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French Online Payment Service Provider HelloAsso Refuses to Close Accounts Belonging to BDS Activists

Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee / France (BNC) 09-12-18

HelloAsso, a French company that provides online payment services, has rejected pressure by Israel lobby groups to shut down the accounts of two French groups which support the BDS movement for Palestinian human rights. HelloAsso will continue to provide services to both Association France Palestine Solidarity (AFPS) and BDS-France.

HelloAsso publicized its decision in a tweet explaining that it supports the right of citizens to call for BDS as part of freedom of expression.

In 2016, the European Union stated:

“The EU stands firm in protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is applicable on EU Member States’ territory, including with regard to BDS actions carried out on this territory.”

Translation of HelloAsso tweet from French original:

[…] “HelloAsso is an apolitical platform that does not take any position regarding the claims of the BDS movement. HelloAsso nevertheless considers this movement as within the realm of free expression and not as discriminatory or antisemitic.

HelloAsso’s position is supported  by the European Union, which has clearly stated it favours protecting freedom of expression and association, including the right to advocate for BDS .

Therefore, the HelloAsso account of AFPS (Association France Palestine Solidarity) will not be removed.

To all those who criticize  us for hosting these organizations, we respond that the conflation that allows attacks on these organizations is dangerous because it conflates antisemitism, which we condemn without ambiguity, and criticism of the state of Israel, which is a political opinion. This freedom of expression is a fundamental right.

Since its creation, HelloAsso has striven to support freedom of association and to protect the right to freedom of speech because we are a platform that is committed to the model of [non-profit] association and at the same time apolitical, open and enriched by differences of opinion, a reflection of our society.”

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Veiled Danger of the ‘Dead’ Oslo Accords

By Ramzy Baroud | Palestine Chronicle | September 12, 2018

Yossi Beilin is back. This unrepentant Israeli ‘peacemaker’ is like the mythical phoenix, continually resurrecting from its ashes. In a recent article in Al-Monitor, Beilin wrote in support of the idea of a confederation between Israel and Palestine.

A confederation “could prevent the need to evacuate settlers and allow those interested to live in Palestine as Israeli citizens, just as a similar number of Palestinian citizens could live in Israel,” he wrote.

Bizarrely, Beilin is promoting a version of an idea that was pushed by Israel’s extremist Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

The difference between Beilin and Lieberman is in how we choose to perceive them: the former was the godfather of the Oslo Accords 25 years ago, a well-known political ‘dove’ and the former Chairman of the ‘left-leaning’ Meretz party. Lieberman, on the other hand, is purportedly the exact opposite.

When Lieberman suggested population transfer and territorial swaps, all hell broke loose. When Beilin did it, his efforts were perceived as an honest attempt at reviving the dormant ‘peace process.’

That is the brilliance of Beilin, his followers and the whole ‘peace process’ that culminated in the Oslo Accords and the famous White House handshake between the late PLO Chairman, Yasser Arafat, and the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in September 1993. They successfully branded this hideous infringement on international law as a sincere effort at achieving peace between two conflicting parties.

The Donald Trump Administration has long surpassed Oslo and its tired clichés of ‘peace process’, ‘painful compromises’ and ‘trust building’ exercises, etc., as it is promoting something else entirely, the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’.

But Oslo will not go away. It remains a problem because the intellectual foundation that led to its conception is still firmly in place – where only Israel matters and the aspirations of the Palestinian people are still inconsequential.

While Beilin is no longer an influential politician, there are many Yossi Beilins who are still lurking, playing the role of ‘peacemakers‘, meeting behind closed doors, on the sideline of conferences, offering their services as interlocutors, wheelers and dealers, and saviors.

The late Palestinian Professor, Edward Said, was not prophesying when he warned of the disastrous future consequences of Oslo as it was being signed. He was dismissed by mainstream media and pundits as radical, lumped with the other ‘enemies of peace’ on ‘both sides’. But, he, like many other Palestinians, was right.

“Labor and Likud leaders alike made no secret of the fact that Oslo was designed to segregate the Palestinians in noncontiguous, economically unviable enclaves, surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements and settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the territories’ integrity,” he wrote in the Nation.

The colonization of Palestine, for the first time, was accelerating with the consent of the Palestinian leadership. The PLO was turned into a local body with the inception of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. The rights of millions of Palestinian refugees in the diaspora were relegated. The West Bank was divided into areas A, B, and C, each governed by different rules, mostly under the control of the Israeli military.

The ‘Palestinian revolution’ turned into an agonizing process of ‘state-building’, but without state or even contiguous territories. Palestinians who rejected the horrific outcomes of Oslo – protracted expansion of Jewish colonies, continued violent Occupation, normalized through ‘security coordination’ between Israel and the PA – were often abused and deemed extremists.

Meanwhile, successive US administrations continued to fund and defend Israel, unconcerned about its self-tailored job title as the ‘honest peace broker.’

The PA played along because the perks were far too lucrative to be abandoned on principle. A new class of Palestinians had risen, dependent on Oslo for its wealth and affluence.

Even when the Trump Administration cut off the Palestinian Refugees Agency, UNRWA, of all funds, and scrapped the $200 million in humanitarian aid to the PA, the US still released 61 million dollars to the PA to maintain its ‘security cooperation’ with Israel. ‘Israel’s security’ is just too sacred a bond to be broken.

This is why Oslo remains dangerous. It is not the agreement itself that matters, but the mindset behind it – the political and diplomatic discourse that is wholly manufactured to serve Israel exclusively.

In January 2017, Daniel Pipes of the pro-Israel Middle East Forum came up with what seemed like a puerile idea: a ‘way to peace’ between Israel and the Palestinians, based on the simple declaration that Israel has won.

The new strategy requires little by way of negotiations. It merely entails that Israel declares ‘victory’, which Pipes defined as “imposing one’s will on the enemy, compelling him through loss to give up his war ambitions.’

As unconscionable as Pipes’ logic was, a few months later, Congressional Republicans in the US launched the “Israel Victory Caucus.” The co-Chair of the Caucus, Rep. Bill Johnson, ‘predicted’ in April 2017 that Trump would soon be heading to Israel to announce the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Since then, the US is following a blueprint of a strategy in which the US advances Israel’s ‘victory’ while imposing conditions of surrender on defeated Palestinians. Despite its more diplomatic and legal language, that was also the essence of Oslo.

Trump, to the satisfaction of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may think that he has single-handedly destroyed the Oslo Accords or whatever remained of it. However, judging by his words and actions, Trump has indicated that the spirit of Oslo remains alive: the bribes, the bullying and the fighting for that coveted and final Israeli ‘victory.’

Oslo is not a specific legal document that can be implemented or rejected. It is a spectrum in which the likes of Beilin, Lieberman, and Pipes have more in common than they may think, and in which the fate of the Palestinian people is left to inept leaders, incapable of thinking outside the permissible space allocated to them by the Israelis and the Americans.

Unfortunately, Abbas and his Authority are still reveling at the expense of the space that is Oslo, not the ‘accords’ – provisions, stipulations and heaps of paper – but the corrupt culture – money, perks and unmitigated defeat.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Congress today sneaking through $38 billion to Israel

If Americans Knew | September 12, 2018

Israel partisans are sneaking through 2 Congressional bills today! Voters need to phone Congress about them now!

  • The largest aid package in U.S. history.
  • A bill for a special envoy who will monitor criticism of Israel world wide.

Phone the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Congressional rep. (If you don’t know who that is, put your zip code in here.)

1) VOTE NO ON S.2497

S. 2497 – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018. The House number is H.R.5141

This gives Israel $33 billion on top of the $5 billion that was recently voted.

It also mandates that NASA work with the Israeli space agency, despite accusations that Israel stole classified information.

More information  here.

2) VOTE NO ON H.R. 1911 

“Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Act of 2018”

This “special envoy” works to monitor criticism of Israel.

More information here.

PDFs of the bills that are before Congress today are here and here.

By the way, U.S. media have not informed American citizens about these current bills – while groups like AIPAC have told their members to pressure Congress for them.

September 12, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

A New Capital? Palestinians say Abu Dis is No Substitute for East Jerusalem

By Jonathon Cook | The National | September 11, 2018

From the offputting concrete edifice that confronts a visitor to Abu Dis, the significance of this West Bank town – past and present – is not immediately obvious.

The eight metre-high grey slabs of Israel’s separation wall silently attest to a divided land and a quarter-century of a failed Middle East peace process.

The entrance to Abu Dis could not be more disconcerting, given reports that Donald Trump’s administration intends it to be the capital of a future Palestinian state, in place of Jerusalem.

The wall, and the security cameras lining the top of it, are the legacy of battles for control of Jerusalem’s borders. Sections of concrete remain charred black by fires residents set years ago in the forlorn hope of weakening the structure and bringing it down.

Before the wall was erected more than a decade ago, Abu Dis had a spectacular view across the valley to Jerusalem’s Old City and the iconic golden-topped Dome of the Rock, less than three kilometres away. It was a few minutes’ drive – or an hour’s hike – to Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the reputed location of Jesus’s crucifixion.

Now, for many of the 13,000 inhabitants, Jerusalem might as well as be on another planet. They can no longer reach its holy places, markets, schools or hospitals.

Abu Dis, say its residents, is hemmed in on all sides – by Israel’s oppressive wall; by illegal Jewish settlements encroaching relentlessly on what is left of its lands; and by a large, Israeli-run landfill site that, according to experts, is a threat to human health.

The Palestinian authorities do not even control Abu Dis. The Israeli security cameras watch over it and armoured jeeps full of Israeli soldiers make forays at will into its crowded streets.

Perhaps fittingly, given the Palestinians’ current plight, Abu Dis feels more like it is being gradually turned into one wing of a dystopian open-air prison than a capital-in-waiting.

Abu Dis repackaged

Nonetheless, the town has been thrust into the spotlight. Rumours have intensified that US President Trump’s promised peace plan – what he terms the “deal of the century” – is nearing completion. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been drafting it for more than a year.

Back in January Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, confirmed for the first time that the White House was leaning on him to accept Abu Dis as his capital.

The issue has become highly charged for Palestinians since May, when Mr Trump overturned decades of diplomatic consensus by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

That appeared to overturn a once widely shared assumption that Israel would be required to withdraw from East Jerusalem, which it occupied in 1967, and allow the Palestinians to declare it their capital.

Instead Mr Kushner and his team appear to believe they can repackage Abu Dis, just outside the city limits, as a substitute capital.

How plausible is it that the Palestinians can accept a ghettoised, anonymous community like Abu Dis for such a pivotal role in their nation-building project?

Symbolic power

Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian cabinet minister, said Mr Trump would find no takers among the Palestinian leadership.

“A Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital simply won’t work. It’s not credible,” he said. “It’s not just Jerusalem’s religious and historic significance. It also has strategic, economic and geographic importance to Palestinians.”

The people of Abu Dis appear to feel the same way, with many pointing to Jerusalem’s enormous symbolic power, as well as the potential role of international tourism in developing the Palestinian economy.

Abu Dis, however, is unlikely ever to attract visitors, even should it get a dramatic makeover.

The approach road, skirting the massive settlement of Maale Adumim, home to 40,000 Jews, is adorned with red signs warning that it is dangerous for Israelis to enter the area.

The section of wall at the entrance to Abu Dis alludes to the residents’ growing anger and frustration – not only with Israel but some of their own leaders.

Artists have spray-painted a giant image of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian resistance leader imprisoned by Israel for the past 16 years. It shows him lifting his handcuffed hands to make a V-for-victory sign.

But noticeably, next to him is a much smaller image of Mr Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whose face has been painted out. He has come under mounting domestic criticism for maintaining Palestinian “security cooperation” with Israel’s occupation forces.

Resentment at such cooperation is felt especially keenly in Abu Dis. Large iron gates in the wall give the Israeli army ready access in and out of the town.

An orphaned town

Under the Oslo accords signed in the mid-1990s, all of Abu Dis was placed temporarily under Israeli military control, and most of it under Israel’s civil control also. That temporary status appears to have become permanent, leaving residents at the whim of hostile Israeli authorities who deny building permits and readily issue demolition orders.

The restrictions mean Abu Dis lacks most of the infrastructure one would associate with a city, let alone a capital.

Abdulwahab Sabbah, a local community activist, said: “We are now a small island of territory controlled by the Israeli army.

“Not only have we lost our schools, the hospitals we once used, our holy places, the job opportunities that the city offered. Families have been split apart too, unable to visit their relatives in Jerusalem.

“We have been orphaned. We have lost Jerusalem, our mother.”

A short drive into Abu Dis and the shell of a huge building comes into view, a reminder that the idea of an Abu Dis upgrade is not the Trump administration’s alone.

In fact, noted Mr Khatib, Israel began rebranding Abu Dis as a second “Al Quds” – the Holy City, the Arabic name for Jerusalem – in the late 1990s, after the Oslo agreement allowed Palestinian leaders to return to Gaza and limited parts of the West Bank.

The Palestinian leadership, desperate to get a foothold closer to the densely populated neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, played along. They expected that Israel would eventually relinquish Abu Dis to full Palestinian control, allowing it to be annexed to East Jerusalem in a future peace deal.

View of al-Aqsa

In 1996 the Palestinians began work building a $4 million parliament on the side of Abu Dis closest to Jerusalem. The location was selected so that the office of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would have a view of Al Aqsa.

Reports from that time talk of Abu Dis becoming a gateway, or “safe corridor”, for West Bank Palestinians to reach the mosque. One proposal was to build a tunnel between Abu Dis and the Old City.

However, with the outbreak of hostilities in 2000 – a Palestinian intifada – work on the parliament came to a halt. The interior was never finished, and there is now no view of Al Aqsa. The parliament too is sealed off from Jerusalem by the wall.

Since then Israel has barred the Palestinian Authority from having any role in East Jerusalem.

Khalil Erekat, a caretaker, holds the key to the unused parliament. Once visitors could inspect the building, including its glass-domed central chamber. Now, he said, only pigeons and the odd stray dog or snake ventured inside.

“No one comes any more,” he added. “The place has been forgotten.”

And that, it seems, is the way Palestinian officials would prefer it. With the Trump administration mooting the town as a substitute capital, the parliament is now an embarrassing white elephant.

Requests from The National to the Palestinian authorities to visit the building were rejected on the grounds that it was no longer structurally safe.

Eyesore ghetto

Evidence of how quickly Israel has transformed Abu Dis from a rural suburb of Jerusalem into an eyesore ghetto are evident in the homes around the parliament.

A once-palatial four-storey home next door would be more in place in war-ravaged Gaza than an impending capital. Its collapsed top floors sit precariously above the rest of the structure.

Mohammed Anati, a retired carpenter aged 64, is a tenant occupying the bottom floor with his wife and three sons.

He said the destruction was carried out by the Jerusalem municipality several years ago, apparently because the upper floors were built in violation of planning rules Israeli military authorities imposed after 1967.

Neighbours speculate that, in fact, Israel was more concerned that the top of the building provided views over the wall.

Mr Anati said that, paradoxically, the Jerusalem municipality treated this small neighbourhood next to the wall as within its jurisdiction. “We have to pay council taxes to Jerusalem even though we are cut off from the city and receive no services,” he said.

Asked whether he thought Abu Dis could be a Palestinian capital, Mr Anati scoffed. “Trump will offer us the worst deal of the century,” he said. “Jerusalem has to be the capital. There is nothing of Jerusalem here since Israel built the wall.”

Only pigeons still free

Nearby, Ghassan Abu Hillel’s two-storey home presses up against the grey slabs of concrete. He said cameras on the top of the wall monitored his and his neighbours’ activities around the clock.

His family moved to this house in 1967, when he was 14 years old, and shortly before Israel occupied Abu Dis, along with the rest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Until the wall was constructed, he spent his time herding sheep and goats on the surrounding hills.

Now he has had to corral them into a corner of the wall. Their improvised pen is daubed with graffiti: “Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.”

His herd of what was once more than 200 sheep is down to barely a dozen. The animals can no longer graze out on the hills, and he cannot afford the cost of feeding them.

Unlike Mr Abu Hillel and the sheep, his pigeons still enjoy their freedom. “They can fly over the wall and reach Jerusalem whenever they want,” he said.

His family owned much of the land surrounding Abu Dis before 1967, he added, but almost all of it had been taken by Israel – originally on the pretext that it was needed for military purposes.

Since then, Israel has built a series of Jewish settlements on the surrounding land, including Maale Adumim, Kfar Adumim and Kedar.

In the early 1980s it also opened a landfill site to cope with the region’s waste. In 2009 the United Nations warned that toxic fumes from waste-burning and leakage into the groundwater posed a threat to local inhabitants’ health.

A bluff from Israel

Some residents are actively finding ways to break out of the isolation imposed on Abu Dis by Israel.

Mr Sabbah is a founder of the Friendship Association, which encourages exchange programmes with European students, teachers and youth clubs. His most successful project is the twinning of Abu Dis with the London borough of Camden.

Mr Sabbah’s prominent political activities may be one reason why his home – along with the local mayor’s – was one of 10 invaded in the middle of the night on September 4.

The operation had the hallmarks of what former Israeli soldiers from the whistleblowing group Breaking the Silence have termed “establishing presence” – military training exercises designed to disrupt the lives of Palestinian communities and spread fear.

Mr Sabbah is sceptical that the Abu Dis proposal by the Trump administration has been made in good faith.

“It’s a bluff,” he said. “Israel has shown through all its actions that it does not want any Palestinian state – and that means no capital, even in Abu Dis.

“It is being offered only because Israel knows no Palestinian leader could ever accept it as a capital. And that way Israel can again blame us for being the ones to reject their version of ‘peace’.”

An oasis of normality

Amid its confinement, however, Abu Dis does have one asset – a university – that now attracts thousands of young Palestinians, though it adds to overcrowding.

The main campus of the Palestinian-run Al Quds university has been operating in Abu Dis since the 1980s.

Sitting on the crossroads between the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Nablus to the south, Jericho to the east, and Ramallah to the north, the Abu Dis campus has grown rapidly. It has profited from the fact that West Bank Palestinians cannot access another campus of Al Quds university in East Jerusalem.

The university is enclosed and security is tight. Inside, students enjoy spacious grounds with shaded gardens, a small oasis of normality where it is possible briefly to forget the situation outside.

Nonetheless, the university is not immune from Israeli military operations either. On September 5, soldiers shut down the campus and nearby schools, as they reportedly fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets at youths.

Omar Mahmoud, aged 23, a medical student from Nablus, raised his eyebrows at the suggestion that Abu Dis could serve as the Palestinians’ capital.

“It’s fully under Israeli control,” he said. “One side there is the wall and on the other side there are Israeli settlements. There are no services and it just gets more crowded by the year.”

He has shared an apartment with other students in Abu Dis for five years. He said: “To be honest, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

September 11, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

International Criminal Court unfazed by US threats of sanctions over Afghan war crimes probe

RT | September 11, 2018

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has said it will “continue to do its work undeterred,” after US National Security Advisor John Bolton threatened sanctions if the tribunal investigates alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan.

The Hague-based court investigates genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes and is backed by 123 countries – but not by China and the US.

“The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its work undeterred, in accordance with those principles and the overarching idea of the rule of law,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The tribunal’s remarks came in response to a scathing verbal attack launched by Bolton in Washington DC on Monday during a speech to the conservative Federalist Society.

“Today, on the eve of September 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the president,” Bolton began, before launching into the blistering offensive against the ICC.

“The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC… We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”

Bolton then issued a very clear threat: If the international court continues to pursue the probe, Washington will ban ICC judges from entering the country, prosecute them and sanction their funding. His main objection is the notion that the ICC could have higher authority than the US constitution and US sovereignty.

“In secular terms we don’t recognize any higher authority than the US constitution,” he said, adding that Trump “will not allow American citizens to be prosecuted by foreign bureaucrats, and he will not allow other nations to dictate our means of self defence.”

In November 2017, an ICC prosecutor requested approval to launch a probe into potential war crimes by the US armed forces and the CIA through the torture of detainees in Afghanistan.

However, Bolton didn’t come out swinging solely on the behalf of the US – he also attacked the ICC’s threat to Washington’s “friend and ally” Israel, as the Middle Eastern country faces an investigation into alleged war crimes against Palestinians.

Bolton said the probe into the actions of Israel, which he described as a “liberal, democratic nation,” was unacceptable, and added that any countries supporting the investigation and cooperating with the ICC would be subject to secondary sanctions.

September 11, 2018 Posted by | War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

US announces closure of Palestinian mission in Washington

Press TV – Sep 10, 2018

The US State Department has announced it is ordering the closure of the Washington mission of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a move that has drawn strong reaction from Palestinians.

“We have permitted the PLO office to conduct operations that support the objective of achieving a lasting, comprehensive peace between Israelis and the Palestinians since the expiration of a previous waiver in November 2017,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Monday.

“However, the PLO has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel,” she stated.

The statement accused PLO leaders of failing to engage with American efforts to establish peace between Palestinians and Israelis and attempting to prompt an investigation of Israel by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Meanwhile in a speech on Monday, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton announced punitive measures against any anti-Israeli action by the ICC.

Bolton threatened imposing harsh sanctions against the ICC in case it decides to move ahead with requests to investigate the US and Israel.

“The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel,” Bolton told members of the conservative Federalist Society gathered at a hotel in Washington, DC. “We will not allow the ICC, or any other organization, to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.”

‘Palestinians won’t succumb to US bullying’

A senior Palestinian official called the decision a “dangerous escalation.”

“We reiterate that the rights of the Palestinian people are not for sale, that we will not succumb to US threats and bullying,” Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat said in a statement to news organizations in advance of Bolton’s speech.

“Accordingly, we continue to call upon the International Criminal Court to open its immediate investigation into Israeli crimes,” he stated.

The PLO office in Washington has long been a source of tension.

In November last year, the Trump administration warned that it might close the office in reaction to a call by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for probing and prosecuting Israeli officials at the ICC and other international organizations.

Erekat responded back then that such a move would undermine prospects of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The PLO warned to cut all ties with the US in case its mission was shuttered. The organization opened the office in 1994 and went on to join the ICC after receiving observer state status at the UN in 2012.

Earlier this year, Palestine asked the ICC to probe human rights violations linked to the Israeli regime’s illegal settlement activities on occupied Palestinian territories.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Aoun: UNRWA funding cut to settle refugees in Lebanon

MEMO | September 10, 2018

Lebanese President Michel Aoun said Monday that the US decision to cut funding for the UN refugee agency UNRWA was the beginning to settle Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters during his flight from Lebanon to France, Aoun said he will discuss the UNRWA issue during his visit to the European Parliament.

“This issue could form the start for settling (refugees in Lebanon), which is banned by the Lebanese Constitution and rejected by the Lebanese people,” he said.

Aoun arrived in Strasbourg on Monday for a three-day visit upon an invitation by Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament.

During the visit, Aoun will discuss relations between Lebanon and the EU as well as a host of regional and international issues.

Last month, the US State Department said Washington would “no longer commit funding” to the UNRWA.

The US had been UNRWA’s largest contributor by far, providing it with $350 million annually — roughly a quarter of the agency’s overall budget.

Established in 1949, UNRWA provides critical aid to Palestinian refugees in the blockaded Gaza Strip, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

“Close Friend” Britain Doesn’t Object to Israel’s Vicious Piracy, nor Does the EU

So it’s OK to ignore the Law of the Seas?

By Stewart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | September 10, 2018

Reports are coming in that Israel plans to sell off the four mercy boats it violently hijacked on the high seas a few weeks ago. The peaceful, unarmed vessels were sailing with desperately needed medical supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip which has been illegally blockade by Israel for 12 years.

The crews and passengers of these mercy boats were arrested by the Israeli military, beaten up, thrown in jail and had their money and personal belongings stolen while in custody. Among the passengers on the al-Awda, was British citizen Dr Swee Ang, a consultant at the famous Bart’s Hospital, who sustained two cracked ribs.

The boats were intended as a gift to the people of Gaza, probably the fishermen, but Israeli intelligence officials claimed they would end up in the hands of Hamas. So the Israeli Central Court has decided sell the boats – stolen property – and hand the proceeds to Israeli families illegally squatting on Palestinian land.

When diplomacy worked

Back in 2008 two humanitarian vessels actually got through to Gaza. In an article at the time, entitled ‘Keeping the Sea-Lane to Gaza Open‘, I wrote…

The success of the ‘Free Gaza’ boats in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention and good offices of the British Foreign Office…

Before the peace activists set sail, the British government was asked about “action to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.

The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells… has now revealed that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.”

Nearly three years later, as Gaza Freedom Flotilla II prepared to sail, the Zionist conspiracy was determined not to let the boats reach their destination because safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through Israel’s control-freakery. Earlier that year the Mavi Marmara had been assaulted with lethal force in international waters, without a care for how many they killed.

This prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council:

“We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II

One of the organizers in London told me that when the British boat’s final passenger list was confirmed, the Foreign Office in London would be contacted with details and asked to “act to ensure the safe passage of their citizens”.

In the end Flotilla II didn’t sail.

Caving in to Israel’s criminal intent

Israel is clearly acting illegally by interfering with the peaceful voyages. A UN fact-finding mission, investigating the assault on the Mavi Marmara, declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception and the Mission therefore finds that the interception was illegal…. and to constitute collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. It could not even be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].

The Centre for Constitutional Rights also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was illegal under international law and amounted to collective punishment. “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”

Craig Murray, an internationally recognized authority on these matters, was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He said that Israel had tried to justify previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing an embargo under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. “San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”

At the same time Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasized “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and called for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.

But when MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides put a question to the EU Commission this was the reply:

Question:

One year after the military action by Israel against a convoy carrying humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza, during which at least ten civilians were killed, another humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza is now being organised, the principal cargo being supplies of stationery for school pupils. Is the EU and in particular the Commission aware of the new mission that is being organised and what is its position on this matter?

Given the participation of EU Member State nationals and the presence of MEPs, will the EU take any measures to ensure that the personal safety of its nationals is not endangered?

Answer:

After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza….

The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.

EU Member States have the responsibility to protect their citizens abroad via their consular services. This responsibility covers assistance for their citizens who might participate in a possible flotilla….

It could have been scripted in Tel Aviv and not by anyone with Christian principles. The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate. There’s nothing “provocative” about unarmed vessels with humanitarian cargoes using it. The organizers had offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to dirty their hands dealing with a belligerent regime that’s cruelly waging a starvation war on women and children. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.

And where is the UN when their maritime Convention is trashed?

Fast-forward to 2018. Her Majesty’s Government has now abandoned all pretense of upholding the Law of the Seas or even pursuing its 2008 policy of intervening to obtain advance clearance from the Israeli authorities. The Foreign Office appears to have joined the Zionist conspiracy to legitimise the Gaza blockade and support Israel’s control-freakery.

Lord Ahmad for the Government, answering a written question in the House of Lords, said: “Embassy officials discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza including the waters off Gaza.”

The waters off Gaza are international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas. Why shouldn’t unarmed aid boats be able sail there unmolested? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? And why is the UN not upholding its own Convention?

In particular, what happened to the diplomacy of 2008? If our embassy was discussing the aid flotilla with Israel nearly 2 months before the 2018 hijacking, what were they talking about? Why didn’t they arrange advance clearance as before? Or were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission? Wouldn’t put it past them.

And in reply to a recent petition demanding a debate on Israel’s undue influence on British politics the Foreign Office says:

“The UK is a close friend of Israel and we enjoy an excellent bilateral relationship. This is built on decades of cooperation between our two countries across a range of fields such as education, hi-tech research, business, arts and culture. Trade between our countries is at record levels, and Israel is an important strategic partner for the UK. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not agree with the allegation of improper influence stated in the petition.

“In 2017 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was made aware of comments made by a member of staff at the Israeli Embassy in 2017 [referring to the Shai Mosat affair] who was being secretly filmed. Following the publication of this video, the Israeli Ambassador apologised and was clear the comments made by this member of staff do not reflect the views of the Embassy or Government of Israel. The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.”

Mosat was a senior political adviser to the Israeli ambassador. The ambassador is Mark Regev, Israel’s former propaganda chief and a notorious liar.

And in reply to a question from myself, Alister Burt, minister for the Middle East, says the FO advises against all travel to Gaza. “Delivery of aid should be co-ordinated with the UN and Israeli and Egyptian Governments. We expect Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law. If wrongdoing has taken place we expect those responsible to be held to account….

“We remain deeply concerned about restrictions on movement and access in Gaza, and the impact that this is having on the humanitarian situation. We have frequent discussions with the Israeli Government about the need to ease restrictions on Gaza. We call on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt to work together to ensure a durable solution for Gaza.”

Burt goes on to say that he recently visited Gaza and the UK Government has announced a new £38 million pogramme for economic development in Gaza and the West Bank and £38.5 million for UNRWA to help refugees plus £2 million for clean water and sanitation in Gaza.

I had made a point of saying I did not wish to receive the usual pro-forma Foreign Office response, but that is what I got.

  • “Expects Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law“? When did that ever happen?
  • “Expects those responsible to be held to account“? But who’s to do it when Israel is such a “close friend”?

We’ll tweak the whiskers of the Russian Bear and slap sanctions on Iran for no good reason. But we fall over backwards to reward Israel for its never-ending evil.

Isn’t it time Government ministers stopped embarrassing us, and themselves, by telling everyone that “we” are “close friends” with a racist endeavour run by a thuggish regime that is contemptuous of international law and the norms of decent behaviour? There’s a name for people who admire that sort of thing.

And by throwing even more British taxpayers’ money at the situation instead of taking punitive action (such as suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement) we simply legitimize the blockade on Gaza and normalise the decades-long occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But that’s the whole idea, is it not Mr Burt? Or is Britain really so weak and so lacking in leverage that we cannot do a small favour for the beleaguered women and children of Gaza whose constant misery is largely due to our arrogance and stupidity?

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jews and Gentiles

By Gilad Atzmon | September 10, 2018

Early Zionism was a significant and glorious moment in Jewish history; a moment of dramatic epiphany fueled by self-loathing. The early Zionists promised to save the Jews from the Jew and to liberate the Jew from the Jews. They were disgusted by the Diaspora non-proletarian urban Jewish culture which they regarded as parasitic. They promised to bond the new Hebrews with labour and soil. They were convinced that they could transform what they saw as a greedy capitalist into a new ‘Israelite hard working peasant.’ They believed that they could make the ‘international cosmopolitan’ into a nationalist patriot, they believed that they knew how to convert Soros into a kibbutznik: they were certain that it was within their capacity to make Alan Dershowitz into a Uri Avneri and Abe Foxman into a peacenik. They promised to make Jews into people like all other people while failing to realize that no other people really want to resemble others.

Zionism has been successful on many fronts. It managed to form a Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine. The Jewish state is a wealthy ghetto and one which is internationally supported. But Israel is a state like no other. It is institutionally racist and murderous. It begs for American taxpayers’ money despite being filthy rich. Sadly, Zionism didn’t solve the Jewish problem, it just moved it to a new location. More significantly, not only did Zionism fail to heal the Jews as it had promised to do, it actually amplified the symptoms it had vowed to obliterate.

Accordingly, the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitsm should be regarded as a Zionist admission that the task of making Jews people like all other people has been a complete failure. No other people have so intensely and institutionally engaged in the suppression of other people’s freedom of speech. Jewish and Zionist bodies work openly and in concert to silence every possible criticism of their state. The real reason for the fight to make the IHRA definition law is that the Zionist position on antisemitism is indefensible.  If the Jews need a special definition of hatred against them (as opposed to a definition of hatred that includes hatred of any people based on race or religion) it proves that, at least in the eyes of the Zionists who push for the definition, Jews are somehow different.

In addition, and for quite some time, history laws and regimes of correctness have been employed to block our access to the Jewish past. This is paradoxical given the fact that the Zionist project is a historically driven adventure: while Zionists often claim their right to self determination on their so-called ‘historical land,’ no one else is allowed to critically examine the Jewish historical past. The Jewish past is, instead, what Jews consider to be their past at a given moment, and as the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand suggests, this so called ‘narrative’ is often an ‘invention.’ No one is permitted to look into the validity of claims made about Jewish participation  in the slave trade. Gentiles are not entitled to look into the role of Jewish Bolsheviks in some colossal communist crimes. The Nakba is legally isolated by walls of Israeli legislation. And it is axiomatic that no one may freely engage in critical thinking on any topic that is even tangentially related to the holocaust. For my suggestion that Jews should self reflect and attempt to understand what it was that led to the animosity against them in the 1930s, I am castigated by some Jewish ethnic activists as a holocaust denier.

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard taught us that history claims to tell us ‘what happened’ but in most cases it actually does the opposite: it is there to conceal our collective shame. To suppress their shame, Americans build holocaust museums in every American city rather than explore their own slave holding past. Rather than deal with their dark imperial history, the Brits allocated a large part of their Imperial Wars Museum to a Holocaust Memorial. Both American and British holocaust museums fail to address the shameful fact that both countries largely blocked their gates to European Jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust. According to Lyotard, the role of the true historian is to unveil the shame, removing layer after layer of suppression. This painful process is where history matures into ethical awareness. And then, there is no examination of responsibility for historical wrongs in the Zionist narrative, for the notion of shame, that instigated the Early Zionist ideology, is totally foreign to Zionist culture and politics.

Israel not only couldn’t be bothered to build a Nakba museum: it does not even acknowledge the Nakba. Zionists didn’t express remorse that their Jewish state deployed snipers to hunt Palestinian protestors, killing hundreds and wounding thousands of them.

Neither Zionists nor Israelis feel the need to find excuses for the fact that their laws are racist: Palestinian Israeli citizens are 7th class citizens and the rest of the Palestinians who live in Israeli controlled territories are locked up in open air prisons. Zionism doesn’t have to deal with shame because shame involves uncanny introspection, it entails humility, ordinariness.  Unlike the Americans and the Brits who made other people’s suffering into their empathy pets, the Zionists, the Israelis and Jews in general are clearly happy to celebrate the primacy of Jewish suffering while making sure everyone else adheres to this principle.  Zionism skillfully put into play the means that suppress criticism all together. But by doing so, Zionism essentially blinded its followers to its own crimes, and it put an end to the dream to become people like all other people.

Although Zionism was an apparatus invented to fix the Jews, to make them ordinary, it had the opposite effect. It made it impossible for its followers to integrate into the rest of the nations as a people amongst people. While Zionism was born to obliterate choseness, as it was practiced it was hijacked by the most problematic form of  Jewish exceptionalism. Interestingly enough, today, just ahead of the Jewish new year, Haaretz revealed that 56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosen. I guess the rest see themselves as exceptional.

 56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosens.

56% of Israeli Jews see themselves as chosen.

If some Zionists out there are still committed to the original Zionist dream, then owning the shame that is attached to the Zionist sin is probably the way forward. Because as things stand at the moment, the only public figure who insists upon seeing Jews as people like all other people and actually act upon it is, believe it or not, Jeremy Corbyn.

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Kamikaze from California

Israel Shamir • Unz Review • September 10, 2018

There are worse, more dangerous endeavours. Ride a tiger, steal cubs from she-bear, walk a high voltage wire. Doubting the Holocaust is slightly less perilous. The doubters found themselves invariably out of job, oftentimes in jail, rarely killed. This is the dogma-Mother-of-all-dogmas, and Jews, the priesthood of New World, are attending to its pristine inviolability.

Nowadays, one may openly doubt the Crucifixion and Resurrection or (maybe) challenge the founding myths of Israel. Yet the cult of the Holocaust retains a unique, court-enforced prohibition against any investigation that might cast a doubt on its sacred dogma. Dogmas have a way of attracting critical minds. And critical minds step forward, despite the inherent danger.

Ron Unz, this kamikaze of critical mind from California, has stepped on the third rail knowingly, in full awareness of the consequences. He did not stop at doubting the established mantra, he also published and made available to readers and internet users some more important books on the subject.

H dogma, discovered Unz, came into existence years after WWII, when people with first hand knowledge of the events were already dead or retired. While the memory was still fresh and pristine, the Jewish Holocaust was unknown, and the very word Holocaust was used in reference to the fiery death of Dresden and Hiroshima, the ultimate Anglo-American crimes.

Unz provides some historical meat to the fearless group of H deniers. Indeed, the H denial had been formed in France, under influence of a French communist and a survivor of Nazi camps Prof Paul Rassinier.

Some deniers were men of Right, some favoured Nazis, like Ernst Zundel and his spouse Ingrid Zundel, the great Prof Robert Faurisson was a Vichy sympathiser, but otherwise H denial had been formed by the Leftists.

This is a good time and place to mention the recently deceased Prof Serge Thion, whom I knew personally. Tall and handsome, a successful man with strong scientific and Leftist credentials, Thion supported the Vietnamese and the Algerians who fought against French colonialism; he occupied a prominent place in French academe and administration, but sacrificed it all and became a refugee and a fugitive from ‘justice’ for his strong position on H denial. He was always on the run from France to Italy to SE Asia, but while running, he also managed a site full of forbidden stuff.

My good friend and an important French and Spanish poet Mme Maria Poumier was/is a Communist, and she lived for some ten years in Cuba. She introduced me to Roger Garaudy, an old Communist, a friend of Arabs and Muslims, the man who tried to bring together Christianity and Communism, and embraced Islam in his endless religious search. Garaudy connected the Holocaust cult with Zionism in his book.

The great stand-up black artist, the funniest French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, a giant son of a Cameroonian and a Bretonese, has made fun of the Holocaust. A political maverick, he ran for Parliament for Marine Le Pen’s Front National, and formed its far-left-and-right wing together with Alain Soral.

The established French MSM prefers to call all these people “Nazis”, but actually they are the real still unbroken Left. Even I was called a Nazi and a H denier, though I never denied (or affirmed) its historical veracity. It is forbidden to deny H under fear of imprisonment, so it is not an option for a law-abiding citizen. And I was never interested in facts, just in their interpretation.

I do deny its religious salvific significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with massacres, be it the Jewish holocaust of 1940s, the Armenian massacre of 1915, the Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc. This is not forbidden yet.

Unz wisely avoided discussion of gruesome details, for the calculation of bodies, stoves and bullets is too awful for a modern reader. It is a meta-narrative, dealing with discussion of the topic without entering the topic, and it was a clever and calculated choice. It is not necessary to overburden the reader with macabre specifics of the events. The details and facts are not really all that important. So many people were killed by their fellow-humans in the course of history, for a lot of reasons. Who cares?

The most important question Unz’s essay leads us to, is not ‘whether six million Jews were killed by Germans just because they were Jews’ but: Why the Holocaust cult became so popular, with its temples, perversely called “Holocaust museums” or “Places of Tolerance” sprung up everywhere from Nebraska to Fiji? There are differing and mutually-non-exclusive answers to this question.

The first and obvious answer is “It is good for rich and powerful Jews”. It solved the eternal problem of the rich and influential, warding off the envy and hate of the poor and exploited. It allowed Madoff and other Jewish swindlers to cheat and steal. It covers asses of the three Jews, the lawyer-fixer Cohen, the smut-dealing publisher Pecker and the numbers whiz Weisselberg who set up Donald Trump. The Jewish oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine use it whenever they are accused of stealing their countries’ wealth.

The second answer is “It is good for Israel”. It allowed the Israeli army to murder children and starve women with impunity. Ari Shavit of Haaretz said in 1996, when the Israeli Army killed over a hundred civilian refugees in Kana, Lebanon: “We may murder with impunity, because the Holocaust museum is on our side”. Now a Holocaust organisation cooked up a definition of antisemitism, explicitly forbidding any criticism of Israel, and forced the Labour Party to accept it, despite objections of the Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The third answer is “Because it is profitable”. Jewish organisations claiming to represent the H survivors, reap billions of dollars from Germany, Switzerland and other countries, even from Poland and Estonia; they pay themselves five- or six digit salaries, while giving out some peanuts for real survivors. Norman Finkelstein covered this angle in his book, mentioned by Ron Unz.

These three answers cover the Jewish position, but they do not fully explain the almost universal acceptance of the H dogma by the ruling classes all over the West. And here comes the fourth answer: “The H cult is good as a discursive tool of the Deep State against the majority”.

The H priests preach that the majority of Germans approved of Hitler and approved of the Holocaust, so one can’t accept democracy and shouldn’t trust the majority, unless the majority votes as ordered by those who know better. Now this idea is being enforced by the New York Times and its sisters against the Deplorables and against Trump who was elected by Deplorables but hasn’t been confirmed by the Deep State. In England, they use it to overturn the people’s vote for Brexit; and before that, they used it to re-run plebiscites until obtaining the desired result in the Netherlands and Sweden.

The fifth answer is “It is good for the US providing it with a licence to be the World Sheriff”.

The H priests teach that the US won the war and restored Germany to the free world, despite its population’s wishes. It means that the US is the force to check and control whatever people or even elites in other countries decide. This is the logic behind American interventions from Grenada and Panama to Afghanistan and Syria. If tomorrow they will invade Italy or Hungary, they will still refer to Auschwitz and Nuremberg.

This also helps to make American occupation of Germany a permanent fixture. Undermined by the H cult, Germans agree they can’t take their fate into their hands, and they have to be firmly guided by the US.

The sixth answer, “It is good for justifying unlimited migration and open borders”. Whenever a government in the US or in Italy tarries with receiving the endless flow of migrants, the Holocaust is immediately mentioned. Every Mexican agricultural worker or an African looking for a better life has to be accepted for the Jews were threatened with the Holocaust.

The seventh answer will lead us into deep waters, and you can skip it if it is too deep for you. “It is good to replace Christ”. The H dogma is a parody of Christian teaching, with Jews being brought as a sacrifice, with Auschwitz replacing Golgotha, and with creation of the State of Israel as a new Resurrection. Jews are essential Christ Deniers, and for them the H is an occasion to downgrade Christianity as “irrelevant after Auschwitz”. The alternative answer is that Auschwitz is irrelevant after the Resurrection, but there aren’t many (or any) Christian theologians daring to say that. Enemies of Christ (Gentile as well as Jewish) are likely to support H cult for its anti-Christian core.

The H cult is not the last word in Jewish fight against Christian faith; there is a the Noahide Project. It starts where the H cult ends. “The Noahides are a theological phenomenon of very recent vintage. It’s a form of Zionist mission, which seeks to create a world religion whose believers adore the Jewish people and the State of Israel – without belonging to either. The believers are required to accept the supremacy of Judaism but are not accepted into the Jewish people and are even barred from upholding such commandments as Sabbath observance. Anyone who wishes to be a Noahide is called upon mainly to recognize the Jewish people and its state.”

Chabad Rabbis hope there will be 7 billion of Noahide believers; adepts of H cult are well on their way to joining the Noahides for they already believe that the death of a Jew is more important than a Gentile death.

These are important points that call for discussion, and hopefully one day we should mount a round table discussing the cardinal question: why H is so popular, and what does it mean for us?

Unz’s essay is a new link in his American Pravda series, where Unz dismantles the web of old worn lies woven by the mainstream media, undermining the whole narrative modern America is based on. ‘The Slaughter of Sacred Cows’, he could call it. Every society needs a dash of revisionism in order to free its spirit from old tenets.

(In Israel, they were called New Historians, who slaughtered the sacred cows of “the Arabs voluntarily had left their homes in 1948” and “the Jews always sought peace, and the Arabs refused their offers”. Benny Morris and Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe undid the myth of 1948, of ethically pure Israel fighting for its survival against the genocide-bent Arabs. The change they brought to the narrative allowed Yitzhak Rabin to sign peace treaty with Yasser Arafat; though this achievement had been erased by the following leaders after Rabin’s assassination.)

Moreover, our society is a result of Sacred Cows’ wholesale slaughter undertaken by previous generation. The cows of Family, Marriage, Normal life, of Boys and Girls, of Womanhood and Manhood, of Going to Church, of trying to keep fit, so many established truths had been slaughtered in the last fifty years. Upon their bones, new cows had been grown: of gender minorities, of toxic white male patriarchy, of bodyshaming, and indeed the Holocaust is one of the fattest cows.

It is a bout of poetic justice that these cows will be slaughtered too. H priests hoped that their narrative, that of Holocaust, will last forever, smoothly flowing into Noahide utopia. But nothing is forever, not even their dogma.

In order to defend their cows, they brought in ‘hate laws’. But the seven reasons we listed above do not include hate of any sorts. You do not have to hate anybody to disprove of crooks, to support Palestinians, to condemn officials milking countries for their personal gain in the name of dead victims, to love democracy, to respect majority, to withdraw soldiers from Germany, to stop mass migration, to reject “invite the world, invade the world” imperial paradigm, and to love Christ.

We come to unexpected conclusion: whether the Holocaust narrative is based on sterling facts or on exaggerations, it is good to reject it. Even if the ‘deniers’ are factually wrong (let us presume it for the sake of argument), they are still right with their conclusions. And Ron Unz had made an important contribution for the benefit of mankind by his publication.

There is a minor fault in his excellent piece, for this self-taught man knows little about Russia. While he has bravely demolished the myths of American and European history, Unz swallowed the Russia-related myths hook, line and sinker. He accepted wholesale every lie that was ever invented by the Western ideologists to regain their control over Russia and eventually over their own workers. This subject will be discussed in our following piece.

P.S. In my previous piece, I wrote about the first ever trial for Holocaust Denial in Russia. The accused was Prof Roman Yushkov of Perm. And now for good news. The Russian jury dismissed the charges against Yushkov and thus confirmed that H denial is not a crime in Russia. Nor in the US, I hasten to add. Neither USSR nor Russia had ever accepted the peculiar idea of uniqueness of Jewish deaths, perhaps because the Russians had lost so many people at the same war.

Shamir on the Holocaust Denial:

Vampire Killers 2001

For Whom The Bell Tolls 2006

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

9/11 Was an Israeli Job

How America was neoconned into World War IV

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • September 10, 2018

Technical impossibilities

Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera.[1] The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web. (Although, while preparing this article, I noticed that Google is now making access to that research more difficult than it was five years ago, artificially prioritizing anti-conspiracy sites.)

For example, members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have demonstrated that it was impossible for plane crashes and jet fuel fires to trigger the collapse of the Twin Towers. Even Donald Trump understood this. In fact, speaking of “collapse” is perhaps misleading: the towers literally exploded, pulverizing concrete and projecting pieces of steel beams weighing several hundred tons hundreds of meters laterally at high speeds. The pyroclastic dust that immediately flooded through the streets, not unlike the dust from a volcano, indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gasses and relatively dense solid particles, an impossible phenomenon in a simple collapse. It is also impossible that WTC7, another skyscraper (47 stories), which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, unless by “controlled demolition.”

Testimonies of firefighters recorded shortly after the events describe sequences of explosions just before the “collapse”, well below the plane impact. The presence of molten metal in the wreckage up to three weeks after the attack is inexplicable except by the presence of incompletely burned explosives. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages (2011): “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel—molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry—like lava.”

Aviation professionals have also reported impossibilities in the behavior of the planes. The charted speeds of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers, 443 mph and 542 mph, exclude these aircraft being Boeing 767s, because these speeds are virtually impossible near ground level. In the unlikely event such speeds could be attained without the aircraft falling apart, flying them accurately into the towers was mission impossible, especially by the amateur pilots blamed for the hijacking. Hosni Mubarak, a former pilot, said he could never do it. (He is not the only head of state to have voiced his doubts: Chavez and Ahmadinejad are among them.) Recall that neither of the black boxes of the jetliners was ever found, an incomprehensible situation.

And of course, there are the obvious anomalies of Shanksville and Pentagon crash sites: no plane or credible plane debris can be seen on any of the numerous photos easily available.

Inside Job or Mossad Job?

Among the growing number of Americans who disbelieve the official version of the 9/11 attacks, two basic theories are in competition: I called them “inside job” and “Mossad job”. The first one is the dominant thesis within the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and blames the American government, or a faction within the American Deep State. The second one claims that the masterminds were members of a powerful Israeli network deeply infiltrated in all spheres of power within the US, including media, government, military and secret services.

This “Mossad job” thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled “Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake”, where he voiced his conviction that September 11th was “a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation.”

We can notice from the outset that incriminating Israelis or Arabs are both “outside job” theories (in fact, they are mirror images of each other, which is understandable in light of what Gilad Atzmon explains about Jewish “projected guilt”).[2] Before even looking at the evidence, “outside job” sounds more credible that “inside job”. There is something monstrous in the idea that a government can deceive and terrorize its own citizens by killing thousands of them, just for starting a series of wars that are not even in the nation’s interest. By comparison, a foreign power attacking the U.S. under the false flag of a third power almost seems like fair play. Indeed suspicion of Israel’s role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of the Mossad as: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies quoted by the Washington Times, September 10th, 2001 — the day before the attacks.

This is an important point, because it raises the question of how and why the 9/11 Truth movement has been led to endorse massively the outrageous “inside job” thesis without even considering the more likely thesis of an attack by a foreign power acting under an Islamic false flag—and what foreign power but Israel would do that?

Of course, the two dissenting theses do not necessarily exclude each other; at least, no one incriminating Israel denies that corrupted elements from the American administration or deep state were involved. The “passionate attachment” between Israel and the U.S. has been going on for decades, and 9/11 is one of its monstruous offsprings.

I can think of no better symbol of that reality than the marriage of Ted and Barbara Olson. Ted Oslon, after having defended Bush in the disputed 2000 election, had been rewarded with the post of Solicitor General (he also defended Dick Cheney when he refused to submit to Congress Enron-related documents). Barbara was a famous CNN reporter, but before that, she was born Barbara Kay Bracher of Jewish parents, educated at Yeshiva University School of Law, and hired by the legal firm WilmerHale, of which Jamie Gorelick, a future member of the 9/11 Commission, was also a member, and whose clients include powerful Israeli firms like Amdocs, a digital communication company charged with spying for Israel in the United States. On September 11, 2001, Barbara Olson alledgedly was on flight AA77, from which she made two telephone calls to her husband. Her calls were reported on CNN in the afternoon, and contributed to crystallize some details of the official story, such as the “box cutters” used as only weapons by the hijackers. Repeatedly invited on television shows after 9/11, Ted Olson frequently contradicted himself when questioned about the calls from his wife. In a 2006 report, the FBI identified only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an unconnected call lasting 0 seconds. Like all other reported phone calls from desperate passengers (including the famous “Hi, Mom. This is Mark Bingham”), Barbara’s call was simply impossible, because the technology required to make high-altitude phone calls was not developed until 2004.[3]

9/11 was made possible by an alliance between secret worshippers of Israel and corrupted American elements. The question is: who, of the two, were the masterminds of this incredibly daring and complex operation, and for what “higher purpose”?

Another question is: why do those who keep repeating as a mantra “9/11 was an inside job” ignore totally the compelling evidence pointing to Israel? In other words, to what extent do they constitute a “controlled opposition” intended to cover up for Israel? Asking this type of question does not mean suspecting anyone who defends an erroneous or incomplete theory of being a hypocrite. Most people defending one theory or the other do so sincerely, based on the information to which they have access. I have myself been a believer in the official theory for 7 years, and in the “inside job” theory for 2 years, before progressively moving on to the present argument from 2010. On the other hand, we can assume that those who lead the public into error on a long term are not just mistaken but lying. In any case, it is legitimate to investigate the background of opinion makers, and when they are caught lying or distorting the truth, we can speculate on their motivation. I will come back to this issue at the end of the article.

The dancing Israelis

Researchers who believe Israel orchestrated 9/11 cite the behavior of a group of individuals who have come to be known as the “dancing Israelis” since their arrest, though their aim was to pass as “dancing Arabs.” Dressed in ostensibly “Middle Eastern” attire, they were seen by various witnesses standing on the roof of a van parked in Jersey City, cheering and taking photos of each other with the WTC in the background, at the very moment the first plane hit the North Tower. The suspects then moved their van to another parking spot in Jersey City, where other witnesses saw them deliver the same ostentatious celebrations.

One anonymous call to the police in Jersey City, reported the same day by NBC News, mentioned “a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there. They look like Palestinians and going around a building. […] I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniforms. […] He’s dressed like an Arab.” The police soon issued the following BOLO alert (be-on-the-look-out) for a “Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion.”

By chance, the van was intercepted around 4 pm, with five young men inside: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari. Before any question was asked, the driver, Sivan Kurzberg, burst out: “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem”.The Kurzberg brothers were formally identified as Mossad agents. All five officially worked for a moving company (a classic cover for espionage) named Urban Moving Systems, whose owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled the country for Tel Aviv on September 14.[4]

This event was first reported the day after the attacks by journalist Paulo Lima in the New Jersey newspaper The Bergen Record, based on “sources close to the investigation” who were convinced of the suspects’ foreknowledge of the morning’s attacks: “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park”.The 579-page FBI report on the investigation that followed (partially declassified in 2005) reveals several important facts. First, once developed, the photos taken by the suspects while watching the North Tower on fire confirm their attitudes of celebration: “They smiled, they hugged each other and they appeared to ‘high five’ one another”. To explain their contentment, the suspects said they were simply happy that, thanks to these terrorist attacks, “the United States will take steps to stop terrorism in the world”. Yet at this point, before the second tower was hit, most Americans believed the crash was an accident. The five Israelis were found connected to another company called Classic International Movers, which employed five other Israelis arrested for their contacts with the nineteen presumed suicide hijackers. In addition, one of the five suspects had called “an individual in South America with authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east”. Finally, the FBI report states that the “The vehicle was also searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces”.

After all this incriminating evidence comes the most puzzling passage of the report: its conclusion that “the FBI no longer has any investigative interests in the detainees and they should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. In fact, a letter addressed to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, dated September 25, 2001, proves that, less than two weeks after the events, the FBI federal headquarter had already decided to close the investigation, asking that “The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should proceed with the appropriate immigration proceedings”. The five “dancing Israelis”, also known as “the high fivers”, were detained 71 days in a Brooklyn prison, where they first refused, then failed, lie detector tests. Finally, they were quietly returned to Israel under the minimal charge of “visa violation.” Three of them were then invited on an Israeli TV talk show in November 2001, where one of them ingenuously declared: “Our purpose was simply to document the event.”

The Israeli spy network

The five “dancing Israelis,” the only suspects arrested on the very day of the 9/11 attacks, were just the tip of an iceberg. In September 2001, the federal police were busy dismantling the largest Israeli spy network ever uncovered on American soil. In the summer preceding the attack, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) compiled a report which would be revealed to the public by the Washington Post on November 23rd, 2001, followed by a Carl Cameron’s four-part documentary broadcast on Fox News from December 11th, 2001. On March 14th, 2002, an article in French newspaper Le Monde signed by Sylvain Cypel also referred to the report, shortly before the French magazine Intelligence Online made it fully accessible on the Internet.[5] It said that 140 Israeli spies, aged between 20 and 30, had been arrested since March 2001, while 60 more were arrested after September 11. Generally posing as art students, they visited at least “36 sensitive sites of the Department of Defense.” “A majority of those questioned have stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units. Some have been linked to high-ranking officials in the Israeli military. One was the son of a two-star general, one served as the bodyguard to the head of the Israeli Army, one served in a Patriot mission unit.” Another, Peer Segalovitz, officer in the 605 Battalion of the Golan Heights, “acknowledged he could blow up buildings, bridges, cars, and anything else that he needed to.”[6]

Of special interest is the mention that “the Hollywood, Florida, area seems to be a central point for these individuals.”[7] More than 30 out of the 140 fake Israeli students identified before 9/11 lived in that city of 140,000 inhabitants. And this city also happens to be the place where fifteen of the nineteen alleged 9/11 Islamist hijackers had regrouped (nine in Hollywood, six in the vicinity), including four of the five supposed to have hijacked Flight AA11. What was the relationship between the Israeli spies and the Islamist terrorists? We were told by mainstream news that the former were monitoring the latter, but failed to report suspicious activities of these terrorists to American authorities. From such a presentation, Israel comes out clean, since a spy agency cannot be blamed for not sharing information with the country it is spying in. At worst, the Israeli Intelligence can be accused of “letting it happen”—a guarantee of impunity. In reality, the Israeli agents were certainly not just monitoring the future “hijackers,” but financing and manipulating them, before disposing of them. We know that Israeli Hanan Serfaty, who rented two flats near Mohamed Atta, had handled at least $100,000 in three months. And we also learned from the New York Times on February 19, 2009, that Ali al-Jarrah, cousin of the alleged hijacker of Flight UA93 Ziad al-Jarrah, had spent twenty-five years spying for the Mossad as an undercover agent infiltrating the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah.

Israeli agents apparently appreciate operating under the cover of artists. Shortly before September 11, a group of fourteen Jewish “artists” under the name of Gelatin installed themselves on the ninety-first floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. There, as a work of “street art,” they removed a window and extended a wooden balcony. To understand what role this piece of scaffolding may have played, it must be remembered that the explosion supposedly resulting from the impact of the Boeing AA11 on the North Tower took place between the ninety-second and the ninety-eighth floors. With the only film of the impact on the North Tower being that of the Naudet brothers, who are under suspicion for numerous reasons, many researchers are convinced that no aircraft hit this tower, and that the explosion simulating the impact was provoked by pre-planted explosives inside the tower.

Floors ninety-three to one hundred of the North Tower were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, whose CEO was Jeffrey Greenberg, son of wealthy Zionist (and financier of George W. Bush) Maurice Greenberg, who also happens to be the owner of Kroll Inc., the firm in charge of security for the entire World Trade Center complex on 9/11. The Greenbergs were also the insurers of the Twin Towers and, on July 24, 2001, they took the precaution of having the contract reinsured by competitors. In November 2000, the board of directors of Marsh & McLennan was joined by (Lewis) Paul Bremer, the chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, who, on September 11, 2001, two hours only after the pulverization of the North Tower, would appear on NBC to name bin Laden as prime suspect, perfectly calm as 400 of his employees are missing (295 will finally be declared dead). “It is the day that will change our lives,” he said. “It is the day when the war that the terrorists declared on the US [. . .] has been brought home to the US.” In 2003, Bremer would be appointed administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to level the Iraqi state to the ground and oversee the theft of almost a trillion dollars intended for its reconstruction.

The super-sayanim

With Goldberg and Bremer, we have reached the upper level of the conspiracy, comprising a number of influential Jewish personalities, working inside and outside the U.S. government — super-sayanim, so to speak. The most representative of those outside government is Larry Silverstein, the real estate shark who, with his partner Frank Lowy, leased the Twin Towers from New York City in the spring of 2001. The head of the New York Port Authority, who granted Silverstein and Lowy the lease, was none other than Lewis Eisenberg, another member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation and former vice-president of AIPAC. It appeared that Silverstein had made a disastrous deal, because the Twin Towers had to be decontaminated for asbestos. The decontamination process had been indefinitely postponed since the 1980s because of its cost, estimated at nearly $1 billion in 1989. In 2001, the New York Port Authority had been all too happy to shift responsibility to Silverstein.

Immediately after acquiring the Twin Towers, Silverstein renegotiated the insurance contracts to cover terrorist attacks, doubling the coverage to $3.5 billion, and made sure he would retain the right to rebuild after such an event. After the attacks, he took his insurers to court in order to receive double compensation, claiming that the two planes were two separate attacks. After a long legal battle, he pocketed $4.5 billion. Silverstein is a leading member of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, the biggest fundraiser for Israel (after the US government, which pays about $3 billion per year in aid to Israel). Silverstein also maintained “close ties with Netanyahu,” according to Haaretz (November 21, 2001): “The two have been on friendly terms since Netanyahu’s stint as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. For years they kept in close touch. Every Sunday afternoon, New York time, Netanyahu would call Silverstein.” Besides being a powerful man, Larry is a lucky man: as he explained in this interview, every morning of the week, he had breakfast at the Windows on the World on top of the North Tower, but on September 11th, he had an appointment with his dermatologist.

Accomplices to the 9/11 false flag attack with strong Israeli connections should also be tracked at the other end of the trajectory of the planes reported to have crashed into the Twin Towers. Flights AA11 and UA175 took off from Logan Airport in Boston, which subcontracted their security to International Consultants on Targeted Security (ICTS), a firm based in Israel and headed by Menachem Atzmon, a treasurer of the Likud. So did Newark Airport where flight UA93 reportedly took off before crashing in Shanksville.

A serious investigation would follow many other trails, such as the Odigo instant messages received by employees at the WTC two hours before the plane crashes, as reported by Haaretz on September 27th, 2001. The first plane hit the WTC at the precise time announced, “almost to the minute,” admitted Alex Diamandis, vice-president of Odigo, headquartered in Israel. Also disturbing is the behavior of the American branch of Zim Israel Navigational, a maritime shipping giant 48% owned by the Jewish state (occasionally used as a cover for the Israeli secret services), which moved its offices from the WTC, along with its 200 employees, September 4th, 2001, one week before the attacks —“like an act of God, we moved”, said the CEO Shaul Cohen-Mintz when interviewed by USA Today, November 17th, 2001.

But of course, none of these trails were ever pursued. That is because the most powerful conspirators were at the highest level of the Justice Department. Michael Chertoff was head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in 2001, and responsible, among many other things, for securing the release of the Israeli agents arrested before and after 9/11, including the “dancing Israelis.” In 2003, this son of a rabbi and of a Mossad pioneer would be appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, in charge of counter-terrorism on the American soil, which allowed him to control dissenting citizens and restrain access to the evidence under the pretext of Sensitive Security Information.

Another chief of the cover-up was Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 presidential Commission established in November 2002. Zelikow is a self-styled specialist in the art of making “public myths” by “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene” (Wikipedia). In December 1998, he co-signed an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated on what would have happened if the 1993 WTC bombing (already attributed to bin Laden) had been done with a nuclear bomb: “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. … Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force.” This is the man who controlled the governmental investigation on the 9/11 terror attacks. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, who nominally led the commission, revealed in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (2006), that the commission “was set up to fail” from the beginning. Zelikow, they claim, had already written a synopsis and a conclusion for the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them as sole mission to prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked to “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful operation—the 9/11 attacks.”

A tight control of mainstream media is perhaps the most delicate aspect of the whole operation. I will not delve into that aspect, for we all know what to expect from the MSM. For a groundbreaking argument on the extent to which 9/11 was psy-op orchestrated by MSM, I recommend Ace Baker’s 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera, chapters 6, 7 and 8.

Machiavellian meta-Zionists

If we move up to the very highest level of the conspiracy, we find ourselves in Tel Aviv. The preparation for 9/11 coincided with the coming to power of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, followed by Ehud Barak in July 1999, and Ariel Sharon in March 2001, who brought back Netanyahu as minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002 (with Netanyahu again becoming prime minister in 2009). It must be noted that both Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were temporarily out of the Israeli government in September 2001, just like Ben-Gurion at the time of Kennedy’s assassination (read my article on JFK). A few months before 9/11, Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, was “recruited” as a consultant to a Mossad front company, SCP Partner, specializing in security and located less than seven miles from Urban Moving Systems.[8] One hour after the explosion of the North Tower, Barak was on BBC World to point the finger at bin Laden (the first to do so), and concluded: “It’s a time to launch an operational, complete war against terror.”

As for Netanyahu, we are not surprised to hear him boast, on CNN in 2006, of having predicted in 1995 that, “if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam bringing down the World Trade Center.” Netanyahu is exemplary of the ever closer “special relationship” between the US and Israel, which started with Truman and blossomed under Johnson. Netanyahu had lived, studied, and worked in the United States from 1960 to 1978, between his 11th and his 27th year—except during his military service—and again after the age of 33, when he was appointed deputy ambassador to Washington and then permanent delegate to the United Nations. Netanyahu appeared regularly on CNN in the early 1990s, contributing to the transformation of the world’s leading news channel into a major Zionist propaganda tool. His political destiny was largely planned and shaped in the United States, under the supervision of those we now call neoconservatives, and the only thing that distinguishes him from them is that, for public relations reasons, he does not possess American nationality.

“What’s a neocon?” once asked Bush 43 to his father Bush 41, after more than three years in the White House. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.”[9] That anecdote, quoted by Andrew Cockburn, sums it up. The neoconservative movement was born in the editorial office of the monthly magazine Commentary, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945 as the press organ of the American Jewish Committee. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” wrote Gal Beckerman in the Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006. “It is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.”

The founding fathers of neoconservatism (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Donald Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky) were self-proclaimed disciples of Leo Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss can be characterized as a meta-Zionist in the sense that, while an ardent supporter of the State of Israel, he rejected the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere, he said in essence in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews.” Strauss would also approve of being called a Machiavellian, for in his Thoughts on Machiavelli, he praised the “the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech” (p. 13). Machiavelli’s model of a prince was Cesar Borgia, the tyrant who after having appointed the cruel Ramiro d’Orco to subdue the province of Romania, had him executed with utter cruelty, thus reaping the people’s gratitude after having diverted their hatred onto another. Machiavelli, writes Strauss, “is a patriot of a particular kind: He is more concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul” (p. 10). And that happens to be exactly what Jewishness is all about, according to Jewish thinkers such as Harry Waton: “The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people” (read more here). As a matter of fact, in the Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, Michael Ledeen, a neocon and founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), assumed that Machiavelli must have been a “secret Jew,” since “if you listen to his political philosophy you will hear Jewish music.”

The neoconservatives of the first generation originally positioned themselves on the far left. Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary, had long claimed to be a Trotskyist. It was soon after the 1967 successful annexation of Arab territories by Israel that the Straussians experienced their conversion to right-wing militarism, to which they owe their new name. Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995, turned from anti-war activist to defense budget booster in the early 70s. He gave the following explanation in 1979: “American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs—from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood [. . .] that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.” (Breaking Ranks, p. 336). Leading the U.S. into war for the benefit of Israel is the essence of the Machiavellian crypto-Zionists known deceptively as neoconservatives.

The Project for a new (((American))) Century

The story of how the neoconservatives reached the position of influence they held under George W. Bush is a complicated one, which I can only outline. They entered the state apparatus for the first time in the baggage of Rumsfeld and Cheney, during president Ford’s cabinet reshuffle known as the “Halloween Massacre,” following Nixon’s resignation. When the Cold War calmed down after America evacuated its troops from Vietnam in 1973, and the CIA produced reassuring analyses of the USSR’s military capabilities and ambitions, Rumsfeld (as Secretary of Defense) and Cheney (as Chief of Staff) persuaded Ford to appoint an independent committee, known as Team B, to revise upward the CIA estimates of the Soviet threat, and reactivate a war attitude in public opinion, Congress, and Administration. Team B was chaired by Richard Pipes and co-chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, both introduced by Richard Perle.

During the Democratic parenthesis of the Carter presidency (1976–80), the neoconservatives worked at unifying the largest number of Jews around their policies, by founding the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which became the second-most powerful pro-Israel lobby after AIPAC. According to its “mission statement”, it is “dedicated to educating Congressional, military and civilian national security decision-makers on American defense and strategic interests, primarily in the Middle East, the cornerstone of which is a robust U.S.-Israeli security cooperation.” In 1980, the neocons were rewarded by Ronald Reagan for their support by a dozen posts in national security and foreign policy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to the Department of Defense; Richard Pipes at the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Michael Ledeen in the State Department. They helped Reagan escalate the Cold War, showering billions of dollars on the military-industrial complex.

The long term planning of 9/11 probably started then. Isser Harel, founder of Israeli secret services (Shai in 1944, Shin Bet in 1948, Mossad until 1963) is reported as prophesizing in 1980, in an interview with Christian Zionist Michael Evans, that Islamic terrorism would end up hitting America in their “phallic symbol”: “Your biggest phallic symbol is New York City and your tallest building will be the phallic symbol they will hit”.[10] (A whole article would be needed to document and explain the revival of the Jewish gift of apocalyptic prophecy in recent decades.)

In 1996, during the Clinton years, the neoconservatives threw all their weight into their ultimate think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), directed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC recommended taking advantage of the defeat of communism to reinforce American hegemony by preventing the emergence of any rival. Their Statement of Principles vowed to extend the current Pax Americana, which entailed “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges.” In its September 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, PNAC anticipated that US forces must become “able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars.” This required a profound transformation, including the development of “a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements.” Unfortunately, according to the authors of the report, “the process of transformation […] is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” It is certainly no coincidence that the three-hour-long blockbuster Pearl Harbor was released in the summer 2001, conveniently entrenching the “New Pearl Harbor” meme into the minds of millions.

PNAC’s architects played the American hegemony card by draping themselves in the super-patriotic discourse of America’s civilizing mission. But their duplicity is exposed in a document brought to public knowledge in 2008: a report published in 1996 by the Israeli think tank Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written specifically for the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The team responsible for the report was led by Richard Perle, and included Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who figured the same year among the signatories of PNAC. As its title suggests, the Clean Break report invited Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993, which officially committed Israel to the return of the territories it occupied illegally since 1967. The new prime minister should instead “engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism” and reaffirm Israel’s right to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In November 2000, Bush Jr. was elected under conditions that raised protests of electoral fraud. Dick Cheney, who had directed his campaign, named himself vice-president and introduced two dozens neoconservatives in foreign policy key positions. The State Department was entrusted to Colin Powell, but he was surrounded with neocon aides such as David Wurmser. As National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a specialist of Russia with no expertise in the Middle East, was entirely dependent on her neocon adviser Philip Zelikow. William Luti and Elliott Abrams, and later Eliot Cohen, were also tasked with steering Rice. But it was mainly from within the Defense Department under Donald Rumsfeld that the most influential neocons were able to fashion US foreign and military policy. Richard Perle occupied the crucial position of director of the Defense Policy Board, responsible for defining military strategy, while Paul Wolfowitz became the “soul of the Pentagon” as deputy secretary with Douglas Feith as under secretary.

The Hanukkah miracle to start WWIV

After eight months in the presidency, Bush was confronted with the “catastrophic event,” the “new Pearl Harbor” that PNAC had wished for a year earlier. 9/11 was a real “Hanukkah miracle” for Israel, commented Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and Israeli National Security Council chairman Uzi Dayan. Netanyahu rejoiced: “It’s very good […] it will generate immediate sympathy […], strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” On September 21, he published an op-ed in the New York Post entitled “Today, We Are All Americans,” in which he delivered his favorite propaganda line: “For the bin Ladens of the world, Israel is merely a sideshow. America is the target.” Three days later the New Republic responded with a headline on behalf of the Americans: “We are all Israelis now.” Americans experienced 9/11 as an act of hatred from the Arab world, and they felt an immediate sympathy for Israel, which the neoconservatives relentlessly exploited. One of the aims was to encourage Americans to view Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians as part of the global fight against Islamic terrorism.

It was a great success. In the years preceding September 11, Israel’s reputation had bottomed out; condemnations had been raining from around the world for its policy of apartheid and colonization, and its systematic war against Palestinian command structures. Increasing numbers of American voices questioned the merits of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. From the day of the attacks, it was all over. As Americans now intended to fight Arab terrorists to the death, they would stop demanding from Israel more reasonable, proportionate retaliation against Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.

Instead, the president’s speeches (written by neocon David Frum) characterized the 9/11 attacks as the trigger for a world war of a new type, one fought against an invisible enemy scattered throughout the Middle East. First, vengeance must come not only against bin Laden, but also against the state harboring him: “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them” (Sept. 11). Second, the war extends to the world: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (Sept. 20). Third, any country that does not support Washington will be treated as an enemy: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (Sept. 20).

In an article in the Wall Street Journal dated November 20, 2001, the neoconservative Eliot Cohen dubbed the war against terrorism as “World War IV,” a framing soon echoed by other American Zionists (the odd choice of the name WWIV rather than WWIII comes, I suspect, from the neocons’ ethnocentric worldview, in which every world war is a step toward Greater Israel; since one major step was accomplished in 1967, the Cold War counts as WW3). In September 2004, at a conference in Washington entitled “World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight,” Cohen said: “The enemy in this war is not ‘terrorism’ […] but militant Islam.” Like the Cold War, the imminent world war, according to Cohen’s vision, has ideological roots, will have global implications, and will last a long time, involving a whole range of conflicts. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a new World War centered in the Middle East has also been popularized by Norman Podhoretz, in “How to Win World War IV” (Commentary, February 2002), followed by a second article in, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” (September 2004), and finally a book titled World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007).[11]

The hijacked conspiracy and the controlled opposition

In the case of 9/11 as in the case of Kennedy, controlled opposition operates on many levels, and many honest scholars now realize that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is partly channeled by individuals and groups secretly aiming at drawing suspicions away from Israel. Such is certainly the case of the three young Jews (Avery, Rowe, and Bermas) who directed the film Loose Change (2005), the most widely watched 9/11 conspiracy film since its first version in 2005. They hitched their whole thesis on a comparison with the never carried-out false flag project Operation Northwoods (timely revealed to the public in May 2001 in James Bamford’s book Body of Secrets, written with the support of former NSA director Michael Hayden, now working for Michael Chertoff), but they failed to mention the attack on the USS Liberty, a well-documented false flag attack by Israel on its U.S. ally. They did not breathe a word about the neoconservatives’ loyalty to Israel, and treat anyone who cited the Israeli role in 9/11 as anti-Semitic. The same can be said of Bermas’s more recent film Invisible Empire (2010), also produced by Alex Jones: a compilation of anti-imperialist clichés focusing on the Bushs and the Rockefellers, without a single hint of the (((Others))).

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 scenario put forward by Loose Change had actually been prewritten by Hollywood: on the 4th of March, 2001, Fox TV broadcast the first episode of the series The Lone Gunmen, watched by 13 million Americans. The plot is about computer hackers working for a secret cabal within the U.S. government, who hijack a jet by remote control with the intent to crash it into one of the Twin Towers, while making it appear to have been hijacked by Islamic terrorists. At the last seconds, the pilots manage to regain control of the plane. The purpose of the failed operation was to trigger a world war under the pretext of fighting terrorism. Truthers of the “inside job” school fancy that this episode must have been written by some whistleblower inside Fox. Unlikely!

There is, of course, some truth in the “inside job” theory, as I said at the beginning. Israel (in the wider sense) would not be able to pull such an operation and get away with it, without complicity at the highest level of U.S. government. How does that work? Pretty much like for the Kennedy assassination, if you consider that the country was then ruled by its vice-president Dick Cheney, the president being a mere dummy (see Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, Random House, 2006). In my book JFK-9/11, I have proposed a plausible scenario of how Israel had in fact hijacked a smaller false flag attack on the Pentagon fabricated by the American Deep State, for the limited purpose of justifying the overthrow of the Talibans in Afghanistan, a goal fully supported by such “Great Gamers” as Zbigniew Brzezinski, but which didn’t in itself interest the neocons.

What the neocons wanted was a new war against Iraq and then a general conflagration in the Middle East leading to the crumbling of all the enemies of Israel, with Syria and Iran high on the list. So they outbid everyone and gave the operation the scale they wanted with the help of their New York super-sayan Silvertein. George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and other goyim who had been kept out of the loop, finding themselves embroiled in geopolitical machinations of global scope, could merely try to save face. On September 19 and 20, Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board met in the company of Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis (inventor of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “clash of civilizations”) but in the absence of Powell and Rice. They prepared a letter to Bush, written on PNAC letterhead, to remind him of his historic mission: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”[12] This was an ultimatum. Bush was certainly aware of the leverage that the neocons had acquired over the major print and television media. He was obliged, under penalty of ending in the proverbial trash bin of history, to endorse the invasion of Iraq that his father had refused the Zionists ten years earlier.

As for Brzezinski and other genuine U.S. imperialists, their support for the invasion of Afghanistan made their timid protests against the Iraq war ineffective. It was a little late in February 2007 when Brzezinski denounced before the Senate “a historical, strategic and moral calamity […] driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris.” In 2012 he declared, regarding the risk of conflagration with Iran, that Obama should stop following Israel like a “stupid mule.” He soon disappeared from the MSM, as a useful idiot no longer useful.

The “half truth” of the exclusively “inside job” theory, which denounces 9/11 as a false flag operation perpetrated by the American state on its own citizens, functions like a secondary false flag hiding the real masters of the operation, who are in fact agents in the service of a foreign nation. One of the aims of this inside-jobish controlled opposition is to force American officials to maintain the “bin Laden did it” masquerade, knowing that tearing apart the fake Islamic flag would only reveal the U.S. flag, not the Israeli flag. No longer controlling the media, they would not have the means to raise this second veil to expose Israel. Any effort to get at the truth would be political suicide. Everyone understands what is at stake: if one day, under mounting pressure from public opinion or for some other strategic reason, the mainstream media abandons the official bin Laden story, the well-rehearsed slogan “9/11 was an inside job” will have prepared Americans to turn against their own government, while the neocon Zionists will remain untouchable (Machiavelli’s method: make another accomplish your dirty ends, then turn popular vengeance against him). And God knows what will happen, if the government has not by then succeeded in disarming its citizens through Sandy Hook-type psy-ops. Government officials have little choice but to stick to the Al-Qaeda story, at least for the next fifty years.

After reaching this conclusion in JFK-9/11, I had the satisfaction of finding that Victor Thorn, in a book that had eluded me (Made in Israel: 9-11 and the Jewish Plot Against America, Sisyphus Press, 2011), had already expressed it in harsher terms: “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. By 2002–2003, ‘truthers’ began appearing at rallies holding placards that read ‘9-11 was an inside job.’ Initially, these signs provided hope for those who didn’t believe the government and mainstream media’s absurd cover stories. But then an awful realization emerged: The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised. […] The mantra, ‘9-11 was an inside job’ is only partially true and is inherently damaging to the ‘truth movement’ because it shifts all attention away from Israel’s traitorous assault against America. […] Leaders of these fake 9-11 groups know the truth about Israel’s 9-11 barbarity. Their willingness to perpetuate or cover it up ultimately makes them as guilty and vile as those who launched the attacks. There are no degrees of separation in this matter. It’s a black-and-white issue. Tell the entire truth about Israel’s Murder, Inc. cabal, or sleep in the same infected bed as these murdering dogs lie in. […] Faux conspiratologists complain about the government and news sources not telling the truth, yet they’ve erected an utter blackout on data regarding Israel and 9-11.”

The missing .3 trillion

Some readers will complain that I am making a very complex operation appear too simple. I plead guilty: I have merely tried here to outline the case against Israel in the short scope of an article. But I am fully aware that creating Greater Israel through a world war fought by the U.S. might not have been the only consideration in the preparation of 9/11. Many private interests had to be involved. Yet I believe none of them interfered with Israel’s plan, and most of them supported it.

There is, for example, the missing gold in the WTC basement : $200 million were recovered from the estimated $1 billion stored: who took the rest? But that is nothing compared to the $2.3 trillion that were missing from the accounts of the Department of Defense for the year 2000, in addition to $1.1 trillion missing for 1999, according to a televised declaration made on September 10th, 2001, the day before the attacks, by Donald Rumsfeld. Just for comparison, this is more than one thousand times the colossal losses of Enron, which triggered a chain of bankruptcies that same year. All this money evaporated into thin air under the watch of William Cohen, Defense Secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term. In 2001, the man who was tasked to help track down the missing trillions was Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Dov Zakheim, a member of PNAC and an ordained rabbi. Practically, the mystery had to be resolved by financial analysts at Resource Services Washington (RSW). Unfortunately, their offices were destroyed by “al-Qaeda” the following morning. The “hijackers” or Flight AA77, rather than hitting the command center on the eastern side of the Pentagon, chose to attempt a theoretically impossible downward spiral at 180 degrees in order to hit the west side of the building precisely at the location of the accounting offices. The 34 experts at RSW perished in their offices, together with 12 other financial analysts, as is noted in the biography of the team leader Robert Russell for the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial: “The weekend before his death, his entire office attended a crab feast at the Russell home. They were celebrating the end of the fiscal-year budget completion. Tragically, every person that attended that party was involved in the Pentagon explosion, and are currently missing”.

By an incredible coincidence, one of the financial experts trying to make sense of the Pentagon financial loss, Bryan Jack, was reported to have died at the precise location of his office, not because he was working there that day, but because he was on a business trip on Flight AA77. In the words of the Washington Post database: “Bryan C. Jack was responsible for crunching America’s defense budget. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77, bound for official business in California when his plane struck the Pentagon, where, on any other day, Jack would have been at work at his computer”. Yahweh must have a sense of chutzpah!

Footnotes

[1] Philippe Broussard, “En dépit des déclarations américaines, les indices menant à Ben Laden restent minces,” Le Monde, September 25, 2001.

[2] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: a Post-Political Manifesto, Interlink Publishing, 2017 , p. 142.

[3] David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions, Arris Books, 2008, pp. 170-182; Webster Griffin Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, Progressive Press, 2008, pp. 321-324.

[4] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, pp. 278–280.

[5] It is quoted here from Bollyn’s book and from Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003.

[6] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 159.

[7] Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, iUniverse, 2003, p. 3.

[8] Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception that Changed the World, 2012 , pp. 278-280.

[9] Quoted by Andrew Cockburn, who claims to have heard the anecdote from “friends of the family”, in Rumsfeld: His Rise, His fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, Scribner, 2011, p. 219.

[10] Michael Evans told of this prophecy in an interview with Deborath Calwell and in his book The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny), quoted in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 71.

[11] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 193.

[12] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 144.


Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

September 10, 2018 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Despite History of Israeli Espionage, Bill Would Force NASA Cooperation with Israel Space Agency

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | September 5, 2018

A bill that was passed by the U.S. Senate in early August and is currently under consideration by the House would mandate that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) work closely with the Israel Space Agency (ISA) despite the fact that such cooperation in the past was used by Israel to steal U.S. state secrets.

The provision is tucked within the bill titled the “United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018,” which would also provide Israel with $38 billion in U.S. military aid over a ten-year period, the largest military aid package in U.S. history. MintPress News previously reported that this massive aid package translates into approximately $23,000 every year for every Israeli family. However, the provision pertaining to NASA, which was first identified by the website If Americans Knew, has largely gone unreported.

According to the current text of the bill, NASA and the Israel Space Agency are mandated to work together “to identify and cooperatively pursue peaceful space exploration and science initiatives in areas of mutual interest, taking all appropriate measures to protect sensitive information, intellectual property, trade secrets, and economic interests of the United States.” The text also references past agreements established between NASA and the ISA such as the first mutual cooperation agreement, signed in 1996, and the 2015 “Framework Agreement for Cooperation in Aeronautics and the Exploration and Use of Airspace and Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes” as the basis for this “continuing cooperation.”

Absent, however, from the bill’s text is the fact that the ISA has used this cooperation in the past to steal classified U.S. information and to conduct espionage. For instance, a lawsuit filed in November 2014 by physicist Dr. Sandra Troian detailed how an Israeli postdoctoral student at Caltech, Amir Gat, blatantly violated U.S. law by illegally transmitting to Israel classified information on NASA technology.

According to court documents, the theft of classified information took place at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an important NASA research and development center. Gat now lives in Israel and works at ITT, an Israeli government institution.

Yet, instead of attempting to stop the espionage, Caltech administrators sought to silence Troian, in violation of the school’s whistleblower policy, and retaliated against her for speaking up, including engaging in efforts to have her fired.

Troian maintains that the school was afraid of taking her concerns seriously, as it would have put the university’s $8 billion contract with NASA at risk and cast the institution in a bad light. Also of note was the fact that the Obama administration showed no interest in the case despite its repeated use of the Espionage Act to target legitimate government whistleblowers.

Thus, the Caltech incident — and the lack of accountability and the effort to silence whistleblowers that ultimately ensued — greatly weaken the bill’s claim that “all appropriate measures to protect sensitive information, intellectual property, trade secrets, and economic interests of the United States” will be followed. Despite the gravity of this incident, the inclusion of this NASA-related provision in the pending bill leaves an open door for such espionage to again take place, to the detriment of U.S. “national security.”

However, as the Trump administration has shown, the “national security” of the U.S. and of Israel have become profoundly intertwined, as President Trump’s campaign promises of “America First” quickly devolved into “Israel First” — thanks largely to the influence of Trump’s largest donor, Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Thus, concerns about Israeli espionage seem to be of little import to the current administration as well as to many members of Congress — particularly those greatly influenced by powerful organizations of the Israel lobby, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

A long-standing double standard

Yet, failure to prevent or punish Israeli espionage in the United States has long been a common policy in Washington that significantly predates the Trump administration. With the notable exception of former U.S. government contractor and Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, the Israel lobby and pro-Israel billionaire donors have been largely successful in obtaining presidential pardons or lenient sentences for alleged Israeli spies.

A clear illustration of this double standard is the case of Colonel Lawrence Franklin, a case that clearly illustrates that espionage, when conducted by Israel, is not treated as seriously by the U.S. government as other cases of espionage. Franklin, a former employee at the U.S. Department of Defense, pled guilty to espionage in 2006 for giving classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as well as directly to Israeli officials, in an attempt to pivot U.S. military forces engaged in Iraq towards Iran.

The Bush administration successfully pushed the Justice Department to pardon Franklin’s co-conspirators and then pushed Justice to reduce Franklin’s 13-year prison sentence to 10 months of house arrest. Subsequently, members of U.S. Congress asked Obama to pardon Franklin in 2016, asserting that “his [Franklin’s] intentions were to save lives and protect this great country” despite the fact that Franklin had sought to involve the U.S. in a war with Iran in order to benefit Israel.

Thus, the current NASA provision in the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018 would ostensibly continue this practice of “turning a blind eye” to Israeli interference and espionage in the United States if the bill is passed in the coming weeks.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

September 8, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment