized from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed four years later — in a move that was never recognized by the world community.

Endorsed by 88-9 votes with 62 abstentions, the resolution urges Israel to withdraw from the “occupied Syrian Golan to the line of 4 June 1967 in implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions.”

It also affirmed that Israel’s unilateral annexation of the Syrian territory in 1981 “constitutes a stumbling block in the way of achieving a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region.”

Over the past decades, Israel has built dozens of settlements in the Golan Heights in defiance of international calls for the regime to stop its construction activities on the occupied land.

Damascus has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying the area must be completely restored to its control.

In a major pro-Israel policy shift, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2019 recognizing Israel’s control over occupied Golan in a blatant violation of international law.

The second resolution, entitled a “Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine,” was approved 145-7, with nine abstentions.

It called on the Tel Aviv regime to withdraw from all territory over the pre-1967 lines in occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

The document also demanded a halt to Israel’s settlement construction activities, spoke of the illegality of annexation plans, and warned the occupying entity against making changes in East Jerusalem al-Quds.

It further took Israel to task for a wide range of actions against the Palestinian people, including the demolition of their homes in Area C of the West Bank.

The three remaining UNGA resolutions affirmed the work of UN Committees operating on behalf of the Palestinians.

Before the vote, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan chastised the General Assembly for not referencing the regime’s recent normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.

“Can this forum be any more detached from the real world?” he asked, claiming, “Instead of encouraging the Palestinians to see how these agreements can transform the region and be used as a catalyst for peace with Israel, this institution votes in favor of these biased resolutions.”

A Palestinian representative denounced Erdan’s “flip” and “offensive” comments, including one where he accused the UNGA of being detached from reality.

“On the contrary, what was discussed today in this debate is the reality. What was discussed today is not so-called ‘Palestinian talking points.’ These are the international talking points,” she said. “This is the international consensus that Israel, the occupying power, continues to object, obstruct, to deny, to belittle and to attempt futilely to destroy.”

The regime has gotten “accustomed to violating the law with zero consequences,” she added. “Only accountability can change this miserable situation and give hope for a future of justice and peace… The hypocritical and degrading claim by the Israeli representative that this institution’s approach has failed perhaps should highlight even more the need of concrete actions by states to implement the resolutions adopted by the UNGA to ensure accountability.”

She also stressed that the passage of the anti-Israel texts showed that support for the Palestinian people remained strong.

Before the General Assembly’s vote, a Jordanian representative, whose country is the custodian of the holy sites in Jerusalem al-Quds, said Israel must maintain the status quo at Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount.

Israel is attempting to “impose a fait accompli on al-Aqsa mosque and Jerusalem,” he said, adding that the occupied city’s “holy sites will remain the focus of Jordanian care and guardianship.”

Jordan will “combat a new fait accompli or change the historic or legal status of the holy city especially at the al-Aqsa Mosque,” he emphasized.

Separately, Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour asked the international community to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law and stick to the so-called two-state solution to the Middle East conflict.

He also called for a boycott of Israeli settlement products and urged Western nations to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Palestinian PM calls for boycott of Israeli settlements

In another development on Wednesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh urged donor countries and international organizations to take serious measures towards boycotting Israeli settlements.

He stressed that the status quo imposed by Israel is deteriorating as the Palestinian land is shrinking, the settlers’ violence is escalating, and access to resources is decreasing daily.

“Economic development is not separate from the political and national project. Rather, it is a lever towards ending the occupation and establishing the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” he said, noting that the world must move to end this occupation because the current status quo cannot continue.

Iran envoy blasts Israel for violating Palestinians’ rights

Mohammad Reza Sahraei, counselor at Iran’s Mission to the UN, said the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People provides an opportunity to “highlight the dire and painful situation endured by Palestinians over the course of decades as a result of the gross and systematic violation of their rights by the Israeli regime.”

“The question of Palestine is the longest-running crisis of our time with no foreseeable conclusion in sight…. In fact, the non-compliance of the occupying regime with relevant international laws and regulations has further prevented the international community from achieving a just and lasting solution to the crisis,” he said.

“After more than seven decades, the Israeli regime has continued to violate the fundamental human rights and dignities of the Palestinian people as well as other Arabs living under its occupation. As a result, Palestinians are not only deprived of their lands and properties while being forcibly evicted but also subjected to violence, terror, and intimidation,” the diplomat added.

December 3, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Weapon used in nuclear scientist’s assassination made in Israel’

Press TV – November 30, 2020

The remains of the weapon used in the Friday assassination of senior nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh show that it was made in Israel, an informed source has told Press TV.

The source made the revelation on Monday, saying the weapon collected from the site of the terrorist act bears the logo and specifications of the Israeli military industry.

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence also said it had obtained “new leads” on the identity of the perpetrators and that the information “will be publicized very soon.”

A former head of the Defense Ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, Fakhrizadeh was targeted in an attack involving at least one explosion and machinegun fire in the town of Absard near Tehran.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted on Sunday that the assassination bears all the hallmarks of the Israeli regime.

The history of Tel Aviv’s sabotage targeting Iran’s nuclear energy program is as old as the program itself.

Many observers believe Israel is not able to carry out such dangerous operations without the prior information and support of the United States which left a landmark nuclear deal with Iran in 2015.

Israel possesses the Middle East’s sole nuclear arsenal estimated to contain at least 200 warheads. The occupying regime maintains a policy of ambiguity concerning its nuclear weapons, neither confirming nor denying publicly that it has the capability.

Unlike Iran, it also refuses to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and does not allow any international inspection of its nuclear weapons program.

November 30, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Expanding Occupation – Brouqin Village

Al-Haq • November 10, 2020

November 29, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Fallacy behind ‘Normalization’

By Lubna Tarabey – Al-Manar – November 28, 2020

“Normalization” is the process through which relationships can become normal or the process of bringing or returning something to a normal state or condition. Normalcy requires a balance of relationships, a regularization, an orderly state of affairs. Is that really the basis of the relationship between the so called “State of Israel” and the other countries of the Arab World that appear to be rushing to sign such ‘normalization’ agreements? Would such a state of affairs result in something that is even remotely balanced?

Let us take a look at this assumed balance and see if it is skewed in any direction – in whose direction. What does the “State of Israel” have? It has a nuclear ability- unlike the Arab countries, the strongest army, and the unconditional support of the United States of America and the Western world. What do any of the Arab states embarking on normalization have? Nothing of the above – not even the support of their people. Yes, they do have an oil-based wealth which can be robbed, used or abused, and that is what the Israelis are after. What resources does ‘Israel’ have that it promises to share with these Arab states? It promises to share nothing – promising peace. The idea in itself would be funny if it was not so pathetic. When were these Arab states now signing agreements ever in a state of war with ‘Israel’? When did any ever offer to send one soldier to fight alongside the Palestinians? The promised peace is pathetic as it is being offered as a gift among two parties that had never even been in war. Arab regimes are fools if they think they would benefit from the Zionists controlling the policies, both internal and external, in ‘Israel’. Which Arab state – those who actually were engaged in armed conflict – ever benefited from any agreement with the Zionists? Did Egypt benefit? Did Jordan benefit? The answer is categorically NO. None of these states benefited and none can hope to ever benefit from such agreements. That is against the policies of the Zionists state as the following clarifies.

The Zionists have a long history of using others. Ends justifies means. No other principle matters to them. Not justice, not equality, not fairness, not even peace. The principle of ‘end justifies means’ is the only principle they adhere to and to achieve their aims they gladly walk over other people. They even did that to Americans themselves – their number one ally. This is something that was seriously and meticulously documented by Alison Weir, the author of a must read book titled “Against Our Better Judgment: the hidden history of how the U.S was used to create Israel” (2014). Describing the scheming of the Zionist movement in the US, the author writes, “It has targeted virtually every sector of American society; worked to involve American in tragic, unnecessary and profoundly costly wars, dominated congress for decades; increasingly determined which candidates could become serious contenders for US presidency; and promoted bigotry towards an entire population, region and culture.”(Weir, 2014:2). The Zionist movement has constantly used any and whichever method to realize its end – using other people, benefiting from other nations economic powers, draining their resources and even stealing and appropriating other people’s history and culture. This is what they have done all over the world. This is what they have done in Palestine.

How can one even consider a normal relationship with an entity that is anything but normal. Its very existence represents an abnormality among nations. The only state in the world that has no history – a mere 60 years of existence – younger than my own father! Created in a land whose people have a history of more than 4000 years. This abnormal state was established at the cost of killing and displacing the natives of the land. The ‘engineers’ behind the establishment of this abnormality were quite aware that their claim to the land had no foundation. So, what was their brilliant solution? Let us steal the needed foundations! It was not enough to steal the land and houses of the Palestinians. Why not go the extra mile? Steal their history and, along the way, their culture. After all, no one can stop them. They enjoyed the support of the almighty western superpowers along with all the technological resources need to do so. The plan was deviously simple: Erase all traces of anything Palestinian and replace it with ‘Israeli’. Hence, the world wide famous Middle Eastern dish called the hummus became Israeli Hummus. The famous relics of the church of Bethlehem were stolen and documented as part of the Jewish heritage. The embroidery work of the Palestinians which for thousands of years stood as a signature of the clothing of the people of Palestine was also stolen and renamed ‘Israeli’. Even names of villages were changed in line with the Jewish pronunciations to establish a sense of continuity and belonging. For example Asqalan became Ashkelon …. The story goes on and on. Palestine was removed from the maps used all over the world and replaced with ‘Israel’. One theft after another. All carried out under the eyes of the so called ‘free world’ which mostly reacted by turning a blind eye, intentionally so, further supporting these atrocities.

Such practices cannot be allowed to continue. People of the Arab World must become active agents, calling out and exposing these practices. A documentation of Palestinian cultural heritage must be embarked upon. The youth of the Arab world must be reminded of how the ‘state of Israel’ was established. Whose houses were destroyed? Whose land was stolen? Whose culture was destroyed? Normalization of what! What a fallacy! There can be no normal relationships – the very basis of the concept is not applicable.

Lubna Tarabey is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Institute of Social Sciences, Lebanese University.

Alison Weir is an American research with a lot of publications on the Zionist movement and the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

November 29, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »