A Passionate Attachment
Deferring to Israel is “what we are”
“I believe that the establishment of the state of Israel was the greatest accomplishment of the twentieth century”
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • February 5, 2019
I predicted three weeks ago that the Senate bill on the Middle East, which was rejected three times while the government was shutdown, would quickly receive cloture by a comfortable margin to end debate and proceed to a full vote in the Senate after the federal bureaucracy reopened. That has proven to be the case. Senate Bill S.1 was approved on January 29th 76 for votes to 22 against. Every Republican voted for it, minus only Rand Paul and Jerry Moran, who did not vote. The Republicans were joined by 25 Democrats, all of whom had previous voted “no” to embarrass the White House over the shutdown. Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, who has described himself as Israel’s protector in the Senate, switched his vote as did notoriously pro-Israel Senators Ben Cardin and Bob Menendez. The bill must now be passed by the Senate, which is certain to take place, before being sent on to the House of Representatives for its approval, where there will certainly be some limited debate. It then will go to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Readers will recall that S.1 the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019, sponsored by the singularly ambitious though demonstrably brain dead Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, included $33 billion in guaranteed aid to Israel for the next ten years, an unprecedented gesture to America’s closest ally and best friend in the whole world, as Congress might describe it.
But the legislation also incorporated measures to criminalize criticism of Israel, referred to as the Combating BDS Act of 2019. It has been correctly observed that that portion of the bill is clearly unconstitutional as it limits free speech, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and is considered to be the bedrock of American civil liberties, but there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will agree if and when the law is contested. Once free expression is abridged for Israel there will be no end to other grievance groups exploiting the precedent to silence criticism and effectively negate the First Amendment.
The potential destruction of the Bill of Rights is only one aspect of the power that Israel has over American policymakers. The widely ballyhooed election of several Congresswomen who appear willing to challenge the Israeli orthodoxy on Capitol Hill is already being countered by the establishment within the Democratic Party, demonstrating once again how deep the corruption of America’s political class by Israel has gone.
In an early December speech before a largely Jewish audience at the Israeli-American Council gathering in South Florida, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated in no uncertain terms just how she and other Congressmen are more responsive to Israel and its supporters than they are to their own constituents. She said in response to a staged question during a “conversation” with Democratic Party top donor Israeli Haim Saban, “I have said to people when they ask me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.”
Now “who we are” is a favorite expression used by a certain type of progressive that was made popular by the smooth talking but devious Barack Obama, meaning “I am taking the moral high ground so don’t ask me any questions or challenge what I have just said.” In Pelosi’s case she is saying precisely that, that American patronage of Israel is a moral imperative, a commitment forever that must be sustained no matter what Israel does and even if the United States itself should fall into ruin.
It is an absurd comment for someone who represents the people of her state and has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the ultimate pander to a right-wing Jewish audience that is socially progressive and consistently votes Democratic, which Pelosi celebrated, while at the same time cheering the bloody repression of the Palestinian people. And while Israel’s cheering section is doing all that, it is also dragging the American people into wars that need not be fought and stealing the taxpayers’ dollars to give to the racist Kleptocrats in charge in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Pelosi, like her partner in crime Senator Chuck Schumer, who also spoke at the conference, has a problem in paying for security along America’s southern border but she does not hesitate to send billions of dollars to Israel every year. One has to wonder at her priorities, but she knows that American Jews are more powerful and relevant to her party’s finances than doing the right thing would be, so there is no evidence of any hesitation on her part to throwing some Arabs and the outliers within her own party under the bus.
And Nancy also spoke of the dissidents in the Democratic Party, all five or so of them, saying “Remove all doubt in your mind. It’s just a question of not paying attention to a few people who may want to go their own way…” Apparently there is plenty of room under that bus for non-believers. And she also threw out a standard line of how “I believe that the establishment of the state of Israel was the greatest accomplishment of the twentieth century” while also unloading on the Arabs saying “We have to I think in Congress make it really clear to Palestinians that we expect them to be responsible negotiators and we haven’t seen a lot of that thus far.”
Apparently, Nancy is unaware that the “establishment” of Israel forced 700,000 people who had lived in Palestine for centuries out of their homes. And she apparently also has missed all those stories of Palestinian “terrorist” children and emergency workers being shot dead by Israeli snipers while they were “negotiating” such things as access to food, water, and medicines from the inside of the Gaza containment fence. Or maybe she’s forgotten about the towns in Israel that can legally ban Christian or Muslim residents as Israel is now officially a Jewish only state. Nancy Pelosi’s extreme efforts to demonstrate loyalty and devotion to a nation that the rest of the world views as a pariah is commendable, but only if one is a sociopath.
There is something completely dead at the heart of American politics which makes basic humanity unacceptable when confronted by a force for evil that has penetrated and manipulated both the national media and the governing political consensus. That is what Israel and its rabid band of supporters have done to the United States. First Amendment? Goodbye. If the U.S. government should crumble under the strain, don’t worry because our support for you is eternal. Kill a couple of hundred Arabs, shoot a few thousand more? No problem. It’s God’s will. And if Israel leads America into a nuclear war? Then we will do what we have to do to protect our ally.
Ask Pelosi and Schumer, “Have you been corrupted?” They will answer “No. Of course not. It is what we are.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Pentagon resists US withdrawal from Syria, claims ISIS might rise again
RT | February 5, 2019
The newest report on US-led operations against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria admits the terrorist group is down to some 2,000 fighters, but argues continued US presence in the region is needed to prevent its resurgence.
Published on Monday, the report authored by the Pentagon and State Department inspectors-general also blamed Turkey for spoiling the US-backed Kurdish militia’s operations against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), and predicts no end to strife in the region, going against President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw US troops from Syria.
The report debunked the widely circulated estimate – from June 2018 – that IS had up to 17,000 fighters in Iraq and up to 14,000 in Syria, calling it questionable even at the time. The US-led coalition, known as the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) had “low confidence” in those estimates as of last July, the report said. As of January, CJTF-OIR estimated only 2,000 IS fighters remaining in the group’s last remaining bastion – known at the Pentagon as the Middle Euphrates River Valley (MERV) and located in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border.
The coalition gave conflicting assessments of IS strength and capabilities, reporting at the end of December that it “remains a battle-hardened and well-disciplined force,” with high morale and “unfazed by Coalition airstrikes,” only to say its morale was “trending downward” in January.
Since December, IS has killed several coalition soldiers in ambushes and with roadside bombs. According to CENTCOM, these are “opportunistic attacks” that will allow the militants to claim a propaganda victory.
‘We have to protect Israel’
Even as US troops are pulling out of Syria, President Trump has said he wants to keep some forces in the region “to protect Israel” and “watch Iran.”
“We have to protect other things that we have,” Trump told CBS on Sunday, but said the troops will be “coming back in a matter of time.”
Monday’s report, on the other hand, matches the reasoning of US intelligence chiefs last week that IS will rise again in the absence of US troops – although only in the limited area near its current holdout, rather than Syria and Iraq as a whole.
“You’ve got these divergent narratives,” security analyst Charles Shoebridge told RT. “Trump is speaking from the hip, if you like, he is speaking off the cuff, and it might be what he’s saying is actually a little bit closer to the truth of where the American strategy actually lies.”
The US ‘deep state’ is firmly against withdrawal from Syria, Shoebridge noted.
Turkey blamed for failure of US-backed offensive against ISIS
One of the things the report revealed is that the US-backed militia was presumably on the brink of crushing the last IS holdout in the Euphrates Valley, but had to halt their operation when Turkey threatened to intervene against the Kurdish fighters.
The Kurdish YPG militia makes up more than two thirds of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which the US have used as the main proxy against IS in northeastern Syria. With the YPG busy against the Turks, the Arab component of the SDF was “unable to conduct” offensive operations, and actually lost ground to IS in late October and November, when bad weather prevented coalition airplanes from flying.
It was only in mid-November, when the YPG was back in the fight, that the SDF was able to roll back IS gains, the report said, describing the YPG “paramount to stability and efforts to defeat ISIS.”
The report was also skeptical of Turkey’s offer to take over the battle against IS, noting that with the exception of the 2016 Al-Bab operation, “Turkey has not participated in ground operations against ISIS in Syria since 2017, nor have Turkish forces participated in the fight against ISIS in the MERV, which is approximately 230 miles away from al Bab and the Turkish border.”
Let Syria finish the job?
IS will remain an issue unless Sunni “socio-economic, political, and sectarian grievances are not adequately addressed by the national and local governments of Iraq and Syria,” the soldiers and diplomats argue. Left unsaid is that these grievances are a product of upheaval caused by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the US support for sectarian rebels in Syria starting in 2011.
Conspicuously absent from the report is the Syrian government, which has fought IS successfully with the support of Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, Shoebridge told RT.
If the SDF strikes a deal with Damascus following the US withdrawal, Shoebridge said, “the Syrian government could fill that vacuum, and continue with their very successful campaign against ISIS themselves.”
Death Knell For Syria Pullout: “We Have To Protect Israel” Says Trump
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 02/03/2019
After approaching two months of talk of a “full” and “immediate” US troop withdrawal from Syria, first ordered by President Trump on December 19 — which was predictably met with swift and fierce pushback from beltway hawks including in some cases his own advisers — it now appears the death knell has sounded on the prior “complete” and “rapid” draw down order.
Trump said in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview this weekend that some unspecified number of US troops will remain in the region, mostly in Iraq, with possibly some still in Syria, in order “to protect Israel” in what appears a significant backtrack from his prior insistence on an absolute withdrawal.
“We’re going to be there and we’re going to be staying. We have to protect Israel,” he replied when pressed by CBS reporter Margaret Brennan. “We have to protect other things that we have. But we’re – yeah, they’ll be coming back in a matter of time.” He did note that “ultimately some will be coming home.”
“Look, we’re protecting the world,” he added. “We’re spending more money than anybody’s ever spent in history, by a lot.” Trump’s slow drift and change in tune on the subject of a promised “rapid” exit comes after Israeli officials led by Prime Minister Netanyahu alongside neocon allies in Washington argued that some 200 US troops in Syria’s southeast desert along the Iraqi border and its 55-kilometer “deconfliction zone” at al-Tanf are the last line of defense against Iranian expansion in Syria, and therefore must stay indefinitely.
“I want to be able to watch Iran,” Trump said further during the CBS interview. “Iran is a real problem.” He explained that “99%” of ISIS’s territory had been liberated but that a contingency of US troops must remain to prevent a resurgent Islamic State as well as to counter Iranian influence, for which American forces must remain in Iraq as well.
“When I took over, Syria was infested with ISIS. It was all over the place. And now you have very little ISIS, and you have the caliphate almost knocked out,” the president said. “We will be announcing in the not too distant future 100% of the caliphate, which is the area – the land – the area – 100. We’re at 99% right now. We’ll be at 100.”
However Trump’s invoking Iranian influence as a rationale for staying further contradicts his prior December statement that the defeat of ISIS was “the only reason” he was in Syria in the first place.
MARGARET BRENNAN: How many troops are still in Syria? When are they coming home?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 2,000 troops.
MARGARET BRENNAN: When are they coming home?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They’re starting to, as we gain the remainder, the final remainder of the caliphate of the area, they’ll be going to our base in Iraq, and ultimately some will be coming home. But we’re going to be there and we’re going to be staying—
MARGARET BRENNAN: So that’s a matter of months?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to protect Israel. We have to protect other things that we have. But we’re- yeah, they’ll be coming back in a matter of time. Look, we’re protecting the world. We’re spending more money than anybody’s ever spent in history, by a lot. We spent, over the last five years, close to 50 billion dollars a year in Afghanistan. That’s more than most countries spend for everything including education, medical, and everything else, other than a few countries. — CBS “Face the Nation” Feb.3 interview transcript
The Pentagon in recent weeks has reportedly been putting logistics in place for a troop draw down from northern and eastern Syria.
Though it remains unclear just how many troops could remain as the majority possibly begin to pullout toward US bases in Iraq, the Tanf base could remain Washington’s last remote outpost disrupting what US defense officials see as a strategic Baghdad-Damascus corridor and highway, and potential key “link” in the Tehran-to-Beirut so-called Shia land bridge.
Foreign Policy magazine has identified this argument as the final card the hawks opposing Trump’s draw down had to play in order to hinder to an actual complete US exit:
“Al-Tanf is a critical element in the effort to prevent Iran from establishing a ground line of communications from Iran through Iraq through Syria to southern Lebanon in support of Lebanese Hezbollah,” an unnamed senior US military source told the magazine.
The Israeli prime minister has pushed hard against the White House pullout plan, and “has repeatedly urged the U.S. to keep troops at Al-Tanf, according to several senior Israeli officials, who also asked not to be identified discussing private talks,” per Bloomberg. The Israelis have reportedly argued “the mere presence of American troops will act as a deterrent to Iran” even if in small numbers as a kind of symbolic threat.
The internal administration debate, following incredible push back against Trump’s withdrawal decision, has made entirely visible the national security deep state’s attempt to check the Commander-in-Chief’s power. And now US presence at al-Tanf represents the last hope of salvaging the hawks’ desire for permanent proxy war against Iran inside Syria.
It appears the deep state has won out over Trump’s initial policy decision once again; but it remains to be seen if, however slowly on what’s clearly a delayed timetable departing from his original plans, all US troops ultimately exit Syria. Until then there’ll be more time and perhaps more provocations the hawks can rely on to effectively ensure full circle return to indefinite occupation in Syria.
Forty years that changed Iran’s history
(Ayatollah Khomeini waves to followers from the balcony of his headquarters in Tehran, Feb 2, 1979, on second day of return from exile.)
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | February 2, 2019
The annual event known as the Ten Days of Dawn marking the political celebration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran on February 11 has begun. This year’s anniversary is a special occasion – the revolution completes 40 years. It becomes a defining moment.
Forty years ago, these ten days shook not only the Middle East but the Muslim world. The Islamic Revolution in Iran was a milestone for political Islam. It underscored that Islam and democracy are compatible. Iran’s electoral politics may have unique Iranian characteristics, which is only natural and far from unusual for other practitioners of democracy such as India or Brazil, for instance, but there can be no two opinions that Iran’s elected governments have acquired representative character and their legitimacy is not in doubt.
Basically, what irks many of Iran’s neighbours is also this compelling political reality of the empowerment of the people, which they themselves lack – be it Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt or Jordan. They are nervous that their own people chaffing under authoritarian rule might get wrong ideas from Iran.
Several cross currents went into the alchemy of Iran’s Islamic Revolution ranging from Persian nationalists to the Communist Tudeh Party, and from Grand Ayotallah Sayyid Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari (who was at odds with Imam Khomeini’s interpretation of the concept of Vilayat al-faqih or ‘Leadership of Jurists’ and espoused that the clergy ought to serve society and remain aloof from politics) to the charismatic ideologue of ‘Red Shi’ism’ Dr. Ali Shariati (who argued that religion in its pure form is concerned with social justice and salvation of the masses and should dispense with idolatrous rituals and established clergy – an entire current of non-Marxian socialism.) That explains the large social base of the Iranian revolution and its capacity to withstand relentless assaults by the US and its allies to undermine the established regime of the Vilayat al-faqih.
The Ten Days of Dawn is an occasion to read again the classic 1978 essay chronicling the upheaval leading to the Iranian revolution authored by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, What Are the Iranians Dreaming About? Foucault concluded his essay like this:
One bears on Iran and its peculiar destiny. At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power. In this will for an “Islamic government,” should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new?
The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both above and below the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.
“Political spirituality” – that is what gives a particular coloration to the Iranian revolution and makes it virtually impossible to repeat anywhere outside Iran.
The festivities of the Ten Days of Dawn began on February 1, which was the day Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned home from France after 14 years in exile to be the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They conclude on February 11, which dates back to the collapse of the Shah’s regime following clashes between some army units and revolutionaries triggered by nationwide protests.
The chartered Air France plane, which brought Khomeini from Paris was half empty so that it could carry extra fuel lest Shah didn’t allow the aircraft to land in Tehran. Khomeini’s allies in Tehran feared for his life. A 50000-strong police force deployed in Tehran on that day but it lost control in no time as swirling crowds overwhelmed the Shah’s security henchmen. An estimated 5 million people had lined the streets of Tehran to witness Khomeini’s homecoming. Read here a poignant BBC dispatch from Tehran on that historic day.
When the history of the decline of US influence in the Middle East gets written, the starting point has to be the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The US could never get over the “loss” of Iran as its key regional ally. An effective regional strategy became difficult to sustain. The consequent inability to let go of Iran accounted for much of the tensions in the Middle East politics in the past four decades. And, inevitably, the US kept losing ground while the Islamic regime in Iran gained in stature and influence as a permanent factor in the political life of the Middle East.
Suffice to say, it won’t be an exaggeration to estimate that the Iranian revolution has proved to be the nemesis of the Western political, economic, cultural domination of the Muslim Middle East. Having said that, it will be erroneous to estimate that the Islamic regime in Iran is locked in a mortal conflict with the West. Far from it. Iran is an ambitious regional power and it factors in that access to Western technology and capital is of crucial importance. Equally, the leadership is acutely conscious that for the preservation of the social base of the Islamic regime, economic development is critical, which again means trade and investment from the West. Iran’s middle class is heavily orientated toward ‘Westernism’.
The bottom line is that much as this may sound a paradox, the reality is that integration into the West is a core objective of the regime’s policies. Europe understands the complexity of Iran’s motivations. Interestingly, the European Union announced on January 31 (on the eve of the anniversary of Khomeini’s return from exile to Tehran) the creation of the so-called Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) as a channel for trade exchanges with Iran circumventing the US sanctions.
Tehran is delighted. Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif promptly tweeted, “Iran welcomes #INSTEX—a long overdue 1st step—in E3 implementation of May 2018 commitments to save JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) by ensuring dividends for Iranians after US’ illegal reimposition of sanctions. We remain ready for constructive engagement with Europe on equal footing & with mutual respect.”
The heart of the matter is that the fortieth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution would have been an occasion to bury the hostility between the US and Iran if only the Trump administration had the sense of history and political foresight to comprehend that Iran can be a factor for regional stability. President Trump did not have to look beyond Iran for an effective partner to bring to a closure the “endless wars” in the Middle East.
Partition: Bad in Ireland and Palestine, Good in Syria?
By Gavin O’Reilly | American Herald Tribune | January 29, 2019
Ask the question in left-wing circles of what affect partitioning a country along ethno-religious lines at the behest of an imperial power can have and the response will usually be straightforward.
In Ireland, following the 1921 surrender agreement between former revolutionaries and the British government, a six-county statelet was formed in the north-east of the country remaining under British rule and with an inbuilt Unionist majority; the pro-British element descended from English and Scottish colonizers, planted in the region by King James in the 17th century in a bid to displace the native Irish population which had provided so much resistance to British occupation.
The Nationalist population of this British-ruled part of Ireland, those descended from the indigenous Irish and who sought to live in an Ireland free of British rule, suffered systemic discrimination at the hands of this newly-formed British statelet, being denied the same access to housing, education, and employment that was afforded to their Unionist counterparts.
A neo-colonial pro-British state was also formed in the south of Ireland, where secret police and military units intern Irish Republicans through the use of non-jury courts to this day.
In Palestine, following the establishment of the Zionist State in 1948 in line with the UK-authored 1917 Balfour Declaration, more than half a million Palestinians found themselves refugees in their own country overnight; being forced from their homes in order to accommodate Jewish settlers from Europe.
The State of Israel, in a similar vein to the occupied North of Ireland, would also subject its indigenous Arab population to systemic discrimination and would go on to launch several imperialist wars against its Arab neighbors throughout its existence, with the most recent being covert Israeli involvement in the Syrian conflict.
This would all ultimately suggest that partition is a concept that should be universally opposed by anyone claiming to be anti-Imperialist. Right?
Wrong; when it comes to the issue of Syria, many ‘anti-Imperialists’ do a complete U-turn on the position and instead demand that the Arab Republic, along with Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, is divided up to form a US-Israeli backed Kurdish ethnostate.
In July 2012, when the Syrian conflict was its height, units of the Syrian Arab Army withdrew from the predominantly Kurdish Rojava region in the north of the country in order to provide assistance to military units fighting elsewhere in the Arab Republic; besieged at the time by Western-backed terrorists and yet to receive the key support which would later be provided by Iran and Russia.
The withdrawal of the SAA allowed local Kurdish militias to turn Rojava into a de facto autonomous region, with the most prominent of said groups being the People’s Protection Units (YPG), part of the wider Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed anti-government group.
However, whilst US-backed groups elsewhere in the country were supported by the White House with the intention of ousting the government of Bashar al-Assad, the primary reason for Washington’s support of the Kurds was to fulfill the 1982 Tel Aviv-authored Yinon plan.
This document, written by Oded Yinon, a senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, envisaged Israel maintaining hegemonic superiority in the region via the balkanization of neighboring Arab states hostile to Tel Aviv; in Syria, a country long known for its opposition to Zionism, this would entail the creation of a Kurdish state in the north of the country in a bid to undermine the authority of Damascus.
However, despite this US support for Rojava lining up perfectly with the Yinon plan, support for the creation of a Kurdish state within Syria remains widespread amongst Western leftists, with the feminist politics of the YPG endearing itself to Western Anarchists in particular; the lessons of Ireland and Palestine being lost it would ultimately seem.
IRmep Lawsuit: US nuclear “policy substitution” for Israel undermines NPT, AECA and bilks US taxpayers
By Ryan Dawson | ANTI neocon Report | January 26, 2019
On January 17, IRmep filed a 59-page brief (PDF HTML) in a lawsuit demanding release of a series of secret presidential letters promising not to force Israel to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or publicly discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
The brief contextualizes a formerly top-secret 1969 cross-agency study about what U.S. policy toward Israel’s nuclear weapons should be. Unanimous consensus between the Departments of Defense, State and intelligence community was that Israel should be compelled to sign the NPT in order to be allowed to purchase conventional U.S. military weapons. Government agencies correctly believed that if Israel was allowed to possess nuclear weapons there would never be peace in the Middle East. National security adviser Henry Kissinger also grudgingly revealed intelligence in the summary that Israelis had stolen U.S. government nuclear material to build their arsenal atomic weapons. (1969 NSC papers on the Israeli nuclear weapons program filed as Exhibit A PDF)
Going against the consensus advice, on September 26, 1969, President Nixon adopted the Israeli policy of “ambiguity” (never confirming or denying Israel’s nuclear weapons program) in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. US presidents through Donald Trump have continued the Israeli “ambiguity” policy in a series of letters written under intense lobbying by the Israeli government.
According to the IRmep legal filing, this policy has perpetuated a $222.8 billion dollar fraud against U.S. taxpayers through non-enforcement of Arms Export Control Act bans on U.S. foreign aid—absent specific waivers—to known foreign nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT. The IRmep filing also debunks a series of assertions and disinformation filed in an affidavit by the National Security Council
On January 18, 2019 the Department of Justice filed a motion to indefinitely stop the lawsuit from proceeding until the end of the government shutdown, citing lack of funds to mount a legal defense. (PDF)
Listen to a discussion about next steps for this critical IRmep litigation and our other lawsuits on the Scott Horton Show (MP3).
Civilians storm & burn Turkish military base in northern Iraq
RT | January 26, 2019
A mob of angry civilians has attacked a Turkish military camp near the Iraqi city of Dohuk, burning equipment and vehicles. The incident comes in response to the deaths of civilians during Turkish airstrikes, local media reports.
The incident occurred in northern Iraq on Saturday, when a large mob of civilians attacked a Turkish military encampment located in the predominantly-Kurdish region of Dohuk.
Footage from the scene which surfaced online shows civilians at the military encampment with Turkish military vehicles and tents burning in the background. At least one person died and 10 were reportedly wounded during the incident. It remains unclear if the Turkish Army sustained any casualties – servicemen are nowhere to be seen in the footage.
According to local media, the attack on the encampment came in protest to Turkish airstrikes and shelling, which have repeatedly hit the vicinity of Dohuk. Earlier on Saturday, at least two civilians were reportedly killed in an airstrike and the incident at the base might have been prompted by the attack.
The incident was acknowledged by the Turkish Defense Ministry, which blamed it on activities of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ankara considers to be a terrorist group. The Turkish military, however, did not confirm that it was the encampment in Dohuk that was attacked.
“An attack has occurred on one of [the] bases located in northern Iraq as a result of provocation by the PKK terrorist organization. There was partial damage to vehicles and equipment during the attack,” the ministry tweeted, adding that it has been “taking necessary measures” regarding the incident.
A Contrast in Murders
Aiia Maasarwe was a student at La Trobe University. (Photo: via Instagram, Ruba Photography)
By Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | January 24, 2019
In late January Aiia al Maasarwe, initially described in the Australian media as an ‘Israeli student’, then as an ‘Arab Israeli’ but never as a Palestinian, the correct description, was murdered in Melbourne.
Aiia, a student of Chinese and English, was in Melbourne as an exchange student, had traveled home by tram after watching a comedy show and was talking to her sister in Palestine when she was attacked, raped and killed while walking a kilometer home late at night.
It was a shocking crime and Melbourne was appalled. The tram she had taken, no. 86, stopped at all stops so people could get on with bundles of flowers to be delivered to the crime scene. Government officials, including the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, made statements expressing their horror.
Compare this with Israel where, to quote The Times of Israel,
“While the murder is major news in Australia, it is not in Israel despite the fact that the two countries have comparable murder rates … no Israeli official has said anything of substance about the killing … while the murder is on the front page of leading Australian newspapers it merits merely a blip on the front page of Israel’s dailies, as will most killings of a not-terror nature.”
In the week after her death, the Israeli embassy in Canberra made contact with the family in Aiia’s home town, Baqa al Gharbiyya, but there was no personal contact from anyone in the government until President Reuven Rivlin wrote to the family.
Baqa al Gharbiyya is not ‘mostly Arab’ as the Australian media, genuflecting to Israel as always, reported but wholly Palestinian. Until Israel began building its apartheid wall in 2000, there was one Baqa: now the wall cuts it into two, Baqa al Gharbiyya (western Baqa), inside pre-1967 Israel, and Baqa al Sharqiyya (eastern Baqa), inside the territories taken in 1967.
Writing in the Guardian, Jennine Khalik, a Sydney-based Palestinian, wrote that while it should not matter where the murdered young woman came from, it did. Either through ignorance or through deliberate suppression, the Australian media insisted that this young Palestinian was an ‘Arab Israeli,’ the official Israeli description of its Palestinian population, and a term rejected by almost all Palestinians.
In keeping with its drive to eradicate Palestine from the map, in every way and at every level, the government of Israel refuses to call its Palestinian population ‘Palestinian.’ It prefers the generic ‘Arab’ which means they come anywhere and could belong anywhere in the Middle East, except in their homeland.
Haifa University professor Sami Smooha carried out a survey in 2017 which showed that only 16 percent of Palestinians living within pre-1967 Israel was willing to be called ‘Arab Israelis.’
They have exactly the same attitude to their Palestinian identity as Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, occupied Jerusalem and the occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel are not living in a state of its citizens like other states but a state for and of the Jewish people. By legal definition they are second class, a status deliberately created by discriminatory laws at every level and now reinforced by the passage last year of the nation-state law.
This law, declaring that Israel is a Jewish nation-state, automatically excludes the Palestinian 17.5 per of the population, Sunni or Christian, plus all others (including the Druze who serve in the armed forces) who are not Jewish.
The law is the inevitable product of a racist ideology which never intended Jews to live peacefully with the Palestinians but to live in Palestine instead of them. The consequence has been an endless round of wars with and on neighboring states, plus deepening oppression of the Palestinian people in the further territories stolen in 1967, as well as oppression of Syrians in the occupied Golan. For Israel to survive as a Jewish state on stolen land this is as it must be.
By and large, this process is supported by the Israeli Jewish population, amongst whom racism has been deliberately inculcated by religious and political leaders to the level of hatred of Palestinians, delight in their suffering and endless justification when they are killed.
Let’s get straight to a central issue here. Had the young woman murdered in Melbourne been Jewish, the media would have reported it entirely differently. The story would have been headlines, it would have run for days and there would have been interviews with the family plus phone calls and visits from senior members of the government.
As it was, little attention was paid to the murder in the media and nothing came to the family from the government until Reuven Rivlin sent his letter. From Netanyahu and senior members of the government, there still has been no personal word of condolence for Aiia’s family.
The killing of Aiia can be contrasted with the response to the murder last October of Aisha al-Rabi. Ayesha, from the Nablus district village of Biddya, was in a car with her husband and a daughter when it was pelted with rocks thrown by youths from a nearby settlement.
These twisted youths, the young Zionist pioneers of the present generation, carrying forward the process of occupation and colonization, are hate-filled fanatics. They glory in the death or discomfort of Palestinians. They terrorize, they scrawl anti-Arab graffiti (not anti-Palestinian as they scarcely recognize the Palestinians as human beings let alone as Palestinian) on walls, they harass women and children, they destroy crops and olive trees, they commit acts of arson, they beat and occasionally they murder.
Violence of this nature has tripled in the past year, with 482 ‘incidents’ reported during the 12 months to December compared to 140 for the previous year.
Time to take a stand, one would think, but not in Israel. Even in the most extreme circumstances the violence every excuse is found for the lenient treatment of these settler youths.
Take for example the stoning of the car which killed Ayesha Rabi’a, the mother of eight children. Many stones were thrown, near the Tapuah checkpoint, not just one, and five youths from the nearby settlement yeshiva – a religious seminary where hatred of ‘Arabs’ seems to be high on the agenda – were arrested.
In a state of its citizens, one might expect messages of sympathy to flow towards the family of the murdered woman from senior members of the government. One might expect assurances that justice would be done and the killers punished to the full extent of the law but in an ostensible Jewish state the sympathy flowed in the other direction, towards the families of the youths accused of killing Ayesha.
They were visited by Ayelet Shaked, the so-called ‘justice minister’ in Netanyahu’s coalition government, a vicious racist by any definition.
In 2015 Shaked paid a similar visit to the families of the youths accused of firebombing a Palestinian home at Douma in July, killing three members of the Dawabshe family, husband, and wife and their 18-month-old son Ali, with only five-year-old Ahmad surviving.
Shaked expressed her sympathy with the families’ plight and encouraged one mother to ‘stay strong.’
There was no visit by Shaked or anyone else in the Israeli government to the relatives of the murdered Palestinian family. While public outrage was expressed in demonstrations, settlers continued to celebrate the murders. At a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem in late 2015, guests brandishing Molotov cocktails, knives and guns danced around holding photos above their heads of Ali Dawabsheh which they then proceeded to stab and burn. The persecution of the Dawabsheh family by settlers continued, with a family house being destroyed in May 2018.
In June 2018 the ‘Lod’ (Lydda – ethnically cleansed in 1948) district court ruled out some of the confessions of the accused youths on the grounds that they had been obtained under torture. One of the defendants who had confessed to previous acts of arson, vandalism and the scrawling of hate graffiti on walls was released to house arrest.
Outside the court several dozen ‘hilltop youth’ celebrated, taunting the Dawabsheh grandfather with cries of ‘Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is on the grill.’ When Reuven Rivlin condemned Jewish terror he received a spate of death threats. The case against the main defendant continues.
Ayalet Shaked was a member of the Jewish Home party until she broke away recently and founded, along with Naftali Bennett, who also split from the Jewish Home, the Heyemin Hehadash (New Right) party.
This new grouping is being misleadingly defined as ‘conservative’. In fact, it is violently rightwing and racist, effectively a Jewish fascist party. Bennett has boasted of killing ‘Arabs’, while Shaked, like many Zionist racists before her, has compared the Palestinians to snakes.
In the meantime, while all of this goes on inside occupied Palestine, the retiring Israeli army chief, Gadi Eisenkot, has boasted that Israel has carried out thousands of air attacks on Syria in recent years, attacking, in fact, almost on a daily basis.
Many of these attacks have been carried out from Lebanese air space. Some have been made behind the radar shield of civilian aircraft, once behind a Russian military aircraft which was then shot down by Syrian air defenses. A frequent target has been installations around Damascus international airport, prompting the Syrian ambassador at the UN, Bashar al Ja’afiri, to warn that if the UN does not intervene, Syria might be forced to retaliate against Tel Aviv airport.
Eisenkot was the author of the ‘Dahiye doctrine’ according to which the aerial destruction visited on the Beirut suburb of Dahiya – the political headquarters of Hizbullah – in 2006 will be carried out across Lebanon in the next war.
Israel is also campaigning again for war on Iran, if it does not start one by its attacks on Syria. Internally and externally, this racist and violent state, a time bomb planted in the Middle East by the British a century ago, is destined to erupt cataclysmically at some point in the future.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
Trump, Pull Them Out of Syria Now, Not Later
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | January 24, 2019
In December, President Trump announced that he was finally ordering an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria. Almost immediately, under pressure from the interventionist crowd, including the national-security branch of the U.S. government, Trump reversed course and announced that he intended to delay the pullout by another four months. Today, it’s not clear that he even intends to abide by that deadline.
Meanwhile, while Trump dawdled with the withdrawal, four more Americans were killed in a suicide-bombing attack carried out by ISIS in Syria. They included two U.S. soldiers, a former U.S. soldier serving as a contractor, and an interpreter. Three other Americans were wounded in the attack.
What did those Americans die for? Nothing. All four died for nothing.
They died for nothing because the U.S. government has no business being in Syria. It never has had any business being in Syria. Those 2,000 U.S. troops don’t belong in Syria. Those four Americans deserve to be alive today. So do all other Americans who are killed in Syria the longer that Trump delays the pullout of all U.S. troops from the country.
Interventionists, not surprisingly, are saying that the ISIS attack instead shows that Trump needs to keep U.S. troops in Syria. They’re saying that the attack shows that ISIS hasn’t really been “defeated,” as Trump claimed when he was justifying his original withdrawal order.
But whether ISIS has been defeated or not is quite besides the point. The point is that the U.S., government has no business in Syria, ISIS or no ISIS.
Moreover, let’s not forget something important: It is interventionists who are responsible for the rise of ISIS. The organization did not exist prior to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Never mind that Iraq had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. What mattered was that interventionists felt that Iraq’s dictator, who had partnered with the U.S. government in the 1980s, now had to go and be replaced with another pro-U.S. dictator.
Interventionists cheered as U.S. forces were invading and occupying the country for many years. But while they were celebrating the destruction of Iraq and the killing and torturing of tens of thousands of Iraqis (none of whom had ever attacked the United States), interventionists were refusing to take personal responsibility for what their interventionism had brought into existence — ISIS, which consisted largely of people who opposed the U.S. interventionist war against Iraq.
So, ISIS, which was a direct result of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, become the new official enemy, which now, interventionists said, required even more interventionism. The idea was that if the U.S. government didn’t now stop ISIS , ISIS would supposedly establish a worldwide Muslim caliphate that would end up conquering the United States and taking over the federal government, much like Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, with whom U.S. officials had partnered in the 1980s, was supposedly going to do if the U.S. government didn’t intervene against him.
The notion was ridiculous from the get-go. ISIS was never coming to get us, any more than Saddam was coming to get us. It was just one more of a series of official bugaboos that interventionists have used to justify their forever foreign interventions and ever-increasing tax-funded largess for the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA.
Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment have used SIS to justify the stationing of those 2000 troops in Syria. But it’s been a lie from the beginning. The real reason those troops are there is to attempt to achieve regime change in Syria, just like they got regime change in Iraq. That’s ultimately what those four Americans died for—regime change, which is the same thing as dying for nothing. That’s because the U.S. government has no business engaging in the business of regime change. It is not a legitimate role of the U.S. government to be deciding who should be in power in foreign countries and engaging in actions to buttress or remove foreign regimes.
Of course, that’s not the mindset of interventionists, including those who pressured Trump into immediately modifying his withdrawal order on Syria. What we hear from them is classic imperialism. “If we get out, there will be a power vacuum that will be filled by Russia, which is our rival.” “We need to counterbalance Iran.” “We need to block our NATO ally Turkey.” “ISIS could become a regional hegemon.”
All that is Empire Talk 101. After all, do you see Switzerland, a country whose government is limited to defense of the country, talking like that? Do you see Swiss officials referring to rivals, counterbalancing, blocking, or the rise of regional hegemons?
Meanwhile, while Trump dawdles with his withdrawal from Syria, he’s now stating that US. military intervention is a possibility for Venezuela, on top of the interventionist sanctions that Trump has already imposed on that country. Just more interventionism from America’s interventionist-in-chief.
Did Khashoggi Really Die?
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 23.01.2019
I have not been convinced about the claims coming from Turkey and from the Washington Post and others regarding the allegations of a gruesome murder of intelligence asset, Jamal Khashoggi, in October, 2018. There are too many anomalies as it was portrayed by various statements from Turkey President Erdogan, and echoed by a chorus of the Western mainstream media. Recent research suggests that perhaps Khashoggi was never in that Saudi Consulate in Istanbul that day, and in fact may still be quite alive and in hiding. If so, it suggests a far larger story behind the affair. Let’s consider the following.
The best way to outline this is to go back to the events around the surprise arrest and detention of numerous Saudi high-ranking persons in late 2017, by Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS as he is known. On November 4, 2017 MBS announced via state TV that numerous leading Saudis including one of the wealthiest, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, had been arrested on charges of corruption, and were being detained in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton hotel. Prince Alwaleed is clearly the critical person.
The son-in-law of President Trump had reportedly made a non-publicized visit to Riyadh for private talks with MBS just days before the mass arrests. A report in the UK Mail newspaper in 2018 claimed that Jared Kushner, representing the President, had informed MBS of a rival Saudi Royals plot to eliminate the Crown Prince. Prince Alwaleed was reported to be at the center of the plotters.
After three months imprisonment, Alwaleed was released from detention on 27 January 2018, following a reported financial settlement. In March 2018 he dropped out from Forbes’ World’s Billionaires’ list. Before his arrest Alwaleed was the largest shareholder in Citibank, a major owner of Twitter, once partner of Bill Gates in Gates Foundation vaccine programs, and generous donor to select Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. According to media reports, Hillary campaign aide Huma Abedin’s brother, Hassan Abedin, Muslim Brotherhood member, worked with Bin Talal on a project called “Spreading Islam to the West.” Bin Talal and other Saudi sources donated as much as $25 million to the Clinton Foundation as she was preparing her Presidential bid. The Prince was also an open foe of Donald Trump.
Who was Khashoggi Really?
Jamal Khashoggi was no ordinary journalist. He actually worked for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. In an interview in the Gulf Times in November last year Alwaleed stated, “Jamal wasn’t only my friend. He was working with me. Actually, his last job in Saudi Arabia was with me…” Jamal was, or is, nephew of CIA-linked asset, the recently deceased Adnan Khashoggi, a nefarious arms dealer involved in the CIA-Saudi BCCI bank and Iran-Contra. Nephew Jamal also worked for the then-Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar, someone so close to the Bush family that George W. nicknamed him “Bandar Bush.” In short, Khashoggi was part of Saudi circles close to the Bush-Clinton group. When King Abdullah decided to skip over Alwaleed’s father, Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, dubbed “The Red Prince” for his reformist views, in his succession, a move that led to Salman, father of MBS, as successor, Alwaleed was on the outs in the Saudi power calculus of King Salman and Crown Prince MBS.
The Saudi government as well as the Brookings Institution confirm that Khashoggi had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was banned from Saudi Arabia in 2011 following the Obama-Hillary Clinton Arab Spring, when the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, and those around him realized that the royal house itself was a potential target for brotherhood regime change, as in Egypt and Tunisia.
