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The Great Israeli Theft of Iraqi Jewish Heritage

Extreme right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (C) holding the Torah stolen from Iraq on January 22, 2015
By Alaa al-Lami | Al-Akhbar | February 3, 2015

Recently, Israel stole one of the symbols of Iraqi Jewish heritage, a rare ancient copy of the Torah. The incident went smoothly and quietly, with blatant collusion between Israel, the United States, the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and the Jordanian authorities, amid suspicious silence from the Iraqi federal authorities and the Iraqi cultural scene, save for a few objections.

The Torah manuscript in question, known as the Iraqi Old Testament Scroll, was written using concentrated pomegranate juice on deer-skin parchments. The manuscript was seized by US forces, among other Iraqi antiquities, which survived the systematic destruction by the illegal Anglo-American invasion and occupation.At the time, it was said that many Iraqi archaeological treasures and large amounts of documents from the Iraqi state’s secret archives were transferred to Israel, ostensibly for restoration and preservation. In truth, however, this was the deliberate looting of Iraqi heritage.

At a ceremony held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israeli authorities publicly displayed that major Iraqi artifact, thus admitting that they had pirated part of Iraq’s heritage. The Israeli Foreign Minister explicitly admitted that the manuscript had been obtained from Kurdistan via Baghdad and Amman, and that it is now being used in daily prayer in the Foreign Ministry synagogue.

According to The Times of Israel, “After it was repaired and prepared for ritual use by a Jerusalem-based scribe, the scroll was placed in a case from Aleppo, Syria and brought over to the ministry.” Avigdor Lieberman, the extremist foreign minister of Israel, did not let the occasion go without repeating old Zionist cliches, saying that “the scroll’s journey from Kurdistan to Baghdad to Amman to Jerusalem was reminiscent of the destiny of the Jewish nation.”

Some like Iraqi writer Akil al-Azraki, one of the rare voices who commented on the affair, believe that the Israeli announcement exposed the lies of the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government had claimed the manuscript was sent along with other Iraqi artifacts to the United States for restoration.

Azraqi, citing information revealed by The Times of Israel, said, “The claim about the Torah scroll having been sent to the United States for restoration is a lie. The scroll was revealed not to have travelled to the United States, but to the Israeli embassy in Amman from that time until 2011. After the attack by Egyptian protesters on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, the manuscript was sent to Israel.”

After the Israelis celebrated their successful piracy, official Iraqi authorities were oddly silent. There was no immediate response to the reports, even in the Iraqi media and cultural scene, save for a few voices.

Recall here that the Minister of Tourism and Antiquities in Iraq Adel Shershab had said on January 19, 2015, “The Jewish archive should have been returned to Iraq since 2005, after it was removed on the grounds of restoring it,” stressing that this was part of Iraqi heritage and that his government would continue efforts to retrieve it.

However, the minister did not say anything in response to the Israeli theft. In turn, the Iraqi Ministry of Culture fell completely silent following the incident, although it had announced on May 13, 2010, that an agreement was conducted between Iraq and the United States, whereby the Iraqi Jewish archive and millions of documents that the US army removed from Baghdad following the US-led invasion in 2003 would be returned to Iraq. These include the archive of the dissolved Baath Party and many Iraqi historical artifacts.

A few days after the report on the Israeli theft, the media published remarks by a member of the Culture Committee in the Iraqi parliament calling on the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to issue a complaint to Washington over the matter.

The news agency that first published the remarks, which is owned by Fakhri Karim, a businessman and senior adviser to former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, tried to promote another account of what happened.

The news agency said the way the manuscript reached Israel was a “mystery,” describing what happened as “the loss of parts of the manuscript,” even though the Israeli foreign ministry had said in its ceremony that the scroll had come from Baghdad via Kurdistan, Jordan, and then Tel Aviv. Fakhri Karim, however, is known for his pro-Israel attitudes. Karim visited the headquarters of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC in Washington, as reported by renowned Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, in a story Al-Akhbar reported in August 2013 (in Arabic).

On the day Al-Mada reported the story, one of its most famous staff writers, Sarmad al-Tai, wrote a strongly-worded criticism of those who protested the theft of the Iraqi Torah scroll, accusing them of folly. He suggested that the Jews who were expelled by the Iraqis from their country in various ways had only retrieved their Torah.
Tai’s article is often quoted by the Israeli media, though some Iraqi Jews who live in Israel and beyond dispute such analysis. Refer, for example, to what Sasson Somekh wrote in his books, and novels by Jewish Iraqi writer Samir Naqqash, who wrote all his novels in Arabic and refused to write anything in Hebrew, considering himself an Iraqi until the last day of his cruel life in Israel. The article received strong responses, though they were few in number, on social media.

The article’s absurd and sinister logic is meant to exonerate the occupation and its allies in the Iraqi federal government, the KRG, and Israel, for the crime of stealing important Iraqi artifacts, produced in Iraq hundreds of years before the creation of the Zionist entity.

Extrapolated further, the same skewed skewed logic can be used to justify an artificial entity, built on injustice, aggression, and warmongering, which has killed, maimed, and displaced people by the millions amid global silence.

The official Iraqi position was not stated publicly until days after the incident. The Iraqi minister of tourism released a statement calling on Washington to return the manuscript to Iraq, and said what happened was unlawful confiscation of a part of Iraqi heritage.

However, the minister repeated previous claims purporting the manuscript had been in Washington. These claims were invalidated by remarks made by Israeli Labor MP Mordechai Ben-Porat, who has Iraqi Jewish ancestry. Ben-Porat said that it was Iraqi government officials who gifted Israel a number of precious historical manuscripts.

Ben-Porat’s account cannot be completely dismissed. It is indeed possible that insiders colluded with this theft and piracy. Recall that Lieberman said that the manuscript was moved from Baghdad to Kurdistan, Jordan, then Tel Aviv.

The theft of Iraqi antiquities is not unprecedented. Many Western powers, led by France, Britain, Germany, and the United States, have its looted artifacts in the last century and before.

Dr Mahmoud al-Saied al-Doghim, Research Associate, Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of London, wrote a paper titled, “One Hundred and Ten Years of US Theft of Iraqi Heritage.” The paper says that entire wings of the Louvre Museum, the Berlin Museum, and the British Museum would have to close down entirely, if they returned all the artifacts stolen from Iraq (and elsewhere).

Doghim estimates the number of stolen artifacts at more than one million. A single US university, the University of Pennsylvania, as he wrote, “Acquired more than 50,000 palettes and other artifacts shedding light on the history of Mesopotamia, and discrediting many of the biblical claims promoted by the Zionists.”

The American occupation forces hit the mother-lode following the invasion of 2003. The US forces seized a large part of the contents of Iraq’s 33 museums.

In effect, the astounding rich history of Iraq and its wealth of ancient historical artifacts is not the subject of dispute. However, it might be very surprising when one examines the numbers.

According to a statement made in March 2003 by former head of Iraqi antiquities Jaber Khalil Ibrahim, archaeologists believe that there are 500,000 archaeological sites in Iraq that remain undiscovered and unstudied, along with ten thousand registered and discovered sites. The sites include at least 25,000 highly important ones.

Only 15 percent of the sites in Iraq have been excavated, most of them located between the Euphrates and the Tigris. This area is considered the cradle of humanity, and from six thousand years ago, it was home to civilizations like the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, all the way to the Abbasids.

The US occupation of Iraq was a disaster for the country’s material heritage.

February 3, 2015 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu: UN Gaza probe should be ‘shelved’

MEMO | February 3, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said that a probe by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) into last year’s Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip should be shelved in light of the recent resignation of inquiry commission head William Schabas.

“After the resignation of the committee chairman, who was biased against Israel, the report that was written at the behest of the UNHRC… needs to be shelved,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

The Israeli premier went so far as to slam the rights council as “an anti-Israel body, the decisions of which prove it has nothing to do with human rights.”

“This is the same council that in 2014 made more decisions against Israel than against Iran, Syria and North Korea combined,” Netanyahu asserted.

“It is Hamas, the other terrorist organizations and the terrorist regimes around us that need to be investigated, not Israel,” he added.

The Israeli government has already said it would not cooperate with the UNHRC committee formed to investigate violations committed during Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip last July and August.

Israel had said that the UN council would not be objective.

The Israeli offensive left more than 2,160 Palestinians dead and some 11,000 injured – the vast majority of them civilians – while partially or completely destroying thousands of residential structures across the territory.

The onslaught, which was launched with the stated aim of ending rocket fire from the coastal enclave, finally ended with the announcement last August of an open-ended cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian resistance factions.

On Monday, Schabas, a Canadian professor of international law, reportedly resigned from his post as head of the investigation committee due to Israeli allegations of bias.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, for his part, hailed Schabas’ resignation, saying it was a “victory” for the self-proclaimed Jewish state.

“It is an Israeli diplomatic victory. However, it will not change the probe’s conclusions,” he said.

He added that the appointment of Schabas to investigate last year’s war against Gaza was like “appointing Cain to investigate who killed Abel.”

February 3, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Head of UN War Crimes Inquiry Resigns After Israeli Accusations of Pro-Gaza Bias

IMEMC News & Agencies | February 3, 2015

The head of a UN inquiry into last summer’s Israeli military offensive in Gaza has said he will resign after Israeli allegations of bias, due to consultancy work he did for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

William Schabas, a Canadian academic, was appointed last August by the head of the UN Human Rights Council to lead a three-member group looking into war crimes during the offensive.

Al Ray reports that, according to the Guardian and in a letter to the commission, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Schabas said he would step down immediately to prevent the issue from overshadowing the preparation of the report and its findings, which are due to be published in March.

Schabas’ departure highlights the sensitivity of the UN investigation just weeks after prosecutors at the international criminal court in The Hague said they had started a preliminary inquiry into atrocities committed in the Palestinian territories.

In the letter, Schabas said that a legal opinion he authored for the PLO in 2012, and for which he was paid some $1,300 (£900), was not different from advice he had given to many other governments and organizations.

“My views on Israel and Palestine as well as on many other issues were well known and very public,” he wrote. “This work in defence of human rights appears to have made me a huge target for malicious attacks.”

Israel has long criticized Schabas’ appointment, citing his record as a strong critic of “the Jewish state” and its current political leadership. Schabas said his work for the PLO had prompted the Human Rights Council’s executive to seek legal advice about his position from UN headquarters on Monday.

“I believe that it is difficult for the work to continue while a procedure is underway to consider whether the chair of the commission should be removed,” he wrote, adding that the commission had largely finished gathering evidence and had begun writing the report.

The appointment of Schabas, who lives in Britain and teaches international law at Middlesex University, was welcomed at the time by Hamas but was harshly criticized by Jewish groups in the US.

Schabas, at the time, had said that he was determined to put aside any views about “things that have gone on in the past”.

The commission is looking into the behavior of both the Israelis and of Hamas.

February 3, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Lieberman: Third Lebanon war, fourth Gaza operation inevitable

Press TV – February 1, 2015

Israel’s foreign minister has described as “inevitable” a third war with Lebanon and a fourth aggression in the besieged Gaza Strip in the wake of a recent retaliatory attack by Hezbollah.

“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable,” Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview with Israel’s Ynet on Sunday.

“There’s no doubt the rules of the game have been changed, what Hezbollah forced upon us. We don’t respond, but rather decide to contain this incident,” Lieberman said, adding that the Lebanese resistance movement is “more determined.”

The Israeli official also said that another war on the Gaza Strip was on the horizon, adding that Hamas was already rebuilding its military capacities.

“We saw 10 rockets being fired at the sea last week. We see every week how they’re rebuilding [their arsenal],” he said, referring to the Palestinian resistance movement.

Hezbollah killed two Israeli soldiers and destroyed at least nine Israeli military vehicles in a retaliatory attack on a military convoy in northern occupied territories on January 28. Tel Aviv said a 20-year-old sergeant and a 25-year-old captain were killed.

Following the attack, Hezbollah said the move was in retaliation for Israel’s January 18 attack on the Syrian section of Golan Heights, where six Hezbollah members and an Iranian commander lost their lives.

Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of martyred Hezbollah top commander, Imad Mughniyeh, was among those killed in the attack.

February 1, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Arrests, Mistreats 700 Palestinian Children Every Year: Report

Palestinian protestors hold posters of 14-year-old Palestinian girl Malak al-Khatib who is in Israeli jail, during a demonstration to show solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Nablus, West Bank on January 27, 2015. Anadolu Agency/Nedal Eshtayah

Al-Akhbar | February 1, 2015

A lawyer for the Department of Prisoner Affairs released a report on Saturday on the mistreatment of Palestinian minors by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) after she visited Palestinian minors in Israeli custody.

The report came after Child Rights International Network (CRIN) published in its first 2015 report that some 700 Palestinian children per year are arrested and face “ill-treatment” by the IOF.

The IOF have shut down a program meant to decrease the number of nighttime arrest raids targeting children in Palestinian homes after less than a year, with statistics suggesting that even when the program was active night raids barely decreased at all.

Military Court Watch, a Palestinian legal monitor focused on the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, said in a statement on Thursday that the Israeli military had also failed to keep any statistics on the program it implemented of its own accord, meaning no independent evaluation could be conducted.

The report comes less than a year after Israeli military authorities unveiled the program to the international media with great fanfare, in the wake of a series of concerns raised in Europe and Australia over the effects of Israeli nighttime raids on Palestinian homes.

Hiba Massalha said in a statement that many of the minors spoke of being assaulted and beaten during their arrests and throughout interrogation.

Malek Hamdan, a 16-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem, was beaten to the point of his bones being fractured while he was held at the Russian Compound detention center, the statement said.

Additionally, 17-year-old prisoner Mohammed Abdul Fattah Radwan, from Qalqiliya, told Massalha that during his detention, he was assaulted and dragged for a long distance while handcuffed and blindfolded.

Radwan was held at the al-Jalama detention center for 15 days. He was interrogated for several hours each day while tied to a small chair.

The teen said he was held in a small, filthy, cold room with the lights kept on all day and all night.

Another prisoner, 16-year-old Mohammed Yusuf Ikhleil from al-Khalil (also known as Hebron), was detained on November 1 while he was on his way home from school. He is currently being held in HaSharon prison.

Ikhleil said he was shot with a live bullet in the thigh, and while he was being detained, he lost a lot of blood as Israeli soldiers beat him.

He was moved to the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba for treatment, where he was kept in the ICU for three days and underwent a bone surgery for his thigh injury.

Ikhleil added that he was interrogated for an hour while at the hospital, and that he was shackled to the bed for 24 hours while guards watched him.

He was taken to the al-Ramla Hospital where he stayed for two months before being moved to HaSharon prison.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old prisoner Hussam Omar Mohammed Abu Khalifa from Bethlehem is suffering from depression and needs constant medical care.

Hussam is currently being held in HaSharon prison.

Moreover, 18-year-old Lina Khattab, a student at Bir Zeit University and dancer in the al-Funoun Palestinian cultural dance troupe, was arrested on December 18 and charged in a military court for “throwing stones” and “participating in an unauthorized demonstration.”

Khattab’s trial has been postponed more than six times. The military court had refused to release her on bail or put her in house arrest. The judge said at the time: “looking at her, I can see the characteristics of a leader.”

In 2013, the UN children’s fund (UNICEF) reported that Israel was the only country in the world where children were “systematically tried” in military courts and gave evidence of practices it said were “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”

The UNICEF report said in a 22-page report that over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, noting the rate was equivalent to “an average of two children each day.”

CRIN report

According to CRIN, some 700 Palestinian children per year are arrested and face “ill-treatment” on the hands of Israeli soldiers.

“During 2014, an average of 197 children were held in military detention every month, 13 per cent of whom are under the age of 16,” the CRIN report read.

“Arrested children are commonly taken into custody by heavily armed soldiers, blindfolded with their wrists tied behind their backs before being transported to an interrogation centre,” CRIN said, adding, “Children questioned about their experience frequently report verbal and physical abuse during the arrest.”

According to research conducted by Defense for Children International in Palestine, which was cited by CRIN in their report, some 56 percent of children report having experienced “coercive” interrogation techniques during their time in Israeli custody.

Some 42 percent say they were forced to sign documents in Hebrew, despite the fact that most Palestinian children do not speak or understand the language.

Additionally, 22 percent of detained children say they underwent up to 24 hours of solitary confinement, in violation of international standards.

“This detention is a clear violation of children’s rights under several international human rights treaties to which Israel is a party,” the CRIN report said.

“The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture has called for a complete ban on solitary confinement for juveniles, warning that it ‘can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pre-trial detention, indefinitely or for prolonged periods, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles.'”

The report said that while it is technically possible to file a complaint about the way a child is treated in Israeli detention, “complaints are almost universally dismissed,” and there are “very few examples of soldiers being punished for ill-treatment.”

The report highlighted a case in which a 14-year-old girl from Ramallah was arrested on December 31 and held for 22 days in Israel before being issued a sentence.

She was charged with throwing stones, blocking the road, and allegedly possessing a knife, “sentenced to two months in prison, and fined $1,528 by an Israeli military court.”

Help free 14-year-old Malak

The Israeli cabinet approved early November a new legislation that would allow the imposition of a prison sentence up to 20 years for those convicted of throwing stones or other objects at Israeli soldiers or their vehicles.

Her father believes she was coerced into confessing, saying: “She seemed to be very sick and scared.”

“The plight of this one girl put a face on a system that routinely runs roughshod over children’s rights,” CRIN said, adding “But behind this story there is a broader issue.”

The report recommended reforms while noting that countless other recommendations by human rights groups regarding the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli custody have gone unheeded by Israeli authorities.

Ultimately, CRIN concluded, children will never be treated well under an Israeli military justice system.

“Regardless of the precise formulation of military rule, it can never protect children in the same way as a developed civilian juvenile justice system which places the best interests of the child at the center of its work,” the report read.

(Ma’an, Al-Akhbar)

February 1, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli False Flags and the Attack on Rev. Stephen Sizer

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | January 31, 2015

The counterfeit hoopla surrounding the Charlie Hebdo ‘free speech’ saga was further undermined this week when a prominent British vicar posted an article on Facebook linking Israel to the 9/11 attacks, for which he is now ‘under investigation.’

Stephen Sizer, a well-known reverend of Christ Church, Virginia Water, posted the Wikispooks article “9/11: Israel Did It” on Facebook and subsequently asked, “Is this [research] anti-Semitic?”

“It raises so many questions,” he added.

Sizer eventually removed the post under mounting pressure from his Diocese and Britain’s Jewish lobby, but affirmed his right to freedom of speech and inquiry.

“It is essential the public become convinced of what happened before and after 9/11,” Sizer told Jewish News Online. “Inevitably the truth will upset many people if it is shown by further investigation that the official explanations are shown to be deficient.” Suppressing discussion of Israel’s role in 9/11 will only “fuel suspicion,” the outspoken preacher stressed.

Sizer is barking up the right tree, hence the frenzied reaction from Zionists and those under their sway.

Mainstream outlets such as the BBC, The Telegraph, The Daily Mirror as well as a number of overt Zionist sources piled on the principled man of god by running identical smear stories about this manufactured ‘scandal.’ The articles in question emphasize that Sizer is ‘being investigated’ for the posting, as if it is a crime to promote an article that calls attention to Israeli false flag terrorism. The hit-pieces also prominently quote a spokesman from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a thuggish Zionist hate-gang who have attacked Sizer as an ‘anti-Semite’ on numerous occasions. But none of the articles or the Israeli fifth columnists they champion addresses the evidence of Israel’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Israel’s fingerprints do indeed appear to be all over the events of 9/11. And judging by the Zionist state’s past behaviour, it should not come as a surprise to learn that 9/11 was in some way organized by Israel’s secret agencies who have on plenty of previous occasions executed false flag attacks aimed at framing their Arab/Muslim adversaries, thereby inducing adverse reactions towards their foes from the West.

A History of Deception

At the time, Israel’s founding fathers were some of the most brutal terrorists around. Two former Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, were leaders of Jewish terrorist militias which waged a merciless insurgency against the indigenous Arabs of Palestine as well as the British colonial administrators of the land in the 1940s. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the personal secretary for Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brains behind the bellicose ‘Revisionist’ fold within the Zionist movement which formulated the ideological framework of the Zionist militant groups who eventually besieged Palestine, destroying more than 500 Arab villages and driving out a minimum of 750,000 Palestinians in a matter of two years, from 1946 to 1948.

In 1946, two years before Israel became a state, Irgun assailants carried out an attack on the King David Hotel which housed Britain’s administrative headquarters in the Mandate of Palestine. Jewish militants under the direction of Begin disguised themselves as Arabs and planted a number of bombs hidden in milk crates in the hotel’s basement, then detonated them causing a huge explosion which leveled a good chunk of the building. Ninety-one people were killed in the blast, including dozens of British personnel. “I’m glad to have been a terrorist for liberation,” said one Jewish Irgunist in a BBC documentary about the bombing. “We didn’t mind being called terrorists then,” another former Irgun militant confessed.

A competing Zionist terrorist faction, the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi), assassinated British soldiers as well as multiple foreign diplomats and mediators such as Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte. That group, originally headed by the Jewish supremacist Avraham Stern, even proposed a military alliance with Nazi Germany in 1941, viewing Britain as a greater roadblock to a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine than Hitler’s regime which was quite happy to expedite the re-settlement of Germany’s Jews to the Middle East.

Fast-forward to 1954 – Israel again initiates a false flag conspiracy in the region, this time in Egypt. A terrorist cell of Zionist mercenaries was discovered in Cairo and Alexandria after they tried and failed to detonate incendiary devices in British and American installations. The Israeli operatives were discovered after one of the conspirators prematurely discharged an incendiary device in his pocket, leading to his arrest and the capture of the whole cabal. The Israeli terrorists later confessed to Egyptian authorities that the provocation was planned, organized and directed by Tel Aviv. The operation was intended to stymie a burgeoning British-American-Egyptian rapport and derail ongoing negotiations between Egypt and Britain which would have seen the British relinquish control of the Suez Canal, much to Israel’s displeasure. It was later dubbed the “Lavon Affair.”

Analyst Richard H. Curtiss, writing in a 1992 article for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, observed that Israel had in the works an identical subterfuge against Jordan the same year, wherein Israeli intelligence “conceived a plan to attack British personnel seconded to King Hussein’s government in Jordan.” “The purpose,” Curtiss explained, “was to sour relations between Britain and Jordan [as well as turn] both Jordan and Britain [against] Egypt, which would be blamed for such attacks.” Curtiss cited a 1979 book, The Untold History of Israel, by Israeli journalists Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel which related the story.

The Lavon Affair was not the first, nor would it be the last Israeli covert operation aimed at framing Arabs for terrorism against the West. In 1967, during the Six Day War between Israel and several Arab states, the Israeli military attacked an American surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters. Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats besieged the vessel for hours, even shooting holes in the large American flag billowing in the wind. Having scoped out the ship hours beforehand, the Israelis were well aware it was American. As a result of Israel’s heinous attack, more than 200 American sailors were dead or wounded. The motive of the blitz was to sink the Liberty, thereby preventing it from relaying messages back to Washington which could have scuttled Israeli plans to seize land from Egypt and Syria during the six-day conflict. If the ship had been successfully destroyed, Israel would have most likely attributed the attack to its Arab foes. The Israelis later captured the Sinai and Golan Heights from Egypt and Syria respectively. Unfortunately for the Israelis, the Liberty did not sink and survivors revealed Israel’s hand behind the attack.

In his books By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception former Mossad katsa Victor Ostrovsky revealed a litany of Israeli covert operations. One clear example of Israeli chicanery that Ostrovsky exposed was a 1986 plot codenamed ‘Operation Trojan’ which saw Mossad agents plant a transponder device on Libyan soil that relayed false coded messages making it look like the Libyan government was coordinating terrorists from their embassies worldwide to attack American targets. Simultaneously a bomb explosion rocked a Berlin nightclub frequented by US military personnel, killing two US servicemen. The Mossad deception successfully coerced a hoodwinked US President Ronald Reagan into launching air strikes on Libya, who cited the fake ‘terrorist’ transmissions emanating from a Mossad device as proof of Libyan culpability in the nightclub attack.

The Israelis are also implicated in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. An investigative report on the World Socialist Web Site entitled “Questions mount in Kenya, Tanzania bombings” detailed US/Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks. The article, authored by Martin McLaughlin, cites reports from ABC News and Haaretz which affirmed that Israeli intelligence elements caused US officials to ignore warnings of an imminent attack against the embassies. US intelligence officials looked to their Israeli colleagues to diagnose the reliability of various warnings of looming danger, but the Israelis insisted they weren’t serious, resulting in no precautions being taken to defend against an assault.

“Four months worth of tips and alert signals that the Nairobi embassy was facing a potential disastrous explosives attack were sent to Washington,” wrote Warren Hough in a report for the American newspaper The Spotlight. “But nothing was done to protect this poorly shielded facility because, on the standard operating procedure inaugurated in the Reagan era, the FBI had to turn to the Israelis for a definite evaluation of these early warnings.”

“Ignore them, it’s just another false alarm,” Mossad told their counterparts in the CIA. The imprudent Israeli advice, Hough explained in the aforesaid article, “was the key factor in persuading the U.S. to let its guard down, resulting in the loss of life of at least 250 victims including 11 Americans.”

Israel didn’t seem to believe its own counsel. According to researcher Ralph Schoenman, the first soldiers at the scene of the crime in Kenya and Tanzania “were special units of the Israeli armed forces and high level agents of the Mossad” who quickly “took control” of the bombed out sites.

Israel’s penchant for coercing America to let its guard down indicates a more sinister fraud at work, beyond an equally damning ‘let it happen’ scenario.

September 11: Israel’s ‘Hanukkah Miracle’ & the Neocons’ ‘New Pearl Harbour’

Exploiting and outright manipulating fissures between the West and the Arab/Muslim world has been a key component of Israeli strategy from the outset. And it is this artificial divide, fostered by years of Zionist subterfuges and political scheming, that lies at the core of the agenda of those truly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the primordial affair which kick started the bogus ‘war on terror’ and endless American war-making in the Middle East.

In a September 2001 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, Osama bin Laden denied responsibility for the attacks, articulating that the real architects of 9/11 are “persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive.” The “civilization, nation, country, or ideology” bin Laden spoke of that prospered the most from 9/11 is undoubtedly Zionism as an ideology and Israel as a country. Israel’s pugnacious leaders made that fact abundantly clear in cavalier public statements made shortly after the disaster.

The 9/11 attacks were “good for Israel” and had the effect of “[shifting] American public opinion in our favour,” announced a jubilant Benjamin Netanyahu on two separate occasions following the attacks, as quoted in Haaretz and other Israeli papers. According to Israeli journalist Aluf Benn, Ariel Sharon and his top military-intelligence advisors had proclaimed 9/11 a ‘Hanukkah miracle’ of good fortune for Israel, “coming just as Israel was under increasing international pressure because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.” The assault on the Twin Towers “placed Israel firmly on the right side of the strategic map with the U.S., and put the Arab world at a disadvantage,” Benn wrote in Haaretz. “That’s the impression left by the speeches given by Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and National Security Council chairman Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, at this week’s Herzliya conference on national security.”

“Since September 11, our leaders have been euphoric,” the former Israeli intelligence chief Ami Ayalon told France’s Le Monde newspaper. “With no more international pressures on Israel, they [the Israeli leadership] think, the way is open.” Ehuk Sprinzak, a founding Dean at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, reiterated the expressions of relief and delight amongst the Zionist leadership, telling the Israeli press that 9/11 was the “most important public relations act ever committed in our favour.” On the day of 9/11, Zionist commentator and Stratfor director George Friedman expressed the view that “[t]he big winner today, intended or not, is the state of Israel” because the attacks will foster a closer alliance between the US and Israel as well as lead America into “a massive covert and overt war against” the Muslim world. Even Israel’s former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, told a Canadian journalist that “one of the immediate results of 9/11 was clearly a very severe backlash of international approbation of Islam in general” and that Israel “obviously benefitted” from America’s response to the atrocity.

Years before 9/11, Zionists and neocons formed a number of think tanks to promote their militarist agenda in the Middle East. The most prominent one was called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and was headed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of Israel’s staunchest supporters in the US. In a September 2000 report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neocons pontificated about the need for a “New Pearl Harbour” to actualize their war plans against Middle Eastern regimes, particularly that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Four years earlier, in 1996, several prominent American neocons, notably Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, authored a strategy paper for an Israeli think tank called the ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.’ In their paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the cadre of pro-Israel evangelists essentially called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which was an “important Israeli strategic objective” from their perspective. The Clean Break authors stipulated that ousting Hussein was needed in order to ultimately weaken Syria, and they further expressed a desire to do away with the Iranian regime, Israel’s foremost military rival in the region.

In April 2002, PNAC neocons sought to capitalize on the 9/11 attacks to expedite their agenda of Iraq’s destruction, calling on President Bush in a written plea to “support Israel” in its “war on terrorism” by accelerating “plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” Israeli citizens Perle, Feith and Wurmser effectively put their wet dreams of war into practice by entering senior policy-making positions in the US administration of George W. Bush, leading the drive for the war in Iraq alongside the Israeli fifth columnist Paul Wolfowitz who in turn was a high ranking Pentagon official under Bush. Researchers fingered Feith’s ‘Office of Special Plans’ in the Pentagon as the fountainhead of disinformation and propaganda about Iraq’s non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” a devious ploy also promoted in Neocon-Zionist literature throughout the 1990s.

And who devised the ‘war on terror’? Despite popular belief among leftists, that ominous philosophy’s birthplace was not in the dysfunctional brain of George W. Bush. Rather, it first emerged at the Jonathan Institute’s ‘Conference on International Terrorism’ held in 1979 in Jerusalem. That group was spearheaded by Israeli politicians of the Likudnik persuasion, principally Benjamin Netanyahu, who endeavored to export their propagandistic memes about ‘terrorism’ to the West, hoping Western governments would do Israel’s bidding in the region. The foundry of lies and untruths sponsored by Netanyahu and his neocon minions in Washington was ultimately calculated to delegitimize Arab/Muslim resistance to Israeli imperial expansion and aggression, hence the widespread dissemination via Zionist-owned media venues of the erroneous contention that ‘Islamic terrorism’ is a unique threat facing the West. In actual fact, the biggest perpetrators and patrons of terrorist violence in the world are the Zionists, the Americans and their allies.

Unsolved Mysteries and Unanswered Questions

Writing in his informative essay “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel,” Dr. Stephen Sniegoski asserts “the ‘war on terrorism’ was never intended to be a war to apprehend and punish the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities. September 11 simply provided a pretext for government leaders to implement long-term policy plans.” Indeed, the ‘war on terror’ amounted to nothing less than a ‘war of terror’ against Israel’s opponents in the Middle East, with 9/11 serving as a very conveniently timed casus belli.

And what of Israel’s Mossad, that “ruthless and cunning” agency of terror that “has the capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” according to a group of US Army analysts? As the Army School of Advanced Military Studies acknowledged in the aforesaid study, Israel’s proclivity for ruthlessness and deception leads many to believe that 9/11 was yet another ‘false flag’ contrivance of the master manipulators in Tel Aviv.

What really happened on that fateful day?

There are many lingering questions about Israel’s role in the attacks. An oft-cited proof of Israeli involvement is the ‘five dancing Israelis’ incident, wherein a group of five individuals, later identified by ABC News, the Jewish Forward and FBI insiders as Mossad agents, were seen by witnesses video-taping the disaster from a New Jersey rooftop, and subsequently cheering, laughing and shouting with “joy and mockery” as 3000 innocents were suffocating in the burning Twin Towers.

The suspicious crew of Israelis were arrested on that day by the NYPD, and later questioned by the FBI about possible foreknowledge of the attacks. Considering they had shown up (with a video camera) in a very convenient spot at a very opportune time of the day, just as everything went down, and outwardly expressed signs of elation rather than fear and horror, it beggars belief to suggest they didn’t know exactly when, where and how the assaults on the Twin Towers would come to pass. In fact, FBI reports partially declassified in 2005 revealed that one of the arrested Israelis named Omer Marmari told authorities that he and his compatriots were acting in a celebratory manner because the attacks would help make the world “understand” Israel’s predicament vis-à-vis the Palestinians. “We’re Israelis. We’re not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem,” Israeli Sivan Kurzburg told the NYPD upon his arrest. While in custody, another of the five Israelis named Oded Ellner remarked: “the United States will [now] take steps to stop terrorism in the world.” How did any of them know for sure who did 9/11 before any investigation had been conducted or how the US’s response to the attacks would benefit their country? Did they not only know when and where the attacks would occur, but also who would be blamed for it and the consequent direction of US foreign policy? That’s way more information than a group of self-professed ‘furniture movers’ should be privy to. The five Israeli suspects were eventually deported back to Israel without charge. In an article about the incident, journalist Christopher Ketcham quoted an anonymous CIA insider close to the investigation into the five Israelis who said “the decision to close down the investigation into the Israelis came from the White House” and that “[i]t was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11.”

And what of those 200 Israelis that Fox News reported had been arrested shortly before and after 9/11, some of whom claimed to be ‘art students’ but were in actuality Mossad spies with expertise in eavesdropping and explosives? What of the mysterious ‘truck bomb’ or ‘explosive laden van’ which was reported to have been ‘packed with explosives’ as it approached the George Washington Bridge? Why were the identities of the apprehended suspects never revealed to the public? Was it because they were Israelis and not Arabs? Is it just a coincidence that the Mossad passed along a very vague and dubious ‘warning’ to the CIA a few months before the attacks, suggesting that 200 ‘Arab terrorists’ were present on American soil and were planning a ‘major operation’? And is it not amazingly conspicuous that the Mossad linked this ‘imminent attack’ of which they had no specific information to “Osama bin Laden and Iraq,” as the UK’s Telegraph reported?

What about the ‘mural van’ that police stopped between 6th and 7th on King Street near the World Trade Center on 9/11? Surely a van with a painting depicting a plane crashing into the Twin Towers that was rented to ‘ethnic Middle Easterners’ according to a Norman Y. Mineta International Institute for Surface Transportation Policy Studies (MTI) report is worthy of scrutiny. If the ‘ethnic Middle Easterners’ behind such an obvious display of foreknowledge were Arabs or Muslims, surely the Zionist-influenced mass media would have reported it, and surely the Zionist-influenced US government would have included it in official reports. But nary a mention of the incident can be found in media or government reports concerning the attacks.

How do we explain the mysterious acquisition of the entire World Trade Center complex by shady New York businessman Larry Silverstein six weeks before the attacks? The Jewish real estate magnate who weirdly “felt a compelling urge” to own the worthless, asbestos-laden Twin Towers happens to be a rabid Zionist with innumerable connections to Zionist lobbies, most notably the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) under whose auspices the Zionist neocons produced the “Clean Break” regime change manifesto. On top of that, Silverstein was a ‘personal friend’ of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, and had weekly conference calls with Netanyahu. Moreover, ‘Lucky Larry’ skipped out on a routine business meeting at the top of the North Tower (the first one hit) on 9/11, claiming a ‘miraculous’ intercession by his wife who insisted he attend a ‘doctor’s appointment’ instead. Silverstein’s business partner on the murky WTC deal, Frank Lowy, is likewise an ardent Zionist Jew who fought in Israel’s ‘war of ethnic cleansing’ and chairs multiple pro-Israel think tanks in Israel itself as well as in Australia where he acts as Tel Aviv’s pro-bono ambassador.

And what of the lack of any credible evidence tying Arabs or Muslims to the attacks? What about the ‘indestructible passport’ of alleged hijacker Satam al-Suqami which miraculously escaped the cabin of the exploded plane into the North Tower, falling hundreds of feet to the ground and emerging without so much as a blemish? Why even bring a passport on a domestic flight let alone a suicide mission? What of the plethora of other eyebrow-raising FBI ‘discoveries,’ such as the inexplicable Mohammed Atta luggage filled to the brim with incriminating ‘evidence’ including Atta’s ‘al-Qaeda plans,’ Arabic-language flight training devices/videos, a Koran, etc. It is the height of credulity to believe that this luggage, which a former FBI agent told Newsday amounted to the “Rosetta stone” of the investigation, conveniently did not get loaded onto the plane and fell right into the FBI’s lap. Does that not reek of a cheesy Hollywood stage-play for the gullible public’s consumption?

What about the markedly un-Islamic theatrics of the ‘19 martyrs for Allah’ who were witnessed cavorting with strippers, taking drugs and binge drinking in bars and clubs throughout Florida and Las Vegas months before the attacks? Why would dedicated ‘jihadists’ who we are told obsessively observed Islamic laws and edicts behave in this blasphemous way shortly before a ‘martyrdom operation’? Isn’t the obvious answer that these folks weren’t real Muslims and were just pretending to be in order to create a phony ‘evidence trail’ for an equally bogus ‘al-Qaeda plot’?

Has it ever been sufficiently explained why several of the named ‘9/11 hijackers’ turned up alive and well in the Middle East, protesting their innocence, as the BBC reported? Could the fact that their passports had been lost and/or stolen in the years preceding the attacks indicate a frame-up at work? Are the CIA and Mossad not experts at stealing identities of innocent people for use on covert ops? Doesn’t Mossad have a ‘special unit’ for crafting fake passports to be used on foreign missions?

Has there ever been a credible explanation as to why most of the ‘19 hijackers’ gained entry to America through a CIA ‘fast-tracking’ VISA program run out of a US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as J. Michael Springmann revealed?

Can we explain how America’s multi-billion dollar military, intelligence and defence apparatus, which consists of a dozen or so intelligence agencies and the most sophisticated defence and spy equipment and networks the world has ever seen, was astoundingly ‘asleep at the wheel’ and ‘unable to detect’ this plot and its rather clumsy progenitors? As the former Pakistani spy chief Hamid Gul mused with bewilderment, “a man living in a cave inside a mountain or a peasant’s hovel” was able to orchestrate 9/11 and thereby outfox the combined military might of America and its powerful allies? “I don’t believe it,” Gul retorted.

Has it ever been properly explained how shoddy pilots who never flew commercial aircraft in their lives were able to precision guide three planes into their targets without a hiccup? How could a plane enter the Pentagon’s highly-protected and watched airspace without fighter jets intercepting it? Is it not odd that whoever was at the controls of Flight 77, or whatever actually hit the Pentagon, decided to not dive into the roof of the building, which would have been a much safer and easier-to-hit target than the façade? Is it just a coincidence that the very side of the building which was hit had just been ‘recently renovated’ with blast-walls and other upgrades so that it could endure explosive impacts with minimal damage? Is it also mere happenstance that all of the Pentagon’s top brass including Donald Rumsfeld were on the opposite side of the building, safely out of harm’s way?

Can we explain how two giant skyscrapers can collapse to the ground at nearly free fall speed, hurling hundred-ton chunks of steel structure hundreds of feet horizontally, simply from the impact of planes and a few scattered fires? Has there ever been a sufficient explanation as to how gravity can pulverize into dust large portions of two 110-story buildings? How did WTC Building 7 – the 47-story high-rise that was not hit by a plane – collapse neatly and symmetrically like a controlled demolition into its own footprint at free fall speed? Does it not defy logic, common sense and even basic laws of physics that no explosives were involved in the gravity-defying collapses of these enormous structures?

These are merely a few of the hundreds of enduring questions that have haunted the US government and its apologists for years.

It is safe to say that satisfactory answers to these very valid and logical inquires will not be forthcoming. Truth cannot prevail so long as the Neocon-Zionist clique which usurped the Bush administration and instigated the calamitous ‘war of civilizations’ by way of monstrous lies and deceit is running the show in Washington and other epicenters of power that effectively dominate the world at the present time.

~

Brandon Martinez is an independent writer and journalist who has written extensively on Zionism, Israel-Palestine, American and Canadian foreign policy, war, terrorism and deception in media and politics. He is the co-founder of Non-Aligned Media (http://nonalignedmedia.com) and author of Hidden History and Grand Deceptions. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective[at]hotmail.com or visit his blog at http://martinezperspective.com.

Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez

February 1, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

CIA, Mossad Behind Killing of Imad Mughniyeh, Washington Post Confirms

Al-Akhbar | January 31, 2015

A report from the Washington Post on Friday confirmed that the CIA and Israel’s spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria.

Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.

He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.

On January 19, Jihad, Mughniyeh’s 24-year-old son, was also killed by Israeli forces in Syria, along with five Hezbollah members and and an Iranian general in a helicopter airstrike near the city of Quneitra.

The bomb that killed Mughniyeh, built by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with the CIA operatives on the ground in Damascus.

“The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” a former US intelligence official told the newspaper.

The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.

According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W. Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.

The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included approval to target Mughniyeh.

“There was an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with him,” a former US official who served in Baghdad told the Post.

According to the newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting on the issue with the head of Israel’s military intelligence service in 2002.

“When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs,” a former US official told the Post.

Though it is not clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint operation to kill him in Syria’s capital.

The agencies collected “pattern of life” information about him and used facial recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a restaurant the night he was killed.

In 2013, an Al-Akhbar investigation into the 2008 assassination revealed that Mossad, under the leadership of Meir Dagan at the time, was responsible for the operation, which took around six weeks to implement, from A to Z.

Mossad and CIA have repeatedly planned and carried out assassinations on Hezbollah’s senior commanders and members in Lebanon and Syria.

In 2013, Hezbollah commander Hassan al-Laqqis was assassinated in the suburbs of Beirut, an attack that the resistance group said was orchestrated by Israeli intelligence.

On Friday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah spoke about the latest attack on Hezbollah members in Quneitra, stressing that Israel had “planned, calculated and took a premeditated decision to assassinate” Hezbollah fighters.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

January 31, 2015 Posted by | War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nasrallah: The Rules of Engagement with Israel Are Over

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A Hezbollah supporter with the words “time for retribution” written on her hand attends a memorial ceremony to honor six Hezbollah fighters killed in Syria by an Israeli airstrike, during which Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made a televised speech. Al-Akhbar/Marwan Tahtah

Al-Akhbar | January 30, 2015

“Don’t try us,” Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah told Israel in a televised speech Friday broadcast during a memorial ceremony to honor the six Hezbollah fighters and the Iranian general killed in an Israeli airstrike in Syria earlier this month.

On January 18, an Israeli helicopter airstrike on the Syrian city of Quneitra near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights killed six fighters of Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah, including a commander, Mohammed Abu Issa, and the son of assassinated senior commander Imad Mughniyeh, as well as Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Mohammed Ali Allahdadi.

Hezbollah has been fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assad in Syria against rebels in the nearly four-year Syrian conflict.

According to Nasrallah, who spoke for an hour and a half, Israel had “planned, calculated and took a premeditated decision to assassinate” the fighters, saying that the motive behind the attack was crystal clear.

Hezbollah’s chief said that while Israel isn’t worried about thousands of armed militants from the al-Nusra Front — al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria — near territories it occupies, the Zionist state “was scared on January 18 of six unarmed Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian in civilian vehicles.”

Observers from the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) confirmed in a report published in December documenting cooperation and coordination between the Israeli army and militant groups in Syria.

The UNDOF report said that observers witnessed several meetings between rebel leaders and Israeli army forces between December 2013 and March 2014, in addition to witnessing the transportation of injured militants to Israeli hospitals following confrontations between the militants and the Syrian army near the occupied Golan border.

Nasrallah said that those killed in the Quneitra attack showed a “fusion of Lebanese-Iranian blood on Syrian soil, and reflects the unity of the cause and the unity of the fate of the countries in the axis of resistance.”

“When the blood of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians unites, we will enter an era of triumph,” he added.

The deaths of Allahdadi and Issa revealed that commanders were present on the ground alongside fighters, Nasrallah said, adding that Jihad Mughniyeh’s death showed how entire families and not just individual members were joining the resistance.

Nasrallah extended his condolences to the families of the Hezbollah fighters as well as the families of the eight Lebanese soldiers who were killed last week in clashes with al-Nusra Front militants in the area of Tallet al-Hamra near Ras Baalbek on the Lebanese-Syrian border.

Nasrallah’s remarks came two days after Hezbollah claimed responsibility for an attack against an Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) convoy in Israeli-occupied Lebanese Shebaa Farms that left a number of Israeli soldiers dead.

According to Israeli figures, two soldiers were killed and seven others were wounded, although Hezbollah-owned Al-Manar news channel said the toll was much higher.

“They killed us in broad daylight, we kill them in broad daylight … they struck two of our vehicles, we targeted two of their vehicles,” Nasrallah said, likening the Quneitra strike to the one by Hezbollah in Shebaa.

“The only difference is that we announced that Israel struck our fighters in Quneitra half an hour after the attack, whereas the Israelis didn’t,” Nasrallah continued, adding that the number of casualties on the Israeli side was “debatable.”

The Shebaa Farms area is a mountainous, narrow sliver of land rich in water resources measuring 25 square kilometers (10 square miles). It has been illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war, although Lebanon has never ceased to call for its restitution.

Israel occupied most of southern Lebanon for 22 years until 2000 and the two countries are still technically at war.

“The Israelis can’t kill our people and then go to sleep … their farmers can’t stay in their fields and their soldiers can’t stroll up and down the border as if they merely killed mosquitoes,” Nasrallah said, asserting that the Zionist state would pay a price for all of its criminal actions even if that meant going to war with Israel.

“We don’t want war but we are not afraid of going to war,” Nasrallah assured. “I think the Shebaa attack was a clear message … Israel was humiliated on Wednesday.”

Nasrallah said Hezbollah would retaliate against any future Israeli attacks on its members “whenever, however and wherever,” adding that the Hezbollah “no longer cares about the rules of engagement anymore.”

“Don’t try us,” Nasrallah defiantly said to Israel.

Since the January 18 airstrike, troops and civilians in northern Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine and the occupied Golan Heights have been on heightened alert and Israel has deployed an Iron Dome rocket interceptor unit near the Syrian border.

“Israelis have been on edge ever since they targeted our fighters in Quneitra,” Nasrallah stated.

Following Wednesday’s attack, Israeli forces hit several Lebanese villages along the border, killing a 36-year-old UN peacekeeper.

Israeli warplanes routinely violate Lebanon’s airspace and have launched several attacks against Syrian targets in recent months, some reportedly carried out from over Lebanon.

On Thursday, Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), said Israeli fighter jets penetrated deep into Lebanese airspace, startling residents as the jets flew over the capital Beirut. Israeli jets were also seen flying over southern Lebanese towns.

Nasrallah said Israel has violated Lebanese’ sovereignty and the 1701 UN resolution “thousands of times” and “on daily basis.”

Moreover, Nasrallah slammed the Arab League as “nonexistent” when it came to fighting Israel and supporting Palestinians, saying the 22-member league has served Israel more than the Palestinians. He gave the 51-day Israeli summer assault on Gaza that left 2,300 Palestinians dead as an example of the Arab League’s failure.

Israeli army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner said Wednesday’s attack was the “most severe” Israel had faced since 2006, when its war with Hezbollah killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and some 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel and the US: a Troubled Romance

By Robert Fantina | CounterPunch | January 30, 2015

It is sometimes interesting to see the many hoops the United States jumps through to accommodate the brutal whims of Israel. With Palestine ratifying the Rome Statute, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) beginning its initial investigation of possible Israeli war crimes committed against the Palestinians, more such information is leaking out.

Israel, it is reported, is pressuring nations that fund the ICC, however inadequately, to either reduce or suspend that funding altogether. Reports are that poor Israel is being rebuffed at every turn, with the major funding nations saying they have no intention of making such adjustments. The U.S., this writer is sure, would cease all funding for the ICC, if it had ever deigned to join. But no international body, it seems, has the right to judge the soldiers and/or leaders of the self-described ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ for illegal invasions, wanton killing of civilians, or torture of political prisoners. So Israel, which has in the past successfully demanded that the U.S. cease any aid to Palestine, can’t rely on the U.S. to pull the plug on the ICC.

All this comes at a very awkward time for the troubled romance between Israel and the U.S., a time when perhaps the final nail has been hammered into the coffin of the dysfunctional bromance between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu. In March, Mr. Netanyahu will visit the U.S. to give Congress his instructions regarding U.S. negotiations with Iran. This, in all likelihood, will torpedo the delicate, years-long negotiations that Mr. Obama, with support from much of the international community, has been spearheading. But the general direction of these negotiations has been displeasing to Mr. Netanyahu, and he will inform Congress of that fact in no uncertain terms. Congress, always responsive to the holders of the purse strings, will fall into line. So what if it means that more young Americans will be sent to kill and die in another war? What is this, when funds are needed for one’s next re-election campaign?

A presidential spokesperson said that Mr. Netanyahu’s forthcoming visit to the U.S. is a slap in the face of Mr. Obama. And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, an international joke if ever there was one, is said to be particularly peeved. Did he not, as has since been reported, contact at least fifty world leaders in December, begging and pleading with them on Israel’s behalf, to vote down a resolution being introduced at the United Nations, that would have mandated an end to the Israel occupation of Palestine by 2017? Was he not successful in procuring Israel’s desire at the expense of the basic human rights of the Palestinians? And then, within days, to have Mr. Netanyahu spit in his eye! Oh, the shame of it! One is confident that Mr. Kerry will send a strongly-worded message to someone in Israeli diplomatic circles, perhaps a staff member responsible for cleaning the guest bath at the ambassador’s residence.

A reasonable person might ask what response to this is most appropriate. Unfortunately, we have moved far beyond reasonable when the U.S. tramples the basic human rights of an entire nation to please a powerful lobby, and when a member of the House of Representative invites a world leader to address Congress without mentioning it to the president. But let’s play the ‘what if’ game anyway.

The U.S. gives Israel $3 billion a year, with no strings attached. One might think that that would give the U.S. some leverage in getting Israel to adapt its behavior in some way. Might not the U.S. say that the next gift, perhaps a shipment of bombers, is contingent on a cessation of new, illegal settlement activity? Or perhaps an end to the brutal blockade of the Gaza Strip? Some adherence to international law, it seems, could be tied to continued U.S. funding.

But no, there is no precedent for such actions; in fact, the reverse is true. There is historical precedent for simply writing a blank check to Israel. In 1988, an Israeli journalist commented that “One may say no to America and still get a bonus.” Nothing has changed in twenty-seven years.

So there we are. In March, Mr. Netanyahu will be in town to address Congress and participate in that even more important governing body, AIPAC (American Israel Political Affairs Committee). Most of Congress will join him there, where the real governing takes place, to bow and scrape before the holders of the biggest checkbooks. Heaven forbid they spend as much time or energy with constituents; what a waste of valuable time! Money, it is said, talks, and the members of Congress always have a listening ear.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is looking in another direction, recognizing the arrogance of Mr. Netanyahu, the cruelty of the occupation, the hypocrisy of the U.S. and the ineffectual administration of Mr. Obama. The work of the ICC will continue slowly, but it will continue. Without Israel’s cooperation, which it has vowed not to provide, there may be no just outcome, but the focus is on Israel. While an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the reputation of an accused who gets off on the technicality of refusal to cooperate is more than a little tarnished. Israel’s long walk toward international isolation is accelerating. And the U.S. is only expediting it.

Whatever the next several months bring for Palestine, Israel and the U.S., only a few things are sure: Palestinians will continue to suffer under the brutal, apartheid Israeli regime even as more and more nations recognize it; Israel will continue to draw almost universal condemnation, with the U.S. being the main holdout, for the brutal occupation of Palestine, and the U.S., long seen outside its own borders as the world’s main terrorist nation, trampling on the human rights of entire nations simply to ensure the filling of corporate coffers, will do nothing to dissuade the world from that opinion. The U.S. and Israel will impede the march of justice, but increasingly it is obvious that they cannot stop it.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Pill Press).

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Problem of Israel in the Modern World

By Michael Welton | CounterPunch | January 30, 2015

The mood of our uneasy times is incredibly bellicose, dark, apocalyptic and vengeful. The “war on terror” is like a virus that infects everything it touches. And it does seem to touch everything, from our popular television shows, to getting across borders, travelling overseas somewhere. You can’t read the Sunday paper without feeling queasy, a sense of dread tingling our nerves and spoiling our lovely morning coffee. Everyday brings a new jolt. And if terror doesn’t do the trick, fear of global warming, or running out of oil will spoil your day for sure.

I am particularly interested in probing the role that religious belief and mythological systems play in dividing us from one another, fuelling irrationality and hatred of others, and dampening any spirit of radical self-criticism. To illustrate the incendiary nature of religious belief, I will focus attention on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the context of the Middle East. Perhaps no topic–Israel’s fate and role in the Middle East–is itself so incendiary and symptomatic of the failure of our global civilization to act justly.

The horrific Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006, the continuing assault on Palestinians in the Gaza strip, now virtually a prison, and the building of settlements in the West Bank, has revealed to the world the stark inadequacies of the old axiom, that “might is right”. I am fascinated with why Israel, particularly, believes that might is right, that war is the only message the Arabs understand and why Israel refuses to talk with their enemy. What belief system underpins the aggressions of Israel against the Palestinians and its Arab surroundings? Why is it so hard for us to criticize Israel in the west? Are there mythic underpinnings and reasons operating here, too?

September 11, 2001 set me on a pathway to understand what was behind this ghastly act of flying hijacked airplanes into the very heart of the American military-industrial complex. Why was it so easy for George W. Bush on a Sunday afternoon, Sept. 16, 2001, on the south lawn of the White House–to utter these words: “We need to be alert to the fact that these evil doers still exist. We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time. No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft–fly US aircraft into buildings full of innocent people–and show no remorse. This is a new kind of-a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take awhile.”

Commentators of the day observed that Bush’s remark about crusade had come in an off-the-cuff comment to a journalist. Actually, he had struggled hard to find the right word. This was the word that came from his gut. It signified the struggle between Good and Evil. On January 29, 2002, Bush announced that: “States like these (Iran, Iraq. N. Korea), and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Unwittingly, Bush was dragged back to the century’s old world of malediction–cursing one’s enemies.

One of the deep reasons why the West is open-hearted to Israel and hard-hearted towards Palestinians (and increasingly all Arabs) is the pre-eminence of “Israel” in the western, Christian imagination. Let me tell a personal story to illustrate my point. The Diary of Anne Frank has taken its place in the western religious imagination from its publication after the war until the present day. I can remember reading an expurgated version of the diary when I was a teenager. The excruciating drama of her hiding from the Gestapo, and her family’s eventual murder, was cut into my youthful memory. I somehow took on her suffering as my own. In my twenties, I read Holocaust narratives by the likes of Elie Wiesel (Night) who captured the horror of trains carrying Jews to the death-camps, Jews who didn’t know what was in store for them as they shuddered down the rails. I read the works of Jewish theologians who taught me that The Holocaust was the most horrific form of human suffering.

When I gradually made the journey from pietistic evangelicalism to liberation theology, like so many others, I read Gustavo Gutierez’s Liberation Theology text with amazement. There, the Exodus narrative was claimed as a paradigm for the liberation struggles of the oppressed everywhere. The spirituals of Black slaves incorporated Old Testament, Jewish imagery as they longed for “Moses” to lead them to the promised land of freedom, away from Pharaoh’s crushing contempt. “Israel” existed as a powerful metaphor–the Jews appeared to be the paradigm of profound suffering. Those suffering from the depredations of South African apartheid, or sugar plantations or the brutality of Latin American dictatorships–could find comfort in the story of the Exodus.

But I didn’t think about the real state of Israel that was forged through violence and terrorism in the 1940s on the historic land of Palestine. Nor did I pay any attention to what actually happened when the ancient Hebrews ventured into the “promised land”, instructed by their tribal sky-god to eliminate the Amalekites. What happened to them? Didn’t Yahweh tell the Israelites to murder, plunder and rape its inhabitants? When I think about Israel now, and the Diary of Anne Frank, I realize the power of Edward Said’s remark that Israel’s “other”, the Palestinians, have never had permission to possess their own narrative. It is not that Anne Frank’s diary ought not to be read. But the fact that we keep telling, and re-telling this story and its variants, leaves little room for other narratives. It contributes to the idea, I think, that Jewish suffering is unique, different from other forms of suffering, mysterious and resistant to rational understanding.

A diary for our time would, perhaps, be entitled The diary of Asthma al-Mugghayr, a 16-year old Palestinian, an account of what happened to his fellow and sister kids and family and community members in and around Rafah. Scribbling among the ruins, would Asthma write of watching his brother, Ahmad, 13 years-old, shot with a single bullet through his head while taking clothes off the drying line and feeding pigeons? Apparently the shot came from a house nearby, which been taken over by Israeli soldiers shortly before. Would he write by candle late at night, amidst the rubble, about the thirteen year old girl who was shot while she was walking to school? What would this teenage boy think about the Israeli commander who emptied his gun into the school girl?

What would Asthma think about the Occupation–a system of military check-points splitting towns and villages into ghettoes, curfews, closures, raids, mass demolition and destruction of houses and land expropriations? How would he characterize daily life, and the grotesque wall, that, when completed will total 400 miles–four times longer than the Berlin wall. Would Asthma write youthful poetry about being caged or displaced? Would this young man be driven mad? Would he confess to a concealed desire to be a suicide bomber?

Maybe Asthma would keep a record of just how many children have been killed. Two-thirds of hundreds of children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of the cases to the head, neck and chest–the sniper’s wound. Would these young men wonder why the Palestinians are always terrorists? Would he have taken his own life?
Why is it almost unspeakable to speak of the suffering of the non-Jew in the west? Why is the suffering of Palestinian people of so little concern and interest to the western mind and politicians? One answer surely is that both Christians and Jews share a common mythology: that Yahweh created the world, that the Jews are a chosen people, that they have been promised a land. Christians and Jews obviously differ regarding the significance of Jesus. But those who embrace him become part of the universal “people of God” who will inherit the earth when the redeemer returns to Zion. Islam has no place in the great purposes of God.

But there is something else. The United States and Israel have fused into a single entity in global politics and world history. Both are uniquely chosen to be redeemer nations, a light unto the nations. They have special status in the cosmic story. Israel is the US, and the US is Israel. The early Puritans were the “new Israel” and America was the Promised Land. America has never forsaken its historical sense of specialness before God, to be a redeemer nation. And, as we will now see, Israel’s imagined destiny was not only to be a homeland for dispossessed Jews. It was to be beacon of civilization in savage Arab lands, a light unto the nations.

We cannot understand the current crisis in the Middle East without understanding the religious mythology and historical circumstances underpinning the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. I can only highlight these. All of us, if asked, probably immediately link The Holocaust perpetrated in Germany with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 in historic Palestine. Getting their own state was Europe’s payment for their suffering in the 1930s and 1940s. Now, they will be safe and less subject to anti-Semitic attacks or assaults. Many of us might even assume, without thinking too much about it, that God gave the land to the Jews. The Palestinians are Amalek. If they will not submit to Jewish rule they must, or will be, destroyed. The basis for this is the Old Testament, the shared sacred text of Christians and Jews. One cannot argue with sacred texts! Indeed, in 1971, Golda Meir told Le Monde that Israel existed as “the fulfilment of promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for is legitimacy.”

Yet those of secular mind might want to ask some questions and probe into history deeply. At the dawn of the twentieth century, historians tell us, Europe’s ‘subject peoples’ (Poles, Czechs, Armenians, Serbs) dreamed of forming their own ‘nation-states’. Places where they might live free from fear. These states privileged particular ethnic groups–defined by language, or religion or antiquity. The Zionist movement originated in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. The land of Zion, the ancient homeland (Israel actually existed for only 60 years in the thousands of years of life in historic Palestine) was an exultant space of hope for some Jews. Zionists dreamed of the restored ‘lost fatherland’. This was a powerful dream that turned into hard fact at the end of World War II.

Zionism coincided with the period of European imperialist expansion and acquisition of lands in Africa and Asia. Lands, including lands in Canada, were acquired and occupied in the name of a higher power, God, and a higher civilization. There is something very interesting here for our understanding of Israel and the crisis in the Middle East. Zionist ideologues like Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl (as did all Israeli leaders from Ben-Gurion onward) believed that they had a divine right to occupy the land that was plainly occupied by others. If they were soft on ‘divine right’, they simply accepted that they were going to lands that were empty. Not empty of real live people, but empty of civilization and proper cultivation. In other words, those who colonize, or steal, other peoples’ lands (be they in Africa, Asia or in the Nass River Valley in BC) carry ideas in their heads about their right to do so. They, the colonists, will cultivate the untended gardens and settle the savages in orderly, moral communities.

The Zionist project, Edward Said has argued, participated in the “great dispossessing movement of modern European colonialism, and with them all the schemes for redeeming the land, resettling the natives, civilizing them, taming their savage customs…” The natives are, to put it bluntly, irrelevant to begin with! They are inferior and marginal. Herzl admitted in his diary that “both the expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.” He thought that they had to be spirited across the border and denied employment. They existed, but not as full human beings. These inferior beings could be put on reservations, on compounds, on native homelands. They could be taxed, counted and used profitably. Then, the new society could be built in the vacated space. Thus, ‘empty’ actually means ‘uncivilized’. Now we can understand the slogan of Israelis who saw Palestine as a “land without people, for a people without land.”

Those are Ben-Gurion’s words. In 1937 he had argued that “we must expel the Arabs and take their places. He acknowledged the presence of Arabs on the land, but denied the presence of Palestinians. In her famous statement to The Sunday Times in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir said: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took over their country. They didn’t exist.” During that same year, Zionist leader Menachem Begin told Kibbutz members the importance of denying the existence of Palestinians. “My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of ‘Palestine’, you demolish your right to live in Kibbutz Ein Haboresh. If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came.”

But the Palestinians were there, weren’t they? At least 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and villages were destroyed or pillaged. Israeli propagandists used to push the story that the Palestinians just ran away, saying, “Here, Israel, take our homes, here’s the key, and don’t forget to look after our olive trees.” Contemporary Israeli historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe have dispelled this farcical story. The Israeli armies and terror squads expelled the villagers through terror and massacre. This the Palestinians call the Nakba, “the original sin.” The process of ethnic cleansing began in the mid-1940s and has never ceased. Border raids, massacres, settlements, slaughter of 20,000 in Lebanon, expulsions, demolitions, arrests, torture, and assassinations, chicanery and all the tricks of road maps that never materialize. Israel is a big problem in the modern world. Perhaps even an anachronism.

Zionist strategy has always been to seize the moment when they can take-over all of Palestine. In 1947-8, under cover of conflict, 78% of historic Palestine was transformed into “Israel.” In 1967, Israel seized the opportunity to take-over the remaining 22% of Palestine. Israel justified the 1967 war as self-defence; thus they are blameless; just as they are in the recent disproportionate destruction of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon. Israel is the perpetual victim; the little David facing the Arab Goliath. Israel never initiates; it only responds.

There is little historic or contemporary evidence that the Israeli military, which runs the country and shapes its mental outlook, has a shred of commitment to a Palestinian state. Liberal critics who rail against the “occupation” of the West Bank or the Gaza and the settlements and the capture of Jerusalem are correct, but only from the Palestinian point of view. Israel is doing everything in its power, day after day, minute after minute, and one stone at a time, one olive grove, one goat at a time, to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state. If it did exist, it would be tiny, fragmented, weak–an act of Palestinian surrender and humiliation.

Don’t we see through Israel and US games? Hamas was elected in democratic elections. US-Israel and the EU have done everything possible, short of utter starvation of the people, to destroy Hamas (and Hezbollah). They keep telling Hamas that they have to lay down their arms, and recognize Israel. But what are Israel’s borders to be recognized? Where are they drawn? Hamas might well agree to return to the 1967 borders with all settlements dismantled. This is just a wicked charade being played out on the international scene, and many fall for it, including Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

We in the west have a hard time seeing what is before our eyes. Another logical error, which we see committed all the time, is to talk of the “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. From our vantage point in Canada, we imagine both are to blame, tanks and F-16s on one side, suicide bombers on the other. Aren’t human beings violent creatures–we mutter to ourselves: just an endless cycle of violence. But the Israel/Palestine story is not one of moral equivalence. It is a story of brutal dispossession and oppression of one people by another; it is not simply a sort of Greek tragedy. The idea of a cycle of violence leaves Israel once again not guilty. Everyone is not an innocent victim.

At this point, one can see where the idea of enemies talking it out can be premature. You feel my pain, I will feel yours. If only we could listen. I’ve suffered, you’ve suffered. Let’s talk. But it is not true that Palestinians have not heard the Zionist story. They have heard it ad nauseum and have heard enough about Jewish suffering. Both sides do not need to listen. It is Israelis and Jews who need to listen. There is lots of evidence–from Jewish Israeli commentators–that most Israelis scarcely give two hoots about the sight of a white-scarfed women scrubbing through the rubble of a bombed out building for a trace of her child.

Can you imagine both sides in apartheid sitting down to talk and listen to one another? What form would the suffering of the white perpetrator of apartheid take? That’s the point, isn’t it–there is a perpetrator, there is a victim; there is an oppressor; there are the oppressed.

Funerals, observes the great Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, are an “integral part of the lives of Palestinians wherever they were, in the homeland or in exile, in the days of their calm and the days of their Intifada, in the days of their wars and the days of their peace punctuated by massacres.” Thus, when Yitzhak Rabin spoke so eloquently of Israelis as absolute victims, and the eyes of those in the White House and the whole world grew wet, Barghouti said that he “knew that [he] would forget for a long time his words that day: “ We are victims of war and violence. We have not known a year or month when mothers have not mourned their sons.”

Barghouti says that Rabin “knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli blood, the blood of every Israeli individual without exception. He knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated by us. He changed facts, he altered the order of things, he presented us as the initiators of violence in the Middle East and said what he said with eloquence, with clarity and conviction.”

Rabin told his story of soldiers returning from war, covered in blood, and funerals where those in attendance could not look into the eyes of grieving mothers. In a remarkable passage in the brilliant book, I saw Ramallah, Barghouti argues compellingly that it is “easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from “Secondly.” Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly”, and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim….You only need to start your story with “Secondly”, and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly”, for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim” (pp. 177-78).

Zionism has been a beautiful dream for many Jews. But Zionism from the ‘standpoint of the victim’ is not a pretty picture. My conclusions may be troubling and disconcerting. But I think that the cause of global justice and world peace, and particularly peace in the Middle East, demands that we understand that the state of Israel is at the crossroads. Israel, the first modern ‘democracy’ to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, can continue towards an “ethnically cleansed” Greater Israel, or transform into a single, integrated, bi-national, multicultural state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. In my view, the ferocity unleashed in Lebanon and the Gaza—laying sieges, causing electricity blackouts, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding children and babies—can only be comprehended in terms of the Zionist project to eradicate any opposition to their goal of total domination in historic Palestine and the surrounding Middle East. Hezbollah was being taught the Zionist’s elementary lesson: we have the right to abduct, you do not.

Israel is an anachronism in our increasingly cosmopolitan world order in that Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privilege from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded. This is a “separatist project” in a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law. Thus, in the Jewish state, one community, the Jews, is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

The wall being erected between Israel and Palestinian occupied territories is a symbol of the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect. You cannot build pathways towards others if you believe they are inferior beings, or that you, and not they, are superior, chosen ones, with your suffering privileged above and beyond everyone else’s. Israel’s actions in the world towards and against the Palestinians—curfews, check points, bulldozers, public humiliations, home demolition, land seizures, shootings, targeted assassinations, and the separatist fence—indicate a state that appears to have lost is moral centre, and is possibly facing its own Nakba.

I believe that the United States’ unconditional support for Israel, and the adoption of an Israeli approach to foreign policy, is undermining the hopes and possibilities for peace in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The US’s catastrophic loss of international political influence and the degradation of its moral image has much to do with their bizarre approval of, and financial support for, Israel’s actions in the Middle East. Israel embraced the “war on terror” when the smoke was still rising from the Towers, immediately identifying the Palestinians as “terrorists” who had to be eliminated. Thus, Israel’s wars, now and in the past, are always presented to the world as wars of necessity, of self-defence.

The compelling question before Israel and the rest of the world is simply this: will Israel reinvent itself and dissolve the exhausted Zionist political project in favour of building a truly bi-national state in historic Palestine for everyone? We have reached a moral crossroads. In the new Middle East defined by the US, only Israel and the US may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of the crossroads, this is unacceptable.

Dr. Michael Welton is a professor at the University of Athabasca. He is the author of Designing the Just Learning Society: a Critical Inquiry.

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Professor Salaita Sues University of Illinois For Free Speech Rights

By Deirdre Fulton | Common Dreams | January 29, 2015

Professor Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American professor of Indigenous studies whose offer of a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was rescinded last year because of his tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza, has filed a civil rights suit against the school and its top officials and donors, saying that his termination violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, as well as basic principles of academic freedom.

“Like any American citizen, I have the right to express my opinion on pressing human rights concerns, including Israeli government actions, without fear of censorship or punishment,” Salaita said in a statement. “The University’s actions have cost me the pinnacle of academic achievement—a tenured professorship, with the opportunity to write and think freely. What makes this worse is that in my case the University abandoned fundamental principles of academic freedom and shared governance, crucial to fostering critical thought, that should be at the core of the university mission.”

Salaita, who is being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights along with the Chicago civil rights law firm of Loevy & Loevy, filed the lawsuit Thursday in a U.S. federal court in Chicago.

The complaint (pdf) alleges that university officials, including the chancellor and university trustees, violated Salaita’s constitutional rights to free speech and due process of law, and breached an employment contract with him. According to CCR, the suit is also against university donors who, based on emails made public, unlawfully threatened future donations to the university if it did not fire Salaita on account of his political views.

As Common Dreams reported in September, Salaita had been awarded the tenured position in fall 2013 and was scheduled to begin on August 16, 2014—just two weeks after Chancellor Phyllis Wise rescinded the offer. University documents released in response to a public-records request revealed that Wise had been pressured by numerous pro-Israel students, parents, alumni, and big-money donors to abort his appointment. These demands followed critical comments by Salaita regarding Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, during which thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, were killed.

The university’s action, which Wise explained was taken because Salaita’s speech lacked “civility,” spurred protests from within the university as well as the academic community at-large. Sixteen academic departments of the university have voted no confidence in the university administration, and prominent academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers have publicly condemned the university’s actions.

“The use of ‘civility’ as cover for violating Professor Salaita’s rights must be challenged, as it threatens the very notion of a University as a place for free inquiry and open debate,” said Maria LaHood, a senior attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “There is neither a ‘civility’ exception nor a ‘Palestine’ exception to the First Amendment.”

According to CCR, the lawsuit seeks Salaita’s reinstatement and monetary relief that includes compensation for the economic hardship and reputational damage he suffered as a result of the university’s actions.

“Only donor pressure, or sheer pride, can explain the administration’s stubborn refusal to revisit a decision that has done so much harm to Dr. Salaita and to constitutional and other principles that academics hold dear,” said Anand Swaminathan of Loevy & Loevy. “The administration has something to hide, and through this lawsuit we intend to expose it.”

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu and His Wife Sued For ‘Racist and Physical Abuse’ of African Bodyguard and Maid

By Zeidy David | Counter Current News | January 26, 2015

bibi-and-sarahBenjamin Netanyahu has long been accused by Palestinians and African refugees of being a racist. But now the Israeli Prime Minister is being sued by a former bodyguard who says that he was constantly subjected to racist and physical abuse.

Manny Naftali, 35, says that Bibi and his wife Sarah did not just provide him with a job, primarily as a bodyguard, they also provided him with constant abuse. The former soldier says that the humiliating treatment by Mrs Netanyahu was the worse, and it occurred almost entirely with her husband’s knowledge.

The lawsuit was just filed with Jerusalem district labour court. Mr Naftali explains in the suit that he worked for 20 months at the Balfour Street residence.

During that time, he describes one particularly disturbing incident when Mrs Netanyahu complained to him about a Shabbat meal.

“We are sophisticated Europeans,” she explained to the Moroccan-descended Naftali. “We don’t eat as much food as you Moroccans. You are stuffing us, so that when they photograph us abroad, we look fat.”

It is unclear why the meal was being blamed on their African Jewish bodyguard.

Mrs Netanyahu also woke him at 3am once just to tell him that he had bought the wrong kind of milk the day before. The intention seemed clearly just to harass Naftali, not to explain her shopping preferences to him. Again, it would seem that the bodyguard was being asked to perform many jobs well outside of the boundaries of his job description.

“When I complained about the time and the tone in which she spoke the harsh words to me, Mr Netanyahu interfered in the discussion and said I should do everything Mrs Netanyahu asked ‘so she will calm down’,” Mr Naftali explained.

Once Sarah Netanyahu smashed a vase of flowers on the floor after discovering the flowers Naftali had placed in them were not fresh. Naftali, she said, “was a poor manager and that such a thing would never happen at the Elysee Palace”.

Naftali said that he was hardly the only one to allege such treatment. A full 29 staff members left “on a bad note.”

“It was made clear to me that I would have to work with a bitter and undermanned staff, and an unreasonable workload and an unending turnover of household workers who refused to work in the presence of the prime minister’s wife,” he added.

Naftali is suing for financial damages, but he is also demanding an apology after Bibi told a television interviewer that Mr Naftali was fired when in fact he had resigned.

This follows a suit in 2010 against the Netanyahus, where their maid, Liliane Peretz said she was constantly shouted at, humiliated, overworked and underpaid. She was also insultingly forced to change her cloths repeatedly throughout the day because the Netanyahus said she was unhygienic.

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | Leave a comment