The national secular religion of this country consists of a cluster of rarely questioned premises, usually inculcated in childhood, comparable to the articles of a real religious creed.
The first proposition is the idea that we live in a “free” country, as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty idol that towers over New York City’s harbor. The system absolutely insists on this point, incessantly hammering it in. It’s its basic tenet. Indeed it’s presented as “self-evident.” You’re in this country, ergo, you are FREE.
It’s inflicted by osmosis. Every institution transmits it. Those who doubt it are encouraged to think they must be mentally ill. (Of course you’re free, you’re told. And so fortunate to be so! How can anyone question that?)
“Freedom” is emblazoned on our coinage and many state automobile licenses. It’s proclaimed each school day morning by tens of millions of otherwise innocent children obliged to recite religiously that they live in a nation “with liberty and justice for all.”
This particular component of the national creed is perhaps comparable to the opening article of the Apostles’ Creed, which alludes to belief in “God the Father Almighty.” Because belief in the U.S.A. as the global headquarters of “Freedom” is as central to what some call “Americanism” as monotheism is to Christianity.
The Pledge of Allegiance expresses the belief, not just in the goodness of “freedom” in itself, but in the idea that we actually live in a free country. (How often people protest, when someone criticizes their thoughts or behavior, “Well hey, it’s a free country!” And they usually truly believe this.)
“I’m proud to be an American,” country crooner Lee Greenwood boasts, “where at least I know I’m free.” He knows this, without any religious doubt. “Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.” (Whoever they are. Presumably people who “hate our freedoms” and are actively conspiring somewhere to invade and enslave us.)
Actually, I suspect that the people of Sweden or Denmark are freer than Lee Greenwood is, or imagines himself to be. But do they know they’re free, with the confidence he exudes?
The second article of the national creed is that the U.S. military (commonly referred to as “our troops”)–wherever and whenever they fight–fight for us, somehow, to “defend our freedoms.” Whenever you attend a ball game (as I do regularly in Fenway Park) you’re told that everyone in the stadium is proud to honor the “servicemen and servicewomen” present–the “heroes” who are “defending our freedoms” in Afghanistan, Iraq, or wherever. We’re expected to applaud them, even in liberal Boston, and indicate our gratitude for whatever it is they did. And if we read in the morning Boston Globe about these heroes killing civilians we should just put it out of mind.
The ball park MC never considers the possibility that there are Red Sox fans there just for the game, who do not see how U.S. troops’ actions in invaded countries defend their freedoms in any way, and who find this insertion of patriotic content into the program really annoying.
Still the crowd rises to its feet on demand, showing deference, accepting the adulation of the troops as a matter of faith. If you just sit there sullenly, refusing to participate, some drunken patriot might hassle you for your traitorous non-enthusiasm. So in this free country it’s best to just stand up to honor the troops and try to maintain your self-respect by being as nonchalant as possible.
Every cable news viewer has seen that endlessly repeated USAA Military Auto Insurance TV commercial, “Thank you Dad.”
“Thank you, Daddy, for defending our country,” says the cute little Latina girl, in one version.
“Thank you for your sacrifice, and thank you for your bravery,” says an African-American women, to her spouse perhaps.
“Thank you, colonel,” says the young white man to his former superior officer.
“Thank you, Daddy,” says the little black girl.
It’s a movingly multi-ethnic crowd, thanking Daddy for his martial valor. Trace Adkin’s “Till the Last Shot’s Fired” is in the background, urging us to “say a prayer for peace” even as the song glorifies the warrior and places priority on his (as opposed to his victims’) peace.
I’m in the fields of Vietnam,
the mountains of Afghanistan
and I’m still hopin’ waitin’
prayin’ I did not die in vain.
Say a prayer for peace for every fallen son.
Set our spirits free. Let me lay down my gun.
… We can’t come home until the last shot’s fired.
It doesn’t seem to make any difference to Adkins what the cause is, or how many people these soldiers killed. They’re heroes–just for doing the unquestionable right thing and firing that last shot (against whoever) as ordered.
The fact is, those who fought in Vietnam and Afghanistan did “die in vain.” Certainly their deaths produced no good for this world. But as suffering servants who sacrifice their lives as commanded, the U.S. military vets occupy the position of Christ in the secular religion. Just as in Christian theology, Jesus is God in human flesh, “our troops” are our (mythical) Freedom personified.
St. Paul writes in his Epistle to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” In the U.S. civic doctrine, the dead troops are the sacrifice necessary to keep us free.
The third proposition in the official state faith is that we live in a democracy, in which the people decide the nation’s fate through exercising their awesome right to vote. This, in the official civic belief system, is the equivalent of the Holy Spirit in Christianity.
Through the ritual of casting a ballot in the hallowed privacy of a voting booth, citizens fulfill their highest civic duty. One is supposed to stand there in that box, in solitude, but in intimate spiritual communication with the benevolent, all-embracing, fatherly state. One is supposed to be grateful to the state for the opportunity to enjoy the right to help determine the future, perhaps by choosing Jed Bush over Hillary Clinton. Or Hillary Clinton over Jed Bush.
One is supposed to leave that sacred space feeling pure and righteous, having performed the highest duty of citizenship. It’s not so important to vote for either one of the two of the viable corporate-sponsored parties (which are really like two factions of a single party, in a one-party dictatorship of the 1%). No. What’s important is to simply vote and, having participated, thereby voted for the system itself.
You’re supposed to leave the ballot box, proud to be an American, because at least you know you voted. You made a difference! You exercised your right. The only downside is that hereafter–whatever happens–you share responsibility. Because you, after all, elected your leaders, didn’t you?
So if you voted for a warmonger who attacks Iran, with hellish consequences, you’ll have to call the inevitable ensuing conflict “our” war, right? Rather than calling it “their” war–the war of the imperialists, from whom you might have appropriately dissociated yourself–just by politely declining the invitation to attend their unpleasant party and play their game.
Voting is fundamentally a statement of faith in the god of Freedom. And in the Christ-like qualities of the divinized warrior who, in this mythology, dies for your precious right to engage in this vapid ritual. Casting a vote in this “democracy” is rather like receiving Holy Communion in the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In the latter rite one reverentially receives and consumes the wine and wafer; in the U.S. civil rite one religiously casts the ballot and swallows the myth.
These three beliefs constitute the Holy Trinity of the national doctrine. They’re indeed all articles of faith, hardly based on reason. After all, how “free” is a country with the world’s highest incarceration rate, with over 700 in jail or prison out of every 100,000?
Almost 7 million adults in this country–nearly 3% of the adult population–are under what’s called “correctional supervision.” With 5% of the world’s population, this free country boasts fully one-quarter of the planetary prison population. 40% of these prisoners are African-American. There are more young black men in prison in this country than in college.
How can anyone speak with a straight face about “freedom” here?
“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,” sang Nina Simone–quite heretically, in bold opposition to the state faith–in 1967, before fleeing the U.S. in 1970 and ultimately settling in France, which she (among other African-American and other exiles) found somewhat freer at that time.
How “free” are we now really–when all citizens are under electronic surveillance (at a level of sophistication that puts East Germany’s fabled Stasi to shame); while young men of color are routinely harassed by police, while police murders have–if only due to cell phone camera video exposure–become almost daily news stories; while government whistle-blowers are jailed for revealing such phenomena as state-sponsored torture?
And how do U.S. soldiers fight “for us” or “defend our freedoms” by invading countries in wars based on lies?
In my own state of Massachusetts there have been what I suppose can be termed some modest advances in freedom in recent times. (Sunday alcohol sales were allowed in 2004, gay marriage was legally recognized in 2004, marijuana possession was decriminalized in 2008). These changes have a meaningful impact on my community. But none of them had anything at all to do with U.S. troops’ actions abroad. And in fact the U.S. war (based on lies) in Iraq set women’s rights far back in that tortured, mutilated country.
The Democrats and Republicans pretend to have real differences with one another. (Rather like pro wrestlers pretend to truly despise one another before the big fight. It’s all for show.) But seriously: how democratic is a country in which two parties sharing a common faith in capitalist imperialism trade the presidency every so often–always vowing to effect change, even while nothing dramatically changes–while the one percent at the top of society (especially the cancerous tenth of that one percent) relentlessly increases its share of the national wealth?
The recent (2014) empirical study by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Stanford professor Benjamin Page declares that the U.S. is not in fact a democracy but an oligarchy in which individuals and even mass-based interest groups cannot prevail over the tiny elite that makes decisions. “Average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence” on policy, they conclude. “Democracy” in this country is a joke.
The national secular creed also entails support for a foreign state which has nothing to do with U.S. freedom, and has not been a battlefield of U.S. blood sacrifice, but which does significantly impact the sacrament of voting. Whereas belief in the trinity of Freedom, Our Troops, and Voting is formally non-religious, this support is rooted deeply in religion.
I refer of course to the role of Israel in the national belief system.
Members of Congress have been known to cite Genesis 12:3, in the Old Testament, to explain their votes in favor of Israel under any circumstances whatsoever. This is the passage in which Yahweh (God) tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” Just the other day Congressman Louis Gohmert (R-TX) declared, “There are many who have been aware of Scripture, and it has been a guide in our relations with Israel.” Enough said!
This sort of ass kissing is politically feasible in a country where, a recent poll showed, 55% of the population believes that God (the Maker of everything) gave what’s now the land of Israel to the Jews in perpetuity. It’s amazing. It would be amusing if the potential ramifications weren’t so horrifying.
President Obama and repeated Congressional resolutions refer to the U.S.’s “eternal support” for Israel. (Notice how such language is never applied to other countries. Despite the “special relationship” U.S. politicians never use such effusive language in referring to ties with the U.K. And recall how France, the U.S.’s oldest ally that gifted it the Statue of Liberty, was vilified as an “enemy” not so long ago–when it refused to support the war on Iraq, based, as that criminal war was, wholly on lies.)
This religious support for Israel in fact produces some amusement in Israel itself, where about a third of the Jewish population considers itself non-religious and takes those Bible fables with a grain of salt. But the support of Christian evangelicals is the key to the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israeli prime ministers are received like rock stars at Christian events held in support of Israel. Christian Zionist organizations play a major role in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobby group that serves as a virtual agency of the Israel state.
In his May 2011 speech to Congress, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu received 29 standing ovations–including one when he declared, “Israel will not return to the indefensible boundaries of 1967.” Never mind that no country in the world recognizes Israel’s right to any land (on the West Bank, or in Gaza, Syria, or Lebanon) occupied during that “pre-emptive” war of aggression. Never mind that it is official U.S. policy to demand, along with the rest of the world, for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders. The bought-and-paid-for Congress rose to applaud Netanyahu’s insistence of the Jewish right to permanently annex more Arab land.
In his March 3, 2015 address to Congress, by invitation of the Republican leaders in the Senate, Netanyahu devoted all of his time to one topic: the G5+1 talks in Switzerland with Iran, and the need for the Congress to oppose any plans for President Obama’s State Department to sign onto any deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Again, incessant standing ovations!
Not surprising. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina and head of the Senate’s Foreign Appropriations Committee, had already told Netanyahu publicly that on Iran “Congress will follow your lead.” How to make sense of such fawning stupidity?
Netanyahu has direly predicted that Iran is close to the production of nuclear weapons since 1992, since before today’s college sophomores were born. He’s been a Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling–that Israel is in imminent, existential danger from Iranian nukes. He will not of course talk about Israel’s nuclear weapons, which the Jewish state has possessed since 1979, when it conducted a joint test with its close ally, the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. (In Israel it is a crime for anyone with knowledge about this to reveal what they know; the nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison for revealing details about it to the British press.)
Israel is the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Its leaders think they have the right to have them, since (for some reason) Israel faces so much hostility from its refugee-flooded neighbors in this harsh world. And they decline to submit their nuclear facilities to UN inspection, while demanding that the world prevent Iran from developing any sort of nuclear program. Even a program like that which Brazil or Argentina might boast of, quite legally.
There is amazingly little discussion in this country of the actual history of the modern state of Israel. About how 33 of the UN ambassadors in 1947 (59% of the total at the time) voted for a plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine that favored the Jewish immigrants over the 65% Arab majority, allotting the Zionist settlers over half the land.
They don’t realize how unrepresentative the UN was at that time, when half the world remained under colonial occupation.
They don’t know that in 1948 many prominent Jewish rabbis in the world opposed the formation of a specifically Jewish-Zionist state in Palestine.
They don’t realize how the entire Muslim world opposed the unfair partition; how major countries that were not majority Muslim (India, Greece, Cuba) voted against it; and how many others (China, Argentina, Ethiopia, Mexico, Yugoslavia, even the United Kingdom) abstained, feeling queasy about the deal and its potential blowback.
They don’t necessarily know that Zionists in the Irgun brown shirt paramilitary group along with the Stern Gang implemented a strategy of terror to produce mass panic and flight that produced 750,000 Palestinian Arab refugees between April 1948 and January 1949. They’ve never been told about the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948.
They certainly don’t realize that many of these Palestinians may be the direct descendents of the Judeans of the Roman province where Jesus lived. It’s not like there was ever really a Diaspora in which the wicked Romans drove out all the Jews. They drove out some, while others remained. Of those who stayed, many became Christians over time and stopped self-identifying as Jewish. Later many converted to Islam. Meanwhile Judeans outside Judea, who numbered in millions even before the birth of Jesus, intermarried with others and for a couple centuries there was actually significant conversion to Judaism by gentiles in both the Roman and Parthian empires.
The Jewish Zionist community in contemporary Israel, which officially represents itself as a people who have “returned” to their ancestral land to which they have some sort of “birthright,” may in fact have less DNA in common with the Judeans of Jesus’ time than with modern European populations. The whole business of Abraham talking with the Supreme Being and being told his direct descendents would possess the Land of Israel forever (and so, who cares what happens to the Arabs?) is mythology. The “call of Abraham” is supposed to have occurred around 1000 years before there even was a written Hebrew language.
Christians in this country, who are prone to be much more literalistic in their reading of the Bible than those in Europe, tend to accept (as real historical phenomena) the story of Noah’s Ark, the bondage in Egypt and parting of the Red Sea. They believe that Moses was given the Law by God himself on Mount Sinai, and that during the conquest of Canaan, the walls of Jericho fell miraculously when the Hebrew “chosen people” blew their trumpets. They believe that the sun once remained stationary in the sky to give Joshua the upper hand in a battle for control of Jerusalem (Joshua 10:13).
The Israeli government and Israel Lobby which serves as its unlicensed agent (de facto exempt from U.S. legal oversight) knows that the U.S. public–largely brainwashed by the secular national religion and its own delusions about being itself a Chosen People inhabiting a Promised Land–is extremely receptive to Israel’s incessant religious pitch. They know that politicians competing for votes know they need to show maximum deference to Israel.
In his March 3 address to Congress, as his mesmerized audience sat imbibing his wisdom, Binyamin Netanyahu sermonized:
We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the Book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies.
The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.
The legislators present rose to applaud this allusion to the Bible story, which immediately segued into the claim that “Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred, the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology…”
The fact is, the story of Queen Esther is a myth. Set in the fifth century BCE but composed around the second century BCE, it describes a situation in which numerous Judeans reside in the city of Babylon in the Persian Empire. The exiles had in fact been permitted to leave by 530 BCE, and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, by the Achaemenid founder Cyrus the Great–a Persian (Iranian) who is actually identified in the Old Testament as “the Lord’s anointed one” (Isaiah: 45:1-7).
This validation as an “anointed one” was, by the way, an honor shared by no other non-Jew in the Bible. Not that you’d expect Netanyahu to point out the positive aspects of the very long relationship between Jews and Iran, which (as you know) has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel in the Middle East. The Jewish minority has representation in the Iranian parliament, and maintains synagogues, Hebrew schools and kosher restaurants. (If you don’t know these facts, thank the U.S. mainstream media.)
In the Book of Esther story, the Persian emperor Ahasuerus (commonly identified with Xerxes, a real person who ruled from 486 to 465 BCE and the fifth in the Achaemenid line) becomes dissatisfied with his current wife. He casts her aside unceremoniously and looks for a new spouse, choosing Esther, a Jew, who conceals her background. She finds favor with the ruler. However, her kinsman Mordecai offends Xerxes’ prime minister, Haman (to whom Netanyahu alluded in his speech) by refusing to bow down before him.
Haman learns that both the queen and Mordecai are Jews. Energized by petty pique, he organizes a plot to massacre all the Jews in the land and seize their property. He tells Xerxes there is a “certain unassimilated nation… throughout the provinces of your realm” whose laws so differ from those of other nations that “it is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8-9). He persuades him to agree to an annihilation campaign.
Again, this is pure fantasy. It never happened. But in the story, a huge pogrom is planned, Mordecai heroically organizes mass prayer and resistance, and Queen Esther at the decisive moment reveals her identity as a Jew to the ruler, and defends her people. Xerxes, egged on by his spouse, has Haman hanged and gives the Jews license to exact revenge on their enemies. Indeed, according to this novelette, Jews during the Feast of Purim slaughter 75,000 Persians (Esther 9:15-16). (None of this is supported by contemporary Persian sources.)
Having observed that this is pure fiction, one can ask why Netanyahu wanted to use it last month in his fiction-riddled presentation to Congress. He must have known that anyone present with a little knowledge of Jewish-Iranian history might have asked: “Excuse me, but doesn’t the Esther story actually tell us that Jews have been in Persia (Iran) for 2,500 years, and that Persian rulers were regarded favorably by ancient Judeans as allies–even ‘God’s anointed’ rather than foes?”
And couldn’t one ask, “How did the Jewish Queen Esther ‘give the right’ to the Jews ‘to defend themselves against their enemies’?” The Jews were allowed to kill the 75,000 Persians in the story because the Persian ruler had given them the right. Netanyahu might not have read the text carefully. But one must suppose that even if he had, he wasn’t trying to give the U.S. audience a rigorous textual exegesis. He was presenting his Likud Party program of continued confrontation with Iran (as a supporter of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements) in biblical gift-wrap.
Just by citing an Old Testament work familiar to some Christians–such as those who dominate Congress–Netanyahu plugged into that chord of commonality that many adherents of the national civic religion like to reference when the trinity of Freedom, Holy War, and Voting alone doesn’t quite do the job.
When you’re a U.S. leader and need to get the people on board a new campaign for Mideast war, you can’t just say, “We’re free. But we have to fight to stay free. And we have to vote for the strongest, who will fight hardest for our freedom.” You also need to exploit the religious element and add, “We have to side with Israel, because God said, he would bless those who blessed it, and curse those who didn’t.”
Again, the first three articles in the national civic religion are actually irreligious; they don’t require belief in deities, souls, and afterlives. But the belief in Israel as the Promised Land of a certain bloodline, granted to it in perpetuity by a certain deity in conversations four millennia ago, is an explicitly religious conviction.
Unfortunately these four creedal myths–that we really enjoy freedom; that this countries wars are for freedom; that the act of voting really means “democracy;” and that the U.S. must always as a matter of principle back Israel–constitute a doctrinal whole.
You can presumably lose faith in the fourth while maintaining adherence to the first three, since the latter don’t involve specifically religious beliefs. But polls suggest that the majority of people in this country still accept all four points in the Creed. They would, in the event of an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran–while prizing their freedom, heroic military and parliamentary system–also applaud any Israeli actions in putative defense of the Jews’ “God-given” land.
Even if the Israelis were to deploy nuclear weapons, out of their known arsenal (which U.S. politicians, for some reason, never ever mention) against an Iran which has none, these people would bless rather than curse them. They would see in the action affirmations of “freedom,” heroic military action, and “democracy” alongside adherence to the unquestionable Word of God.
How can one possibly challenge the U.S. state religion–this nonsensical mass of concepts in the service of the 1% including an inordinate share of billionaire Iran-baiting Zionists? Six media corporations (GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS) control the “news” consumed by the great majority of people in this country. They all promote the national belief system.
Freedom. Our troops. The beauty of the ballot box. God and Israel.
They all instruct their reporters, in the event of a Ferguson-style situation, to spin the story away from any radical critique of systemic police brutality victimizing the non-white poor. Of course they all uphold the freedom of the abused people to demonstrate (“peacefully”); they have to confirm the national creed that the people are somehow, basically, “free” under the existing system.
“Journalists” and talking heads from Lou Dobbs to Al Sharpton unite in urging the people to respond properly, responsibly to events that disturb them (whether it’s war, economic injustice, or police brutality) by registering to vote!
Off the streets and into the polling booth! To elect more Obamas, more saviors! (Even though–let me repeat–Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have concluded empirically that in the U.S. your vote means very little.)
They all resist criticism of war, and investigative journalism before the next war-based-on-lies occurs. They all get critical as the U.S. enters a morass, and belatedly might even question the premises for a particular war. But they will always, culturally, uphold the warrior as the soul of the nation. Even after a war has itself been discredited, clearly exposed as based on lies, the warrior is upheld as a freedom fighter and social role model.
How to disabuse people of those doctrinal premises? How to persuade them to see Israel rationally–free of religious baggage–as a normal, oppressive settler-state surrounded by neighbors who are (most understandably) indignant about its aggressions since 1948?
It may well be impossible. State religions are hard to crack. Still, the petering out of state faiths in Europe and the collapse of State Shinto in Japan after 1945 suggest that the U.S. secular national religion might also eventually (as that old Persian expression goes) “fade from the page of time.”
I’m hopeful there will come a time when our youth–frustrated with job prospects and housing issues, fed up with police brutality, burdened with student debt, disgusted with wars based on lies, nauseated by the Stasi-like NSA surveillance of their private lives, shocked by the raw statistics showing how wealth is apportioned in this “free” country, disillusioned by their own engagement with the “American dream”–will rebel big time.
Understanding through experience that this is NOT a free country, and that humanity can do much, much better, they will observe matter-of-factly that U.S. military personnel deployed in imperialist wars are NOT heroes.
They will recognize that elections in this society are a ritual to legitimate the status quo, an ideological trap, not the best means to effect real change.
And they will realize that the mystical hold of Israel over the U.S. polity, which does not advantage the individual citizen at all, is rooted in a mythological misreading of the past.
In today’s world that interpretation of past reality necessarily dovetails with anti-Arab racism and ignorant Islamophobia. Senators and Congressmen will tell you quite frankly they’d be happy to “give” Israel the whole West Bank because the Bible tells them that “the Jews” should ultimately have it.
These fine Christian Zionists have no problem with Palestinian dislocation and disenfranchisement. But maybe their day is ending. The day of the U.S. state religion may be ending. The day that the Israeli prime minister citing biblical fairy tales can dictate U.S. policy in the Mideast may be ending as Bibi reaps the whirlwind of his Bible-thumping address to Congress.
A tsunami of disillusionment is, if not inevitable, at least very likely. It’s good to be disabused of illusions or delusions, religious, patriotic or both. May our youth shuffle off the Zionist coil, seeing it for what it is: the ideological prop for more war that has nothing to do with freedom.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Soraya Sepahpour Ulrich, an independent researcher and writer, in Irvine, to get her take on the stance of Iran and other countries over the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Mohammad Javad Zarif’s spokes of fairness and equity when it comes to the implementation of the NPT, has that been like that ever since this treaty came into effect?
Sepahpour: Regrettably, not at all and under the international law there ought to be no discrimination whatsoever. In fact, scholars have argued that the only time that discrimination if he wants to be called that is acceptable in international law is to elevate the status of a state to be on par with the rest. But right now as we said the international law has been hijacked and we see that powerful states are doling out favors to those that are pariah states, especially Israel in the region, and in fact, rewarding them for violating international law, while again themselves violating international law by not rendering assistance to those who are signatories to this treaty.
Press TV: How imperative is this for this NPT treaty to remain relevant to be able to bring Israel’s nukes under its control or supervision and also compel nations like the United States to clamp down on their own arsenals?
Sepahpour: I think if the former director general of the IAEA Mr. ElBaradei had listened to Mr. Zarif and perhaps he has, he would have applauded him. In 2004, Dr. ElBaradei, in fact, said that we need to talk seriously to Israel about its nuclear weapons whether it wants to admit to having them or not. And in fact, he called on a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. So, Mr. Zarif is right on the point in calling out, Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, is being rewarded for having nuclear weapons. And as far as the other states are not abiding by the NPT, again I’d like to quote Mohamed ElBaradei, he was the IAEA chief for three terms and he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize together with the IAEA, and he said of nuclear powers, it is like them having it, “dangling a cigarette in their mouth while telling others not to smoke”. You can not violate international law and expect others to comply. This will create total chaos, disorder and it is a threat not just to the Middle East but to the entire world.
Press TV: When you speak of international law, so let’s not forget Iran is a signatory to the NPT and yet it has faced multiple sanctions regarding its peaceful nuclear energy program. That in itself is another violation, would not you agree?
Sepahpour: It is absolutely a violation. The whole purpose of the IAEA, when it was established in 1957 as a body of the United Nations, was to enable peaceful nations, those there were party, there was no treaty at that time, but to spread nuclear technologies, peaceful use around the world and NPT which was presented in 1968 for signature, in fact the whole spirit of the NPT was not only to render assistance in peaceful nuclear technology to the signatories but to ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons, total disarmament and stop proliferation none of that has happened, in fact, Iran is a victim of policies here. There are nations that would want to use this law, this international treaty as a tool to dole out favors to the nations to that their working with and to those that are demanding their rights under the international law. So, it is very hypocritical, it is very dangerous and I think that this was a good occasion for the world to listen to a representative of 120 nations. And I just want to add that Iran has asked in numerous occasions for there to be total nuclear disarmament in the Middle East and even in 2009 the Arab League had said they could no longer tolerate Israel’s nuclear weapons without it is being subjected to… become a part of the NPT and have its nuclear facilities inspected. So, the vast majority of the world understands what is going on and what needs to happen. It is for more powerful nations that have hijacked the NPT that are keeping it as hostage to come on-board and be law abiding.
As soon as the framework for a comprehensive nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers was announced in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 2, Vox.com content manager Max Fisher came out strongly in favor of the agreement’s reported details. While his optimism is certainly welcome, his understanding of some key details leaves something to be desired.
Unfortunately, for someone who writes about the Iranian nuclear program as much as he does, Fisher seems not to have a very solid grasp on certain basic facts about the program. Sure, this is tricky, complex stuff, but if you’re in the business of producing what you refer to as “explanatory journalism” – and your entire reporting model is based upon providing clear analysis to a presumably less knowledgeable public – you should probably know what you’re talking about.
Here are just a few of his most recent errors.
‘Covert Nuclear Facilities’
In his “plain English” guide to the framework parameters, as described by the United States State Department, Fisher notes that facilities at Natanz and Fordow will continue to operate, with uranium enrichment continuing at Natanz and non-uranium enrichment and research occurring at Fordow.
Fisher concludes that this is a good deal for those worried about Iranian nuclear capabilities. “International inspectors will have access [to these facilities],” he writes, “so they won’t really function as covert nuclear facilities anymore.”
But, apparently unbeknownst to Fisher, neither Natanz nor Fordow ever actually functioned as secret nuclear enrichment facilities. Ever.
Natanz
While much is often made of the 2002 revelation of Iran’s supposedly clandestine enrichment plant at Natanz, rarely do we hear that the pilot facility was still under construction when it was declared by Iran to the IAEA. Per Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA at the time, however, “Iran did not have to declare that it was building a pilot plant until 180 days before it expected to introduce nuclear material into the plant,” explained a May 2003 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Furthermore, as pointed out at the time by a research analyst at the Arms Control Association, Iran “is not required to allow visits to the Arak and Natanz sites under its current agreements with the IAEA.”
In effect, the United States has long been proud of discovering a construction site that Iran was under absolutely no obligation to announce to the IAEA. Natanz was not operational until June 2006, at which which point it had already been under IAEA safeguards for over three years. Not a single atom of enriched uranium has ever been produced at Natanz outside the purview of IAEA inspectors. Nevertheless, in a separate article published the same day, Fisher claims Natanz “was once used for covert enrichment.”
Fordow
Similarly, the site at Fordow was never a functional enrichment site outside IAEA monitoring. As with Natanz, it was “clandestine” only to the effect that it wasn’t officially declared by Iran to the IAEA before the US intelligence agencies said they already knew about it.
The site was announced by Iran to the IAEA on September 21, 2009, well in advance of the 180 days prior to the introduction of nuclear material as required by Iran’s Safeguards Agreement. At the time, the facility was still under construction and did not actually begin uranium enrichment until early January 2012, roughly 28 months after it had been declared to the IAEA. Upon visiting the facility six weeks after it was announced, then-IAEA Secretary General Mohammed ElBaradei described Fordow as “a hole in a mountain” and “nothing to be worried about.”
When the plant began operation, the IAEA confirmed that “all nuclear material in the facility remains under the agency’s containment and surveillance.” This was the case well before the November 2013 interim deal between the P5+1 and Iran and this remains the case to this day.
While Fisher has written elsewhere that both the Natanz and Fordow “sites are now publicly declared and will be monitored as part of any deal,” meaning “their value (and threat) as covert facilities is gone,” he appears to insinuate that recent negotiations – and namely Iranian concessions extracted by determined American negotiators – are responsible for this positive state of affairs. Natanz has been safeguarded, monitored and inspected by the IAEA for over a decade, Fordow for over four years.
‘Plutonium Plant at Arak’
If you read Vox.com, you’d really think Iran has something called a “plutonium plant at Arak.” The main reason you’d probably think that is because that’s exactly what Max Fisher and other explainers at the site claim as fact over and over again. Here’s Fisher from the other day:
There is so much wrong with Fisher’s understanding of Iran’s Arak facilities it’s difficult to know where to begin. Fisher even changed the original words of the State Department’s “fact sheet” on the deal framework to match his misunderstanding before allowing himself to explain things to his readers. Basically none of Fisher’s sentences in this section make any sense.
What Fisher routinely refers to as Iran’s “plutonium plant” is actually the IR-40 heavy water research reactor, a nuclear reactor at the Arak complex that is still under construction and not yet operational. The half-built reactor is under IAEA safeguards and is visited regularly by inspectors. Nevertheless, it has long been used by Israel and its contingent of hawkish American supporters as an alternate way to fear-monger about Iran’s nuclear program.
In simple terms, heavy water reactors are fueled by natural, rather than enriched, uranium. Heavy water, a non-nuclear form of water, acts as both a moderator and coolant in the fuel process. These reactors are said to pose a potential proliferation threat due to the amounts of plutonium produced as a byproduct of their spent nuclear fuel, material that could then be separated from the irradiated fuel and further processed to weapons-grade levels.
So, to be clear, Iran has not been building a “plutonium plant,” let alone a facility “for making and storing potentially weapons-grade plutonium.” Rather, it has been building a certain type of nuclear reactor that happens to produce plutonium as a byproduct in its spent fuel.
Still, the Arak reactor is not in itself a proliferation risk. Even though plutonium is produced as a byproduct of running the reactor, it must first be separated out from irradiated fuel and reprocessed to weapons-grade material before it poses any actual danger. Iran has no reprocessing plant, and has long agreed not to build one.
Reading Fisher’s explanation, it’s clear he thinks that, once operational, the facility at Arak would have somehow made “weapons-grade plutonium,” but now will only “make nuclear fuel” to power a reactor. He is wrong. The relevant facility at Arak is a reactor; it doesn’t make fuel, it runs on fuel. Whenever it is eventually commissioned, it will be used for medical, scientific and agricultural research.
Beyond this, even before Iran’s current negotiating team was in place following the election of President Hassan Rouhani in June 2013, “Iran encouraged United Nations nuclear monitors to use powerful new detection technologies to dispel international concern that the Persian Gulf country is seeking to build atomic weapons,” reportedBloomberg News.
“We always welcome the agency to have more sophisticated equipment, to have more accuracy in their measurements, so that technical matters will not be politicized,” Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh told the press in Vienna at the time, adding that Iran “won’t object to IAEA monitors using new technologies to determine whether plutonium is being extracted from spent fuel at its new reactor in Arak.”
In his guide to the nuclear framework, Fisher went to weird lengths to confuse his readership about Arak. The State Department’s own fact sheet notes, “Iran has agreed to redesign and rebuild a heavy water research reactor in Arak, based on a design that is agreed to by the P5+1, which will not produce weapons grade plutonium, and which will support peaceful nuclear research and radioisotope production.” Fisher changed the mention of “a heavy water research reactor” to “plutonium plant,” which appears to be a deliberate decision to make Iran’s safeguarded nuclear program sound undoubtedly nefarious.
Fisher also writes that, under the agreement, Iran “is barred from heavy-water reactor use.” That’s not true. Even though IR-40’s reactor core will be redesigned and rebuilt, it will still be a heavy water reactor. What the framework fact sheet says, however, is specifically that “Iran will not build any additional heavy water reactors for 15 years.” (emphasis mine)
‘Inspections’
As part of the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) agreed to in November 2013, Iran has granted IAEA inspectors regular access to non-safeguarded, non-nuclear sites such as centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops and storage facilities, and uranium mines and mills at Gchine, Saghand, and Ardakan. Fisher is pleased with this development, explaining that, “Inspectors, by gaining access to not just the core nuclear sites but also secondary things like uranium mills and centrifuge plants, will be in a really good position to make sure Iran isn’t cheating on a deal or trying to build another secret facility somewhere.”
Fisher’s sentence construction here is both curious and revealing. He notes that “by gaining access” to “core nuclear sites” as well as other, non-nuclear sites, inspectors have a clearer picture of the entire Iranian supply chain for its nuclear program. But the nuclear sites in question have always been under safeguards and open to routine inspections since they were declared years ago, prior to any actual nuclear work being done there. This is nothing new; it is not a virtue of the JPOA or any other recent negotiated terms. You wouldn’t know this by reading Fisher’s work.
Even before the JPOA was negotiated, Iran’s was the most heavily-scrutinized nuclear program on the planet and had been for years. Though the IAEA has even deeper access as a result of the interim deal (which will presumably continue for the foreseeable future as part of any final deal), the regular inspection regimen was itself quite intensive and intrusive. Rarely is this noted in mainstream media reports, leading many to the outrageously incorrect conclusion that, prior to the current nuclear talks, Iran operated a wholly unmonitored, clandestine and opaque nuclear program. (This is actual an apt description of Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.) Nothing could be further from the truth.
Nuclear expert Mark Hibbs has explained, “There are IAEA safeguards personnel in Iran 24/7/365,” pointing out that inspectors enter and examine enrichment sites “frequently and routinely,” where they carry out “two kinds of inspections: ‘announced inspections’ and ‘short-notice announced inspections.'” The “announced inspections” are conducted with “24-hour notification” given to Iran, while “Iran’s subsidiary arrangements in fact permit the IAEA to conduct a short-notice inspection upon two hours’ notice.” Each of Iran’s enrichment facilities was already subject to two regular inspections every month. Additionally, two unannounced inspections were conducted every month at both Natanz and Fordow.
Former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian, now a lecturer at Princeton University, has noted that, between 2003 and 2012, “the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has implemented the most robust inspections in its history with more than 100 unannounced and over 4000 man-day inspections in Iran.” In 2012 alone, IAEA investigators spent 1,356 calendar days in Iran, conducting 215 on-site inspections of the country’s 16 declared nuclear facilities, and spending more than 12% of the agency’s entire $127.8 million budget on intrusively monitoring the Iranian program, which includes only a single functional nuclear reactor that doesn’t even operate at full capacity.
IAEA inspectors have also had consistently open access to the gas conversion facility at Esfahan and the light water reactor at Bushehr, despite these facilities not being explicitly covered by Iran’s Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA.
The agency has continued to verify – four times a year for the past dozen years – that Iran has never diverted any nuclear material for military purposes and has also affirmed “it has all the means it needs to make sure that does not happen with Iran’s enriched uranium, including cameras, physical inspections and seals on certain materials and components.”
And that was before the increased scrutiny provided by the JPOA.
‘Breakout Time’
In his post on why the newly-announcement framework – as described by the State Department’s own fact sheet – is such a good deal, Fisher explains the oft-used term “breakout time” to his readers this way:
If Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei woke up tomorrow morning and decided to kick out all of the inspectors and set his entire nuclear program toward building a nuclear warhead — to “break out” to a bomb — right now it would take him two or three months. Under the terms of the framework, his program would be so much smaller that it would take him an entire year to build a single nuclear warhead.
Fisher is wrong about this. “Breakout time” – an arbitrary measure in itself – is not the time it takes to build one nuclear bomb. Rather, it is the time it would hypothetically take Iran to acquire enough highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for one nuclear bomb. As Gary Sick has succinctly explained:
Note that “breakout” does not mean Iran will have a nuclear device. It is the starting point to build a nuclear device, which most experts agree would require roughly a year for Iran to do–and probably another two or more years to create a device that could be fit into a workable missile warhead. Plus every other country that has ever built a nuclear weapon considered it essential to run a test before actually using their design. There goes bomb No. 1.
So when officials, pundits, and interested parties talk about a one-year breakout time for Iran, what they are really saying is that if Iran decides to break its word and go for a bomb, it will take approximately one year to accumulate 27 kilograms of HEU. The hard part follows.
As is common in Fisher’s reporting, uranium enrichment is presented as nearly synonymous with nuclear bomb-making. Fisher essentially conflatesthe two, thereby drawing conclusions that neither the IAEA nor Western and Israeliintelligence agencies have made. Acquiring uranium enriched to high enough levels for a nuclear bomb is only one component of manufacturing a nuclear weapon, which includes the mastery of the detonation process, requisite missile technology, and making a bomb deliverable.
For over a decade, it has been acknowledged that, in addition to the nine nuclear weapons states (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), perhaps “40 countries or more now have the know-how to produce nuclear weapons,” according to former IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei.
Nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt had also noted that, “if a nation has a developed civilian nuclear infrastructure—which the NPT actually encourages—this implies it has a fairly solid nuclear-weapons capability. Just like Iran, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan also have a nuclear-weapons capability—they, too, could break out of the NPT and make a nuclear device in short order. Capabilities and intentions cannot be conflated.”
‘Modified Code 3.1’
Fisher writes that, under the proposed deal, “Iran has finally agreed to comply by a rule known as Modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements General Part to Iran’s Safeguards Agreement, shorthanded as Modified Code 3.1. It says that Iran has to notify inspectors immediately on its decision to build any new facility where it plans to do nuclear work — long before construction starts.”
This is true and Fisher should have left it at that. Instead, he went on to smugly editorialize about Iran’s behavior and it’s here that he revealed his misunderstanding of the actual issues at stake. He writes:
Iran in the past has either rejected this rule or stated that it would only notify inspectors a few months before introducing nuclear material at a facility — a “cover your ass” move in case the world caught them building a new nuclear site. Tehran’s promise to comply may signal that it intends to stop building such covert facilities.
In truth, what Fisher refers to as “a ‘cover your ass’ move” is actually a legally binding stipulation of the original Code 3.1 under Iran’s Subsidiary Arrangements to its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA, which was implemented in 1976, two years after the initial safeguards.
In 1992, the IAEA modified the code to read that member states would have to notify the agency and provide design information at the planning stage for new facilities, rather than the previously obligatory “no later than 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material to the site.” While most countries accepted the modified code, Iran did not and the original Code 3.1 remained legally in place until February 26, 2003, when Iran agreed to voluntarily implement the modified code, pending ratification by the Iranian parliament. The modified code remained in place for over four years, though it was never ratified.
Days after the adoption of an illegal sanctions resolution by the UN Security Council on March 24, 2007, an outraged Iran suspended its voluntary implementation of the modified code, and reverted to re-implementing the 1976 version of Code 3.1.
While the IAEA disputes Iran’s legal authority to unilaterally revert to the original code, Iran isn’t randomly rejecting official protocol and making up rules as it goes along, despite what Fisher would have his readers believe.
As to Fisher’s claim about Iran building “covert facilities,” that was already addressed above.
Obfuscatory Journalism
Two years ago, researchers at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies (CISSM) released the findings of an extensive examination of mainstream media’s coverage of the Iranian nuclear program between 2009 and 2012. “The manner in which news media frame their coverage of Iran’s nuclear program is critically important to public understanding and to policy decisions that will determine whether the dispute can be resolved without war,” the report’s authors wrote.
Among other things, the study found that when media “coverage did address Iranian nuclear intentions and capabilities, it did so in a manner that lacked precision, was inconsistent over time, and failed to provide adequate sourcing and context for claims,” which in turn “led to an inaccurate picture of the choices facing policy makers.”
It also found that “coverage generally adopted the tendency of U.S., European, and Israeli officials to place on Iran the burden to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program, failing to acknowledge the roles of these other countries in the dispute” and that such coverage often “reflected and reinforced the negative sentiments about Iran that are broadly shared by U.S., European, and Israeli publics,” leading to “misunderstandings about the interests involved and narrowed the range of acceptable outcomes.”
Unfortunately, Fisher’s coverage of the Iranian nuclear program and the current negotiations are hardly any different. For a media venture dedicated to “explanatory journalism,” this is even more troubling.
With two months to go before the June deadline for a comprehensive nuclear accord between Iran and the P5+1, Fisher and his Vox colleagues will inevitably publish more articles about the Iranian nuclear program.
Still, here’s hoping that, before he explains anything else about the Iranian nuclear program, Max Fisher finally gets his facts straight.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says Israel is the main impediment to the universality of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the single violator of the accord.
“Unfortunately, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and its refusal to engage with the international community has become the greatest impediment to the universality of this treaty,” Zarif told Press TV correspondent in New York upon the arrival of Iran’s delegation of nuclear negotiators in the city to attend the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the NPT.
Israel is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East with up to 400 undeclared nuclear warheads. Tel Aviv has rejected global calls to join the NPT and does not allow international inspectors to observe its controversial nuclear program.
“Israel is the single most violator of this international regime (NPT) which is the requirement of the international community,” Zarif stressed.
The top Iranian diplomat further underlined the need for the establishment of a nukes-free zone in the Middle East.
“Since [the] 1970s, the General Assembly of the United Nations has been calling for the establishment of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, he said.
He underlined that the call for such a nuclear-free zone is not something new.
“In 1995, when the NPT was renewed, there was a declaration on the need for the universality of the NPT as well as the need for the establishment of the nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. This request, or requirement and demand of the international community and member states of the NPT was again repeated in 2010 in the last review conference,” Zarif said.
“One of the most important issues in the NPT review process is to look into ways and means of bringing about universality and bring about the Israeli compliance with NPT,” he added.
He also elaborated on the function of the NPT, stressing that the treaty “rests on three pillars: nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”
He also said that the issue of Israeli compliance with the NPT will top the agenda in the 2015 Review Conference.
Zarif further noted that he will probably have a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of the event during which the will discuss the issues surrounding negotiations on Iran’ nuclear program. The meeting will be the first time since the groundbreaking talks on Iran’s nuclear program in the Swiss city of Lausanne earlier in the month.
The top Iranian diplomat said he will also hold separate meetings with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and some foreign ministers of the P5+1– the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany, engaged in talks with Iran over its nuclear program.
Zarif also said that he will make a speech on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement countries as Iran is the movement’s current chair. The countries of the Non-Aligned Movement represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations members and contain 55 percent of the world population.
He further stressed that he will also sit for talks with foreign ministers of the countries in the region to discuss the ongoing crisis in Syria, Iraq, and especially in Yemen.
The NPT review conference, slated to be held from April 27 to May 22 at the UN headquarters, will address issues such as nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, safeguards measures and the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
A recent article by Jorge Elbaum, the former executive director of DAIA (Delegation for Argentine Jewish Associations), the principle Argentine Jewish umbrella groups, published in the Buenos Aires daily Pagina 12, provides a detailed account of the damaging links between the State of Israel, US Wall Street speculators, and local Argentine Zionists in government and out. Elbaum describes how their efforts have been specifically directed toward destabilizing the incumbent center-left government of President Cristina Fernandez, while securing exorbitant profits for a Zionist Wall Street speculator, Paul Singer of Elliott Management as well as undermining a joint Iranian-Argentine investigation of the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires.
Elbaum’s article was written in response to the death of Alberto Nisman, a Zionist zealot and chief government prosecutor in the terrorist bombing investigation for over 20 years.
The serious issues raised by the political use and gross manipulation of the horrors of the bombing of the Argentine Jewish Community Center shows how Tel Aviv (and its political assets in Argentina and the US) further Israeli power in the Middle East, in particular, by isolating and demonizing Iran. This is important at two critical levels, which this article seeks to highlight.
First of all, Israel attempted to sidetrack the Argentine investigation, by involving some of its powerful Wall Street assets and influential pro-Israel lobbies (the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC among others). Their purpose was to fabricate ‘evidence’ in order to implicate Iran in the crime and to manipulate their influential assets in Argentina, especially in this case, chief prosecutor Nisman and many of the leaders of DAIA, to accuse the Argentine government of complicity in an ‘Iranian cover-up’.
The second issue, raised by Israel’s intervention in Argentina’s investigation into the bombing, has wider and deeper implications: How Israel promotes its foreign policy objectives in various countries by grooming and manipulating local influential Jewish officials and community organizations. This furthers Tel Aviv’s goal of regional hegemony and territorial aggrandizement. In other words, Israeli political reach extends far beyond the Middle East and goes ‘global’, operating without any consideration of the dangers it inflicts on Jews in the ‘target countries’. To this end, Israel has been creating a worldwide network of Jews, which calls into question their loyalty to the polity of their home countries where they have resided for generations.
The nefarious impact, which Israel’s intervention has on the sovereignty of its ‘target countries’, presents a danger to innocent and loyal Jewish citizens who are not acting as agents of Tel Aviv.
For these reasons it is important to critically analyze the specific characteristics of Israel’s dangerous meddling in Argentina.
The Crisis of the Argentine Justice System: Unsolved Terrorist Crimes and Israeli Intervention
After the anti-Semitic bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, the Argentine judicial and legal system seriously bungled the investigation, despite collaboration from the US FBI and Israel’s Mossad. Argentina’s then President Carlos Menem was an ardent neo-liberal, unconditional backer of US foreign policy and strong supporter of Israel. His regime was still heavily infested with high-ranking police, military, and intelligence officials deeply implicated in the seven-year bloody military dictatorship (1976-83) during which 30,000 Argentine citizens were murdered. Among the victims of this ‘dirty war’ were hundreds of Argentine Jews, activists, intellectuals and militants who were tortured and murdered to the anti-Semitic taunts of their military and police assassins. During this same horrific ‘pogrom’ of Argentina’s committed Jewish activists, the state of Israel managed to sell tens of millions of dollars in arms to the junta, breaking a US-EU boycott. Notoriously, the conservative leaders of the DAIA and AMIA (Argentine-Israel Mutual Association) failed to defend the lives of Jewish activists and militants. After attending meetings with the junta, many conservative Jewish leaders would dismiss the concerns of the families of the disappeared and tortured Argentine Jews, saying: ‘They must have done something…’
The bungled investigation into the 1994 bombing included the arrest of right-wing police officials who were later released and the mysterious loss of vital forensic evidence. Accusations against various foreign regimes and organizations shifted according to the political needs of the US and Israel: First, the Lebanese group, Hezbollah, Israel’s main military adversary during its bloody occupation of southern Lebanon in 1990’s was touted as the responsible party. A few years later, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, prior to the Israeli-backed US invasion of Iraq; then the Palestinians were trotted out, followed by Syria’s Baathist intelligence forces. After the total destruction of Iraq by the US ‘coalition’ and the decline of influential Arab states in the Middle East, the Israelis have settled on Iran as the ‘prime suspect’, coinciding with Tehran’s rise of as a regional power – challenging Israeli and US hegemony.
With the 2001 collapse of Argentina’s version of a kleptocratic, neo-liberal, pro-US bootlicking regime, and in the midst of a dire economic depression, there was a popular upheaval and the subsequent election of President Kirchner bringing a new center-left government to power.
The new government, defaulting on its murderous foreign debt, oversaw Argentina’s economic recovery and a vast increase in social spending which stabilized capitalism. Kirchner also promoted greater independence in foreign policy and sought to enhance Buenos Aires relations with Israel by re-opening the investigation into the bombing and retaining Alberto Nisman, as chief prosecutor.
Nisman, the Mossad, and the US Embassy Connection
In his article, ‘Vultures, Nisman, DAIA: The Money Route’ (Pagina 12, 4/18/15), Jorge Elbaum, points out that chief prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, opened a secret bank account in New York. As Elbaum told prominent figures in Argentina’s Jewish community, Nisman’s campaign to discredit the government’s joint investigatory commission with Iran and demonize the Argentine government was financed, at least in part, by New York’s vulture fund head, Paul Singer, who stood to make hundreds of millions in profit. According to documents, cited by Elbaum, US embassy personnel and leading US Zionist organizations, including the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, led by Mark Dubowitz, as well as Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, fed Nisman fabricated ‘evidence’ and corrected numerous substantive and grammatical flaws in his report purporting to ‘demonstrate’ Argentine’s cover-up of the Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing. However, forensic and legal experts in Argentina have determined that Nisman’s claims lack any legal basis or credibility.
The entire ‘Operation Nisman’ appears to have been orchestrated by Israel with the goal of isolating Iran via fabricated evidence supposed to ‘prove’ its role in the 1994 bombing. The recruitment of Nisman, as a key Israeli operative, was central to Israel’s strategy of using the DAIA and other Argentine – Jewish organizations to attack the Argentine-Iran memo of understanding regarding the investigation of the bombing. Israel pushed US-Zionist organizations to intensify their intervention into Argentine politics via their networks with Argentine-Jewish organizations. The vulture-fund speculator, Paul Singer, who had bought defaulted Argentine debt for ‘pennies on the dollar’, was demanding full payment through sympathetic New York courts. He had funded a special speculators’ task force on Argentina joining forces with Israel, US Zionist organizations and Alberto Nisman in order to manipulate Argentina’s investigation and secure a bountiful return. Nisman thus became a ‘key tool’ to Israel’s regional military strategy toward Iran, to New York speculator Singer’s strategy to grab a billion dollar windfall and to the Argentine right wing’s campaign to destabilize the center-left government of Kirschner-Fernandez.
By acting mainly in the interest of Israel and US Zionists, Nisman sacrificed the Argentine-Jewish community’s desire for a serious, truthful investigation into the bombing leading to identification and conviction of the perpetrators. Moreover, Nisman compromised himself by being a tool for Israel’s foreign policy against the interest of the Argentine government, which he was sworn to serve, and endangered the status of the Argentine Jewish community among Argentines in general by raising questions about their loyalty to their home country.
Fortunately, Argentina has sophisticated, prominent Jewish leaders who see themselves as Argentine citizens first and foremost, including leaders like Foreign Secretary Hector Timmerman who proposed the joint investigation with Iran as well as the former DAIA Executive Director Jorge Elbaum who has played a major role in denouncing Israel’s intervention in Argentine politics. It is citizens, like Elbaum, who have exposed the Israeli government’s role in recruiting and manipulating local leading Argentine-Jews to serve Tel Aviv’s foreign policy interests.
This is in stark contrast to the United States where no major American-Jewish leader has dared to denounce the role of leading Zionist organizations as Israel’s conduit. Furthermore, unlike Argentina, where a sector of the liberal press (Pagina 12) has published critical accounts of Nisman’s fabrications and Israel’s destabilization campaign, newspapers in the US, like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, have continued to present Nisman’s discredited report as a serious investigation by a courageous, ‘martyred’ prosecutor. The US media continues to portray the entire Argentine judicial system as corrupt and argue that Nisman’s death must have been a state-orchestrated crime. The US public has never been presented with the fact that the leading critics of Nisman’s report and his own behavior were prominent Argentine Jews and that Argentina’s foreign minister, Hector Timmerman, organized the Argentine-Iran commission.
Conclusion
That Israel was willing to derail any serious the investigation into the 1994 bombing, which killed and maimed scores of Argentine Jews, in order to further its campaign against Iran, demonstrates the extent to which the self-styled ‘Jewish State’ is willing to sacrifice the interests and security of world Jewry to further its narrow military agenda.
Equally egregious is the way in which Tel Aviv recruits overseas Jews to serve Israel’s interests against that of their own countries, turning them into a ‘fifth column’, operating inside and outside of their governments. That Israeli intelligence has been exposed and denounced in the case of Nisman, has not forestalled nor prevented Israel from continuing this long-standing, practice of dangerous meddling. This is especially evident in the ‘Israel-first behavior’ of leading Jewish American organizations and political leaders who have pledged their total allegiance to Netanyahu’s war agenda against Iran an bought the US Congress to scuttle the peace accord.
It merits repetition: Israel’s widespread practice of recruiting Jewish citizens and officials of other countries to serve as vehicles of Israeli policies has the potential to foment a new and possibly violent backlash, once the greater population has been made aware of such treasonous activities. In this regard, Israel does not represent a bastion of security for world Jewry, but a cynical, manipulative and deadly threat. Perhaps that is Israel’s ultimate strategy – create a backlash of generalized anger against overseas Jews and precipitate massive flight to Israel from countries like Argentina, while the few who remain can be better manipulated to serve Tel Aviv.
Epilogue
A few days ago, on April 23, a crowd of several hundred Argentine Jews met to repudiate the arrogant claims of the established leaders of the DAIA and the AMIA that they represent ‘all Argentine Jews”. This overflow crowd in the auditorium of the telephone workers union proposed to create a ‘collective and democratic space, based on links of solidarity over and above commercial connections.’ The Jewish community in the US would be wise to pay close attention to Argentina’s example.
US Republican presidential hopefuls and some other GOP lawmakers were in the state of Nevada on Saturday to attract big donors for their campaign funding.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Senator Rob Portman (OH), Governor Mike Pence (IN), and Senator Lindsey Graham (SC), all Republicans, were in Las Vegas for the annual Republican Jewish Coalition’s spring meeting which began on Thursday.
The candidates wrapped up 3 days of lobbying for Israel to attract potentially billions of dollars in donations in the biggest gambling hub in the US.
They were there to win big donations from casino tycoons, most notably Zionist Sheldon Adelson who is the largest campaign donor in the US.
As far as the GOP contenders in Las Vegas are concerned, the fight to win Adelson’s support and others in Las Vegas is all about showing support and solidarity for Tel Aviv.
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry said, “Ignoring the lessons of history, our president aims to sign an agreement with… the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“Sadly, the American friendship and alliance with Israel has never been more imperiled than it is right now today under this administration,” said Ted Cruz, one of the Republican presidential candidates.
About 800 members of the summit enthusiastically cheered the consecutive slaps on Obama and on a potential nuclear agreement with Iran and promises of loyalty to Tel Aviv.
In fact, Adelson was not there on Saturday, according to local media, because that’s when the session was open to the media.
It is reported that Adelson has a favorite candidate so far, and that’s Senator Marco Rubio who the tycoon “speaks to once every 2 weeks.”
Adelson spent almost $150 million in the last presidential election in 2012 and he is set to throw in millions of more dollars behind his favorite contender in 2016.
Adelson, a Jewish American and the country’s eighth-wealthiest person, has said that he will not invest in the 2016 elections based on personal loyalty but on a more strategic aim.
He is a prominent supporter of Israel’s Likud Party, which is currently headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is also known for his anti-Iran rants.
During a speech at Yeshiva University in New York City in October 2014, Adelson said that the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran before beginning negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program.
As the fear campaign advances into ever-more delirious extremes, Westerners continue to be submerged in sensationalist headlines about ‘homegrown terrorism’ and ‘ISIS recruits.’
The American, Australian, Canadian, British, French, German and other governments have been on the hunt lately, swooping up a handful of would-be ISIS recruits before they could make their journey to Syria and Iraq. The arrests appear to be part of a stage-managed public relations effort to 1) keep up the false pretense that the West is actually trying to stop people from joining ISIS, when in fact they have been gleefully turning a blind eye to it if not aiding and abetting it, and 2) to justify the growing surveillance state across the West.
ABC Newstells us that more than 2000 Westerners, mostly from immigrant communities but also a number of white converts to Islam, have joined ISIS and other terrorist groups fighting to topple the Syrian government. Knowing the high level of surveillance and monitoring that Western agencies already employ against Muslim communities, it beggars belief that all of these individuals simply evaded the all-seeing eye of Western intelligence which includes the “Five Eyes” spy network consisting of the combined espionage might of the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand and Australia. The massive resources of the spy agencies of those countries in conjunction with the data mining brigands of the NSA makes it hard for one to believe that they’re just unable to track and intervene before Western citizens depart for the phony ‘jihad’ against Israel’s adversaries in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.
The Interceptrevealed that in a recent FBI ‘bust’ of an alleged ISIS sympathizer who was purportedly planning an attack inside the US, the suspect was goaded by FBI informants, as is the case with nearly every major foiled ‘terror plot’ in recent American history. John T. Booker Jr., the Kansas man accused of plotting a terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS, had checked himself into a mental hospital about a year before his arrest. The Intercept reports that the two FBI informants who initiated contact with Booker Jr. “provided the 20-year-old with the materials and support that led to his arrest on Friday on charges stemming from his alleged plans to carry out an attack against Fort Riley in support of the Islamic State.”
This example is merely one of many hundreds of cases involving the FBI’s army of 15,000 plus informants who infiltrate Muslim communities then work to incite and coerce impressionable, dejected young Muslims into completely inept and doomed-to-fail ‘terror plots.’
Canadian authorities have been caught mimicking the FBI’s duplicitous and unethical tactics of fabricating terror plots by way of informants. One recent case involved a bumbling British Columbia couple, John Nuttall and his wife Amanda Korody, who were prodded and pushed into a laughable ‘terrorist conspiracy’ by undercover RCMP agents. The Vancouver Sunreported that the undercover agents “spent more than four months in a futile attempt to have John Nuttall articulate a real [terrorist] plan.” Another Sunreport described the ‘terror couple’ as “impoverished addicts” and delineated how an undercover agent coddled and encouraged them every step of the way, making suggestions about explosives and targets.
A story that broke earlier this year unveiled the West’s two-faced gambit as it relates to ISIS. The Turkish government exposed the identity of a Syrian national on the payroll of Canadian intelligence who was acting as a human trafficker for ISIS, escorting dozens of Europeans through Turkey and delivering them to ISIS strongholds in Syria, including three British schoolgirls.
“Turkish news agencies reported … that a foreign intelligence agent detained in that country on suspicion of helping the [three British] girls travel to neighbouring Syria to join ISIL was working for the Canadian government,” stated an Ottawa Citizenreport on the scandal. The agent in question, Mohammed Mehmet Rashid, told Turkish authorities that he made routine trips to the Canadian embassy in Jordan where he received his marching orders from CSIS, Canada’s spy agency. That embassy was headed by Bruno Saccomani, a former RCMP officer and the former chief of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s security detail. Harper handpicked Saccomani to be the ambassador to Jordan.
Another issue routinely overlooked by mainstream media is that ISIS is not the only violent radical group that Western citizens are bustling to join. Hundreds of Canadians, Americans, Australians and Europeans have joined the Israeli military over the years, participating in the murder of thousands of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, the mass destruction of property and other war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In an article entitled “Supporting ‘terror tourism’ to Israel gets Canadian tax credits,” Yves Engler, an expert on Canadian foreign affairs, observes that in Canada “[i]t is illegal for Somali Canadians to fight in that country but it is okay for Canadian Jews to kill Palestinians in Gaza. And the government will give you a charitable tax credit if you give them money to support it.” Engler documents the activities of pro-Israel charities operating freely in Canada that recruit young Jews to fight for Israel. “At least 25 volunteers from the Greater Toronto Area fought in Gaza during Israel’s 22-day 2008/2009 assault that left some 1,400 Palestinians dead,” notes Engler, adding that “during Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon the Canadian Jewish News reported that ‘Canadian youths leave home to join Israeli army.’”
“The double standard is extreme,” Engler writes, pointing out how Canadians are proscribed from recruiting for foreign militaries under the Foreign Enlistment Act, but this law apparently doesn’t apply to Jews who enjoy a privileged status in Canada and other Western countries.
The Canadian government’s pro-Israel extremism showed its ugly face in 2014 when the Harper administration added IRFAN-Canada, a Muslim charity which helped raise funds for the besieged people of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to its list of banned ‘terrorist organizations.’ According to the Harper regime’s skewed Zionist logic, Muslim charities that work with the democratically elected leadership of Gaza in order to dispense humanitarian aid to the suffering Palestinians are engaged in ‘supporting terrorism.’ Yet Jewish-Zionist charities are allowed, even aided and abetted by the Canadian state through ‘tax credits’ for donors, to raise funds for the Israeli military and even to recruit radicalized Canadian Jews to fight in Israel’s bloody wars of aggression – but this somehow does not constitute material support for terrorism.
Evidently, in Harper’s pro-Zionist fantasy world ‘terrorist’ is a smear word applied exclusively to the opponents of Israeli imperialism, whereas a state birthed through ethnic cleansing and maintained by way of bribery, blackmail, and state-sponsored mass murder is praised to the heavens merely for allowing its privileged Jewish citizens and disenfranchised Arab subjects to vote for whichever hawkish Zionist politician will continue the policies of terror in the holy land.
Aqraba, Occupied Palestine – On 25th April 2015 ISM volunteers met with the mayor of Aqraba, Ayman Bani Fadl, who has asked internationals to document the intrusive Israeli occupation forces’ actions over the past week. The Israeli forces have been using civilian farm land to carry out training operations. The military have an encampment where they have stationed around ten tanks and approximately fifteen more armored vehicles, as well as numerous troops.
Israeli occupation forces present on Palestinian land near Aqraba (Photo by Aqraba Muncipality 24.04.15)
The military training in this area is hugely damaging to the farming economy, due to the fact that this seasons harvest began earlier in the month. Farmers are now prevented from carrying out their harvest by the presence of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). The mayor stated that it is likely the military chose the time and area in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the harvest and the livelihoods of the civilian population. He also claimed the actions of the IOF were strategically designed to expropriate the land, forcing the farmers to leave the area. He went on to say that the military have already designated 150,000 dunams of Aqraba land as a military zone. Meaning, the military have full control of the area. Despite this, the IOF have chosen to carry out their present training operations on the 10,000 dunams that remain accessible to the farmers.
These military operations occur on a regular basis and have a permanent and damaging effect on the community. Not least of which is the unexploded ordinance, carelessly left by the military, which has been responsible for killing four individuals and maiming tens of others, mostly children.
To add to the continuing persecution of Aqraba civilians, four months ago the electricity network, financed by the Belgian government, was demolished by Israeli forces. Due to a lack of funds, the municipality has only been able to temporarily reconstruct a portion of the network.
Furthermore, this continual land grab results in Israeli control over highly fertile agricultural soil and cuts off Palestinian access to the Jordan Valley, restricting freedom of movement and their right to cultivate their own farming land.
The present military operation in Aqraba is just one example of the ongoing violent harassment and disruption that is one of many tactics used by Israeli forces, to make life so intolerable for Palestinians they will leave and abandon their land. Oppressive tactics of a similar nature are rife throughout the West Bank, with towns and villages in and around the Jordan Valley being particularly subject to persecution from the Israeli forces.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Peter Rushton, a historian and political commentator from London, and Lawrence J. Korb, a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense in Washington, to discuss Washington’s delivery of new F-35 fighter jets to Israel.
Rushton says the delivery of fighter jets truly shows that the policies of US President Barack Obama are totally in line with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, adding the most worrying fact is that the White House continues its military deals with Tel Aviv despite the regime’s longstanding aggressive policies.
The analyst slammed the recent military deal with Israel, which is the sole possessor of nuclear arms in the Middle East, saying such an accord strips Washington of any means of leverage that could enable the US to contain Tel Aviv’s warmongering policies.
Meanwhile, Korb believes the US is selling the equipment to Israel only to bolster the regime’s deterrence power in the face of dangers in the region.
Partisans of Israel are not content merely to murder and maim Palestinian civilians. They also launch “weaponized words” against anyone who speaks out against their crimes . . . including the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
The Zionists’ latest verbal salvo has targeted The Lancet, the world’s best-known medical journal. Medical apologists for Israel’s July 2014 assault on Gaza have posted a letter claiming The Lancet’s July 22 2014 article on Israeli war crimes constitutes “stereotypical extremist hate propaganda.” It seems the Israel lobby’s medical division has declared war on The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, and its publisher, Reed Elsevier.
The Zionists, who have bought up the Western mainstream media and are currently targeting Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians in the biggest wave of hate propaganda in history, are hardly qualified to issue such accusations.
The Zionist doctors’ letter accuses The Lancet of a long list of vague and portentously-worded alleged misdeeds. But it offers virtually no specifics whatsoever to back up its hyper-general accusations. The vacuous list of charges against The Lancet includes “ethical and scientific lapses” (such as?), “failure to apply the normal rigorous standards of honesty and transparency” (with no examples given), failure to “publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed” (without offering a single concrete example of anything the Lancet published that required any such correction).
The Zionist letter attacks The Lancet’s July 22 2014 article “An open letter for the people in Gaza.” The angry authors bombastically assert: “ ‘An open letter for the people in Gaza’ by Manduca et al contains false assertions, unverifiable dishonest ‘facts’, many of them libellous, and glaring omissions.”
But the Zionists cannot name a single false assertion. They are just blowing smoke, hoping that nobody is paying close attention.
The Lancet Ombudsman had already investigated “An open letter for the people in Gaza” and found no false statements. According to HandsOffTheLancet.com, the Ombudsman did cite a “’regrettable statement’ that, because only 5% of Israeli academics had supported an appeal to” Israel to end the “military operation in Gaza (Gur-Arieh 2014), the authors had been ‘tempted to conclude that … the rest of the Israeli academics [had been] complicit in the massacre and destruction of Gaza.’”
But what is regrettable about such a statement? Can there be any doubt that the vast majority of Israeli academics, indeed a virtual unanimity of Zionists in Occupied Palestine, were actively or passively complicit in the massacre, and the larger genocide? While it may be regrettable that the Zionists in Occupied Palestine are complicit in Tel Aviv’s war crimes, and its larger ongoing program of genocide, it is not the slightest bit regrettable that The Lancet writers have pointed out such a disturbing but indisputable fact. (Polls show that virtually all Zionists in Occupied Palestine support the Gaza massacres, including the so-called Cast Lead in 2008-2009 and Protective Edge last summer.)
The roughly 500 Zionist doctors who are fulminating against The Lancet ought to have their licenses to practice medicine revoked. Then they ought to be put on trial for complicity in genocide propaganda. They are a disgrace to the medical profession, like the Nazi doctors who were indirectly responsible for brutalizing helpless people in World War II Germany because they averted their gazes from the crimes of their countrymen.
Unlike the Nazi Doctors (and their mirror images, the Zionist Doctors), the authors of “An open letter for the people in Gaza” could not avert their gaze:
“The massacre in Gaza spares no one, and includes the disabled and sick in hospitals, children playing on the beach or on the roof top, with a large majority of non-combatants. Hospitals, clinics, ambulances, mosques, schools, and press buildings have all been attacked, with thousands of private homes bombed, clearly directing fire to target whole families killing them within their homes…”
The Zionist Doctors have not demonstrated a single factual error in the above words, nor in any other passage from “An open letter for the people in Gaza.”
The current assault on The Lancet is not the first Zionist war on a leading medical journal. In 2004, British Medical Journal (BMJ) published “Palestine: the assault on health and other war crimes.” According to the article:
“Two thirds of the 621 children (two thirds under 15 years) killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound… Clearly, soldiers are routinely authorized to shoot to kill children in situations of minimal or no threat.”
The BMJ article was unprecedented. For first time in history, one of the world’s leading medical journals had documented the murder by sniper fire of more than 600 helpless Palestinian children – many of them “hunted for sport” as described by one horrified eyewitness, the journalist Chris Hedges, in his famous article “Gaza Diary.”
The Zionist reaction was swift. BMJ was castigated with the usual blustering Zionist rhetoric. But not a single factual mistake was found. As usual, the Zionists used vicious ad hominem attacks to obscure the hollowness of their arguments.
On December 9th, 1946, an American military tribunal charged twenty-three leading German physicians with crimes against humanity. Sixteen were convicted, and seven were executed.
Will the Zionist Doctors, whose complicity in genocide propaganda has been demonstrated by their attack on The Lancet, one day meet a similar fate?
Obama has been quoted saying he “takes full responsibility” for the two hostages, one American and one Italian, killed recently in a drone attack. At the same time, Obama praised the United States for its transparency in such matters.
What in God’s name does he mean? How can you have responsibility with no consequences? Isn’t that a bit like patting yourself on the back for high principles, having just committed murder? And transparency? That also is a word without meaning when applied to a country which runs a string of secret wars and coups, a country which spies on virtually the entire planet, and a country whose warehouses bulge with so many classified documents it would take a thousand years to review them.
Obama’s use of words has no meaning, much like the lack of meaning inherent in the kind of world into which he is eagerly helping to pitch us.
He has killed two innocent people in the course of an extrajudicial killing of others who were themselves, as is usual in these attacks, mere suspects.
And it is not the first time he has done this, only the first time where we know the names and faces of his victims. We only know the names and faces here because they were an American and an Italian. Our feeble and utterly corrupt press never lifts a finger to investigate who the thousands of others have been.
Estimates vary, but something on the order of 2,500 people have been murdered this way by the United States, almost all of them innocent, ordinary people, and even America’s intended targets, supposed terrorists, are guilty of nothing in law.
If a leader uses the word terror today, he can pretty much do anything he or his sadistic military/ security/ intelligence creeps want to do. I do not see any difference in these acts from those of the former military juntas in South America who made thousands of “undesirable” people simply disappear.
There’s an old saying about democratic governments that you pretty much deserve the government you get, but the glib saying is, of course, considerably less than true. Besides, it is not a great stretch to say of America today that it is about as much a democracy as was the former Soviet Union, with the key difference being voters in America get two choices instead of one on their ballots, each of them however ready to do exactly the same things, with only minor stylistic variations. You might say the choices represent two fashion statements in one official party.
However, if Western people in general just quietly accept the institutional barbarism Obama represents, they will indeed deserve the governments they get.
And what’s hurtling towards us, far more quickly than many realize, is government entirely by and for elites – wealthy, wealthy people with their paid mouthpiece political leaders and the vast military/ security apparatus they employ – the rest of humanity being reduced to unimportant mobs to be kept under control at the smallest sign of their becoming difficult, not so very much different from prisoners and perhaps even livestock.
We actually have an early prototype of the kind of society our leaders are working towards. We see it in Israel. The word “terror” there plays the same ugly role, almost like an air raid siren, justifying literally any response.
Has the world said one word of the 2,200 people slaughtered in Gaza recently and left to rot in its rubble? How about Israel’s treatment of refugees of color? I see no protest over their being horribly abused and even being turned away against international laws and conventions.
And now Israel uses dirty tricks like shipping refugees off to questionable African states whose leaders have been paid bribes to take them. Can you imagine a bright future for any of them under such circumstances? They too are more than a little likely to disappear.
Of course, assassination in many forms and in many places has played a large role in Israel’s brief history. Anyone Israel does not like is expendable, and America’s whole response to “terror” is right out of an official Israeli manual.
Israel loves to sing tired songs about democracy, but half the people under its control have no rights, no vote, no future, and are frequently openly told they are undesirable and should get out. Thousands are kept in prisons, and brutal acts like spraying farm land with filthy waste-water or with potent herbicides or cutting off power supplies are fairly regular events. When those on the receiving end get too uppity, they will be either assassinated or bombed or have their homes stolen through some of the most unjust laws on the planet.
Apart from the ghastly lives enforced upon millions of non-Jews by the “Jewish state,” Israel’s Jewish population demonstrates another part of the social model. Ordinary Israelis have quite unpleasant lives by Western standards, with home ownership out of reach, the price of everything exorbitant, being subject to oppressive army service, and living in a place which in many ways resembles a high security prison with guards, spies, and restrictions everywhere. The elites of Israel do very handsomely, thank you, just as oligarchs anywhere do, all the groaning mass of other residents’ problems and limits providing them with boundless opportunities, and most of the oligarchs freely move back and forth between continents with their dual passports to cut deals or avoid troubles.
That set of conditions and practices has become a model now for the United States, and where the United States goes, so go its weak-kneed allies like Britain, France, Germany, and even our once fair-minded Canada.
BETHLEHEM – The South African minister of higher education said late Thursday that he had been denied entry to Palestine by Israeli authorities in revenge for political stances against Israeli policies.
“This is not only an act against him, but also an act against him as a member of the Cabinet, so by extension it’s an anti-government protest by Israel,” spokesperson KhayeNkwanyana told South African news website News24.
Minister Blade Nzimande was due to travel to the West Bank for a six-day working visit to discuss collaborations between the University of Johannesburg and Palestinian universities, a follow up to an agreement signed when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited South Africa last year.
The Ministry said, however, that the Israeli consulate refused to grant him a visa as a result of his political views in what is being labeled an “attack” on the South African government itself in the local press.
Nkwanyana said that the visa rejection was creating a “serious diplomatic problem,” noting that it effectively barred all South African officials from visiting both Palestine as well as Israel.
All travel in and out of the West Bank is controlled by Israel, meaning that Israeli military authorities hold ultimate control over any individual trying to reach the Palestinian territories.
“We must just boycott Israel,” the minister said in a statement to the press, adding that Israel was trying to “minimize the number of people who can actually see what is happening on the ground.”
He also said that he would urge South African institutions of higher education to cut their ties to Israeli institutions.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki condemned the move in a statement released on the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
“Israel’s policies would not succeed in isolating the Palestinians,” he said.
“It will only embolden them into more struggle for ending Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.”
South Africa is a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause and numerous government officials have repeatedly compared the Israeli occupation and the systematic discrimination practiced against Palestinians to the racial apartheid policies practiced by the South African government against its black citizens until 1994.
Israeli authorities have repeatedly denied entry to officials from other countries and even from international bodies such as the United Nations that it feel have taken antagonistic political stances.
In January, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes, and consequences, Rashida Manjoo said she had been denied entry by Israel.
She said she had tried for months to get permission to enter in order to undertake a fact-finding mission, but had been refused entry.
In November, Israeli authorities banned the Colombian foreign minister from visiting the West Bank after discovering that she did not plan to meet with Israeli officials as well.
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
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Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