The Obama Administration, as I detail in Manifest Destiny, working with the CIA, planned a drastic series of regime changes across the Islamic world to install Muslim Brotherhood regimes “friendly” with the CIA and the Obama administration. Key members of the Obama Administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s special assistant, Huma Abedin, had deep ties to the Saudi part of the Muslim Brotherhood where Abedin’s mother lives. Her mother, Saleha Abedin– an academic in Saudi Arabia where Huma grew up– according to a report on Al Jazeera and other Arab media, is a prominent member of the womens’ organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Huma’s brother is also reported linked to the organization. Notably, the late John McCain, whose ties to leading members of ISIS and Al Qaeda is public record, tried to discredit fellow Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for pointing to Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood ties. This is the faction within Saudi Arabia that Khashoggi was tied to.
As President, Trump’s first foreign trip was to meet MBS and the Saudi King, a trip sharply criticized by Democrat Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Once a Trump Presidency moved to rebuild the frayed relations that had developed between Obama and the Saudi monarchy under King Abdullah and later King Salman, father of Crown Prince MBS, the faction around pro-Obama Prince Bin Talal Alwaleed was out of favor, to put it mildly, especially after Hillary Clinton lost. In June 2017 Alwaleed’s former employee, Jamal Khashoggi, fled into self-imposed exile in the US where he had studied earlier, after the government banned his twitter account in Saudi.
Khashoggi alive?
Once MBS acted to arrest Alwaleed and numerous others, the future of the money flows between Alwaleed to not only Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and to other Democrats he had “supported” with Saudi millions, was in jeopardy. While it is difficult to confirm, a BBC Turkish journalist in Istanbul reportedly told an arab language paper after the alleged gruesome murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi that, in fact, Jamal Khashoggi was alive and well, somewhere in hiding.
It is a fact that former CIA head and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, gave a briefing to the US Senate in which they told the senators that there was no evidence to suggest MBS was behind this alleged crime. They added that they couldn’t even confirm a crime had happened! Only CIA head Gina Haspel, former CIA London station chief, disputed their claims. The Erdogan claims that the body was chopped up and then dissolved in acid for disposal without trace harkens back to the account of the Navy Seal disposal of the dead body allegedly of Osama bin Laden, which the Obama Administration claimed they dumped at sea “according to Muslim tradition.” Conveniently in both cases there was no body to forensically confirm.
Indeed the allegations to world media around the Khashoggi affair were tightly controlled by Turkey’s President Erdogan who repeatedly promised then failed to reveal, what he said were secret Turkish intelligence tapes of the alleged murder. Erdogan is reported very close to the Muslim Brotherhood if not a hidden member, one reason for his close support of Qatar after MBS and the Saudi king declared economic sanctions on Qatar for support of terrorism, in fact Qatari support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Here we are dealing with shifting political alliances with huge consequences potentially for US and world politics given the enormous size of the Saudi financial resources. It’s also bizarre that Khashoggi allegedly agreed to go to a Saudi Consulate in Turkey and to supposedly get divorce papers. Further, his reported fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, seems to be equally mysterious, with some asking whether she in fact is an agent of Turkish intelligence used to discredit Saudi Arabia.
The claims of Erdogan of the assassination of Jamal by a Saudi team were buttressed by a mysterious Khaled Saffuri, who told Yahoo News reporter, Michael Isikoff, that Khashoggi became a bitter foe of MBS for his articles in the media criticizing the arrests of Prince Bin Talal and others. Research reveals that Saffuri, media source on the Khashoggi alleged murder, also has had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood front organization, American Muslim Council, and to Qatar, host to the exiled Brotherhood for years. Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood was a factor in the break between MBS and Qatar two years ago.
Saffuri is also the protégé of al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi, reportedly also an influential Muslim Brotherhood supporter who before 2004 met with both G.W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. Alamoudi is currently in US federal prison since 2004 for his role as bagman for a Libyan/Al-Qaeda assassination plot to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. In brief, the prime sources on the Khashoggi murder are few and hardly without bias.
At this point it is difficult to go beyond speculation. Clear is that Jamal Khashoggi is missing from public view since early October. But until the Turkish government or someone else presents serious forensic evidence, habeas corpus, that indeed shows Alwaleed’s former employee, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by a Saudi assassination team, let alone by one commanded by Crown Prince bin Salman, the situation warrants more serious examination. It is curious that the same liberal media such as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that attacks MBS for the alleged murder of their reporter, Khashoggi, fails to criticize previous Saudi executions or even subsequent ones.
Did Khashoggi really die at the Istanbul Consulate or was something else going on? To stage a fake execution of Khashoggi to discredit and even possibly topple MBS might possibly have appeared to Alwaleed and his CIA friends in Washington to be a clever way of restoring their power and financial influence. If so, it seems to have failed.
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‘Israel sees Iran as obstacle to its policies’
Press TV – August 25, 2017
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel felt threatened by Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu expressed his Iranophobic view in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday. Press TV has asked Scott Rickard, former American intelligence linguist from Tampa, Florida, and Brent Budowsky, a columnist at The Hill from Washington, to give their thoughts on the issue.
Rickard said Tel Aviv is concerned about the fact that the regime could not carry out its old project to spread sectarian divisions and pave the way for dismemberment of the countries in the Middle East region because of the Iranian-led resistance against Israeli policies, not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but also in the whole region.
“Iran is not a threat to Israel whatsoever. The threat that Israel sees is the fact that their Oded Yinon Plan is being put to a hold by Iran,” the intelligence linguist said on Thursday night.
“They (the Israelis) look at Iran as a threat only because they have no influence on their governments and Iran is autonomous and is not under the Zionist influence,” he added.
Since the victory of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Tehran has been critical of Israel’s policies in the region, whereas “no leaders [of other states] even dared to speak out against Zionism,” Rickard argued. … continue
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