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Neocon ‘Chaos Promotion’ in the Mideast

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | April 13, 2015

Former Washington insider and four-star General Wesley Clark spilled the beans several years ago on how Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative co-conspirators implemented their sweeping plan to destabilize key Middle Eastern countries once it became clear that post-Soviet Russia “won’t stop us.”

As I recently reviewed a YouTube eight-minute clip of General Clark’s October 2007 speech, what leaped out at me was that the neocons had been enabled by their assessment that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – Russia had become neutralized and posed no deterrent to U.S. military action in the Middle East.

While Clark’s public exposé largely escaped attention in the neocon-friendly “mainstream media” (surprise, surprise!), he recounted being told by a senior general at the Pentagon shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 about the Donald Rumsfeld/Paul Wolfowitz-led plan for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

This was startling enough, I grant you, since officially the United States presents itself as a nation that respects international law, frowns upon other powerful nations overthrowing the governments of weaker states, and – in the aftermath of World War II – condemned past aggressions by Nazi Germany and decried Soviet “subversion” of pro-U.S. nations.

But what caught my eye this time was the significance of Clark’s depiction of Wolfowitz in 1992 gloating over what he judged to be a major lesson learned from the Desert Storm attack on Iraq in 1991; namely, “the Soviets won’t stop us.”

That remark directly addresses a question that has troubled me since March 2003 when George W. Bush attacked Iraq. Would the neocons – widely known as “the crazies” at least among the remaining sane people of Washington – have been crazy enough to opt for war to re-arrange the Middle East if the Soviet Union had not fallen apart in 1991?

The question is not an idle one. Despite the debacle in Iraq and elsewhere, the neocon “crazies” still exercise huge influence in Establishment Washington. Thus, the question now becomes whether, with Russia far more stable and much stronger, the “crazies” are prepared to risk military escalation with Russia over Ukraine, what retired U.S. diplomat William R. Polk deemed a potentially dangerous nuclear confrontation, a “Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.”

Putin’s Comment

The geopolitical vacuum that enabled the neocons to try out their “regime change” scheme in the Middle East may have been what Russian President Vladimir Putin was referring to in his state-of-the-nation address on April 25, 2005, when he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [past] century.” Putin’s comment has been a favorite meme of those who seek to demonize Putin by portraying him as lusting to re-establish a powerful USSR through aggression in Europe.

But, commenting two years after the Iraq invasion, Putin seemed correct at least in how the neocons exploited the absence of the Russian counterweight to over-extend American power in ways that were harmful to the world, devastating to the people at the receiving end of the neocon interventions, and even detrimental to the United States.

If one takes a step back and attempts an unbiased look at the spread of violence in the Middle East over the past quarter-century, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Putin’s comment was on the mark. With Russia a much-weakened military power in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was nothing to deter U.S. policymakers from the kind of adventurism at Russia’s soft underbelly that, in earlier years, would have carried considerable risk of armed U.S.-USSR confrontation.

I lived in the USSR during the 1970s and would not wish that kind of restrictive regime on anyone. Until it fell apart, though, it was militarily strong enough to deter Wolfowitz-style adventurism. And I will say that – for the millions of people now dead, injured or displaced by U.S. military action in the Middle East over the past dozen years – the collapse of the Soviet Union as a deterrent to U.S. war-making was not only a “geopolitical catastrophe” but an unmitigated disaster.

Visiting Wolfowitz

In his 2007 speech, General Clark related how in early 1991 he dropped in on Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (and later, from 2001 to 2005, Deputy Secretary of Defense). It was just after a major Shia uprising in Iraq in March 1991. President George H.W. Bush’s administration had provoked it, but then did nothing to rescue the Shia from brutal retaliation by Saddam Hussein, who had just survived his Persian Gulf defeat.

According to Clark, Wolfowitz said: “We should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. The truth is, one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us. We’ve got about five or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran (sic), Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

It’s now been more than 10 years, of course. But do not be deceived into thinking Wolfowitz and his neocon colleagues believe they have failed in any major way. The unrest they initiated keeps mounting – in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon – not to mention fresh violence now in full swing in Yemen and the crisis in Ukraine. Yet, the Teflon coating painted on the neocons continues to cover and protect them in the “mainstream media.”

True, one neocon disappointment is Iran. It is more stable and less isolated than before; it is playing a sophisticated role in Iraq; and it is on the verge of concluding a major nuclear agreement with the West – barring the throwing of a neocon/Israeli monkey wrench into the works to thwart it, as has been done in the past.

An earlier setback for the neocons came at the end of August 2013 when President Barack Obama decided not to let himself be mouse-trapped by the neocons into ordering U.S. forces to attack Syria. Wolfowitz et al. were on the threshold of having the U.S. formally join the war against Bashar al-Assad’s government of Syria when there was the proverbial slip between cup and lip. With the aid of the neocons’ new devil-incarnate Vladimir Putin, Obama faced them down and avoided war.

A week after it became clear that the neocons were not going to get their war in Syria, I found myself at the main CNN studio in Washington together with Paul Wolfowitz and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, another important neocon. As I reported in “How War on Syria Lost Its Way,” the scene was surreal – funereal, even, with both Wolfowitz and Lieberman very much down-in-the-mouth, behaving as though they had just watched their favorite team lose the Super Bowl.

Israeli/Neocon Preferences

But the neocons are nothing if not resilient. Despite their grotesque disasters, like the Iraq War, and their disappointments, like not getting their war on Syria, they neither learn lessons nor change goals. They just readjust their aim, shooting now at Putin over Ukraine as a way to clear the path again for “regime change” in Syria and Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Why Neocons Seek to Destabilize Russia.”]

The neocons also can take some solace from their “success” at enflaming the Middle East with Shia and Sunni now at each other’s throats — a bad thing for many people of the world and certainly for the many innocent victims in the region, but not so bad for the neocons. After all, it is the view of Israeli leaders and their neocon bedfellows (and women) that the internecine wars among Muslims provide at least some short-term advantages for Israel as it consolidates control over the Palestinian West Bank.

In a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memorandum for President Obama on Sept. 6, 2013, we called attention to an uncommonly candid report about Israeli/neocon motivation, written by none other than the Israel-friendly New York Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem Jodi Rudoren on Sept. 2, 2013, just two days after Obama took advantage of Putin’s success in persuading the Syrians to allow their chemical weapons to be destroyed and called off the planned attack on Syria, causing consternation among neocons in Washington.

Rudoren can perhaps be excused for her naïve lack of “political correctness.” She had been barely a year on the job, had very little prior experience with reporting on the Middle East, and – in the excitement about the almost-attack on Syria – she apparently forgot the strictures normally imposed on the Times’ reporting from Jerusalem. In any case, Israel’s priorities became crystal clear in what Rudoren wrote.

In her article, entitled “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” Rudoren noted that the Israelis were arguing, quietly, that the best outcome for Syria’s (then) 2 ½-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, was no outcome:

“For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

“‘This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’”

Clear enough? If this is the way Israel’s leaders continue to regard the situation in Syria, then they look on deeper U.S. involvement – overt or covert – as likely to ensure that there is no early resolution of the conflict there. The longer Sunni and Shia are killing each other, not only in Syria but also across the region as a whole, the safer Tel Aviv’s leaders calculate Israel is.

Favoring Jihadis

But Israeli leaders have also made clear that if one side must win, they would prefer the Sunni side, despite its bloody extremists from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. In September 2013, shortly after Rudoren’s article, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren – then speaking as a former ambassador – said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

Netanyahu sounded a similar theme in his March 3, 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress in which he trivialized the threat from the Islamic State with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” when compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East.

That Syria’s main ally is Iran with which it has a mutual defense treaty plays a role in Israeli calculations. Accordingly, while some Western leaders would like to achieve a realistic if imperfect settlement of the Syrian civil war, others who enjoy considerable influence in Washington would just as soon see the Assad government and the entire region bleed out.

As cynical and cruel as this strategy is, it isn’t all that hard to understand. Yet, it seems to be one of those complicated, politically charged situations well above the pay-grade of the sophomores advising President Obama – who, sad to say, are no match for the neocons in the Washington Establishment. Not to mention the Netanyahu-mesmerized Congress.

Corker Uncorked

Speaking of Congress, a year after Rudoren’s report, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, divulged some details about the military attack that had been planned against Syria, while lamenting that it was canceled.

In doing so, Corker called Obama’s abrupt change on Aug. 31, 2013, in opting for negotiations over open war on Syria, “the worst moment in U.S. foreign policy since I’ve been here.” Following the neocon script, Corker blasted the deal (since fully implemented) with Putin and the Syrians to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.

Corker complained, “In essence – I’m sorry to be slightly rhetorical – we jumped into Putin’s lap.” A big No-No, of course – especially in Congress – to “jump into Putin’s lap” even though Obama was able to achieve the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons without the United States jumping into another Middle East war.

It would have been nice, of course, if General Clark had thought to share his inside-Pentagon information earlier with the rest of us. In no way should he be seen as a whistleblower.

At the time of his September 2007 speech, he was deep into his quixotic attempt to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. In other words, Clark broke the omerta code of silence observed by virtually all U.S. generals, even post-retirement, merely to put some distance between himself and the debacle in Iraq – and win some favor among anti-war Democrats. It didn’t work, so he endorsed Hillary Clinton; that didn’t work, so he endorsed Barack Obama.

Wolfowitz, typically, has landed on his feet. He is now presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s foreign policy/defense adviser, no doubt outlining his preferred approach to the Middle East chessboard to his new boss. Does anyone know the plural of “bedlam?”

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served for a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and CIA analyst and is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

April 14, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Shifting Narrative on Iran

Iran will always be the enemy

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • April 14, 2015

For more than twenty years the world has been hearing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends in the United States that Iran is a global threat because it is developing nuclear weapons. Netanyahu’s warning has been framed around his repeated prediction that if nothing were done to intercede in the process the Mullahs would have a weapon of mass destruction in their hands within six months or a year. Since that time numerous time spans of six months or a year have passed and no weapon has appeared, even though Israel did its best to provide forged intelligence to muddy the waters about what was actually occurring. In a notable scam, a lap top prepared by Mossad and delivered by an Iranian dissident group half convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was up to something. Israel has also been adept at floating false “intelligence based” allegations that the Iranians were carrying out uranium enrichment in hidden, secret facilities.

But alas, the accepted narrative proved to be a bit creaky. In 2007 the United States intelligence community issued a joint assessment based on reliable information indicating that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program, so the threat that was being described as imminent suddenly became purely speculative and speculative threats are a dime a dozen, paling before the reality of actual North Korean nuclear weapons and fifty or more nukes in the hands of an unstable Pakistan.

When the threat of Iran actually building a bomb in the near term became less credible, the narrative perforce shifted its focus. It became no longer a question of Iran actually constructing a nuclear weapon. The central bone of contention became their having the capability to do so at some future point. This became known as “breakout capability,” which was defined as the ability to use stockpiled low enriched uranium, enrich it to weapons grade, and engineer it into a weapon. Inevitably, the breakout time for Iran was again often described as six months to a year, demonstrating that no good phony narrative detail element should ever go to waste.

Netanyahu and a number of American congressmen then continued to tinker with their warning, still complaining about breakout but emphasizing that it was actually the capability part that was most troubling. Iran, though a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which nuclear armed Israel is not, should have no right to enrich any uranium at all and ought to be forced to get rid of any uranium in its stockpile. It would also have to dispose of the centrifuges and other equipment used for enrichment and shut down the Fordo facility which, it was alleged, might be able to secretly produce weapons grade enriched uranium.

Ironically, the demands of both Israel and Congress made no sense as Iran and at least fifty other countries already possessed “capability” to make a nuclear weapon as there are many trained engineers able to understand the technical information that is already publicly available to those who know where to look. And the narrative became even more suspect when, in 2010, U.S. intelligence reexamined its previous finding and stated again that Tehran was not developing a weapon at all, an assertion that was actually confirmed by Israel’s Mossad, making it even more difficult to maintain the fiction that Iran was a danger to world peace.

Other intelligence assessments suggested that even if Tehran were able to obtain one or two crude nuclear weapons the threat could easily be contained, all of which produced yet another reset among the anti-Iran claque. The new focus was on delivery systems. Reports that Iran was developing or possibly buying from North Korea a new longer range missile for its arsenal became a key issue and the Obama administration wasted considerable time and energy in first correctly asserting that the missiles were not part of the discussion before folding and including mentioning them in talks as a sop to Israel. The new missiles, per Netanyahu, could allegedly hit parts of Europe and might be improved to the point where they could become intercontinental. And if Iran could acquire a bomb from somebody or develop its own through breakout it would threaten the entire world. The fact that Iran had neither the missile nor the weapon was seemingly irrelevant.

So now we arrive at 2015 and a former Israeli intelligence chief has openly said what most of the rest of the world has long known: Netanyahu is a liar when he talks about Iran. Concurrently, the P5+1 group of negotiators have concluded a marathon 18 months negotiation by achieving a framework agreement with Iran which will substantially diminish its ability to enrich uranium at all, will greatly reduce its stockpile and will also subject all of its research facilities to intrusive inspections. In return sanctions on Iran will slowly be lifted, but it should be observed that most of the major concessions were made by the Islamic Republic, where there is considerable pressure from the public to make Iran again a normal member of the international community.

It is a good agreement for all parties, guaranteeing that Iran will not go nuclear in a bad way and offering a substantive reward for cooperation to the country’s people and government. Unfortunately, details of how an agreement will actually be implemented have yet to be worked out, meaning that a final document is not anticipated until the end of June. That means the troublemakers still have time to create mischief.

Of course Netanyahu and a large number of American Congressmen might be singled out as the aforementioned troublemakers and it has to be reported that they are clearly not happy with the Obama framework. As an agreement will basically eliminate the short term threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, the initial kibitzing from the usual critics focused on what might happen after the ten years covered by the agreement. Netanyahu has averred that it would virtually guarantee an Iranian bomb after that point, but as his prescience is questionable and he has been wrong about everything else that argument did not obtain much traction, not even in the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal.

Sensing defeat, Netanyahu and his tame congressmen clearly decided a sharp change in direction would be necessary and, presumably guided by the warm and friendly hand of AIPAC, a new approach was concocted combining two essential elements. First, it was claimed that Iran cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement because, as Chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman put it “deception” is in the Iranian leadership DNA. That would mean that Iran might appear to be going along with the agreement but it would secretly be manufacturing a weapon. Just exactly how that would take place under an intrusive inspections regime is not clear, but the idea is to plant the seed that Iranians are intrinsically deceitful and dangerous.

The second argument, which began to evolve before the framework agreement was announced and which not surprisingly has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, is that Iran is threatening and dangerous by virtue of its behavior beyond its nuclear program. Congressmen and pundits have begun to bleat that Iran “now dominates four Arab capitals” and it also “supports terrorism.” One op-ed writer who should know better has described the development of a new Persian Empire.

The first argument is sheer fantasy and racist to boot but the second argument, intended to shift the narrative in a new direction, is actually the more ridiculous. Iran has a struggling economy, a relatively weak military, and much of its outreach to Shi’a communities in neighboring states is in response to the hostility surrounding it engineered by the U.S., Israel and the Sunni ruled regimes in the Persian Gulf. Creating and exploiting a limited sphere of influence as a defensive measure is far from uniquely Iranian.

And the assertion that Iran is controlling four Arab capitals – Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Sanaa – is breathtaking in its audacity. Iran has friends and allies in all four states but it does not determine what the government does or does not do in any one of them. The close relationship of Iran with Syria and Iraq is largely defensive and can indeed be described as derived from the instability in the region that came about because of reckless American intervention against Saddam Hussein followed by Washington’s support of a roadmap to remove Bashir al-Assad.

As for the terrorism issue, one might reasonably argue that Iran has been on the receiving end more often than not. It has been subjected to bombing and shooting attacks carried out by armed separatists supported by Tel Aviv and Washington, its scientists and technicians have been assassinated by Israel and its computer systems have been attacked with Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame viruses. According to the annual State Department Countries Report on Terrorism, Tehran’s actual support of what the U.S. and Israel claim are terrorists consists of continuing “… support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and for Hizballah. It has also increased its presence in Africa and attempted to smuggle arms to Houthi separatists in Yemen and Shia oppositionists in Bahrain. Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) and its regional proxy groups to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East. The IRGC-QF is the regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad. Iran views Syria as a crucial causeway in its weapons supply route to Hizballah, its primary beneficiary.”

The meddling by the Revolutionary Guards would appear to be small potatoes, largely defensive in nature and focused on specific regional interests and concerns, relatively minor in comparison with what the United States does globally. The two Palestinian groups cited by name later in the report, the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), plus Hizballah in Lebanon, would be considered resistance organizations against Israeli occupation and aggression by many. None of them threatens the United States.

The sad reality is that the pro-Israel crowd wants a war with Iran to be fought exclusively by the United States no matter what Iran does to avoid an armed conflict and they will twist the narrative so that Tehran always represents a serious threat. Remember the lies that were concocted to justify invading Iraq? Iraq allegedly had weapons of mass destruction, it threatened the entire region, it supported terrorism… does that sound familiar? Even complete surrender by Tehran might not be enough to satisfy the hawks in Congress and in Israel because the fact that Iran is in terms of geography, resources and population a regional power is what disturbs psychopaths like Benjamin Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Hopefully the American public has finally developed enough savvy to see through the barrage of war talk and lies that it will be subjected to over the next two months. Hopefully Israel and its Lobby and its friends will go down in defeat one more time, perhaps a defeat decisive enough to convince them that their narrative shifting is not any longer working. Hopefully.

April 14, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel refuses to probe bombing of civilians in Gaza

MEMO | April 10, 2015

Chief Military Advocate General Danny Efroni said he refuses to probe the bombing of civilians in the Gaza Strip during last summer’s war, but will probe potential acts of looting and robbery committed by Israeli soldiers.

Efroni said: “You will never hear me say, ‘The IDF is the most moral army in the world’.”

Nearly 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the air, naval and ground strikes on Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians. A quarter of the victims were children.

In an interview with Haaretz newspaper, published yesterday, Efroni said: “We will not put soldiers on trial only in order to satisfy the media, which is disturbed by the large number of civilians killed in the war. I am not investigating in order to satisfy anyone. I will not file indictments in order to arrange the statistics of B’Tselem,” which criticised the small number of indictments in the past.

An indication of Efroni and the army’s general approach is the fact that despite the passing of over eight months since the end of the war, no decision has been made regarding whether or not a military probe into the incident in Rafah that has become known as “Black Friday” on 1 August, when the IDF implemented the Hannibal Directive after the abduction of Second Lt. Hadar Goldin.

This criminal and brutal operation involved the launching of very heavy artillery fire and intensive air, ground and naval strikes, resulting in the death of dozens of Palestinian civilians. Some estimates indicate that 150 Palestinians were killed in the attack, the vast majority of whom were civilians. The Israeli army has admitted that it did not warn the civilians in the Rafah area to leave their homes before they launched the intense strike.

Despite this, Efroni said that a Military Police probe is not an insurance policy for the IDF protecting them from being prosecuted at The Hague. “If the probe is a whitewash and not a true investigation, nothing will stop the ICC,” he added.

Israeli human rights organisations B’Tselem and Yesh Din claimed that the investigation system in the IDF is “a failure” and that Israel “is not interested and not capable of investigating violations of Palestinians’ human rights by the security forces.”

B’Tselem also claimed that the IDF investigations do not arrive at the truth, noting that of the 52 Military Police probes opened after Operation Cast Lead, carried out in late 2008 and early 2009, only three resulted in the filing of indictments – and the harshest punishment was for a soldier who stole a credit card.

April 11, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Real Nuclear Threat in the Middle East

By Sheldon Richman | Free Association | April 8, 2015

To get a sense of how badly the regime in Iran wants sanctions relief for the Iranian people, you have to do more than contemplate the major concessions it has made in negotiations with the United States and the rest of the P5+1. Not only is Iran willing to dismantle a major part of its peaceful civilian nuclear program, to submit to the most intrusive inspections, to redesign a reactor, to eliminate two-thirds of its centrifuges, to get rid of much of its enriched uranium, and to limit nuclear research — it must do all this while being harangued by the nuclear monopolist of the Middle East — Israel — which remains, unlike Iran, a nonsigner of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and faces no inspections or limits on its production of nuclear weapons.

This is something out of Alice in Wonderland. The Islamic Republic of Iran, born in 1979, has not attacked another country. (With U.S. help, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.) In contrast, Israel has attacked its Arab neighbors several times since its founding, including two devastating invasions and a long occupation of Lebanon, not to mention repeated onslaughts in the Gaza Strip and the military occupation of the West Bank. Israel has also repeatedly threatened war against Iran and engaged in covert and proxy warfare, including the assassination of scientists. Even with Iran progressing toward a nuclear agreement, Israel (like the United States) continues to threaten Iran.

Yet Iran is universally cast as the villain (with scant evidence) and Israel the vulnerable victim.

You’d never know that Iran favors turning the Middle East into a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone (a nuclear-weapons-free zone was first proposed by the U.S.-allied shah of Iran and Egypt in 1974), and beyond that, Iran over a decade ago offered a “grand bargain” that contained provisions to reassure the world about its nuclear program and an offer to recognize Israel, specifically, acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative. The George W. Bush administration rebuffed Iran.

At the last NPT review conference in 2010, Iran renewed its support for the zone, the BBC reported at the time: “Tehran supports the ‘immediate and unconditional’ implementation of the 1995 resolution [to create the zone], declares the [then] president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The United States and Israel claim in principle to support having the Middle East free of nuclear weapons — but not just yet. The Israeli government said in 2010 that implementation of the principle could occur “only after peace agreements with all the countries in the region.” ABC News quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Israel might sign the NPT “if the Middle East one day advances to a messianic age where the lion lies down with the lambs.”

That is classic Netanyahu demagoguery. As noted, the Arab League in 2002 — and again in 2007 — offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and arrived at a “just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” At that point the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region”; i.e., they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”

Thus Netanyahu’s position is a sham. He could have peace treaties in short order if he wanted to. But, as he said before the recent elections, he will never allow the Palestinians to have their own country.

For its part, the United States “broadly agrees with Israel that conditions for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone do not yet exist in the Middle East,” the BBC reported. In other words, the Obama administration slavishly takes the Israel-AIPAC line.

While politicians and pundits lose sleep over an Iranian nuclear-weapons program that does not exist — are they having nightmares of the United States being deterred by Iran? — they support Israel, the nuclear power that brutalizes a captive population, attacks its neighbors, threatens war against Iran, and refuses to talk peace with willing partners.

 

April 9, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

When Free Speech Becomes Dead Silence – The Israel Lobby And A Cowed Academia

Media Lens | April 8, 2015

The sudden cancellation of an academic conference on Israel, as well as the lack of outcry from ‘mainstream’ media, demonstrates once again the skewed limits to ‘free speech’ in ‘advanced’ Western democracies. ‘Je suis Charlie’ already feels like ancient history. It certainly does not apply when it comes to scrutiny of the state of Israel.

The conference, titled ‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’, was to be held at the University of Southampton from 15-17 April 2015. Planned speakers included Richard Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Gabi Piterberg, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, Israeli academic Ilan Pappé and Palestinian historian Nur Musalha.

The meeting was billed as the ‘first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine.’ The approach would be scholarly with ‘multidisciplinary debate reflecting diverse perspectives, and thus genuine disagreements’. Rather than being a coven of political extremists and violent hotheads, this was to be a serious gathering of respected and authoritative academics with in-depth knowledge of Israel and Palestine.

But intense pressure from the Israel lobby about the airing of ‘anti-Semitic views’ has torpedoed the University of Southampton’s earlier stated commitment to uphold ‘freedom of speech within the law’. In a classic piece of bureaucratic hand-wringing, the university issued a corporate-style statement on 1 April that leaned heavily on the pretext of ‘health and safety’ to kill off the conference. This happened a mere two weeks before the conference, planned months earlier in consultation with the university, was due to begin.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews was among those Zionist groups that had been urging the university to cancel the event. Its president, Vivian Wineman, said:

‘It is formulated in extremist terms, has attracted toxic speakers and is likely to result in an increase in anti-Semitism and tension on campus.’

The Telegraph reported that ‘at least two major patrons of the university were considering withdrawing their financial support. One is a charitable foundation, the other a wealthy family.’

There was also fierce criticism from several politicians at Westminster. Mark Hoban, the Conservative MP for Fareham, described the conference as a ‘provocative, hard-line, one-sided forum that would question and delegitimize the existence of a democratic state.’ Caroline Nokes, MP for Romsey and Southampton North, said the university risked bringing itself into disrepute by hosting what she described as ‘an apparently one-sided event’.

A senior government minister even got involved. Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities, derided the conference as a ‘one-sided diatribe’. He went further:

‘There is a careful line between legitimate academic debate on international law and the actions of governments, and the far-left’s bashing of Israel which often descends into naked anti-Semitism.’

This was outrageous high-level political interference in free speech. When the university confirmed that it was cancelling the conference, the decision was predictably welcomed by the Israeli embassy in London:

‘This was a clear instance of an extremist political campaign masquerading as an academic exercise, and it is only right to recognise that respecting free speech does not mean tolerating intolerance.’

Michael Gove, the Government Chief Whip and former Secretary of State for Education, could barely contain his glee:

‘It was not a conference, it was an anti-Israel hate-fest.’

The ‘Health And Safety’ Pretext

On April 2, the conference organisers responded to the university’s sudden reversal of its earlier commitment to hold the conference. The organisers, who include Israeli-born law professor Oren Ben-Dor, said that they were ‘shocked and dismayed’ at the university’s about-turn. This was especially disappointing given that the police had given assurances that they would be ‘able to manage the demonstrations’.

The organisers noted that ‘general sensitivity following recent terrorist events in Europe’ had been ‘misused to inflate the risks’ of the conference going ahead. More widely, warned the organisers, the implications for academic freedom would be dire:

‘The stakes for academic public space, for academic freedom and for freedom of speech are too high. The message it sends to other academic institutions and to students all over the world is grave and depressing. It will potentially make campuses obedient and depoliticised, distant and docile corporate spaces.’

An inadvertent clue to the reality underlying the university’s rhetoric on ‘security’ and ‘health and safety’ could be found in a report last month in the Jewish Chronicle. Board of Deputies of British Jews president Wineman told the Chronicle that:

‘When we had a meeting with the university vice-chancellor they said they would review it [the conference] on health and safety terms.

‘The two lines of attack [sic] possible were legal and health and safety and they were leaning on that one.’

The ‘line of attack’ about ‘health and safety’, then, appears to be cover for the university caving in to pro-Israel pressure. This fits a wider pattern of the pro-Israel lobby’s fear of increasing global condemnation of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and international law. As Ben White, an authoritative freelance journalist on the Middle East, reported last month, the British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, recently met with UK university heads to discuss Israel and the limits of ‘freedom of speech’. Also present were representatives of at least three pro-Israel organisations: the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Union of Jewish Students.

Southampton University’s refusal at the time to buckle under pro-Israel lobby pressure was cited in the meeting. White noted:

‘This stubborn commitment to freedom of speech has clearly angered Britain’s Israel lobby, but the bigger question here is why a UK ambassador was involved in the first place.’

When pressed to explain this, a Foreign Office spokesperson told White that ‘part of Matthew Gould’s role involves outreach to the British Jewish Community.’ White added:

‘The spokesperson did not elaborate on whether lobbying British universities was part of the ambassador’s remit.’

The conference organisers have now lodged an injunction at the High Court in London in an attempt to prevent the university from curtailing their right to freedom of speech. The legal argument is that in unfairly withdrawing permission for the conference, the university has capitulated to the pro-Israel lobby. ‘This is blatant censorship under the guise of a specter of campus being overrun by violent hordes, which is patently groundless,’ said Mark McDonald, a public interest lawyer from the chambers of Michael Mansfield QC.

Many academics have protested the university’s decision. David Gurnham, the Director of Research at the university’s School of Law, wrote in an email to vice-chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam:

‘It seems to me outrageous that you seem to have allowed the bullying and threats of the Israeli lobby to prevent the perfectly lawful and legitimate exercise of free speech and academic debate. I understand that the police had reported that they would be perfectly able and willing to deal with any security concerns at the event: this ought to be good enough.

‘Cancelling the event in this way makes the University look weak, spineless and reactionary. I am proud to be a member of academic staff here, but your decision to withdraw support for a conference in this manner makes me, and I’m sure very many others like me, seriously question the University’s commitment to open and free debate.’

(More letters of protest from academics can be read here.)

All this comes at a time when the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is gathering strength. A recent debate at the Cambridge Union Society even passed the motion that ‘This House Believes Israel Is A Rogue State’.

At the time of writing, a petition calling for the University of Southampton to uphold free speech has attracted almost 10,000 signatures in just one week (it took a Zionist petition in favour of cancelling the conference one month to reach around 6,500).

An earlier petition in support of the conference was signed by round 900 academics around the world.

All of this must make the pro-Israel lobby deeply uncomfortable. As Ben White observed:

‘Whatever the final outcome, this story is significant for the way in which it illustrates not so much the pro-Israel lobby’s power, but its weaknesses.’

No More ‘Je Suis Charlie’

Media coverage of the cancellation of the conference has been almost non-existent. We found just three news articles in the national press: one in the Guardian, one in the Telegraph and one in the Express.

But what is even more glaring than the lack of news coverage is the editorial silence on the pro-Israel lobby’s bullying and intimidation. What happened to all those grand declarations from editorial offices, under the banner ‘Je suis Charlie’, to uphold freedom of speech and the ‘right to offend’? The journalists and cartoonists who were murdered at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris were, we were told, ‘martyrs for freedom of speech’. The atrocity was ‘a war declared on civilisation’, ‘an attack on the free world’, ‘an assault on journalists and free speech’. A Guardian editorial proclaimed:

‘If there is a right to free speech, implicit within it there has to be a right to offend. Any society that’s serious about liberty has to defend the free flow of ugly words, even ugly sentiments.’

Where is the outpouring of dismay now from liberal commentators across the British media at the actions of the pro-Israel lobby? Where are the comment pieces decrying this latest attack on free speech? When it comes to Israel, the ‘right to offend’ is quietly dropped.

Moreover, why should it be ‘toxic’ to examine critically the founding ideology of Israel, a state that was built on one of the largest forced migrations in modern history? As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé documented in his acclaimed 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the establishment of Israel in 1948 was ‘Nakba’ – a catastrophe – for the Palestinians. More than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, were uprooted, and over 500 Palestinian villages destroyed.

Nakba largely remains a taboo subject for ‘mainstream’ coverage of the Middle East. Indeed, notes Pappé, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israel is a ‘crime [that] has been erased almost totally from the global public memory’. This crime, he continues:

‘has been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.’ (Ibid., p. xiii)

Sadly, the fear of offending the powerful pro-Israel lobby remains a major factor in British politics, cultural debate and media reporting of Israel and Palestine (see Peter Oborne’s Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 in 2009). As one senior BBC television news producer revealed to Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group:

‘We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis.’

‘The Specious Slur Of Anti-Semitism’

In a moving piece of personal testimony, Professor Suleiman Sharkh of the University of Southampton, one of the conference organisers, published an open letter. He said:

‘I grew up in Gaza, but my family is originally from a town called Majdal Asqlan (now called Ashkelon by Israel). In November 1948, six months after the establishment of the State of Israel and after the wars had ended, the town was bombed and many people were killed. Those who survived were herded towards Gaza, crawling on their hands and knees in the thorny field. Since then we have lived in squalid refugee camps. I walked around in the sand soiled by the open sewers with my bare feet. I got my first shoes when I went to school at the age of six.’

Professor Sharkh then explained the relevance and importance of the conference to Palestinian people:

‘International Law was responsible for our misery. It was used to legalise the theft of our homes and it continues to be used to legalise the ongoing oppression of my people by the State of Israel. The questions asked by the conference are therefore questions that I have been asking all my life. They are important questions that need to be answered.’

The conference is now likely to go ahead at an alternative venue to be publicised soon.

The journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, whose powerful documentary Palestine Is Still The Issue is a must-see, told Media Lens (email, April 3, 2015):

‘Israel is a gangster state. It holds the world record in the breach and defiance of international law. It regularly massacres and terrorises the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, which even David Cameron has described as an “open prison”. Its courts uphold racism as state policy. It has re-elected a congenital liar as its prime minister. Its historians have long revealed the criminality of its beginning — the theft of land, the murder and brutalising of the indigenous population.’

He continued:

‘What Israel has, however, are powerful collaborators, who, even at the lowest rung, are able to intimidate institutional bureaucrats and others with the specious slur of anti-Semitism. In Britain, the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies operate this barely disguised smear as efficiently as a metronome. They, and others, have now helped silence a much needed conference on Israel at the University of Southampton. But they should not be wholly blamed. The collusion of the university authorities as they run up the false flag of “security concerns” is to blame; and the memory of every murdered child in Gaza is now their spectre. And along with the so-called “lobby”, they cannot win.’

Pilger concluded:

‘The rest of humanity has long recognised the truth about Israel, as every international survey shows. With exquisite timing, student unions across the UK are joining the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that is sweeping country after country, including the United States. The craven decision of Southampton will speed its progress; nothing is surer.’

Suggested Action

Please sign this petition in support of the conference.

Academics can also sign this statement of support.

April 8, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

‘We control US politicians like marionettes’ – Former Israeli politician

By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | April 6, 2015

Do Zionists control America?

Yossi Sarid, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, seems to think so. In a February 2015 Haaretz column, Sarid wrote:

In these very moments, the protocols are being rewritten. Rich Jews are writing them in their own handwriting. They, in their wealth, are confirming with their own signatures what anti-Semites used to slander them with in days gone by: We, the elders of Zion, pull the strings of Congress, and the congressmen are nothing but marionettes who do our will. If they don’t understand our words, they’ll understand our threats. And if in the past, we ran the show from behind the scenes, now we’re doing it openly, from center stage. And if you forget our donations, the wellspring will run dry.

The candid admission is one of many from Israeli politicians and Jewish commentators who openly boast of their power over the United States government, media and financial world.

Believing themselves to have a ‘divine right’ to rule, these Old Testament fundamentalists apparently want us to know we are nothing more than serfs and cotton-pickers on a global Zionist slave plantation.

As one of Israel’s chief religious leaders Ovadia Yosef put it, “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.”

April 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Southampton faces outcry from staff and public over cancelled Israel conference

MEMO | April 7, 2015

The University of Southampton is facing a public outcry and discontent from staff over its cancellation of a conference on Israel and international law.

After months of pressure from pro-Israel advocacy groups, university officials announced last week that the event would not take place due to concerns over ‘health and safety’.

Since organisers revealed that Southampton was pulling the plug, more than 9,300 people have signed a petition calling for the university to “uphold free speech & allow the conference on Israel and international law to proceed.”

Within the university itself, more than 30 researchers, lecturers and professors at Southampton have joined a list of some 900 academics expressing support for the conference.

The Southampton signatories include David Gurnham, the School of Law’s Director of Research, Professor Michael Kelly OBE, Head of Modern Languages, and Professor Malcolm H Levitt FRS.

In addition, the Vice-Chancellor has received emails from a number of staff unhappy about the decision to drop the conference, some of whom have published their letters publicly.

Among them was an email from Dr. A.M. Viens, Associate Professor in Law and the interim director of the Law School’s Centre for Health Ethics and Law (HEAL). Dr. Viens urged the administration to reconsider, so as to “take a strong stance of academic freedom.”

In a sign of the growing dissatisfaction, Chief Operating Office Steve White has asked staff to channel concerns through their line manager, “who should reassure them that the University will be monitoring and responding to any developments.”

Any “further concerns” are to be directed to a “HR hotline.”

Meanwhile, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has called the cancellation “unprecedented”, and condemned the University for “allowing political pressure to determine its academic activities.”

According to Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, chair of BRICUP, “in living memory no academic conference at a UK university has been cancelled due to external political pressure.” He added: “Southampton’s decision sets an atrocious precedent that must be reversed. If not it deserves to be treated as a pariah by the rest of the academic community.”

Organisers are currently pursuing a legal challenge, with further developments expected this week.

April 7, 2015 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Israeli soldier: Palestinians are our training targets

MEMO | April 7, 2015

The Israeli army uses Palestinians as targets for their training, Haaretz reported a former soldier as saying.

In an article entitled “From an Israeli combat soldier to conscientious objector”, Haaretz said that “after two years in the Israel Defence Forces, Yaron Kaplan, 21, of Lod, is declaring himself a conscientious objector and is refusing to continue his service because of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”

“From the moment I began my training I understood how violent this place is,” he said. “It was a totally traumatic experience. Every time we would do shooting practice, we would be ‘executing’ someone – ‘Now we shoot Mohammed; now we shoot at Ahmed’,” he said.

Kaplan said that he joined the army immediately after he graduated from the military college, but has now quit. He explained this is because of the “violent nature of the army”.

Ruling out any chance of a peaceful solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said: “I can’t expect or demand from a person that he be my partner, or that he should really see me as a partner for dialogue as long as I am imposing a military regime on him.”

Kalan said he would not return to his army service after Passover, he will present himself at his base and expect to be imprisoned.

“I am fully aware of the ramifications of this, what the path before me looks like – a lot of prison, including lengthy terms,” he said. “I have no doubt that this is the right thing to do. The emotional price and the price to my conscience that I would have to pay for the mental suffering of being in the army are too heavy from my perspective.”

April 7, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Lausanne statement: Small victory for truth

By KEVIN BARRETT | Press TV | April 6, 2015

Thursday’s agreement between the P5+1 countries and Iran has been hailed as a victory for peace. Its opponents, led by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, are terrified that the agreement may lead to a more peaceful and stable Middle East in which Zionist expansionism and genocide would be unsustainable.

But the agreement is not just a step toward peace. It also represents a step toward truth. And truth, even more than peace, is what truly terrifies Netanyahu and his neoconservative allies.

The Myth of “Iran nuclear crisis”

The whole “Iran nuclear crisis” is a myth. To put it more bluntly, it is a lie. And that lie was meticulously constructed by neoconservative Zionists to serve their interests, according to their philosophy of governance, which worships big lies and views truth-speaking as dangerous to society.

In reality, there is no “Iran nuclear crisis.” Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. Both the current Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and his predecessor, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, have issued and repeatedly confirmed edicts that absolutely ban – on religious grounds – the development of nuclear weapons.

The American CIA and Israeli Mossad essentially acknowledge this. Both agencies have issued reports stating that there is no evidence Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Claims to the contrary are fraudulent. Gareth Porter’s book Manufactured Crisis shows that the same neoconservative and Israeli networks that fabricated fake evidence of Iraqi WMD also forged phony documents purporting to show an Iranian interest in nuclear weapons. Both forgeries were designed to trick America into fighting wars for Israel.

Such swindles and forgeries are “noble lies” in the eyes of neoconservatives. Their “noble lies” about 9/11-anthrax and Iraqi WMD led to the deaths of more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of many millions of refugees, the long-term poisoning of those countries with depleted uranium, the rise of the so-called Islamic State, the destruction of America’s international reputation, and a groundswell of well-justified vitriolic hatred of America and Israel all over the world. The neocon claim that the ends justify the means is preposterous in light of these facts.

If US President Obama and the other P5+1 leaders had fully faced these facts and declared them openly, it would have been a smashing victory for truth. Unfortunately, hypocrisy is the way of the world and especially the way of the West. So they are retiring the “Iranian nuclear crisis” myth quietly by pretending that their hard-won agreement has saved the world from being destroyed by (nonexistent) Iranian nuclear weapons.

The P5+1 leaders are fighting a big lie with a smaller lie – a risky strategy. By refusing to expose the false premise of an “Iranian nuclear threat,” the P5+1 leaders are leaving the door open for neocons to try to revive the myth.

In hopes of preventing such retrenchment, Obama and his realist faction of the P5+1 are firing warning shots across Netanyahu’s bow – and across the bows of Israeli assets in Congress. They have officially exposed the Israeli nuclear weapons program by declassifying US government documents showing Israel has been making and stockpiling nuclear weapons for decades, unmasking Netanyahu as the worst imaginable hypocrite. And they have exposed Congressional collusion with Netanyahu that violates US Constitutional law.

Let us briefly review the case for charging Congressional representatives with violating the Constitution of the United States. According to reports apparently leaked by the US Administration, Netanyahu spied on the negotiations and fed secret information to his stooges in Congress in an attempt to torpedo an agreement with Iran.

By accepting information classified as secret under US law, provided by a foreign (Israeli) intelligence service, as part of an effort to undermine the President’s negotiations with a foreign power (Iran), numerous pro-Israel Senators and Representatives clearly violated Article II Section 2 of the American Constitution. That section holds that the power to negotiate treaties is vested solely with the President; the Senate’s role is merely “advice and consent.” In the Federalist Papers No. 64, the framers of the Constitution explain that the purpose for reserving this power to the President is to ensure that diplomacy can be conducted in secret, so that the contents of treaties can remain secret until they are submitted to the Senate for ratification.

Collaborating with a foreign intelligence service to spy on the President’s secret negotiations in order to publicize and wreck those negotiations clearly violates Article II Section 2. And if we face the unpleasant fact that Israel is an enemy of the United States, given that it has repeatedly waged war on the US by attacking US targets and mass-murdering Americans, from the Lavon Affair of 1954 to the USS Liberty massacre of 1967 to the controlled demolitions of September 11th, 2001, we have no choice but to admit that these Congressmen are guilty of treason as well.

Would the Obama Administration really consider charging Israeli assets in Congress with violating the Constitution . . . or even treason? Might Obama even consider revealing to the American people that Israel, which has essentially stolen more than a trillion dollars from America, is not America’s friend, but its worst enemy?

Senator Diane Feinstein, a wealthy liberal Zionist close to the Obama Administration, recognizes that Netanyahu’s actions are endangering Israel. In a recent interview she said she wished Netanyahu would “contain himself” because his rash actions could “backfire.”

If Netanyahu’s out-of-control chutzpah does backfire to the point that Israel’s crimes against America are fully exposed, truth will win a resounding victory.

Unfortunately, the Zionist stranglehold on mainstream media will probably prevent “big truth” from leaking out in a big way, at least in the near term. So we truth-seekers will presumably have to content ourselves with smaller victories. One such small victory is the impending “resolution” of the phony, nonexistent, Zionist-fabricated “Iran nuclear crisis.”

April 6, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza returns to 8-hour electricity schedule

Ma’an – 06/04/2015

GAZA CITY – The Gaza Strip electricity distribution company said Sunday that the Gaza Strip would return to the 8-hour program for electricity, in which power is supplied and cut off in 8-hour intervals.

Jamal al-Dardasawi, a spokesman for the company, told Ma’an that it has started to receive the first batches of electricity generated by the local generation station which returned to work Sunday evening.

Al-Dardasawi said the first 24 hours of the new schedule would be confusing, but the schedule would be balanced in all areas with a day.

The return to the program comes after the government’s decision to exempt the station of tax on fuel for three months.

The plant, Gaza’s sole power station, was to be supplied with fuel on Sunday after more than a month-long closure when the Gazan energy authority ran out of funding.

Nathmi Muhanna, PA director of border crossings in the Gaza Strip, said that 10 trucks carrying 400,000 liters of fuel would be passing though the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing on Sunday, and that a regular supply of fuel would be resumed during the week.

On Mar. 2, the Hamas-run energy authority closed the plant after they were unable to afford the taxes demanded by the PA for importing fuel into besieged Gaza.

In December last year, Qatar stepped in and donated $10 million to the PA to cover the tax, effectively exempting Hamas from paying it, but by March that money dried up.

The plant requires 550,000 liters of fuel per day to produce at capacity, the energy authority says.

Even with the plant running, Gaza has only been able to supply about 12 hours of electricity to residents each day, and that it was believed that would fall to just 6 hours after the plant’s shutdown.

Gaza’s energy authority has been plagued by supply problems due to the Israeli blockade, in place since 2007 and upheld by Egypt, as well as devastation caused by war.

Last summer the plant was targeted during the 50-day Israeli offensive on Gaza, completely knocking it out of commission. The Gaza power authority said at the time that the damages from the attack could take up to a year to fix completely.

Both Israel and Egypt also feed electricity into Gaza, but the extent of this supply is severely limited as part of the blockade.

Many individual homes have their own generators, and households can purchase, expensively, fuel that comes into Gaza for private consumption.

April 6, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama says a vulnerable Israel would be ‘failure’ of his presidency

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Press TV – April 6, 2015

US President Barack Obama says he is not seeking to weaken Israel, adding a vulnerable Tel Aviv would be a failure of his presidency.

Obama made the remakes in a 45-minute video interview with New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, a staunch supporter of Israel and its policies, on Saturday. The interview was posted on Sunday.

“I would consider it a failure on my part, a fundamental failure of my presidency, if on my watch or as a consequence of work that I’ve done, Israel was rendered more vulnerable,” Obama told Friedman.

Referring to the differences between Washington and Tel Aviv over the recent mutual understanding between the P5+1 and Iran over its nuclear energy program, Obama said Israel has reason to be concerned.

Obama said that no disagreements between Israel and the United States can break their mutual bond.

He also said that America’s defense of Israel is unshakable. He said the Switzerland understanding had a clear message that if anyone messes with Israel, America will be there.

Obama once again defended the understanding achieved on issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.

On Thursday, the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – reached an outline of a potentially historic agreement with Iran over Tehran’s civilian nuclear work that would lift all international sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic in exchange for certain steps Tehran will take with regard to its nuclear program.

Obama has hailed the “historic understanding” with Iran, saying that it paves the way for a final agreement in three months.

Israeli officials have called it a “historic mistake which will make the world far more dangerous.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN on Sunday that the nuclear understanding reached in Switzerland last week was a “bad deal” which would endanger Tel Aviv’s survival.

“It doesn’t roll back Iran’s nuclear program. It keeps a vast nuclear infrastructure in place,” Netanyahu said. “Not a single centrifuge is destroyed. Not a single nuclear facility is shut down including the underground facilities…. Thousands of centrifuges will keep spinning enriching uranium. That’s a bad deal.”

April 6, 2015 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

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